On the Tenth Anniversary of Pravda (Reminiscences)

Source: Tom 17

1. The Lena Days

The Lena days were the result of the Stolypin regime of "pacification." Younger Party members, of course, have not experienced and do not remember the delights of that regime. As for the veterans, they probably remember the accursed punitive expeditions, the bandit raids on workers' organizations, the mass flogging of peasants, and as a cover for all this -- the Black Hundred-Cadet Duma. The fettering of public thought, general fatigue and apathy, poverty and despair among the workers, the downtroddenness and intimidation of the peasants amid the general orgy of the police-landlord-capitalist gang -- such were the characteristic features of the Stolypin "pacification."

A superficial observer might have concluded that the era of revolutions had passed into oblivion, that a period of Russia's "constitutional" development on the Prussian model had set in. The Liquidators -- the Mensheviks -- shouted this openly, preaching the necessity of organizing a Stolypin-legalist workers' party. And certain old "Bolsheviks," sympathizing in their hearts with such preaching, prudently abandoned the ranks of our Party.

The triumph of the lash and darkness was complete. "An abomination of desolation" -- thus was the political life of Russia characterized at the time.

The Lena days burst into this "abomination of desolation" like a hurricane and revealed a new picture to all. It turned out that the Stolypin regime was not so firmly established after all, that the Duma inspired contempt among the masses, and that the working class had accumulated enough energy within itself to rush into battle for a new revolution. It was enough for workers to be shot down in a remote Siberian backwater (Bodaibo on the Lena) for Russia to be covered with strikes and for the Petrograd proletariat, taking to the streets, to sweep away at one stroke the boastful minister Makarov with his insolent slogan "so it was, so it shall be." These were the first swallows of a gathering mighty movement. Zvezda was right at the time in exclaiming: "We are alive; our crimson blood boils with the fire of unspent forces..." The rise of a new revolutionary movement was a fact.

It was in the waves of this movement that the mass workers' newspaper Pravda was born.

2. The Founding of Pravda

It was in mid-April 1912, in the evening, at the apartment of Comrade Poletayev, where two Duma deputies (Pokrovsky and Poletayev), two journalists (Olminsky and Baturin), and I, a member of the CC (I, as an illegal, was taking refuge with the "immune" Poletayev), agreed on the platform of Pravda and put together the first issue of the newspaper. I do not recall whether Pravda's closest contributors -- Demyan Bedny and Danilov -- were present at this meeting.

The technical and material prerequisites for the newspaper had already been created thanks to the agitation of Zvezda, the sympathy of the broad masses of workers, and the mass voluntary collections of money for Pravda at factories and plants. Pravda was truly the result of the efforts of the working class of Russia and above all of Petrograd. Without these efforts it could not have existed.

The character of Pravda was clear: Pravda was called upon to popularize among the masses the platform of Zvezda. "Whoever reads Zvezda," wrote Pravda in its very first issue, "and knows its contributors, who are also contributors to Pravda, will have no difficulty understanding the direction in which Pravda will work." The difference between Zvezda and Pravda consisted only in the fact that Pravda's audience, unlike that of Zvezda, was not the advanced workers but the broad masses of the working class. Pravda was to help the advanced workers to rally around the Party banner the broad strata of the Russian working class who had awakened to a new struggle but were politically backward. That is precisely why Pravda set as one of its tasks the training of writers from among the workers themselves and their involvement in the leadership of the newspaper.

"We should like," wrote Pravda in its very first issue, "workers not to confine themselves to mere sympathy but to take an active part in the running of our newspaper. Let the workers not say that writing is 'unfamiliar' work for them: worker-writers do not drop ready-made from the sky; they are developed only gradually, in the course of literary work. One need only take the matter up boldly: stumble a couple of times, and then you will learn to write..."

3. The Organizational Significance of Pravda

Pravda appeared on the scene at such a period of our Party's development when the underground was entirely in the hands of the Bolsheviks (the Mensheviks had fled from it), while the legal forms of organization -- the Duma fraction, the press, the sickness benefit funds, the insurance funds, and the trade unions -- had not yet been fully won from the Mensheviks. This was the period of the decisive struggle by the Bolsheviks to drive the Liquidators (Mensheviks) out of the legal forms of organization of the working class. The slogan of "removing" the Mensheviks from their posts was then the most popular slogan of the workers' movement. The pages of Pravda were filled with reports of the expulsion from insurance organizations, sickness benefit funds, and trade unions of the Liquidators who had for a time ensconced themselves there. All six deputies' seats of the workers' curia were won from the Mensheviks. The Menshevik press was in an equally or nearly equally hopeless position. This was truly a heroic struggle of Bolshevik-minded workers for the Party, for the agents of tsarism were not idle, persecuting and destroying the Bolsheviks, and without legal cover the Party, driven underground, was unable to develop further. Moreover, without winning the legal organizations, the Party, under the political conditions of that time, could not have extended its tentacles to the broad masses and rallied them around its banner; it would have become cut off from the masses and turned into a closed circle, stewing in its own juice.

At the center of this struggle for Party-mindedness, for the creation of a mass workers' party, stood Pravda. It was not simply a newspaper summing up the Bolsheviks' successes in winning the legal workers' organizations; it was at the same time an organizing center, rallying these organizations around the underground nuclei of the Party and directing the workers' movement toward one definite goal. Comrade Lenin wrote as early as What Is to Be Done? (1902) that a well-organized all-Russian militant newspaper should be not only a collective agitator but also a collective organizer. It was precisely such a newspaper that Pravda became in the period of the struggle against the Liquidators for the preservation of the underground and the winning of the legal workers' organizations. If it is true that without victory over the Liquidators we would not have had that party, strong in its cohesion and invincible in its devotion to the proletariat, which organized the October of 1917, then it is equally true that the persistent and self-sacrificing work of the old Pravda did much to prepare and hasten that victory over the Liquidators. In this sense, the old Pravda was undoubtedly the harbinger of the future glorious victories of the Russian proletariat.

Pravda No. 98, May 5, 1922.

Signed: I. Stalin.