V. I.

Lenin

The Workers and Pravda

Pravda has already summed up some of the results of its six months’ work.

These results showed first of all and above all that only
through the efforts of the workers themselves, only through the
tremendous upsurge of their enthusiasm, their resolve and stubbornness in
the struggle, and only after the April–May movement, was it
possible for the St. Petersburg workers’ newspaper, Pravda , to
appear.

In its summing up, Pravda confined itself for a start to the
data on group donations made by workers to their daily newspaper. These
data reveal to us only a small part of the workers’ support; they
do not tell us about the much more valuable and difficult direct
support—moral support, sup port through personal participation, support
for the policy of the newspaper, support through contributing materials,
discussing and circulating the paper, etc.

But even the limited data at the disposal of Pravda showed
that a very impressive number of workers’ groups had directly
linked themselves with it. Let us cast a general glance at the results.

| January 1912 . . . | 14 |
| --- | --- |
| February . . . | 18 |
| March . . . | 76 |
| April . . . | 227 |
| May . . . | 135 |
| June . . . | 34 |
| July . . . | 26 |
| August (up to 19th) 1912 . . . | 21 |
| Total . . . | 551 |

Altogether five hundred and fifty-one groups of workers
supported Pravda by their donations.

It would be interesting to sum up the results of a whole number of
other collections and donations by workers. We have constantly seen in
Pravda reports on contributions in support of various strikes. We
have also seen reports on collections for the victims of repressions, for
the Lena goldfields victims, for individual Pravda editors,
collections for the election campaign, for relief of the famine-stricken,
and so on and so forth.

The varied nature of these collections makes it much more difficult to
assess the results here, and we are not yet in a position to say whether a
statistical summary can give a satisfactory picture of the matter. But it
is obvious in any case that these varied collections take up a very
substantial part of the workers ’ life .

As they look through the reports on workers’ collections in connection with letters from factory and office workers in all parts
of Russia, Pravda readers, most of whom are dispersed and
separated from one another by the severe external conditions of Russian
life, gain some idea how the proletarians of various trades and
various localities are fighting, how they are awakening to the defence of
working-class democracy.

The chronicle of workers’ life is only just beginning to
develop into a permanent feature of Pravda . There can be no doubt
that subsequently, in addition to letters about abuses in factories, about
the awakening of a new section of the proletariat, about collections for
one or another field of the workers’ cause, the workers’ newspaper will
receive reports about the views and sentiments of the workers, election
campaigns, the election of workers’ delegates, what the workers read, the
questions of particular interest to them, and so on.

The workers’ newspaper is a workers’ forum. Before the whole of Russia
the workers should raise here, one after another, the various questions of
workers’ life in general and of working-class democracy in particular. The
workers of St. Petersburg have made a beginning. It is to their energy that
the proletariat of Russia owes the workers’ first daily newspaper after the
grim years of social stagnation. Let us, then, carry their cause forward, unitedly supporting and developing the
workers’ paper of the capital, the harbinger of the spring to come, when
the whole of Russia will be covered by a network of workers’ organisations
with workers’ newspapers.

We, the workers, have yet to build this Russia, and we shall build it.

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