Page:Lenin - What Is To Be Done - tr. Joe Fineberg (1929).pdf/165

 grievous error indeed to build up the party organisation in the expectation only of outbreaks and street fighting, or only upon the "forward march of the drab, every-day struggle." We must always carry on our every-day work and always be prepared for everything, because very frequently, it is almost impossible to foresee beforehand when periods of outbreaks will give way to periods of calm. And even in those cases when it is possible to do so, it will not he possible to utilise this foresight for the purpose of reconstructing our organisation, because in an autocratic country these changes from turmoil to Calm take place with astonishing rapidity and are sometimes due merely to a single night raid by the tsarist janizaries. And the revolution itself must not by any means he regarded as a single act (as Nadezhdin apparently imagines) but as a series of more or less powerful outbreaks rapidly alternating with more or less intense calm. For that reason, the principal content of the activity of our party organisation, the "trick" of this activity should be, to carry on work that is possible and necessary both in the period of the most powerful outbreaks as well as in periods of complete calm, that is to say: work of political agitation linked up over the whole of Russia, that will enlighten all aspects of life and will be carried on among the broadest possible strata of the masses. But this work cannot possibly be carried on in contemporary Russia without an All-Russian newspaper, issued very frequently. An organisation that is built up around this newspaper, an organisation of collaborators of this paper (collaborators in the broad sense of the word, i. e., all those working for it) will be ready for everything, from protecting the honour, the prestige, and continuity of the party in periods of acute revolutionary "depression" to preparing for, commencing and carrying out the national armed insurrection.

Indeed, picture to yourselves a very ordinary occurrence with