<P> In 1937, a draft of the Short Course was submitted to Stalin, who in turn requested several revisions to the text, including more historical background . On 16 April, the Politburo decreed that Knoriņš, Yaroslavsky and Pospelov would be relieved from all their other party obligations for a period of four months in order to complete the Short Course . </P> <P> Between 8 September and 17 September 1938, Pospelov, Yaroslavsky, Andrei Zhdanov and Vyacheslav Molotov (Knoriņš was arrested in the Great Purge and executed on 29 July 1938) met daily with Stalin in his office at the Kremlin to make the last edits to the manuscript . The first chapter appeared in Pravda on 9 September 1938, and the rest of the text was published in serial form, the last chapter on 19 September . On that day, the Politburo decided to have a first edition of six million copies, to be sold at a particularly low price--three rubles a copy, equivalent to the price of a liter and half of milk at the time . On 1 October, the book was released . </P> <P> On 14 November, the Central Committee issued a resolution On Conduct of Party Propaganda in Connection with the Publication of the Short Course, stating it "ends all arbitrariness and confusion in the presentation of Party history" and turning the book into mandatory reading in the curriculum of all university students and attendants of Party schools . </P> <P> Until Stalin's death in March 1953, the Short Course was reprinted 301 times and had 42,816,000 copies issued in Russian alone . In addition, it was translated to 66 other languages . In Hungary, 530,000 copies were printed between 1948 and 1950 . In Czechoslovakia, over 652,000 copies were printed from 1950 to 1954 . It was the most widely disseminated work in Stalin's time, and no Communist publication broke its record until Quotations from Chairman Mao . </P>

History of the communist party of the soviet union short course