Most volumes of this kind apply a theory. This one states it. Rostislav Ulyanovsky was the Soviet Union's foremost theorist of what Moscow called the non-capitalist path of development, or socialist orientation-the doctrine that a backward, pre-industrial nation with barely a working class could cross to socialism without passing through capitalism, guided by revolutionary democrats and underwritten by the USSR. That doctrine organises a whole shelf of Soviet writing on Asia and Africa. Here is the theory whole, argued in the open by the man who did most to build it. Ulyanovsky (1904-1995) was an orientalist and economist by training, a Doctor of Economics, and is generally identified as a deputy head of the Central Committee's International Department. He writes with the confidence of a man setting out an official line rather than probing an open question-an apparatus intellectual, but an unusually able one. The book ranges across the newly independent states of both continents: the class structures decolonisation left behind, the role of the army and the single party, the national bourgeoisie, land reform, the state sector, and the terms on which Soviet support was offered. A note on dating. The Russian original is of 1978, but the English is a translation of a revised text carrying a later imprint, and the revision is real: the chapter on Iran discusses the fall of the Shah, the oil workers' general strike and Iran's departure from CENTO, all events of 1979. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.
