Colloquially known as the Short Course (Russian: Краткий курс), it became the most widely disseminated book during the time (until 1952) that Joseph Stalin served as the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the AUCP (B) and one of the most important works elucidating Marxism–Leninism.

On 16 April, the Politburo decreed that Knoriņ, Pospelov and Yaroslavsky would be relieved from all their other party obligations for a period of four months in order to complete the Short Course.

The names of Filipp Goloshchyokin and Nikolai Yezhov, initially described as "experienced leaders engaged in enlightening the Red Army" in 1938, were deleted from the book after both were arrested in 1939.

Leszek Kołakowski described the "Short Course" as "perfect manual of false history and doublethink": Its lies and suppressions were too obvious to be overlooked by readers who had witnessed the events in question: all but the youngest party members knew who Trotsky was and how collectivization had taken place in Russia, but, obliged as they were to parrot the official version, they became co-authors of the new past and believers in it as party-inspired truth.

In this way Stalinism really produced the ‘new Soviet man’: an ideological schizophrenic, a liar who believed what he was saying, a man capable of incessant, voluntary acts of intellectual self- mutilation.Although the Short Course was eventually rejected by the Soviet leadership during the Khrushchev Thaw, its formulations, especially the idea that class struggle not only continued, but intensified as the state moved towards socialism, continued to be of fundamental importance in China, where Mao Zedong repeatedly attacked his opponents in the Communist Party of China as "capitalist roaders" and agents of bourgeois, counter-revolutionary and Kuomintang conspiracies.

[12] Mao felt that the Short Course best combined the teachings of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin as well as being a blue print to applying communist ideals in the real world.