Reference Library
Bukharin, 'On the Character of Our Revolution and the Possibility of Victorious Socialist Construction in the USSR' (1926)
Bukharin's pamphlet, written after the defeat of the New Opposition, giving the possibility of building socialism in one country its theoretical grounding: the character of the Russian revolution, the 'maturity' of world capitalism, the theory of state capitalism, the passage from restoration to reconstruction, and the sources of socialist accumulation. Maslov, Sukhanov, Bogdanov, Kautsky and Trotsky are placed in a single Menshevik lineage as variations on 'Russia is not ripe for socialism'. The theoretical counterpart of Stalin's 1925 formula and the starting point of the 1928 'Notes of an Economist'.
Read the full text → Writings & speechesTwo Documents of the United Opposition: the 'Declaration of the Thirteen' (1926) and the 'Platform of the Bolshevik-Leninists (Opposition)' (1927)
The declaration that Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Krupskaya and nine others submitted to the joint plenum of July 1926 — defining party bureaucratism as the source of factionalism and summarising the Opposition's positions on wages, industrialisation, the countryside and the Comintern in twelve sections — with the supplementary statement against Zinoviev's removal from the Politburo; and the twelve-chapter draft Platform submitted before the Fifteenth Congress in September 1927 (the condition of the workers, the growth of the kulak, the pace of industrialisation, the bureaucratisation of the soviets, the party regime, the danger of war, the defeat of the Chinese revolution). The banned Platform became the ground for expelling the Opposition.
Read the full text → Writings & speechesStalin, 'Grain Procurements and the Prospects for Agricultural Development'
Stalin's remarks to local officials during his January 1928 tour of Siberia at the height of the grain procurement crisis. He orders Article 107 of the criminal code used against kulaks holding grain back for a better price, demands that prosecutors and judges unwilling to do so be replaced, and then argues that small individual peasant farming cannot carry the country, setting collective and state farms as the immediate task. The turn from buying grain on NEP's market terms to taking it by administrative force is visible inside a single document.
Read the full text → Writings & speechesBukharin, 'Notes of an Economist'
The Right Opposition's direct answer, printed in Pravda on 30 September 1928. Without once naming Stalin, Bukharin works through the growth rates of industrial capital investment, the building-materials balance and the metals allocation tables to show that the plan contradicts its own control figures, that a tempo its raw materials cannot follow will stall industry itself, and that the grain crisis came from a broken balance between industry and agriculture rather than from kulak resistance. Complete text with its five statistical tables.
Read the full text → Writings & speechesStalin, 'A Year of Great Change'
Printed in Pravda for the twelfth anniversary of the October Revolution, this is how the 1928 argument ended, in the winner's own words. Stalin tallies the year under labour productivity, industrial construction and agriculture; the third is the point. His claim that the middle peasant, not just the poor one, had come into the collective farms village by village becomes wholesale collectivisation two months later. The question of tempo Bukharin had raised is answered with results rather than argument.
Read the full text → Writings & speechesZhdanov, Soviet Literature: The Richest in Ideas, the Most Advanced Literature
A complete translation of the speech Zhdanov delivered in the name of the Central Committee and Sovnarkom on the opening day of the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, 17 August 1934. The official definition of socialist realism (truthful depiction of reality in its revolutionary development, combined with the ideological remolding and education of the toilers), the exegesis of Stalin's phrase 'engineers of human souls', and the doctrine of revolutionary romanticism were all formulated here, and the congress wrote the method into the Writers' Union charter. A decade later this aesthetic program became the theoretical yardstick of the Zhdanovshchina. Translated from the 1935 English edition, with the key formulations checked against the Russian original.
Read the full text → Writings & speechesDimitrov's Report to the Seventh Comintern Congress: The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International
Full text of the keynote report and closing speech of the Seventh Comintern Congress, August 1935: the Dimitrov definition of fascism and the turn to the united and popular fronts.
Read the full text → Writings & speechesTwo lines on the Spanish Civil War: six documents, 1936-1937
The split inside the Republic over whether the war or the revolution came first, read in documents of the time: the telegrams Stalin and the Spanish Communist Party exchanged on 16 October 1936, two speeches in which the party's general secretary Jose Diaz argued for a regular army and set out what winning the war required, and two 1937 pieces by Trotsky attacking that line.
Read the full text → Writings & speechesStalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism
Complete Korean translation of Stalin's September 1938 essay, published as Chapter 4, Section 2 of the Short Course history of the CPSU(B). It sets out four features of the Marxist dialectical method and three of philosophical materialism, then systematizes historical materialism around the mode of production. The text became the standard philosophical primer of the Soviet era.
Read the full text → Writings & speechesDaladier's Declaration to Parliament, 2 September 1939
Full Korean translation of the declaration read by Premier Daladier to the Chamber of Deputies the day after Germany invaded Poland, justifying French entry into the war, with the parliamentary applause markings of the Journal officiel.
Read the full text → Writings & speechesKhrushchev's Secret Speech, On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences
A complete Korean translation of the report Khrushchev delivered to the closed session of the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU on 25 February 1956. Beginning with Lenin's proposal in his Letter to the Congress to remove Stalin, it moves through the mass repression that followed Kirov's murder, the execution of most of the Central Committee elected in 1934, confessions obtained by torture, the misjudgements of the first months of the war, the deportation of whole nationalities, the break with Yugoslavia, the Leningrad Affair and the Doctors' Plot, and the making of the cult itself. At its centre are the prison letters of Eikhe, Rudzutak and Kedrov, read out from the rostrum. Translated from the 1989 publication in the CPSU Central Committee Bulletin, with that edition's sixty-six editorial notes rendered as a separate section.
Read the full text → Writings & speechesGorbachev, 'On Perestroika and the Party's Cadre Policy' (1987)
The January 1987 plenum report in which perestroika turned from economic 'acceleration' to political 'democratisation'. Locating the causes of stagnation in the 'braking mechanism' and the conservatism of the cadres, Gorbachev proposed multi-candidate secret-ballot elections in the party and the soviets, elected enterprise directors, and glasnost: 'we need democracy like air'. The first official formulation of the method of appealing over the heads of a resistant leadership to the party rank and file and the people, which led to the Nineteenth Party Conference and the 1989 elections.
Read the full text → Writings & speechesGorbachev's Address to the UN General Assembly (1988)
A full translation of Gorbachev's address to the UN General Assembly on 7 December 1988: the summa of the New Thinking, from the primacy of universal human values to freedom of choice and de-ideologization, and the announcement of a unilateral cut of 500,000 troops that became a milestone of the Cold War's end. Translated from the English of the UN provisional verbatim record (A/43/PV.72).
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