the house of one of the m.ernbers of the group, Anatole Alekseyevich Vaneyev,[1] and so the original Rabocheye Dyelo was not fated to see the light. The leading article in this number (which perhaps in thirty years' time some Russkaya Starina [Russian Antiquary] will discover in the archives of the Department of Police) described the historic tasks of the working class in Russia, of which the achievement of political liberty is regarded as the most important. This number also contained an article entitled, "What Are Our Cabinet Ministers Thinking Of?" which dealt with the wrecking of the premises of the elementary education committees by the police. In addition, there was some correspondence, from St. Petersburg, as well as from other parts of Russia (for example, a letter on the shooting down of the workers in the Yaroslav province). This, if we are not mistaken, · "first attempt" of the Russian Social-Democrats of the nineties was not a narrow, local, and certainly not an "economic" newspaper, hut one that aimed to the strike movement with the revolutionary movement against autocracy, and to win all the victims of oppression and politics and reactionary obscurantism. over to the side of Social-Democracy. No one in the slightest degree acquainted with the state the movement at that period could doubt that such a paper would have been fully approved of by the workers of the capital and the revolutionary intelligentsia and would have had a wide circulation. The failure of the enterprise merely showed that the Socialocrats of that time were unable to meet the immediate requirements of the time owing to their lack of revolutionary experience and practical training. The same thing must be said with regard to the St. Petersburg Rabochy Listok [Workers' Leaflet] and particularly with regard to the Rabochaya Gazeta and Manifesto established in the spring of 1898 by the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. Of course, we would not dream of blaming the Social-Democrats of that time for this unpreparedness. But in order to obtain the benefit of the experience of that movement, and to learn practical lessons from it, we must thoroughly understand causes and significance of this or that shortcoming. For that reason
- ↑ A. A. Vaneyev died in eastern Siberia in 1899, from consumption, which he contracted as a result of his solitary confinement in prison prior to his banishment. That is why we are able to publish the above information, the authenticity of which we guarantee, for it comes from persons who were closely and directly acquainted with A. A. Vaneyev.
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