Joseph Stalin

French Marxist Charles Bettelheim's huge work covering the class struggle in the USSR from 1930 to 1941. Split into two parts, 'The Dominated' (looking at the experiences and resistance of workers and peasantry under the ruling Communist Party) and 'The Dominators' (looking at the machinations of the ruling party itself).

In 'Reconstructing Lenin', four decades in the making, Tamás Krausz, makes a major contribution to a growing field of contemporary Lenin studies. This rich and penetrating account reveals Lenin busy at the work of revolution, his thought shaped by immediate political events but never straying far from a coherent theoretical perspective. Krausz balances detailed descriptions of Lenin’s time and place with lucid explications of his intellectual development, covering a range of topics like war and revolution, dictatorship and democracy, socialism and utopianism. 'Reconstructing Lenin' will change the way you look at a man and a movement.

A valuable collection of nearly 300 documents (from 1894-1991) on Russia and socialism, from a variety of contributors - e.g. Lenin, the Russian left communists, Luxemburg.

In this essay first published in 1930 in France, the founder of the Workers Group denounces the bureaucracy that he claims seized power in a “coup d’état” in 1920 at the Ninth Congress of the CPSU(b)—its “latest deception” being its fraudulent appeals for “freedom of criticism” and “self-criticism” after a series of revolts by workers and peasants in the early to mid-1920s—and calls for a restoration of proletarian democracy (as exemplified by the Paris Commune) by democratizing the functions exercised by bureaucratic State institutions (production, distribution, oversight) and replacing them with Soviets (“Councils”), cooperatives and trade unions.