Not a book anyone sat down to write: a folder of seventeen articles lifted out of the Soviet press of a single year and bound between covers. Every article keeps its source printed at the foot of its last page - Pravda, Kommunist, New Times, International Affairs, Voprosy filosofii, Voprosy istorii - and the habit lets a reader date the collection exactly. The pieces run across 1971, from the Pravda survey of 1 July on the fiftieth anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party to a foreign-policy study in the December International Affairs. This is a dossier assembled hot and shipped abroad early the next year, with none of the lag that separates so many volumes of the period from the moment they describe.
The currency is the point. Where the philosophical volumes of the anti-Maoist cluster argue about dialectics, this is the foreign-policy volley: Peking's conduct in the world, the splitting of the international movement, and above all the opening to Washington. Its occasion is Kissinger's secret flight to Peking in July 1971 and the announcement that Nixon would follow.
The contributors are the Soviet establishment at close to full strength. P. Fedoseyev, vice-president of the Academy of Sciences, supplies the keynote. Georgy Arbatov, the Soviet Union's foremost specialist on the United States, writes on the Nixon opening. Several of the most authoritative pieces carry the byline "I. Alexandrov" - not a man but a house signature, the name Pravda reserved for statements meant to be read as official.
It is also a document caught mid-turn. Articles written before 13 September 1971 still present Lin Biao as Mao's anointed heir and quote the Party Rules naming him; the last and latest piece quietly registers that he no longer figures as successor, without being able to say why. Moscow could infer the fall but not yet report the aircraft.
New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.
