Page:Lenin - What Is To Be Done - tr. Joe Fineberg (1929).pdf/138

 stop being tempted by the ease and closer proximity of a local newspaper which, as our revolutionary experience has shown, proves to a large extent to be more apparent than real.

And it is a bad service indeed those publicists render to the practical work, who, thinking they stand particularly close to the practical workers, fail to see this deceptiveness, and express the astonishingly cheap and astonishingly hollow argument: We must have local newspapers, we :must have district newspapers, and we must have All-Russian newspapers. Generally speaking of course, all these are necessary, but when you undertake to solve a concrete organisational problem surely you :must take time and circumstances into consideration. Is it not Quixotic on the part of Svoboda [No. 1, p. 68], in a special article "dealing with the question of a newspaper" to write: "It seems to us that every locality where any number of workingmen are collected, should have its own labour newspaper. Not a newspaper· imported from somewhere or other, but its very own." If the publicist who wrote that refuses to think about the significance of his own words, then at least you, reader, think about it for him. How many scores if not hundreds "localities where workingmen are collected in any more or less considerable number" are there in Russia, and would it not be simply perpetuating our primitive methods if indeed every organisation set to work to publish its own newspaper? How this diffusion would facilitate the task of the gendarmes fishing out—without any considerable effort at that—the local party workers at the very beginning of their activity and preventing them from developing into real revolutionists! A reader of an All-Russian newspaper, continues the author, would not find descriptions of the misdeeds of the factory-owners and the "details of factory life in other towns outside his district at all interesting." But "an inhabitant of Oryol would not find it dull reading about Oryol affairs. Each time he picked up his paper he would know that some factory-owner was 'caught' and another 'exposed,' and his spirits would begin to soar" [p. 69]. Yes, yes, the spirit of the Oryolian would begin to soar, but the thoughts of our publicist also begin to soar—too high. He should have asked himself: Is it right to concern oneself entirely with defending the striving after small reforms? We are second to no one in our appreciation of the importance and necessity of factory exposures, but it must be borne in mind that we have reached a stage when St. Petersburgians find it dull reading the St.