In recent years, the number of studies on the history of the Soviet working class has increased dramatically. This is due both to the general increase in attention to the social aspect of the development of Soviet society and to the practice of communist construction, in which the leading role of the working class is increasingly revealed. The monograph of Candidate of Historical Sciences A. I. Vdovin and Doctor of Historical Sciences V. Z. Drobizhev (MSU) - a multi-faceted study of the Soviet working class in transition - will take its rightful place among the works on the history of the working class of the USSR. The authors set themselves the following tasks: "to analyze the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of new additions to the working class, to find out the place of new additions in the structure of the working class, their impact on the class as a whole, and to reveal the process of turning new workers into cadres" (p.4). A. I. Vdovin and V. Z. Drobizhev pay great attention to the theoretical and methodological aspects of the topic. The book describes the most important Leninist propositions about the sources and ways of growth of the working class, analyzes the Soviet historiography of the problem, and thoroughly criticizes the works of bourgeois historians. We have only one remark concerning the authors ' treatment of the problem of the inner strata of the working class. Of course, it has long been necessary to abandon the very outdated concept put forward by B. L. Markus in his article "On the question of methods for studying the social composition of the proletariat of the USSR"1, which simplified and confused the main and secondary dominant features. A. I. Vdovin and V. Z. Drobizhev did not limit themselves to criticizing this concept and proposed their own division of the working class. However, it is illegal to combine the "working aristocracy" and recent rural immigrants, who have not yet had time to assimilate proletarian psychology, int ... Читать далее