Almost every book on this list was written about Soviet power by people who served it. This one was written by it.
Following Lenin's Course collects the speeches and articles of Leonid Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, from the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution in November 1967 to the Sixth Congress of the Polish party in December 1971. It is the voice of the man himself, at the height of his authority, addressing his own Central Committee, the congresses of the fraternal parties, the collective farmers, the Komsomol.
The volume is front-loaded with set-pieces. It opens with the November 1967 jubilee report, a canonical survey of the whole Soviet past from October through the Civil War, industrialisation, collectivisation and the war. It closes with the great occasion of his early rule: the Central Committee report to the Twenty-Fourth Congress of 30 March 1971 and the six-point Peace Programme announced there. Between them sit the speech to the international meeting of Communist parties in June 1969, the Lenin-centenary report of April 1970, and a chain of addresses to the Polish, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Czechoslovak, East German and Yugoslav parties.
The value of this as evidence is unusual. When a textbook tells you the Soviet state embodies socialist democracy, you are reading a functionary paid to say so; when Brezhnev tells you, you are reading the man who decides what the state does. And the deeds are a matter of record. These are the speeches of the author of the August 1968 intervention in Czechoslovakia, explaining why he follows Lenin's course - delivered ten months and then thirty-one months after the tanks, and not smoothing the matter over but defending it.
New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.
