Page:Lenin - What Is To Be Done - tr. Joe Fineberg (1929).pdf/139

 Petersburg correspondence of the St. Petersburg Rabochaya Mysl. Local factory exposures have always been and should always continue to be made through the medium of leaflets, but we must raise the level of the newspaper, and not degrade it to the level of a factory leaflet. We do not require "petty" exposures for our "newspaper." We require exposures of the important, typical evils of factory life, exposures based on the most striking facts, and capable of interesting all workers and all leaders of the movement, capable of really enriching their knowledge, widening their outlook, and of rousing new districts and workers of new trade groups.

"Moreover, in a local newspaper, the misdeeds of the factory officials and other authorities may he seized upon immediately, and caught red-handed. In the case of a general newspaper, however, by the time the news reaches the paper, and by the time they are published, the facts will have been forgotten in the localities in which they occurred. The reader, when he gets the paper, will say: 'God knows when that happened!'" [ibid]. Exactly: God knows when it happened. As we know, from the source I have already quoted, during two-and-a-half years, thirty issues of newspapers were published in six cities. This, on the average, is one issue per city per half year. And even if our frivolous publicist trebled his estimate of the productivity of local work (which would be wrong in the case of an average city, because it is impossible to increase productivity to any extent by our primitive methods), we would still get only one issue every two months, i. e., nothing at all like "catching them red-handed." It would he sufficient, however, to combine a score or so of local organisations, and assign active functions to their delegates in organising a general newspaper, to enable us to "seize upon," over the whole of Russia, not petty, but really outstanding and typical evils once every fortnight. No one who has any knowledge at all of the state of affairs in our organisations can have the slightest doubt about that. It is quite absurd to talk about an illegal newspaper capturing the enemy red-handed, that is, if we mean it seriously and not merely as a metaphor. That can only be done by an anonymous leaflet, because an incident like that can only be of interest for a matter of a day or two (take, for example, the usual, brief strikes, beatings in a factory, demonstrations, etc.).

"The Workers not only live in factories, they also live in the cities," continues our author, rising from the particular to the