One of the better things Progress ever exported, and the volume where Marxism arrives in Russia, written by the man who brought it.

The five-volume Selected Philosophical Works was prepared not by a propaganda department but by the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences, working with Plekhanov House, the archive in Leningrad that holds his manuscripts. The texts were checked against the surviving manuscripts and against editions published in his lifetime. The annotations are substantial and largely factual - dating pamphlets, identifying obscure Populist journals, tracing where a passage first appeared - and the notes open with a statement of method: square brackets mark passages omitted in certain previous editions. The editors restored material earlier Russian printings had dropped, and told the reader they had done it.

Volume One covers twelve years, 1883 to 1895, and they are the right twelve. It opens with Socialism and the Political Struggle, the founding pamphlet of the Emancipation of Labour group, and Our Differences, the long settling of accounts with Populism. It prints both the 1884 and 1887 draft programmes, the demolition of the renegade Tikhomirov, two versions of the 1889 Paris congress speech, the 1891 essay on the sixtieth anniversary of Hegel's death, his notes to his own translation of Engels's Ludwig Feuerbach, and The Development of the Monist View of History with its two appendices against Mikhailovsky.

For several of these texts these remain the only English versions in general circulation.

Volume One of five. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.