Lenin Collected Works:
Volume 13

Preface by Progress Publishers

Volume Thirteen contains works written by Lenin between June 1907 and April 1908.

The articles “Against Boycott”, “Notes of a Publicist”, “Revolution and Counter-Revolution”, “The Third Duma”, “Political Notes”, and “The New Agrarian Policy” are devoted to an analysis and appraisal of the political situation in Russia after the defeat of the first revolution and to defining the tasks of the Party organisations during the period of reaction. In these articles, as well as in the speeches delivered at the St. Petersburg and All-Russian conferences of the R.S.D.L.P., which are published in this volume, Lenin also formulated the aims of the Duma tactics of the Bolsheviks at that new stage.

The volume includes such important works of Lenin on the agrarian question as The Agrarian Question and the “Critics of Marx” (Chapters X-XII) and The Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy in the First Russian Revolution 1905-1907.

Included in the volume is the Preface to the first, three- volume collection of Lenin's writings, entitled Twelve Years, which was not published in full owing to persecution by the censorship. The Preface is a short review of the history of Lenin's struggle for revolutionary Marxism against liberalism ·and opportunism.

The volume contains the article “Trade-Union Neutrality” in which Lenin criticises the opportunism of Plekhanov and the Mensheviks, who attempted to make the labour movement in Russia take the path of trade-unionism.

Two articles under the same title “The International Socialist Congress in Stuttgart” reflect the struggle waged by Lenin and the Bolsheviks against opportunism in the international labour movement. The articles expose the deviations of the German Social-Democrats from the positions of revolutionary Marxism.

For the first time in any collection of Lenin's works, this volume contains the draft resolution of the Third Conference of the R.S.D.L.P. ("Second All-Russian") on the question of participation in the elections to the Third Duma, “Outline of a Draft Resolution on the All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions”, the note “On Plekhanov's Article”, and “Statement of the Editors of Proletary”.

In the “Preface to the Pamphlet by Voinov (A. V. Lunacharsky) on the Attitude of the Party Towards the Trade Unions”, also included for the first time in Lenin's Collect ed Works, Lenin opposes the slogan of “neutrality” of the trade unions and urges the necessity of close alignment of the trade unions with the Party with a view to developing the socialist consciousness of the proletariat and educating the latter in the spirit of revolutionary Social-Democracy.