Preface

Source: Works, Vol. 9, December-July, 1927, pp. XI-XIII
Publisher: Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1954
Transcription/Markup: Brian Reid
Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2008). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.

The ninth volume of the Works of J. V. Stalin contains writings and speeches of the period from December 1926 to July 1927.

This was a time when the workers and peasants of the U.S.S.R., under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party and on the basis of the decisions of the Fourteenth Congress and Fifteenth Conference of the C.P.S.U.(B.), were continuing their efforts for the socialist industrialisation of the country.

The strengthening of the socialist economy of the U.S.S.R. gave rise to a sharp intensification of the struggle of the imperialist states against the Soviet Union, and of the struggle of the capitalist elements against the socialist elements within the country.

“Something like a united front from Chamberlain to Trotsky was being formed” against the Soviet government.

In his report “Once More on the Social-Democratic Deviation in Our Party,” delivered at the Seventh Enlarged Plenum of the E.C.C.I., and his reply to the discussion on the report, his speeches at the Fifteenth Moscow Gubernia Party Conference and at the meeting of workers of the Stalin Railway Workshops, the article “Notes on Contemporary Themes” and in other works, J. V. Stalin upholds and develops the Marxist-Leninist teaching on the Party as the principal directing and guiding force of the Soviet state, exposes the “theories” of the leaders of the Trotsky-Zinoviev bloc as inimical to the cause of the working class and the Bolshevik Party, and denounces the subversive activities of these leaders within the C.P.S.U.(B.) and the Comintern.

In these works, J. V. Stalin deals with questions of the theory and practice of socialist industrialisation, the building of socialism in the U.S.S.R.; he stresses the unity and indivisibility of the national and international tasks of the socialist revolution; he defines the Party’s line in the sphere of foreign policy at a time when the threat of a now armed attack on the U.S.S.R. had grown, and indicates the requirements for strengthening the defensive capacity of the Soviet Union.

In “The Party’s Three Fundamental Slogans on the Peasant Question,” “Concerning the Question of a Workers’ and Peasants’ Government,” and “The Slogan of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Poor Peasantry in the Period of Preparation for October,” J. V. Stalin develops Lenin’s teaching on the alliance of the working class and the peasantry, and on the leading role of the proletariat in this alliance, and explains the class essence of the Soviet state and Soviet Government.

A considerable part of the ninth volume is taken up by works devoted to an analysis of the motive forces and prospects of development of the revolutionary-democratic and anti-imperialist movement of the Chinese people in 1925-27. They include: “Questions of the Chinese Revolution,” “Talk With Students of the Sun Yat-sen University,” “The Revolution in China and the Tasks of the Comintern,” and others.

Published for the first time in this volume are J. V. Stalin’s letters to Ksenofontov, Zaitsev, Shinkevich, Chugunov, Tsvetkov and Alypov, and Pokrovsky.

Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute
of the C.C., C.P.S.U.(B.)