Paul Sweezy's blurb on the back cover promised an interesting book with an interesting history. The contents did not, unfortunately, deliver. About 1/4 of the book is about Marx or Engels. About 1/4 of that is about their ideas. The rest is general history of political ideas in the 19th century (Sweezy says that this is a good example of Marxist history writing, but the focus is firmly on the superstructure, if you will, rather than economic trends). While a full fifth of the book is about the daily toil of the IWA, there is *nothing* about Capital or its ideas. The Communist Manifesto gets a page and a half treatment. I don't know the circumstances in Russia in 1927 well enough to comment on why this is the case--perhaps the notoriously theory-deaf Stalin didn't want to be reminded of complicated ideas--but this book is not really a biography nor an introduction to Marx and Engels' ideas. It's not bad in its discussion of the historical period, and reads as an interesting document of its times. But it is not what the blurb promises.