V. I.

Lenin

Letterson tasks of the revolutionary youth could be arranged on the following plan:

I. What the present-day student body consists of and what the
task of achieving its ideological unity involves.

II. Importance of Marxism in revolutionising the students (in
the revolutionary movement).

III. Social-Democrats and Socialist-Revolutionaries in
Russia. Theoretical and tactical differences between them. Terrorism.

IV. Problems of student organisation from the standpoint of
“revolutionising the students”.

V. Students and the working class (?).

{Ideological unity= a certain lack of ideological principles. General argument—different groups among the
students. Analyse—what groups, their accidental or inevitable character.

Upliftersin different classes of society.

Upliftersas basis of liberals.

Classcharacter of the six groups insufficiently distinct:
autocracy the chief determining factor (reactionaries— uplifters—liberals). Petty bourgeoisie, workers,
bourgeoisie— class [1] groupings already beginning to take shape.

Progressivesignificance of class (and political)
differentiation. Example. Academics and their differentiation from “ liberals ”. This differentiation does not
hinder but helps political utilisation (development, growth).

“Ideologicalunity”. Quid est? [2]

Between whom? Academics + liberals?
Liberals + socialists?

Only Socialist-Revolutionaries and Social-Democrats?

Achievingideological unity=propagating definite ideas, clarifying class differences, effecting ideological
demarcation.

Achievingideological unity = propagating ideas that can lead forward , the ideas of the progressive class.

Revolutionary Marxism, its emergence in Europe before
1848, its role in Western Europe and Russia.

{ insert : about the “superkluge " [3] contention that bourgeois students cannot become imbued with
socialism. }

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Notes:
[1]
Not “newly emerged” (the socialist intelligentsia), but going back half a century, beginning with
the Petrashevsky circle, [4] approximately. — Lenin

[2]
What is it?— Ed .

[3]
“Over-clever.”– Ed . — Lenin

[4]
The Petrashevsky circle was a group of progressive-minded
commoner-intellectuals formed in St. Petersburg in the mid-forties of the
last century around M. V. Butashevich-Petrashevsky, a fol lower of the French
utopian socialist Fourier. Among the members were writers, teachers,
students, minor government officials, army officers, and so on. While not
uniform in their political views, most of them were opponents of the tsarist
autocracy and the serf system.

Amongthose connected with the Petrashevsky circle were the writers
Dostoyevsky and Saltykov-Shchedrin and the poets Pie shcheyev, Maikov, and
Taras Shevchenko.