Books on Soviet Russia 1917-1942 Book

Text extracted from opening pages of book: BOOKS ON SOVIET RUSSIA 1917-1942 A Bibliography and a Guide to Heading by PHILIP GRIERSON, M. A. FELLOW OF GONVILLE AND CAIU8 COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE METHUEN & CO. LTD., LONDON 36 Essex Street, Strand,, W. C. 2 First published in 1943 BOOK PRODUCTION VMEOKDMY THIS BOOK IS PRODUCED IN COMPLETE CONFORMITY WITH THE AUTHORISED ECONOMY STANDARD PU1MT1E1> IN GREAT BRITAIN PREFACE THIS book represents the first attempt to compile a list of books and pamphlets on post-revolutionary Russia that have been published in Great Britain. The period that it covers is the twenty-five years between February 1917 and the end of June 1942. But a mere list of names and titles, while it might be of value to a fairly restricted class of librarians and booksellers, would be of little use to the general public, and there is at present a serious need for some kind of guide to the enormous and very varied literature in existence on the Soviet Union. I have therefore tried to make the bibliography acceptable to a wider public by including in it a certain number of works chiefly collections of documents and personal memoirs * published outside Great Britain, mainly in the United States or in the Soviet Union and occasionally in languages other than English, and by adding to each item a note on its character and the point of view from which it is written. In both these features the personal factor is involved, and it is in them that I shall probably lay myself most open to criticism. The choice of foreign works has depended on the extent and the vagaries of my own reading and knowledge to some degree also on my estimate of the availability in England of the books I mention and it will probably strike any expert as most unsatisfactory. But while it would no doubt have been very desirable to have planned something on the lines of Kerner's Slavic Europe, there are insuperable obstacles to attempting such, a compilation under present circumstances. Too many libraries are inac cessible, and it is either difficult or impossible to communicate with scholars and publishers in other countries. I hope, how* ever, that my references to foreign literature may be found to be of use, though I give them with the proviso that no attempt has been made to render them systematic and that many excellent works have been left out altogether. The comments on books and pamphlets are only intended to serve as a rough guide to their character. I have tried to be as objective as possible, and my judgments will, I think, vi BOOKS ON SOVIET RUSSIA usually be found to err on the side of charity. My object otherwise has been to give only those items of information which will enable a reader to identify a book or pamphlet easily : the author's name, the exact title, the number of pages, the publisher's name and the date of publication. Some details which a strict bibliographer might like to include, but which are of no practical importance, have been omitted. For example, if a book, printed in the USSR, was published in May 1983 and reprinted in England later in the same year, the fact that one edition was printed in England and the other was not has not been recorded unless there were other differences between them. When a work has been reprinted a number of times without any change, the exact dates of each reprint have been omitted. It need scarcely be pointed out that a fairly large proportion of the books and the great bulk of the pamph lets mentioned in this bibliography are long since out of print ; they can only be obtained second-hand or consulted in a library. It has not always been easy to decide what items should be included and what should be left out. The limitation to books and pamphlets has been fairly strictly followed ; only a few articles in periodicals have been included for reference purposes, and off-prints of articles have been omitted unless they were clearly put on the market as pamphlets. A few books published in the early yeRead More