Written: 1880
Translated by Edmund Griffiths, 2026.
Marked-up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive
In recent years, the need to add to the socialist literature that exists in Russian has been felt more and more strongly. True, during this time we have had a few social-revolutionary periodicals, but they could not fill up the gaps in our literature.
They could not and did not address the theoretical questions of socialism. By the time they appeared, in late 1877 or early 1878, our socialist party already had the experience of the preceding years of struggle behind it. On the basis of this experience, old methods of struggle were being subjected to criticism, new programmes were being worked out, new practical techniques were being planned. And at the same time, with the cessation of socialist publications overseas, our only means of exchanging ideas on all these questions – questions permitting no delay – were one-off meetings of individuals or so-called ‘get-togethers’ of socialists. The number of people involved in the discussion of these questions, together with the mounting vigile of the police and the lack of system in the debates held at these get-togethers, meant that neither of these methods could meet the party’s needs.
Life insistently demanded a widening of the socialist audience. A heated, anxious period was beginning. A struggle was getting underway, forcing a series of questions that had previously not been clearly formulated. The shot fired by Vera Zasulich, and her acquittal by the jury [1]; the demonstration outside the court building; the demonstration sparked by the killing of Sidoratsky [2]; the New Cotton Mill strike [3], and other facts whose revolutionary importe was no less significant, served to popularize the party’s name and to attract attention to it even from people who had not previously known it existed, or who had accounted for everything as being intrigues by foreign enemies. The revolutionary’s pulse beat more strongly than ever. Amid a whirlwind of events, following one after another with unprecedented speed, there was a palpable need to coordinate, to work out a common plan of action, to secure means of speaking to several thousand people at once. The proclamations of the Petersburg Free Press [4] became more frequent; issues of socialist newspapers appeared. From then on, every active circle that possessed the resources was obliged to include issuing a print organ as one of its necessary functions.
But this state of affairs, while it summoned our periodicals into existence, also prevented them from allocating much space to theoretical questions. Occupied with studying the conditions of, and chances for, practical struggle, they naturally bore a predominantly agitational character. The task posed to them by life itself was to find methods of action, given the existing forces of the social-revolutionary party in Russia and the existing resiste from the governmental organization, that would make our inevitable losses as productive as possible. The necessity and inevitability of social revolution in modern European societies, and the theoretical propositions of socialism, were the first premises for meeting this task; they were thought not to need either proof or any more detailed elaboration. The majority of leading articles began with a general and dogmatic formulation of them. And this is no surprise. Our ‘underground’ publications were aimed at a particular circle of readers, among whom their starting points raised no discussion. These readers were convinced socialists. But even if a fully formed socialist (as far as assessing their practical activity is concerned) did not need any other methods of argumentation, we should not forget that no new teaching and no new party can ignore theoretical questions and go unpunished. The significe of this truth is greater in Russia than anywhere else. The unbelievably intense struggle with the government prevents revolutionary socialists from calmly working to fill up gaps in their education. They have neither the time nor the appropriate conditions. Under fire from police persecution even in early youth, they often do not have so much as a room they can call their own. They go for months, sometimes even years, with no fixed abode. Their mode of life is that of the vagabond; they get up in the morning and do not always know where they will find a place to rest that night. Under these conditions, intellectual work is – if not utterly impossible – at least rendered difficult. If revolutionaries are interested in some historical question or some other general proposition of socialism, they cannot read multi-volume studies; they cannot look for the factual information they need in legal literature. And what could legal literature offer anyway, in a country where even Comte’s Course in Positive Philosophy is counted as a forbidden work? And yet it is not only intellectual habits and needs that might require socialists to increase their mental baggage: there is a practical benefit too. The success of propaganda among intellectuals or urban workers – propaganda for practical methods of action, not just for socialist theory – is sometimes directly proportional to the breadth of the propagandist’s education.
In this case, the only thing that could be of assiste to practical activists was socialist literature. Without setting itself fantastically broad goals, it had to offer a systematic and thorough exposition of socialist doctrine, as well as history and its connection to different aspects of contemporary social life, covering at least the most important epochs of humanity’s historical life from a socialist viewpoint. Separate books and pamphlets could have taken account, more conveniently than periodicals could, of different phases in readers’ intellectual development and different stages in the formation of their worldview. This would have been one of their irreplaceable advantages, since the readers of our publications included not just convinced socialists but also people who had not yet managed to draw the conclusions from their theoretical knowledge and life experience. They were not satisfied by the confusion of concepts, the faint hinting at definite opinions, that our long-suffering legal literature is obliged to make do with; but they had not yet reached the other side of the chasm that divides the censorship-friendly worldview of the Russian philistine from the worldview of the socialist. This chasm is so vast that very few managed to leap across it unaided: only a very lucky combination of circumstes enabled anyone to work out socialist opinions on their own. There was an obvious mismatch between the vital need to replace our losses and keep swelling the ranks of the socialist party and this slow, random way of developing individuals. We needed to speed up the transition from a vague oppositional attitude to the ranks of revolutionary socialism, we needed to build a bridge to where we were that could be crossed, without toil and without risking exhaustion on the way, by people searching for the truth in theory and in everyday life. We needed to popularize those general premises that served as the starting point in publications dealing with methods of practical struggle – popularize them, work them out in detail, and shed light on them from different points of view.
We have not yet made good on these requirements, or, if you like, we have made good on them to a highly imperfect degree.
True, the works of Bakunin and publications by the editors of Vpered! [5] and Rabotnik [6] appear on the material evidence table in a great many trials. Some of them bear the stamp of uncommon talent and far-reaching erudition. Their exposition ranges from an abstract discussion with a reader possessing a European education to a tale that a ten-year-old child could understand. But – to say nothing of the fact that these publications are becoming rarer and rarer, that it gets harder every year to meet the demand for them – a library made up of them would still not be sufficiently complete. These works were brought out independently of one another. There was as yet no overall plan to publish as broad and diverse a series of socialist works as possible. This incompleteness and lack of system meant that Russian socialist literature, from the time of its first emergence, could never fully satisfy the requirements of readers from the so-called intelligentsia. In recent years, however, we have paid no attention to theoretical literature at all, even though the reader at the beginning of the 1880s may be more demanding in that regard than readers were a decade ago. While the conditions of Russian reality have demanded that we concentrate our attention on the field of practical struggle, among the Western European socialist parties theoretical work has been taking its usual course. New contributions have been added to their literature. Neither has practical life stood still: events have taken place in the last half-decade that deserve the full attention of socialists from all countries and nations. Such are the workers’ unrest in America, the Irish agrarian agitation, the congresses of the French workers, etc. The Russian reader only hears of them from reports in censored newspapers, because our periodicals, swamped with material, have only been able to cast an occasional fleeting gle at social movements in the West.
It seems to us that now is the time to think seriously about remedying these deficiencies. The fiercer our struggle with the government becomes, the more frequently its blows rain down on us, and the more difficult are the conditions in which we have to live and work – so much the more firmly should we grasp the saving thread of our key principles, so much the more often should we call attention to it from everyone around, so that they can see it and feel it in all its reality. In the labyrinth of unforeseen political events, it will safeguard us against unreasonable compromises and stop us resembling the Biblical Esau, who sold his birthright for a mess of pottage. Amid the flood of filth and lies that all our opponents pour on us, it will help an impartial witness to distinguish the innocent from the guilty and to understand what socialism is striving for.
That is how we understand the significe of socialist literature for propagandizing our ideas among the intelligentsia. Popular literature deserves Russian socialists’ attention no less.
Our publications for the people consist largely of tendentious short stories, written with more or less talent. The predominant element in this literature is the tale. [7] Its characteristic feature is that the language and the the authors’ means of argumentation are uniformly aimed at the understanding of an average type of reader. Reading this popular literature, one would imagine that the audience for which it is written contains no sharp differences in intellectual development or in the socio-economic position and the most vital interests of its various component parts. One would think the methods and techniques of socialist propaganda remained the same among a gang of fisherfolk on the Volga, and workers in the big cities, and in a settlement of a Cossack host, and in a little craft workshop in the depths of the provinces. – Worse than that. Until The Steam Engine came out in Ukrainian [8], we did not have one single book to prove we remembered the multi-ethnic makeup of the Russian Empire. We intended our popular publications for the entire labouring population, from one end of Russia to the other, but we overlooked the fact that the Russian state consists of many nationalities, and among the lower strata of society they have entirely preserved their national character and their languages. Only Great Russians could read The Tale of the Four Brothers [9]; Emelka Pugachev [10] was seen as suitable to stir up the revolutionary tradition along the Volga and also in Ukraine, which celebrates its own popular heroes and has its own mass movements.The preachers of Christianity, famously, were more practical in this respect than us, because the Apostles took care to have the Holy Ghost descend on them in good time and grant them the gift of speaking in all languages. – These techniques could not, of course, succeed in practice. We pose the solidarity of interests of the entire labouring world as the ideal, but we must not assume that this concept is intrinsic to the worldview of the people; we cannot take it, aside from the influence of socialists, as the starting point for revolutionary propaganda. The task of revolutionary propaganda is not to offer this solidarity to the people as a finished, abstract conclusion, a revealed dogma, but rather to make the process of generalizing the interests of labouring units comprehensible and accessible in itself to the peasant, the worker, or the Cossack. We need to apply the method of teaching by example, to break down the formula of solidarity before their very eyes into its component parts, each of which contains ordinary life. This is the sense and significe of what is called propaganda or agitation on the basis of local interests. But if it is to succeed, then socialist literature cannot ignore local, national, historical, or economic particulars: on the contrary, its activity must be adapted to them completely: and then, starting from local interests that everyone understands, it needs to work to smooth out the rough patches, to reconcile the antagonism that exists between different nationalities or different groups of toilers.
Just take the Don Cossack Host. The different economic and legal positions of the peasant and the Cossack are obvious to both. Hence comes the antagonism that makes the peasant look with envy at the comparatively enormous allotment holding of the Cossack, while the latter in turn despises the ‘muzhik’. – Our popular revolutionary publications are intended, as we have said, for the average type of reader. This average is the peasant. One wonders whether Russian socialists propose simply to leave Cossackdom in peace; or, if not, how much success a revolutionary pamphlet will have among Cossacks, if it talks about the needs of thr muzhik and is written in peasant language. – The facts show that even these pamphlets do meet with a good reception there, and get the job done, provided there are appropriate comments to go with them. But if the ground is favourable for socialist influence, then the total lack of tools specially adapted to work that ground is all the more regrettable. In fact, we do not have a single book or a single proclamation that tries to explain to the Cossacks the actual relations between them and the state, to point the way out of that situation, to show them the need for solidarity with the muzhik, so despised on the Don. And the same must also be said, of course, regarding the Ural and Black Sea hosts.
If from the Cossacks we pass to the urban workers, then the picture presented by our revolutionary literature is no more encouraging. It is no exaggeration to say that the stratum of factory workers is entirely deprived of any socialist literature that would be suited to them. In most cases these are people whose background is as urban commoners. This contingent is continuously being added to, including from the peasantry; but, when these peasants find themselves in economic conditions quite unlike those of the village, they soon become accustomed to their position and acquire all the habits of a permanent resident of the big cities. Factory workers do not cease to be interested in the land question, of course, but their attitude toward it is now purely negative. They are no longer engaged in agricultural work, and, having a trade, they see no benefit in going back to it; their only dream is to be rid of the taxes on their allotments, which often exceed the profitability of the land. The centre of gravity of their interests is in the question of wages, of rent for their accommodation, and of the prices of essentials or even luxuries. The process of capitalist production has seized them in its mechanism, and has left its imprint on all their interests and habits and on their whole view of the world. A comparatively high wage enables them to rent a room rather than a corner [11], and to live and feed themselves in a somewhat human way; it increases their wants, while the sword of Damocles of unemployment and total, helpless immiseration is always hanging over their heads. Their indefinite position makes them mobile, impressionable, and dissatisfied. They no longer despise German clothing – they strut in it on their days off, and spend a significant proportion of their earnings on it. They avoid rustic turns of phrase and fit out their sentences with foreign words; they want to seem educated. In fact, the word ‘seem’ is not quite right. Life in the big centres destroys the equilibrium that had characterized the worldview of a tiller of the soil in an economically backward country. It makes them sceptics, turns their minds into a tabula rasa on which life is always inscribing a new and wider horizon. This mental overhaul creates a genuine desire to know and to learn. Factory workers follow the newspapers; the more adved among them are acquiring books. Under these conditions, what can some Tale of the Kopeck [12] offer them?
The agrarian question is of little interest to factory workers. Even the method of argumentation and exposition in our popular publications does not correspond to their degree of mental development. They spark the work of thinking in the worker’s brain, they arouse a mass of doubts and misconceptions, and they can provide no answers. The workers are left to look for solutions to the questions that interest them by talking to a propagandist, or else to resort to reading censored books. Neither can compensate them for the absence of socialist literature that is accessible to their understanding. In a country where the police detective can take to himself the words of Scripture, ‘where two or three are gathered together, there am I in the midst of them’, large meetings are very difficult; and a private, one-to-one exchange of ideas is bound to be fragmentary and lacking in system. And the more the number of new converts increases, the harder will socialists find it to use the spoken word to make up for the lack of printed matter. Finally, we must also bear in mind the fact that the work done in previous years has created a certain contingent of socialists among the workers, a contingent that has outgrown the possibility of personal influence by the most adved individuals. As for legal literature, its service to the cause of preaching socialism can only be indirect. It can provide material, it can present facts and studies which, if they are criticized in the right way, may help to clarify socialist tasks; but criticizing the facts in that way is not legal literature’s business. Most of its representatives are either hostile to socialism or indifferent to it. Finally, the existing censorship prohibits ‘the noxious doctrines of socialism and communism’. To all of this we need only add that the workers have too little time to find a kernel of truth buried deep in a mass of printed rubbish, or to cultivate, through diverse and systematic reading, the ability to orient themselves amid the innuendo, allusion, and even hypocrisy of legal literature. Its weighty volumes are not meant for people who work ten hours a day at least.
In the absence of socialist literature, the results from the workers reading legal literature are far from encouraging. The French Revolution is placed alongside the Instruction of Catherine the Great [13], the Paris Commune alongside English factory legislation, the works of Chernyshevsky alongside the constitutional longings of liberal newspapers and journals. Ultimately, only one thing is clear to the workers: that in modern society they are pariahs, that they are dissatisfied with their position, and that they are ready to take up arms to change it for the better. What would that better look like? What are the paths to get there? That is just as dark and indefinite as it was to the French worker in 1848 who was delegated by his comrades to approach Louis Blanc and demand a decree ‘on the organization of labour’: when he was asked what the decree should say, he just repeated the same words again. Developments in France subsequent to 1848 show who gains from that state of affairs.
With the lack of system in our propaganda we are preparing the ground for intrigues by the political parties, which will one day recover from their present powerlessness. But by then it may be too late to put things right. We are not, of course, speaking of particular individuals. A lucky combination of conditions has given some workers the che to obtain a solid education. We know people like that; but we also know that they are the very people who will probably agree with what we have said. In these lines we are only repeating what we have heard from their own mouths more than once. The story of their intellectual development is the story of labour that only an uncommon mind is capable of. The fact that the Western European workers have brought forth their Bebels, Mosts, Malons, and Varlins does not mean they do not need, so to speak, elementary primers of socialism. Our Western European brothers know the value of the printed word extremely well. Without even referring to Germany, the classic country of socialist literature for the people, we can point to a whole series of Italian popular pamphlets. They deal with the state, with machines and socialism, with collectivism and socialism, with distribution, etc., etc. The French have done less in this direction than others, but in Fre the deficiency is partly made good by the existence of a workers’ organ, Le Prolétaire, and by workers’ congresses and meetings. We should not neglect this example. Of course, we may be told that the factory workers we have been discussing make up only a minority, that the majority in the factories hardly differ from the peasants: they treat their factory work as a kind of seasonal labour migration and they are more interested in the land question than the factory question. This is only true to the extent that it does not detract from the need for socialist literature for factory workers. For many of them, indeed, labour in the factory is a matter of temporary migration. But the wellbeing of their families often depends on it entirely. Factory workers come from the belt of Russia where the land does not yield enough to cover the payments attached to it. For these semi-industrial, semi-agricultural workers, their wages are the most significant part of their budget. Wage fluctuations affect them in the gravest way, drawing them willy-nilly into struggle with capital. Can it be said that in this struggle they do not need socialists’ help? And, if they do, then what should this help consist of but clarifying the struggle’s goals and methods, explaining the true relations between labour and capital? The large strikes by Petersburg weavers and cotton-spinners have shown the importe of workers’ organizations existing in the industrial centres. Those same strikes have shown that the influence of secret workers’ socialist organizations depends directly on how clearly they understand modern social relations and the tasks of the economic revolution. In fact, this makes sense a priori. An increase in socialist literature is one of the most vital needs of the modern workers’ movement in Russia. It is one of the most serious services that our socialist intelligentsia – which includes a section of the urban workers – can render it.
In just the same way, nobody is likely to deny the importance of socialist publications for the peasants. We are far from suggesting that disseminating books should be the only method of socialist activity among the people. We know there are other methods that will never lose their importe, and under the political conditions that now obtain in Russia they become all the more prominent. But however unimportant socialists living among the people may think disseminating books is, however limited the sphere within which they think books can be disseminated, they cannot but admit that books can render extremely serious services. Above all, socialists can never do without allies from among the people themselves. Being local residents, these allies can be a connecting link between the socialist organization and the mass of the people. On closer acquaintance, they can and should be recruited to the organization. It will then be necessary to initiate them into its objectives and its tasks; and this is where the role of propaganda in books begins. Here too, just as among the urban workers or the intelligentsia, the organization’s resilience and influence are in direct proportion to the degree of its members’ consciousness of their relation to the surrounding reality and the means of obtaining a better future. In this connection, a description of the present state of the peasantry, of its land allotments and the payments attached to them, the quantitative relation of small and large land ownership in Russia, the history of the peasant estate, finally the goals and aspirations of the social-revolutionary party – all this would make an extremely worthwhile topic for our popular publications.
In conclusion, we see that each of the existing branches of socialist literature needs very substantial additions. Further, given the different economic positions and different habits of the various classes among Russia’s labouring population, our popular literature must be, so to speak, differentiated into a number of different branches: literature for urban workers, for Cossacks, and for the peasantry.
Doing this is all the more possible and necessary because the very struggle that poses this task also provides indirect means to resolve it. A certain percentage of Russian socialists are always obliged to seek refuge abroad. True, the individual makeup of our emigration is always changing. But even the few months that each individual has to spend overseas are enough to facilitate, one way or another, the expansion of socialist literature for intellectuals, peasants, and workers. And there are also people who will not be able to return to Russia for a long time. Their duty is to devote whatever leisure is left them from the daily struggle for existence to the cause of the social revolution back home; and the duty of a well-organized party is to utilize their energies.
We suggest to socialists of all factions and tendencies, whether their views are expressed by Vpered!, Rabotnik, or Obshchina [14], Zemlya i Volya [15], Nachalo [16], Narodnaya Volya [17], Cherny Peredel [18], or Hromada [19], to unite for a cause that will undoubtedly benefit them all.
This cause is the publication of books and pamphlets elaborating theoretical questions relating to socialism. The whole series will be named the Russian Social-Revolutionary Library.
Publications in the Russian Social-Revolutionary Library are intended:
for the intelligentsia, i.e. for readers who are used to reading serious works and who possess the necessary leisure.
for the people, i.e. for readers who are prevented, by insufficient time or preparation, from making use of works in the first category. This will include popular pamphlets for workers, peasants, Cossacks, etc. Popular publications in the Russian Social-Revolutionary Library will be adapted in language and method of exposition to suit the most important economic and ethnographic peculiarities of different areas of Russia. Achieving this goal with some degree of completeness will depend on the support our endeavour receives from different social-revolutionary circles inside Russia.
To cover the cost of publication, a Russian Social-Revolutionary Library fund is established.
The business of publishing the Russian Social-Revolutionary Library is conducted by an Editorial Commission of three persons and a treasurer.
The method of electing the commission and treasurer, and their functions, will be laid down at the first meeting of all persons willing to collaborate on publication. The meeting must be convened within six months of the publication of the first volume in the Russian Social-Revolutionary Library.
At the present time a provisional Editorial Commission has been elected by the votes of people who have agreed for their works to be published, and has then elected a treasurer.
The business of the provisional editorial commission is restricted to arranging the publication of the works submitted to it, based on the time when they are delivered and on the available funds. The commission only has the right to exclude works that directly reject the basic foundations of workers’ socialism and works that are blatantly without any literary merit. If it finds that manuscripts it receives require additions or changes, it will go into the question together with the authors, but it cannot made any changes to manuscripts without the authors’ consent; in extreme cases it may include notes in the publication. If any author should indulge in personal abuse against other members of the socialist party, or expressions that the commission finds to be indecent and counter to the goal of the publication – uniting all factions of Russian socialism for serious work on common questions for common purposes, – then the commission shall convene a general meeting and invite it to resolve the matter.
The duties of the treasurer are to handle all business relating to the fund’s fines. All correspondence should be addressed to him. He will issue receipts for monies received for the fund, and for manuscripts received for the editorial commission.
The first meeting of Russian socialists prepared to contribute either their written works or financially will finally establish all the management details. Persons who are not present will be able to vote by proxy.
The following persons have been elected to the provisional Editorial Commission: L.N. Hartmann, P.L. Lavrov, and N.A. Morozov.
1. In 1878, Vera Zasulich shot and injured the governor of St Petersburg, General Trepov, following an incident where a detainee had been beaten for failing to remove his hat in the general’s presence. At her trial she admitted firing the revolver, but the jury found her not guilty. – Translator’s note.
2. Grigory Sidoratsky (1859?–1878), killed by police at a demonstration about the Zasulich case. – Translator’s note.
3. The New Cotton Mill, in St Petersburg, was one of Russia’s first modern industrial enterprises; a strike involving 2,000 workers took place there in early 1878. – Translator’s note.
4. Underground printing press, set up in 1879 by the Narodnaya Volya organization. – Translator’s note.
5. Journal published between 1873 and 1877 in Zurich and London (5 issues). – Translator’s note.
6. Newspaper published in 1875 and 1876 in Geneva (15 issues). – Translator’s note.
7. Please bear in mind that everything we say about socialist literature in ‘Russian’ actually refers specifically to Great Russian literature.
8. By Serhiy Podolynskyi (1875). – Translator’s note.
9. By Lev Tikhomirov (1873). – Translator’s note.
10. Emelian Pugachev, leader of a rising centred in the Volga basin (1773–75); Plekhanov uses the diminutive form of his first name. – Translator’s note.
11. None of what we say here about factory workers applies to the so-called unskilled labourers, who live no better in any respect than the peasants.
12. The Tale of the Kopeck, by Sergei Stepnyak-Kravchinsky (1873). – Translator’s note.
13. Issued in 1767 and dealing with the modernization and rationalization of Russian law. – Translator’s note.
14. Journal published in 1879 in Geneva. – Translator’s note.
15. Newspaper published illegally in 1878 and 1879 in St Petersburg. – Translator’s note.
16. Journal published illegally in 1878 in St Petersburg. – Translator’s note.
17. Newspaper published illegally between 1879 and 1885 in several cities in the Russian Empire. – Translator’s note.
18. Journal published in 1880 and 1881 in several locations, including illegally in St Petersburg. Edited by Plekhanov. – Translator’s note.
19. Journal published between 1878 and 1882 in Geneva, in Ukrainian. – Translator’s note.
Last updated on 20. August 2026