ABSTRACT
The publication of the whole of the Grundrisse in the USSR in 1939-41 was preceded by partial publications of Marx’s 1857-8 manuscripts. The essay on ‘Carey and Bastiat’ and the ‘Introduction’ had already been published in Russian in journals and collections, the former in 1904-5 (Marx 1904 and 1905) and the latter in 1922 (Marx 1922), on the basis of Karl Kautsky’s editions in Die Neue Zeit. The Russian edition of the ‘Introduction’ was used by V. Khuluflu for its translation into Azerbaijanian, issued in Baku in 1930 and 2,000 copies were printed (Marx 1930). The subsequent publications of extracts from the Grundrisse were directly based on the work of deciphering and interpretation done on Marx’s economic manuscripts, as part of the rest of his works. Around 7,000 pages of these manuscripts were photographed in 1923 at the Archive of the German Social Democratic Party and later reached the Marx-Engels Institute (MEI) in Moscow in the form of photocopies. The first attempt to order and catalogue Marx’s draft economic manuscripts was made by Christoph Wurm, who worked at the MEI until January 1925. Pavel Lazarevich Veller took over the project in the 1925-7 and systematised and detailed Marx’s economic legacy in the so-called ‘Pasporta ekonomicheskikh rukopisei’ [‘Passports of Economic Manuscripts’], archival catalogues still in use today. Veller named the seven notebooks containing the Grundrisse ‘Short series’, to distinguish them from the ‘Long series’, i.e. 23 notebooks of the manuscript from 1861-3.
