The volume where the series reaches its own present, and something changes on the title page before a word of the history is read. The earlier volumes came from the Institute of the International Working-Class Movement, the body set up in 1966 to write exactly this history. This one is credited to a different institute of the same Academy - the Institute of World Economy and International Relations, the establishment for studying the capitalist world - with N. N. Inozemtsev as editor-in-chief and a team led by G. G. Diligensky, K. G. Kholodkovsky and S. P. Peregudov. The subject has passed from the historians of the labour movement to the specialists in Western capitalism, and it shows. This is the most empirical book in the series and, on its polemical surface, the least strident. Its coverage is named exactly in the Russian subtitle: the working-class movement of the developed capitalist countries after the Second World War, 1945 to 1979. Postwar reconstruction and the long boom, the trade unions and their bargaining, the mass parties of France and Italy, the events of 1968, the crisis of the 1970s and the beginnings of Eurocommunism. The manuscript dates to the turn of that decade rather than to the imprint year: the standing authority is the Twenty-Sixth Congress of 1981, and the narrative runs out in 1980 with the British steel strike, the Swedish general strike, Reagan's election and the Italian local elections of that June. Volume Six. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.
