Communist Morality

The title page of this book names three authors: Marx, Engels and Lenin. The book contains eight.

Counted in words, the largest single contributor to Communist Morality is Nikita Khrushchev, who supplies 10,790 of its roughly 47,000 words of text - more than Marx and Engels together, who supply 6,823, and more than Lenin, who supplies 9,971. Add the extracts from the 1961 Party Programme, which Khrushchev presented, and the sitting First Secretary accounts for very nearly a third of a volume attributed to three men who had been dead for between thirty-eight and seventy-nine years.

The book does not conceal this; its own blurb promises statements by "Marx, Engels, Lenin and prominent Soviet statesmen, including N. S. Khrushchov, M. I. Kalinin, S. M. Kirov and others". The concealment is on the spine. And that gap is the whole operation of the volume: it is a device for delivering a document issued in October 1961 - the Moral Code of the Builder of Communism - with a pedigree attached.

Which is precisely what makes it worth reading. It is the most complete surviving statement of what the Soviet state, at the one moment when it was telling part of the truth about itself, wanted morality to mean: what a communist owed to work, to the collective, to the family, to other nations, and to the state. The classical extracts are real and well chosen; the Khrushchev-era material around them is the thing itself, in its own voice.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.