M. "Science". 1970. 319 pp. The print run is 7000 copies. Price 1 rub 73 kopecks.

The authors of the collection 1, prepared by the Institute of Soviet History of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, set out to study V. I. Lenin's system of views on the socio-political structure of Russia, to show the interaction of the main social classes and strata in the process of capitalist evolution of the country and the maturing of the prerequisites for the bourgeois - democratic and socialist revolutions. At the same time, the basic Leninist propositions about the three camps - the nobility - government, bourgeois-liberal and democratic, whose struggle was the main axis of the entire political life of capitalist Russia, as well as the Leninist idea of the hegemony of the proletariat in the liberation movement in the era of imperialism were taken as the basis.

The main articles of the collection are the result of many years of work of their authors on the relevant specific problems of national history, an organic combination of the study of Lenin's concept and the analysis of the factual material that forms its basis. Along with materials that somehow reflect the results of research previously carried out by various groups of historians, the collection contains significant sections that touch on poorly studied or controversial issues. The difficulties encountered in the course of discussions on a number of issues are to some extent related to the fact that historians do not always properly take into account the development of Lenin's views on the economy and political system of Russia. An important advantage that distinguishes the collection favorably is that its authors strive to show Leninist thought in development and its constant enrichment as the historical situation changed, new historical experience accumulated and theoretically generalized. This approach allows for a fuller coverage-

1 Editorial Board: M. S. Volin, I. F. Gindin, L. M. Ivanov (Executive Editor), M. S. Simonova, S. V. Tyutyukin (Deputy Executive Editor).

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to preserve the richest theoretical heritage of V. I. Lenin and provide a complete picture" of the essence and significance of Lenin's concept of Russian capitalism. This is also facilitated by the structure of the collection chosen by the authors, which successfully combines the problematic and historical (Chronological) aspects of the study.

The collection opens with an article by M. S. Volin on Lenin's theory of the hegemony of the proletariat in the liberation movement. The author makes a successful attempt to reveal Lenin's thesis that the entire history of the political struggle in Russia at the beginning of the XX century was a struggle for who would lead the social movement and attract the masses to their side-the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. The article shows that the Proletariat became a hegemon class not only because this role could no longer be played by the liberal bourgeoisie in the era of imperialism, but also because the proletariat turned into an independent political force at that time, forcing, according to V. I. Lenin, the bourgeoisie to fear revolution more than reaction. The hegemony of the proletariat is revealed not as something given once and for all, but as the result of the most acute and uncompromising ideological and organizational struggle of the Leninist Party against the liberal bourgeoisie and the petty-bourgeois socialist Mensheviks.

The article by Yu. Z. Polevoy reveals V. I. Lenin's views on the process of combining the theory of socialism with the working-class movement. The author emphasizes Lenin's idea that, as a mass revolutionary force, the proletariat was ahead of the Russian bourgeoisie both ideologically, politically and organizationally, creating its own political party before the liberal Union of Liberation, not to mention the Octobrist and Cadet parties.

A large part of the collection is devoted to clarifying the system of Leninist views on the Russian peasantry (article by A.M. Anfimov, section on the peasants in the article by I. F. Gindin). It is known that the peasantry in Russia was a complex combination of the estate divisions inherited from serfdom and the social new formations of the capitalist era. Discussions in recent years have shown that many problems related to the social structure of the peasantry still remain unresolved. Moreover, even Lenin's propositions about the nature of the Russian peasantry were sometimes understood and interpreted in different ways. Often in the literature, when discussing the main trend in the Evolution of the countryside, only that part of Lenin's concepts that revealed the breakdown of capitalist agrarian relations was highlighted. The Collection emphasizes that V. I. Lenin never lost sight of the hindering factors, remnants of serfdom in the countryside, without taking into account the influence of which it is impossible to fully understand the causes and nature of the agrarian and peasant revolution. Considering Lenin's views on the process of stratification of the peasantry in pre-revolutionary Russia, the authors note that they do not imply the idea of a complete split of the peasantry into two antagonistic classes. This stratification was still at the stage when a general democratic struggle of the Peasantry as a whole against the landlords and landlords ' land ownership was objectively possible. In this connection, a special analysis of Lenin's views on the peasant revolution seems fruitful. The authors rightly emphasize the general theoretical significance of Lenin's conclusions and their huge role in substantiating the tactical line of Bolshevism in the Russian Revolution.

The collection also reflects the Question of the intelligentsia (article by G. I. Shchetinina). The author reveals the extremely important role of the advanced Russian intelligentsia in the liberation movement, its democracy, which is rooted in the historical conditions of Russia: the incompleteness of bourgeois-democratic transformations, the long Democratic tradition and the close connection of the intelligentsia with the masses of the people. G. Y. Shchetinina traces Lenin's views on the evolution of the Russian intelligentsia in the second half of the XIX - early XX centuries: from "wordless " intellectual democracy refers to groups associated with certain classes and political trends. However, in our opinion, the article did not cover the issue of the democratic intelligentsia properly. The question of which narodnik parties of the early twentieth century were the successors of the revolutionary or liberal narodniks of the previous historical period also needs to be clarified (p. 151).

Two articles are devoted to the little-studied question of the class enemies of the proletariat - the bourgeois liberals. The article by K. F. Shatsillo examines the place of Russian liberalism in the social movement of the late XIX-early XX century. The author notes that the methodological basis of-

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The basis of the analysis of the ideological struggle in Russia during the period under study is Lenin's concept of the existence of three camps in the arena of political struggle, each of which had its own class base, ideology, program and tactics. The author convincingly shows that V. I. Lenin drew a very clear line between "counter-revolutionary liberalism"and" counter-revolutionary feudalism". The article clearly states that the class essence of liberalism has always and everywhere been the expression of the interests of the capitalist development of the country (pp. 166-167). The article describes the objective basis of Lenin's tactics of using liberals as one of the sources of "additional forces and resources for the revolutionary workers' party "(p. 179) during the bourgeois - democratic revolution. The temporary and transitory character of compromises between social-democrats and liberals during the period of the bourgeois-democratic struggle was explained by the fact that as the revolution progressed, the gap between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie became ever wider, despite the fact that in 1905 liberalism, especially its left wing, was more opposed to the autocracy than in the preceding period a decade. Therefore, the author concludes that Lenin's assessment of the liberals in the spring and summer of 1905 was based not on a change in their tactics and the degree of opposition, but on a change in the balance of forces between the liberal and revolutionary camps, the growth of the revolutionary movement in the country, which made the opposition of the liberals less and less significant in the overall balance of political groups opposed to the autocracy (p. 190 - 191).

S. V. Tyutyukin, in his article on the cadet party, gives an interesting formulation of the question of the socio-political role of the main bourgeois parties, of the emerging "division of labor" in the political struggle, which was expressed in the fact that the Cadets came forward whenever the bourgeoisie needed to establish contact with the forces of democracy, and the Octobrists were an ideal tool for colluding with the autocracy (p. 197). Tracing the objective changes in the social base of the cadets after the first bourgeois-democratic revolution, the author identifies in cadetism the main, purely bourgeois core and side "branches" with a democratic tinge, and argumentatively defines the main historical trend that this party objectively represented, expressing the interests of bourgeois development in general. The article examines the special nature of the cadets ' counterrevolutionism, which was expressed before the overthrow of the autocracy primarily in the desire to ideologically debunk the revolution, sow constitutional illusions among the people and instill in their consciousness the idea that the path of reform is more realistic and beneficial to the masses than the path of revolutionary struggle. In fact, for the first time in the historical literature, an attempt is made to analyze Lenin's propositions about the hegemony of the cadets at the descending stage of the first Russian revolution, in 1906-1907. S. V. Tyutyukin shows that between Lenin's well-known statements about the hegemony of the proletariat in the revolution of 1905-1907 and his thesis about the temporary hegemony of the Cadets in the period I and II There is no contradiction between the state Dumas, for V. I. Lenin understood cadet hegemony in a strictly limited sense - as the ideological influence of the Cadets on a part of the petty-bourgeois strata of the city and countryside and individual groups of workers, which arose on the basis of constitutional illusions that were inevitable during the retreat of the revolution and gave the Cadets predominance in the First and Second Dumas.

The collection ends with an article by I. F. Gindin. It seems to link together the individual aspects of the characterization of V. I. Lenin's views on the socio-economic structure of Russia in its relation to the economic basis of the country and the corresponding political superstructure considered in the previous sections. The author generally successfully solves this complex problem. With good reason, the article emphasizes the decisive importance of the historical experience of the first Russian revolution, which allowed V. I. Lenin to enrich the initial ideas about the capitalist development of Russia with the most important provisions about the objectively possible types of this development, and at the same time make the necessary clarifications in the question of the remnants of serfdom in the countryside. At the same time, it is quite appropriate to focus on Lenin's generalizations about the incompleteness of the bourgeois perestroika of the country, in which the dominance of monopolies was already established, and those acute socio-economic contradictions that inevitably resulted from the complex interweaving and interaction of monopolistic, early capitalist and pre-capitalist forms of economic relations.

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The author formulates a number of interesting propositions concerning the conditions that determined the well - known independence of the autocracy from the nobility, but, as it seems to us, when covering the question of the possibility of adapting the autocracy to capitalism, the objective and economic aspects of this process are not fully shaded. If the autocracy could adapt itself to the bourgeois conditions of Russia's development in the post-reform period, this was primarily due to the very objective possibility of a landowner-bourgeois path of development in Russia, on which the nobility could not but enter, wishing to preserve their economic and political privileges. It is equally obvious that the problem of the adaptability of autocracy cannot be considered in isolation, in isolation from the capitalist transformation of its very socio - economic base - landowner land ownership and economy. It was, in essence, a single process of adapting the autocratic-landlord order to the capitalist evolution of the country. From this point of view, certain formulations in the part of the author's reasoning that concerns the fate of the autocratic regime need to be clarified (see pages 315-316). They are hardly consistent with the author's own statements about the limits of the autocracy's adaptability, which he correctly connects with the exceptional depth of the existing socio-economic antagonisms in Russia, which precluded a reformist way out of the country's crisis (pp. 305, 307-308).

Now let's talk about some of the general disadvantages of the collection. Obviously, it should not have been completed, but should have begun with an article about the socio-economic structure of the country, which would have allowed the reader to immediately present the decisive economic basis that determined the entire complex and internally contradictory socio-political structure of Russia. The economic roots of such distinctive phenomena in Russia at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries as the hegemony of the proletariat in the liberation movement under the counterrevolution of the liberal bourgeoisie would be more clearly defined. It is all the more important to emphasize that it is precisely the economic aspects of these phenomena that are insufficiently disclosed in the book when describing the Russian proletariat and bourgeois liberalism.

A special section in the collection should be dedicated to describing the positions of feudal landlords and the right-wing political parties that represented their interests. The articles in the collection also do not give a sufficient picture of the petty-bourgeois parties. The authors of most articles focus their attention mainly on the problems of the first Russian Revolution, without bringing their research to October 1917. Meanwhile, in the period from February to October 1917, it was precisely the main socio-political forces that emerged during the first Russian Revolution that finally took shape and most clearly manifested themselves in Russia.

In general, the collection is one of those generalizing studies that serve as significant milestones in the process of an increasingly in-depth analysis of Lenin's concept of the historical development of capitalist Russia.

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