**BURNING ISSUE OF THE DAY.**

1. Smaller summary of great even[ts.] Beginning of revolution
(No. 4) *) — uprising (No. 5) 2) — designat[ion of] uprising (No. 6) 3).

2. Burning [issue] of day = uprising. Its condition:
support of fire. Combustible material?

3. "Expanding the basis of the revolution": agitation
among urban paupery and peasantry (agitational significance of Gapon as a type of evolution).

4. Especially grows the significance of organization in such
moments: letter from comrade from Russia in department from Party 4).
Not to retreat from the task of "organizing the revolution"
and carrying out (and designating) the uprising, but rather to emphasize p r e c i s e l y
these tasks and p r e p a r e for them.

5. ("Organizational work of social democracy" p. 63 3) by Struve. Tales. Contra. What [is] to [be] Done. General significance of "falling away of work" 5).

6. And now a terrible expanding of the movement. Unknown
channels, countless unforeseeable *) allies, countless comrades,
friends and sympathizers.

7. "War t i m e."
Hundreds of circles, tenfold [increase in] various tasks, learning from events, learning in war, paramount significance
of leadership, of organization of leaders.

**BURNING ISSUE OF THE DAY.**

The proletariat, as it were, suddenly raised the entire revolutionary movement to a new, higher level — we wrote in No. 5 of *Vpered*.
And the further we move away from the ninth of January, the more
and more gigantic tasks emerge before social democracy,
requiring from it a solution. The beginning of the revolution brings to the fore the question of insurrection. We noted this in No. 4 of *Vpered* *),
we endeavored to develop various practical aspects of this
task in No. 5 2), we pointed out in No. 6 3) the complete bankruptcy and
enormous harm of the ideas spread by certain social democrats about
the impossibility of designating, conducting, and leading an insurrection by the organized vanguard of the working class. We must [now] dwell in more
detail on several other aspects of this urgent question of our
party, which now appears, obviously to all, as an urgent question of the entire people.

The revolutionary flame flared up suddenly bright and unexpectedly swift. The ruling clique strives with all its might to make it appear
that the fire is extinguished. But no base comedies like the reception of substitute workers (partly downright spies) by the tsar, like promises
of reforms will deceive the newly awakened to political life enormous mass of the proletariat. The fire is not extinguished; the flame smolders with incomparably greater force over an incomparably greater surface.
The combustible material continues to accumulate as news of the ninth of January spreads to remote localities and backwaters of Russia, as the criminal war continues, as ever new deceptions, evasions, delays and stratagems of tsarist policy are exposed. Judging from conversations in
"society," from reports of correspondents to foreign newspapers, from
information in Russian newspapers, discontent, embitterment
and a spirit of passive resistance penetrate with especial rapidity
into the circles of the propertied classes, embracing both landowner-zemstvo members and commercial-industrial capitalists, factory owners, merchants and intellectuals generally. It is perfectly natural that these circles
are able and know how to display their sentiments openly.
But it would be a tremendous error to think that the common people remain outside this
movement. They are silent, but ferment proceeds far and wide through countless such paths, of which we cannot
form ourselves any conception. If zemstvo addresses, intellectual banquets
and legal newspaper speeches about freedom awakened (of course, not all at once) hundreds of thousands of Petrograd proletarians, then now the bloody events of the 9th of January and the gigantic political strike,
which has encompassed surely more than a million workers throughout all of Russia, a strike not yet ended to this very day — these events and this strike will stir many millions of urban paupers and peasantry.