"There is, indeed, some irony in the appearance of this worthy series two decades after it was most urgently needed. In the years after World War II, when intense anti-Communist sentiment in Western Europe and the United States coloured the reporting of developments in the Communist world scholars, government officials and the public at large would have profited greatly by the dispassionate appraisals which characterize the Yearbooks. Today these appraisals are less crucial to a grasp of world affairs. The world Communist movement itself, wracked by its own internal convolutions, is a less formidable force in international politics than it once was, or appeared to be. Most of the parties dealt with in meticulous detail in the Yearbooks are now almost without significance in their local political setting and are not likely to gain stature in the years immediately ahead; their leverage in international affairs is negligible. The parties that are important – that is, those in power and a dozen or so others which play an active part in democratic systems (as in Italy and France) – are better understood today through wider and more exacting research. The Yearbooks, for instance tell us nothing about the activities of the Eastern European parties or of the CPSU that is not already known through a variety of sources readily available to anyone interested."