>From the Author
Just after the end of the millenium I was invited to teach a course at the Institute of Sociology, "Classical and Contemporary Marxism," for future masters. These were young people who had graduated from provincial universities already after Soviet textbooks had been replaced by new books prepared on grants from the Soros Foundation and prgrams on "scientific communism" transformed overnight into courses on political science.
Although Marxism had been almost completely rooted out of the political and economic sciences in university programs, sociologists, even if they did not consider themselves adherents of the ideological views of Marx, were not able to completely avoid his influence. However, in order to get to know and understand something, it is necessary to study it. And there was nowhere to study.
The first problem I encountered was that when you begin to talk about "contemporary" or "clasical" Marxism in post-Soviet Russia, the students have no idea what you are talking about. You can discuss as much as you like the precise differences between the views of Lanin, Gramsci and Trotsky, but the question that arose when I began the course was completely different: what, eaxtly, do students know about classical Marxism?
I belong to a generation that studied in the Soviet Union, and for me Marxist terminology was natural and understandbale since my youth. A particular prepared system of norms was beaten into our heads: what was called "Soviet Marxism" in Western Europe and among us, with the light hand of Zinoviev and Stalin, was known as Marxism-Leninism. At the very least, we had a more or less accurate idea of what classical Marxism was. It doed not follow from this that everyone in the USSR understood and knew Marx correctly. But at least they had an approximate knowledge. It was part of the overall culture.
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