M. Politizdat. 1970. 627 pp. The print run is 100,000. Price 2 rubles 5 kopecks.

The book, which readers received on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the birth of Friedrich Engels, is the first Soviet study to cover the life and work of Karl Marx's friend and colleague with such completeness and comprehensiveness. It seems to sum up the work done for several decades by Soviet historians of Marxism, starting with D. B. Ryazanov, V. A. Bystryansky, M. V. Serebryakov, F. P. Schiller, D. I. Rosenberg, E. A. Stepanova and ending with the current generation. The author's team 1 included representatives of various social sciences (historians, philosophers, economists), whose joint work gave the study a comprehensive character.

The authors of the biography relied not only on the results of the work of their predecessors - and these, in addition to domestic authors, should include such scientists as F. Mehring, G. Mayer, as well as O. Kornyu, H. Ulrich and others - but above all on a solid documentary base. The rich collections of the Central Party Archive of the IML under the Central Committee of the CPSU were used, including letters addressed to Marx and Engels, a unique collection of the workers 'and democratic press of the XIX century, stored in the institute's library, and memoirs of Engels' friends and associates. The latest publications of Engels ' literary heritage are also taken into account. The publication is illustrated and provided with a personal index and a press index. All this provided a high scientific level of the book.

One of the greatest difficulties that Engels 'biographers face is that they must be able to show the originality and specificity of Engels' contribution to a unified Marxist theory, to the common cause of creating and developing a scientific worldview of the revolutionary proletariat and combining this theory with the mass working-class movement. It is very difficult to solve this problem, and with the current level of development of Marxist problems, it is not always possible, but I must say that in general, the authors ' team managed to make a significant step forward in solving this problem.

In contrast to the fabrications of the bourgeois falsifiers of Marxism, the book shows that there was a complete unity of views between Marx and Engels on all the basic and somewhat essential questions of theory and practice. Without such inner unity, their unprecedented creative collaboration would be unthinkable.-

1 Author's team: L. F. Ilyichev (head), E. P. Kandel, N. Y. Kolpinsky, A. I. Malysh, G. D. Obichkin, V. V. Platkovsky, E. A. Stepanova, B. G. Tartakovsky.

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Without such unity, Engels ' development of scientific communism after Marx's death would have been impossible. The book presents the creative community of the founders of Marxism very concretely, demonstrating its constant, everyday character. The authors managed to show the creative collaboration of Marx and Engels as a mutual enrichment of two geniuses of science and revolution. In particular, Lenin's well-known, but not always deeply understood, thesis that "Capital" is a "work of two"is presented in a well-reasoned way2 .

The biography records the stages of the formation of the views of the young Engels, analyzes the originality of his path to creating a scientific worldview of the revolutionary proletariat, the process of overcoming religious views imposed by his upbringing and the environment. Engels 'book shows well the unusually strong democratic feeling of hatred for political arbitrariness, 3 for all oppression and violence, a feeling that in many ways contributed to the maturation of Engels' socialist convictions. At the same time, the authors describe in detail the great life and theoretical school that the young Engels went through: mastering the best achievements of human thought and participating in the practical and political struggle of his time, both in Germany and in England.

The biography reveals Engels ' contribution to the creation and development of all the components of Marxist theory, both during Marx's lifetime and after his death. When considering Engels ' development of Marxist teaching after 1883, the authors convincingly show that he did not change one iota the basic principles of the theory created by him together with Marx.

The analysis of Engels ' philosophical works given in the book serves as a clear refutation of the fictions of bourgeois and revisionist "Marxologists" that Engels allegedly distorted Marx's philosophical teaching. When covering Engels ' philosophical works, the authors tried to highlight in them - this is especially true for the paragraph on the "Dialectic of Nature", which is unfortunately quite short - fundamentally important thoughts of Engels, which have completely preserved their significance for our time.

This makes it possible not only to reveal their depth more fully, but also strikes a blow at the attempts of bourgeois falsifiers to belittle the significance of Engels ' works, especially those related to the problems of dialectics of natural science, on the grounds that the specific material used by Engels is "outdated".

The biography details the place of Engels in the creation and development of the economic theory of Marxism. The authors correctly emphasize that "Engels was the first socialist to apply the dialectical method to the analysis of the economic relations of bourgeois society in a masterly way" (pp. 34-35). In a concise and informative way, the authors were able to reveal Engels ' analysis of new phenomena in the capitalist economy. Engels followed these phenomena closely and was able to notice some of the main features of the pre-imperialist era. But in contrast to the reformists, he saw them not as the beginning of a peaceful transformation of capitalism into socialism, but as a further aggravation of the contradictions of capitalism and "the creation of the material prerequisites for socialism, the objective basis for the preparation of the socialist revolution" (p.565).

Engels ' contribution to the theory of scientific communism was extremely significant. These questions occupied a special place in his work in the 1980s and 1990s, when the development of the working - class movement required, on the one hand, an answer to a number of problems concerning the goals of this movement, and, on the other, it was necessary to oppose all sorts of petty-bourgeois ideas about the future of society. "When speaking about the future society," the biography says, "Engels repeatedly stressed that we can only talk about certain main features, basic laws, which can be determined on the basis of already known facts and trends in development, and not about details for which life has not yet provided material" (p. 584). Engels was able to identify some essential laws of the future of society, to outline the answer to those questions that should have faced the proletarian parties after the conquest of power - in the transition period, and when socialism will turn into a real reality. It was a question of recognizing public ownership of the tools and means of production in its nationwide form as the basis for the socialist transformation of society.

2 See V. I. Lenin. PSS. Vol. 2, p. 12.

3 Ibid., p. 13.

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the importance of the role of co-operation in the transition to socialism, the forms and methods of transferring the peasantry to socialist lines, the place of the intelligentsia in the construction of a new society, and the increasing role of the subjective factor under socialism. The biography emphasizes that Engels approached the socialist society as a society that changes and develops according to certain laws, considered its construction as a conscious and purposeful process based on the knowledge of objective laws. This is important to note, because in the Western literature one often comes across such a perversion of Marx's and Engels ' thoughts on the problems of building communism, when the strict determinism of Marx in Capital is contrasted with the imaginary voluntarism of Engels, who allegedly considered communism only in terms of a leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.

The book shows Engels ' creative application of the dialectical-materialistic method to the development of problems in specific sciences, in particular history. In those paragraphs where Engels ' works on the history of Germany and Ireland and the genesis of Christianity are discussed, some features of his research method are revealed: a thorough analysis of primary sources, the richness and diversity of the material involved, critical use of the works of bourgeois authors, "the ability to link coverage of relatively remote historical events with the actual tasks of the working-class movement" (p.443).

The chapters and sections of the biography devoted to Engels ' activities in the working-class movement of the 60s and 90s of the XIX century are read with special interest. Lenin considered Engels, after Karl Marx, "the most remarkable scholar and teacher of the modern proletariat in the entire civilized world." 4 The extensive factual material presented in the book convincingly confirms this Leninist idea.

"For me," wrote Engels, " Marx's historical theory is the basic condition for all sustained and consistent revolutionary tactics..."5 . Engels devoted great attention to the elaboration of such tactics and their application in the practice of the working-class movement. Engels ' activity-and this idea is consistently carried out in his biography-was characterized by a deep understanding of both the general laws of the proletarian struggle and the specific tasks of the working-class movement at each of its stages. Much effort, patient and persistent work was required of Engels to bring the understanding of these tasks to the consciousness of active workers in the working-class movement. The biography rightly notes that if one of the most important lessons of the Paris Commune - the need to create independent political parties of the working class - was firmly accepted by the advanced workers and gradually implemented, then "its other, no less important lesson is the great importance of the class consciousness of the broad masses, the need for ideological unity of the movement on the basis of the theory of scientific communism this lesson was not fully understood even by many socialists, who generally held Marxist positions" (p. 332). Therefore, those who reproached Marx and Engels for being too "picky" in matters of theory, without recognizing the importance of the struggle for its purity, did not actually understand the dialectic of the development of the working-class movement. While raising the workers to the level of awareness of their world - historical role, Engels also closely followed the experience of their struggle. As the biography says, "the practice of the revolutionary struggle convincingly confirmed the correctness of scientific communism, while at the same time providing material for concretizing and developing its propositions" (p.327). The authors consistently and concretely reveal Engels ' role in developing the scientific strategy and tactics of the working-class movement, showing that the interaction of Marxist theory and the working-class movement led both to the improvement of the theory itself and to an increase in the level of consciousness and organization of the working-class movement. The material in this book shows that Engels ' writings reflect and deeply develop literally all the main problems of the theory and tactics of the proletarian revolution. This was especially true of such issues as the dictatorship of the proletariat, the correlation between reforms and revolution, peaceful and violent forms of struggle, the connection of peasant and national liberation movements with the struggle of the proletariat, its hegemony in general democratic movements, and many others. Considerable attention is paid to bio-

4 Ibid., p. 5.

5 K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch. Vol. 36, p. 260.

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This article is dedicated to Engels ' struggle for the triumph of the principles of proletarian internationalism in the working-class movement. The authors note that it was Engels who in 1845, in his article "The Festival of Nations in London", "first formulated in the press the principles of proletarian internationalism" (pp. 65-66). The book examines the main stages of Engels 'struggle for international solidarity of the working class in the "Union of Communists", during the period of reaction, in the First International, and during the creation of mass workers ' parties in individual countries. Speaking about the forms of international cooperation of the working class, the authors point out that Marx and Engels "always subordinated the forms and methods of the revolutionary proletarian movement to the tasks that the working class faced in this historical period. And when the situation demanded it, they boldly and decisively broke with the old forms of organization, which no longer corresponded to the new conditions" (p.329). At the same time, Engels sharply criticized any concessions to nationalist sentiments.

The biography highlights the relentless struggle that Engels waged from the mid-1940s until his death against right-wing and" left " opportunism, and the two-pronged nature of this struggle can be traced at every stage. Thus, when analyzing Engels ' series of articles "Bakuninists at Work", which is usually considered in the literature only in terms of the struggle against anarchism, the authors correctly emphasize that it was directed not only against anarchism, but, in essence, against reformism (p.335).

Engels 'connections with the workers' and socialist movements of different countries, which were carried out over a number of decades and allowed Engels to be an "adviser and leader of the European socialists", are specifically revealed in the book6 . He helped the young workers ' parties with advice, criticism, and friendly support. Engels 'influence on the formation of the workers' movement was also enormous. "His attitude towards his comrades in the struggle largely determined the image of the proletarian fighters, his friends and associates" (pp. 287-288).

There are interesting pages devoted to Engels ' relations with Russian revolutionaries and his deep study of socio-economic and political relations in Russia at that time. Showing Engels ' deep faith in the revolutionary future of our country, the authors note that "in full agreement with Marx, Engels believed that the upcoming revolution in Russia should be bourgeois-democratic in nature, peasant primarily.... Considering the Russian democratic revolution as an integral part of the pan - European revolutionary process, Engels attributed to its victory fundamental changes on the entire European continent" (pp. 408-409).

The book conveys to the reader the image of Engels, the charm of his personality, the versatility of a scientist, the inflexibility of a revolutionary. The biography as a generalizing work reflects the current level of development of the history of Marxism. A number of fundamental problems in Marx studies have been studied quite well, but there are some questions that still need to be worked out. Thus, the processes of formation and development of individual components of Marxism are not equally studied - and this is reflected in the book. Engels ' contribution to the development of dialectical problems and to the development of Marxist economic theory is studied in more detail, while the process of creating the theory of scientific communism is less studied. The main thing is done - the first large biography of Engels in the USSR has been created, which, we hope, will serve as the beginning of a whole series of Soviet monographic studies about the life and work of this remarkable scientist and revolutionary.

6 V. I. Lenin. PSS. Vol. 2, p. 13.

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