know how to obtain or to satisfy their desire to engage in broad activities. And I continue to insist that we can start establishing real contacts only with the aid of a common newspaper, as a single, regular, All-Russian enterprise, which will summarise the results of all the diverse forms of activity and thereby stimulate our people to march forward untiringly along all the innumerable paths which lead to the revolution in the same way as all roads lead to Rome. If we do not want unity in name only, we must arrange for every local circle immediately to assign, say a fourth of its forces to active work for the common cause, and the newspaper will immediately convey to them[1] the general design, dimensions and character of this cause, will indicate to them precisely the most serious defects of All-Russian activity, where agitation is lacking and where contacts are weak, and point out which small wheel in the great general mechanism could be repaired or replaced by a better one. A circle that has not commenced to work yet, which is only just seeking work, could then start, not like a craftsman in a small separate workshop unaware of the development that has taken place in "industry," or of the general state of the given industry and the methods of production prevailing in it, but as a participant in an extensive enterprise that reflects the whole general revolutionary attack upon the autocracy. And the more perfect the finish of each little wheel will be, the larger the number of detail workers working for the common cause, the closer will our network become and the less consternation will inevitable police raids call forth in the common ranks.
The mere function of distributing a newspaper will help to establish real contacts (that is, if it were a newspaper worthy of the name, i. e., if it is issued regularly, not once a month like a big magazine, but four times a month). At the present time, communication between cities on revolutionary business is an extreme rarity, and at all events an exception rather than the rule. If we had a newspaper, however, such communication would become the rule and would secure, not only the distribution of the newspaper, of course, but also (and what is more important) an interchange of
- ↑ A reservation: that is, if a given circle sympathises with the policy of newspaper and considers it useful to become a collaborator, meaning by that, not merely a literary collaborator but a revolutionary collaborator generally. Note for Rabocheye Dyelo: among the revolutionists who attach value to the cause and not to playing at democracy, who do not separate "sympathy" from active and lively participation, this reservation is taken for granted.
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