A first textbook, and it says so on its opening line: intended for those beginning to study Marxist-Leninist philosophy, and behaving like one throughout. Eighteen chapters, each broken into numbered sections and headed sub-sections, with worked examples about gold and about atoms and a summary closing every argument.
Nothing in it is difficult, and that is the point of it. V. G. Afanasyev was among the most widely read Soviet expositors of the doctrine - he would shortly become editor-in-chief of Pravda - and he had a real gift for making an abstract position plain without visibly simplifying it. For a reader who wants to know what dialectical and historical materialism amounted to as a body of teaching, rather than as a caricature, this is the most approachable route in.
It is also a book with datable layers, which makes it useful as a specimen. Its doctrinal spine is older than its imprint: the Party Programme it quotes on the withering away of the state is that of 1961, and its political framework is the Twenty-Fifth Congress of 1976. The 1977 Constitution is present, so a revision pass was made after October of that year. And the topmost layer is later still - a closing section on India opens on the thirtieth anniversary of the Indian Constitution in January 1980 and the elections that returned Indira Gandhi.
So the last hand was laid on it in the spring of 1980, and in that revision detente is still advancing and the Soviet Army does not enter Afghanistan.
Translated by David Fidlon. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.
