V. I. Lenin

Draft Agreement Between the R.S.D.L.P. C.C. and The Priboi Group on its Recognition as the R.S.D.L.P. C.C. Publishers {1}

Introduction

X)) merits and Important role.

I In view of the advance of the business and the need for official
recognition, it should be correctly constituted asthe C. C. Publishers on the following principles:

a) the group shall autonomously conduct the administrative and
organisational sector;

b) all books and material which are not urgent shall be submitted to
the C.C. for preliminary review, and the urgent ones shall be published
without such submission, but with the C.C. representative having the right
of veto.

In the event of differences and the impossibility of agreement, the
question shall be referred to the full C.C. collegium for the final
decision.

The same full collegium shall decide the question of publishing
pamphlets in the event of any differences between the C.C. representative
and the Priboi collegium on the question of pamphlets coming in through the
C.C. representative.

c) The C.C. appoints Comrade X to take charge of the financial side of
its publishers.

August 7, 1913

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Notes:
{1}
The legal Bolshevik Priboi Publishers was set up in St. Petersburg in
early 1913 and operated under the direction of the Party’s Central
Committee. It responded to various questions of the working-class
movement. Emerging during the “insurance campaign” it issued many
publications on workers’ social insurance. Subsequently, on instructions
from the Party’s C.C., it devoted much attention to the issue of popular
agitation and propaganda pamphlets on socio-political and Party
questions. In view of the intensified persecution of the workers’ press by
the tsarist government at the start of the First World War, Priboi had to
cease its activity and resumed it only in March 1917. In 1918, it was
integrated with Kommunist Publishers, which had been set up as a merger of
several publishing houses (Volna, Zhizn i Znaniye, etc.).

p. 291