Part Two of How the Steel Was Tempered contains a sustained dramatisation of the Party discussion of 1923 and 1924, in which the Left Opposition is the enemy. The foreword to Part One of this edition speaks of the depraved Trotskyite Dubava, and of how political double-dealing goes hand in hand with moral dissipation. We have reissued this novel without cuts, and we do not pretend that sentence is not in front of it. A publishing house in this tradition cannot put the book into a reader's hands with a note about the weather. The new critical introduction written for this edition says so directly, and argues that the value of the book depends entirely on its not having been cut. What follows the discussion is the part everyone remembers: Korchagin's body failing joint by joint, the refusal to stop, and the turn to writing when nothing else is left. It is the most influential Soviet novel of its century, and its second half is where its politics are stated rather than implied. The text is the Foreign Languages Publishing House printing of 1952, translated by R. Prokofieva, reproduced complete and unaltered.
