Searching for a Way

Contents

• “Scorched Earth” and Defensive Maximalism
• The Reconstruction of Leninism
• A Step Forward or Two Steps Back?
• Time to Work in a New Way

Russia in the late 90s: the decade of active, though spontaneous and fragmented, economic struggle of the proletariat was drawing to a close, its apogee being the “rail war” of 1998.¹

In these conditions, in the summer of 1997, a small Marxist group emerged in Kirov, which, first of all, drastically distanced itself from “official” and “semi-official” “communism” – the various pseudo-communist successors of the Stalinist counter-revolution that, in the first half of the twentieth century, destroyed the Marxist school in Russia and had already thoroughly discredited themselves by that time, although some of them, like some kind of zombie companies, persist to this day.

“Scorched Earth” and Defensive Maximalism

The Kirov Marxist Group (KMG), which stood at the origins of our organisation, was effectively forced to begin from scratch: the “scorched earth” tactics employed by Stalinism led to a rupture in the continuity of the revolutionary party – there was no one to transmit the practical, theoretical, and organisational experience of the Bolsheviks to our generation. On the other hand, it was necessary to confront a rising nationalism (present even on the electoral level)², which found fertile ground in depressed working-class neighbourhoods, and to pull young people who cared about what was happening away from its influence. More broadly, the official political environment in Russia at that time was far more fragmented than the current “one-and-a-half-party” system³, while ideological front lines were far more sharply drawn. This acute ideological confrontation was often accompanied by physical clashes in the city’s streets.

All these factors meant that, from the outset, our group’s orientation bore a pronounced imprint of maximalism. It was decided to launch our own press organ, which was named Komsa. The reasons for this choice were set out in the editorial of the first issue, published in June 1998: «In the late Soviet period, komsa was the name given to the unruly, uncontrollable section of the mass organisation of the Komsomol – those who found it intolerable to sit through tediously uniform meetings,» and who «had no interest in the prospect» of making a career, something the «Komsomol bosses» were actively pursuing. In contrast to them, young maximalists «preferred to live and to perceive everything that was taking place in all its diversity. They were reprimanded and expelled from the organisation. Yet, paradoxical as it may seem, it was precisely they who, having entered new left-radical organisations, were the first to come out against the power of capital.

We have nothing in common with the Komsomol elite of the late 1980s. They were handed fashionable bars and restaurants, banks and the beaches of the Canary Islands; we, by contrast, were left with a devastated, impoverished society in which we must struggle, strive, and simply live. […]

Like the “Elusive Avengers”⁴, we too hate the bourgeoisie and all forms of counter-revolution. We have united to struggle for a new, classless society in which there will be no place for the exploitation of man by man or for violence; a society in which the principal evil – private property, concentrated in the hands of a handful of wealthy parasites who regard themselves as masters of life – will be abolished. With the abolition of private property, commodity-money relations will also be abolished. The name of this new society is communism.

But before this society can be realised, the proletariat – that is, the class of wage labourers – must take power and overthrow the old capitalist world. Yet the advance towards communism does not end there: the proletariat must establish its own apparatus for the suppression of bourgeois resistance. This society will no longer be a state, since power within it will be in the hands of the majority – such majority rule is termed in Marxism the dictatorship of the proletariat. This constitutes a transitional period in which the old society is abolished and the new one brought into being.

The creation of a new society is possible only with the emergence of a new human being – free, dignified, striving for knowledge and all-round development, and free from bourgeois prejudices and obscurantism. Such a person can be formed only within a communist organisation».⁵

This mood and the character of that period in Russia in the 1990s were well reflected in Komsa headlines such as “Barkashov – the Russian brother of Hitler”, “Is Zyuganov very distant from fascism?”⁶, and so on.

It soon became clear that it was necessary to establish contacts with various radical left groups in other regions as well.

In August 2000, the KMG took part in the Second Conference of the Movement for a Workers’ Party (DzRP) – a formation that amounted to an “organisational fog” of heterogeneous currents, including not only a Leninist tendency but also legalist and spontaneist ones⁷, united solely by the aspiration to create a workers’ party, but not by any common strategy. At this conference, a split occurred: delegates of the Marxist Workers’ Party and the Workers’ Faction of the DzRP left the movement; shortly thereafter, the KMG also withdrew from the organisation. Earlier still, we had established co-operation with the Union of Marxists, jointly publishing in 1998 the first issue of the newspaper Perspektiva – a more “intellectual” publication compared to the KMG’s own paper (the aforementioned Komsa), which also continued to publish

The following data we collected on the distribution of our newspapers at the gates of Kirov’s plants and factories speaks to the level of workers’ activity in the 1990s and their interest in Marxist publications: at the Avitek plant, 7 copies of Komsa and 23 copies of various issues of Perspektiva were sold in July 1999; at the Non-Ferrous Metals Processing Plant (OCM), 2 copies of Komsa and 2 copies of Perspektiva; at the Kirov Meat Combine, 6 copies of Komsa and 11 copies of Perspektiva; at the Kirov Tyre Plant, 3 copies of Komsa and 24 copies of Perspektiva; at the Lepse Electromechanical Plant, 18 copies of Komsa and 38 copies of Perspektiva; at the Artificial Leather Combine, 4 copies of Komsa and 4 copies of Perspektiva.⁸

It was a state of “grumbling silence”. Among the industrial workers – towards whom we primarily directed our agitation and propaganda at the time – the majority were dissatisfied, “but to do anything – God forbid!”. At the same time, more than 45 per cent of wage labourers were owed wages. Processes of degradation and lumpenisation within the working class were intensifying. Near the factory gates one could often hear irritated whispers: “Give us guns! To hell with your newspapers!”. Were these wage labourers proletarians in the classical sense of the term? Did they live solely by the sale of their labour-power? They went to work, yet returned with empty pockets: companies in the region owed them what ranged from several months to several years of wages. How did they survive all this time? Through vegetables grown on their own garden plots, mushrooms and berries gathered in the forest, and fish caught in the rivers. Some income was obtained through casual jobs on the side, some through taking equipment and materials from their “main place of work”. Petty theft and absenteeism had been commonplace in Russia since “Soviet” times. The attitude towards work at “one’s own” factory was passed down from generation to generation. “Everything around belongs to the collective, everything around belongs to no one” – this classic piece of Soviet folk wisdom aptly reflects the prevailing attitude towards “common” property. The privatisation of this property in the 1990s was aptly dubbed prikhvatizatsiya⁹ by proletarian circles. This redistribution of property from above corresponded to a process of petty theft from below. It was a spontaneous, individualistic manifestation of the class struggle. Only a few rose above this level of class consciousness. Nor could it have been otherwise: «the worker, on the one hand, effectively became a petty proprietor, while on the other was compelled to sacrifice his health, education, and culture, subjecting himself to intense self-exploitation. In such conditions, there can be no question of any serious political activity».¹⁰

Information on the geographical distribution of Komsa can be found in the table published in No. 1(6) for the year 2000; we reproduce it here, adding a “Total” row.

Distribución de Komsa

City	N.º 4	N.º 5
Kírov*	332	323
Kazan	50
Krasnodar	30	20
Moscow	128	297
Leningrad		50
Perm*	50
Chelyabinsk	30	35
Murmansk	10
Ufa	60	50
Odessa		10
Sevastopol	5
Barnaul	30
Nizhny Nóvgorod	30	50
Birsk	5	5
Astrakhan	10
Yasnogorsk		10
Vyborg		10
Rostov-on-Don	30	20
Voronezh		3
Kazakhstan		20
Kyiv		20
Samara		25
Kaluga	30
Kaliningrad	30
Nevinnomyssk	30
Arzamas-16	10
Gus-Khrustalny	10
Individual sending	100	42
TOTAL	1010	940

*In these cities, Komsa had subscribers.

The groups that had withdrawn from the DzRP formed the “Marxist Bloc”, which in November 2000 published the first issue of the newspaper Delo rabochikh, focused primarily on covering and analysing the economic struggle of the proletariat. For all the shortcomings of such an approach – now evident – it was conditioned by an attempt to pull the most class-conscious workers from the influence of bourgeois factions which, reviving the traditions of “Zubatovism” under new historical conditions, sought to harness the then highly active workers’ movement to their own ends, going so far as to draw certain of its detachments into manoeuvres over the redistribution of property and to create “socially oriented” movements that acquired considerable electoral weight.¹¹

Even at that time, we placed our emphasis on work in the proletarian and student milieu and on the distribution of newspapers at factory gates, in the streets, and through door-to-door canvassing in working-class districts. At the same time, in an effort to restore the broken thread of Marxist theory, we undertook its systematic and organised study, gathering for this purpose in comrades’ flats, since we lacked the means to rent even the cheapest office.

Thus, passing through various stages of development and acquiring the necessary experience in practical struggle, comrades were formed who, a few years later¹², would establish Noviy Prometey in St Petersburg.

The Reconstruction of Leninism

In the period of “pre-history”, when the organisation is in the process of formation, both theoretical and practical instruments inevitably arise which, in the period of “maturity”, are subsequently discarded from its arsenal as having failed to justify themselves. At that time, these included a disproportionate emphasis on “workers’ democracy” and on the coverage of the economic struggle of wage labourers, a concentration on local politics to the detriment of international relations¹³, attempts to utilise the mandate of a deputy of the regional Duma for revolutionary propaganda¹⁴ – made possible by the protests of workers and intermediate strata – and so forth.

At the same time, even then one could observe the formation of those instruments which would later become constants of the organisation’s work. In essence, what was at stake was the reconstruction of Leninist principles:

– the struggle in the interests of the proletariat as a life choice of every activist («Personal ambitions must be cast aside; the interests of the cause come first»¹⁵);

– the defence of the understanding of the state as an apparatus of class violence of the ruling class (in an article with the telling title “To hell with the army”, we wrote: «On the 21st of February 1999, the united ranks of the Kirov opposition (Trudovoy Kirov, the RCRP, CPRF, VKP(b), and other kindred organisations) held their traditional rally marking the anniversary of the founding of the Red Army. Nostalgia for days gone by alternated with indignation at the accursed Yeltsinists who had destroyed the USSR, and with it our valiant Soviet Army. The speech by the secretary of the Kirov Marxist Group, however, hung in the air, provoking bewilderment and outrage among the patriotic veterans. Small wonder: he dared to say, “The army is collapsing – well, to hell with it; this only makes it easier for the proletariat to take power into its own hands. For the army is not tanks or guns, nor even soldiers from working-class families, but an apparatus of class violence of the ruling class.” This elementary truth of Marxism proved unknown to many who, apparently by some misunderstanding, bear the name of communists»¹⁶);

– an awareness of the fact that, in a non-revolutionary period, politics is the preserve of narrow, organised minorities – the vanguards of the classes – and, consequently, of the necessity of forming a cadre party capable of defending the strategic and organisational autonomy of the proletarian vanguard: «Unity is impossible with opportunists, those who place the tasks of political self-preservation above the interests of the common struggle. Unity is impossible with those who advocate an alliance (in practice) with the “national” bourgeoisie against the “comprador” bourgeoisie […]. Unity is undesirable with those who glorify “humanism” and “democracy” in abstraction from their class content […]. Unity is necessary with those who see the sole problem in the absence of a proletarian vanguard, for such people lack only one step – to look in the mirror! If we have recognised the necessity of the socialist revolution, if we see that the only force capable of accomplishing it is an organised and active working class, if we are already engaged in the work of enlightening and organising the masses – then we are precisely that vanguard of the proletariat. Only we act in a fragmented, amateurish manner, whereas we must act on a broad scale, professionally and in a centralised manner. […] Class consciousness arises not so much by virtue of “economic origin” as in the course of class struggle […]. The working class can give rise to labourists, nationalists, and “couldn’t-care-less” types – there is nothing surprising in this. It is naïve to regard every workers’ protest as the beginning of a revolution. On the contrary, matters must not be left to spontaneity; it is necessary to intensify propaganda and our own organisational presence within the collectives…»¹⁷;

– the recognition of the necessity of a press organ of our own, acting not only as a collective propagandist but also as an organiser («It is necessary to provide workers with information on the state of the workers’ movement across all regions. It is necessary to enable workers to see and understand the community of interests of all workers – that in every corner of Russia workers are struggling for the same thing. This can be achieved only through the exchange of experience of struggle. This task can be fulfilled only by a newspaper. At the same time, the newspaper must also act as an organiser. The newspaper must become a tribune for advanced workers and workers’ leaders […]. The joint activity of these advanced workers and leaders will lead to a situation in which workers’ groups will no longer struggle in a spontaneous and scattered manner, but in an organised and collective way. In short, a newspaper is needed. Today, this newspaper must reflect the qualitative changes taking place in the workers’ movement and become an instrument aiding workers in their unification»¹⁸);

– the positioning of oneself as an organisation of the world working class («The OKPR¹⁹ considers itself one of the organisations of the international workers’ movement in the struggle against international capital»²⁰) and the consistent implementation of the line of proletarian internationalism under all conditions («However much some communists may wish to struggle ONLY against Zionism, it INEVITABLY turns into a struggle against Jews in general. However much one may wish to support the “brotherly Serbs”, it turns into support for the Serbian bourgeoisie. However much one may wish to oppose world imperialism in the person of Bill Clinton, it results in assistance to Arab imperialism in the person of Saddam Hussein. The recognition of national interests as superior to class interests is ruinous for the communist movement»²¹);

– a strategy formed on the basis of a Marxist analysis of significant global phenomena (the system of states, international relations, their medium- and long-term tendencies, etc.), as well as an analysis of the dynamics of the principal enemy – “one’s own” imperialism – and the formulation of a corresponding political position on each particular question precisely on the basis of these facts (thus, in one article from October 2000, the following analysis was presented in this vein: «The economically depressed region²² was²³ in a state of deep social depression²⁴; crime, alcoholism, and illness were on the rise in the city […]. This situation persisted until the Putin turning point in Russian history. With the demand for patriotism and a national idea, and with the wars in the Balkans and Chechnya, orders began to pour into the Kirov defence industry, and not just from Russia. A mass recruitment of workers and specialists began, including those previously made redundant […]. Deputy Prime Minister A. Klebanov reported unprecedented, “fantastic” economic growth in the Kirov defence industry (over 1,000 % (!)), while the “popularly elected” Kirov governor V. N. Sergeenkov did not miss the opportunity to bask in self-congratulation, unreservedly attributing the “economic miracle” to his own genius. Any sober-minded observer will understand that for industry to make such a leap in such a short period of time, it must previously have been virtually non-functioning. Consequently, there is no economic miracle here, but merely a state order. For Marxists who know and understand the inevitability of these processes, life itself poses the tasks of the immediate period: 1. To conduct agitation and propaganda among the proletariat, explaining the essence of what is taking place, the possible paths of development, and the only revolutionary means of resolving the problem. 2. To create and develop our own organisation. 3. To promote the development of the workers’ movement and to win authority within it. […] To go out and call on workers to strike today is profoundly senseless. To wait until they themselves begin to strike or struggle for their rights by other means is to trail in their wake. We have no other path than that of revolutionary Marxist propaganda and class struggle, and this path cannot be realised without the creation of a revolutionary Marxist party».²⁵);

We intend to reprint some of the articles from that period, including those cited above, in full, accompanied by brief commentary, in our journal and on our website: original copies of Komsa are now virtually impossible to obtain (outside of archives).

It was a romantic period of our revolutionary formation. We were gaining experience, striving to grow alongside our class, and experiencing firsthand everything that was happening to it. We made mistakes and took blows – and not only in the figurative sense of the word. We lost those whom we had considered our comrades, but who, for one reason or another, chose a different path. We also lost genuine comrades, whose young lives were cut short under mysterious circumstances. We moved forward – at times without a compass, at times feeling out our way forward.

A Step Forward or Two Steps Back?

In the winter of 2000, the Italian organisation Lotta Comunista established contact with us. We had long wanted to break out of our isolation and establish links with internationalists from other countries. But we were not specifically seeking contact with Lotta Comunista; indeed, before our first meeting, we knew nothing about the organisation. It was Lotta Comunista who found us. This chance connection developed into almost a quarter of a century of relations, activity, discussions, and struggle.

This choice enabled us to:

– broaden our Marxist horizons and deepen our experience;

– gain access to the extensive long-term strategic analysis of international relations carried out by Lotta Comunista over decades, as well as to more specific, but equally valuable, scholarly materials on a wide range of questions;

– adopt a model of serious, responsible, disciplined, and systematic organisational work based on long-term planning.

However, after almost a quarter of a century, we were compelled to break relations with this organisation, since throughout all this time it failed to pose a number of interconnected key questions: about the causes of the present passivity of our class; about the conditions under which it will overcome this passivity; and about what the model of the party itself, its methods of work, and the very type of proletarian revolutionary should be under precisely such conditions of the class.

In conditions of the complete absence of any proletarian class movement, Lotta Comunista, seeking at all costs to preserve the quantitative results it had achieved – which do indeed appear impressive against the background of other internationalist groups – inevitably arrived at purely mechanistic methods of work, enabling it to recruit new supporters and retain old ones without regard for their level of preparation or understanding even of the increasingly unambitious material published in the newspaper, let alone of the fundamental questions of Marxism. And this root problem has naturally given rise to a multitude of more particular shortcomings in the organisation’s current work, which it would be inappropriate to address here.

More serious disagreements – for example, the attitude towards the so-called “Resistance Movement” during the Second World War, and many others – will find their expression in the pages of our journal. Open polemic has always been a weapon of Marxism, and we shall continue to use it in our struggle.

Ultimately, the most fundamental issue remains under serious doubt – namely, the ability of Lotta Comunista to carry out a positive qualitative leap the moment history and the class demand it.

We have learnt a great deal over this quarter of a century, and have gained and taught new comrades. Through practical experience, we came to understand that a newspaper is not only an organ of propaganda and agitation, but also a collective organiser. Our newspaper was published regularly, every month, and each issue contained our own articles. We took part in the publication of Marxist books, from their preparation through to typesetting and distribution. We ourselves prepared and conducted party schools with intensive study of the Marxist classics, engaged in the study of the history of the workers’ movement, and carried out research into capitalism. This quarter of a century was not lost time.

We have unquestionably become stronger than we were at the moment of our acquaintance with Lotta Comunista. Precisely for this reason, it cannot be said that we have taken two steps back. We continue to move forward. Having understood that staying any further within Lotta Comunista is incompatible with the conclusions we have reached (set out in our “Manifesto”), we took the only possible decision – to break relations with this organisation.

Since August 2025, our articles have no longer been published in the newspaper Proletarian Internationalism, whose pages are now filled solely with translations of Lotta Comunista. An insignificant part of our former comrades remained within Lotta Comunista. Everyone makes their choice. We made ours: leaving to those who preferred to preserve their connection with Lotta Comunista the name of the organisation, the newspaper, and much else besides.

We continue the struggle.

Time to Work in a New Way

Every consistent Marxist inevitably arrives at the conclusion we set out in our “Manifesto”: for the first time, our epoch confronts the proletariat and its vanguard in the form of the communists with the task of carrying out only their own, purely communist tasks; and now more than ever «the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property», to use the words of the “Manifesto of the Communist Party”.

On the other hand, as we have already said above, the present stage of this epoch is characterised by the absence of a mass workers’ movement and of a proletarian party as a significant political factor, by the extremely low level of consciousness among the workers, and by the complete and undivided domination of bourgeois ideologies throughout society, including within our own class.

Thus, any genuinely communist group, proceeding from these two premises – the character of our goal and the objective impossibility of acquiring a mass base for its achievement – must arrive at the conclusion that its activity at the present time should consist in carrying out the following tasks: 1) the selection and Marxist training of a small number of devoted fighters for the cause of the proletariat; 2) the development of Marxist theory in relation to contemporary conditions; 3) the restoration of the broken thread of the Marxist school – this applies above all to the Russian-speaking part of our class, where in practice it is necessary to begin from zero, from the “scorched earth” left behind by Stalinism.

And it is precisely from the standpoint of the effectiveness of carrying out these tasks that any instrument used by a communist group, including its press organ, must be evaluated.

We do not yet possess a precise understanding of what exactly such an organ should be, but we do know which negative features should be avoided. Unfortunately for us, these features are displayed by the newspaper Lotta Comunista, which in its present form hardly makes it possible to advance in carrying out the tasks outlined above.

The established working method of its editorial board and authors consists in filling almost every issue of the newspaper almost entirely – with the exception of one or two articles – with materials from the bourgeois press. The collection of such materials in itself, especially on so prolonged and systematic a basis, is undoubtedly necessary, but the problem is that they are published in an unprocessed and unanalysed form; and we are not speaking even of a simple formal – in other words, technical – analysis, let alone a Marxist one. Moreover, in many cases even simple commentary on the cited materials is absent.

These articles might have been suitable as preparatory material for actual articles, were it not for one “but”: they do not rise even to that level, since the best examples of such materials – for example, Lenin’s “Notebooks on Imperialism” – contain profound commentary and an initial systematisation of the materials.

It is hardly surprising that in its present form the newspaper leaves many communists perplexed – communists who, let us recall, see the abolition of private property as their goal. They simply do not understand why they should read a communist newspaper in order to learn about European and American drone models. One can read about such matters in specialised publications, where these issues are covered far more deeply and in far greater detail. And now imagine that articles of this kind constitute the overwhelming majority of the newspaper’s contents. In that case, the newspaper contains almost nothing specifically communist – that is, nothing which could not be found in more or less serious bourgeois publications. The only indication of the political orientation to which the publication believes itself to adhere is the newspaper’s title.

In other words, we are confronted with precisely the situation aptly described by the young Marx: «The form is of no value if it is not the form of the content».²⁶

Writing such articles is a relatively simple matter, and lately it seems that AI can do this no worse. It does not require serious cadre training, deep knowledge of Marxism (in many cases, it requires no knowledge of Marxism whatsoever), careful selection, systematisation, and analysis of facts, or large amounts of time; and it can easily become a mechanical conveyor-belt form of work carried out by inertia, allowing one to remain within a comfort zone formed over many years.

However, from the standpoint of the tasks outlined above, this method is self-destructive for several reasons:

– it does not permit the specifically Marxist training of fighters for the cause of the proletariat, since neither writing nor reading such a newspaper requires one to be a communist at all. The authors of such articles learn neither independent analysis nor work on literary style; this leads to a situation in which they are unable either to attract even a sympathetic audience or to genuinely engage it. This will turn into a real catastrophe at the moment of an acceleration of the class struggle: how will the authors of the present articles, with their dry bureaucratic style, be able to kindle revolutionary passion in workers prepared for the decisive battle? Will they suddenly acquire a powerful style without ever having practised it? The question is rhetorical;

– a more or less politically educated communist, devoted to his ideas and always striving to develop himself, time and time again finds nothing there capable of genuinely engaging him, which in the end leads to apathy and estrangement from the organisation. This applies to an even greater extent to comrades possessing the highest level of class consciousness. As for the “rank-and-file” comrades, the result is that they cease reading the newspaper altogether: it attracts neither by its content nor by its form. As a consequence, a situation emerges in which they do not integrate into the organisation precisely as communists, but merely carry out the mechanical work of distributing the newspaper and organising flows of people;

– it wastes the time even of those communists whom it has managed to recruit, consolidate, and involve in the work; under present conditions of a catastrophic shortage of politically educated communists, forcing them to engage in the mere compilation of the bourgeois press represents the height of wastefulness;

– it does not permit the development of Marxist theory in relation to contemporary conditions, since the newspaper does not even contain sections in which the results of independent research, or at least of a meta-analysis of already existing legal-Marxist and bourgeois studies, might be presented. And in general, this work is scarcely carried out at all, since the lion’s share of the cadres’ time is occupied by purely mechanical operations (collecting excerpts, distributing the newspaper, and so forth). Moreover, such an approach does not imply discussions or exchanges of experience with other internationalist currents, which ultimately leads to the theoretical degradation of the activists;

– it permits the task of restoring the broken thread of the Marxist school to be resolved only to a small and frankly insufficient extent: only an insignificant proportion of publications is devoted to this theme, despite the fact that the work to be done is a vast untrodden field; meanwhile, the editorial board prefers to occupy its authors with the compilation of conjunctural journalistic notes from the bourgeois media on profits, financial bubbles, and debts, which at best will cease to be relevant within a few months – or even weeks or days. In other words, we are not speaking of more or less profound research that would retain its usefulness for at least several years.

Form and content are inseparable; they are dialectically interconnected. A non-revolutionary form cannot be filled with revolutionary content.

In order to understand all this, time was necessary. Was too much of it spent? Perhaps this was facilitated in part by the fact that our activity in Russia was, in essence, autonomous. The greater integration into the work of Lotta Comunista that took place with the beginning of the Russian–Ukrainian war accelerated our understanding of the differences in our approaches and methods.

The break with the mechanistic methods of the past marks the beginning of a new stage for our organisation. Leaving behind a quarter of a century of illusions and organisational formalism, we continue our struggle on a qualitatively different level. From now on, all our forces and resources will be subordinated to the fulfilment of our genuine tasks: the uncompromising selection and Marxist training of revolutionary cadres, and the development of communist theory in relation to contemporary conditions. Henceforth, our form will be inseparably linked with our revolutionary content.

Footnotes

1. - On the Workers’ Movement and the Workers’ Newspaper [in Rus.] // Delo rabochikh. 2002. November. No. 1. P. 1. ↩

2. - Melnikova N. Kirov Region: in July 1998 [in Rus.] // International Institute for Humanitarian and Political Studies. Political Monitoring. URL: http://www.igpi.ru/monitoring/1047645476/1998/0798/43.html ↩

3. - We have devoted a number of our publications to this feature of the Russian political system. “Let us clarify what is meant: with the emergence of United Russia_, despite the formal existence of a multi-party system, the effective synthesis of interests, as well as the renewal of the political line and personnel of the Russian ruling class, takes place within this party; all the others, at best, express the minority interests of particular groups of the bourgeoisie and therefore, on the parliamentary stage, play a secondary role as a garnish to the main course. Their function is limited to capturing the votes of the discontented and creating the illusion of choice. It is precisely this party-political system, which has confirmed its viability in the most recent parliamentary elections, that we describe as a ‘one-and-a-half-party system’”_ (The Emptiness of Parliamentarism // Proletarian Internationalism. 2016. October. No. 26). Furthermore, a description of this phenomenon can be found in the articles “Social Reality and a Storm in a Teacup of Electoral Politics” (Proletarian Internationalism, No. 62, October 2019), “Illusions of the Ruling Class and the Realities of Russian Imperialism (I)” (Proletarian Internationalism, No. 82, June 2021), “Colour Revolutions and Sovereign Democracy” (Proletarian Internationalism, No. 104, May 2023), and “The Historical Delay of Restructuring” (Proletarian Internationalism, No. 122, November 2024). ↩

4. - A 1967 Soviet adventure film about young people during the Civil War. [translator’s note] ↩

5. - Komsa. 1998. June. No. 1. P. 1. [in Rus.] ↩

6. - Ibid. ↩

7. - Three Paths for the “Movement”. [in Rus.] URL: https://www.oocities.org/marxparty/lpp/lp6/tusovka.htm. ↩

8. - Salnikov S. Going to the Factories . [in Rus.] // Agency for Social and Political Information. Bulletin No. 1(49). 2000. February. URL: http://libelli.ru/works/aspi-49.htm ↩

9. - from Russian prikhvatit’, meaning “to grab”, “to snatch”. [translator’s note] ↩

10. - Salnikov S. The Working Class of Kirov: Recent Tendencies and Prospects of Struggle. [in Rus.] // Agency for Social and Political Information. Bulletin No. 1(49). 2000. February. URL: http://libelli.ru/works/aspi-49.htm. ↩

11. - Minin S. “Zubatovism” in the May Day Style [in Rus.] // Left.ru. 2000. 25 September. No. 3 (3).URL: https://left.ru/2000/3/mai.html. ↩

12. - At the end of 2005. ↩

13. - See issues of the newspaper Delo rabochikh: No. 1 (November 2000), No. 1(2) (January 2001), No. 3(4) (April 2001), No. 4(5) (April 2001). ↩

14. - At one of the sessions of the Kirov Regional Duma, the chair of the Duma addressed Deputy S. Salnikov so: “Cease political agitation within the walls of the Regional Duma; this is not the place for it!” (see: The Ghost of World Revolution Visits the Kirov Authorities [in Rus.] // published as a leaflet, September 2000). ↩

15. - Class Analysis of Society and the Prospects for Overcoming Communist Multipartism in Russia [in Rus.] // Komsa. 1998. August. No. 3 (3). P. 6. ↩

16. - To Hell with the Army… [in Rus.] // Komsa. 1999. March. No. 1 (4). P. 3. ↩

17. - A Mirror for the Hero [in Rus.] // Komsa. 1999. March. No. 1 (4). P. 3. ↩

18. - On the Workers’ Movement and the Workers’ Newspaper [in Rus.] // Delo rabochikh. 2002. November. No. 1. P. 1. ↩

19. - “United Communist Party of Russia”. The party name is provisional. ↩

20. - Class Analysis of Society and the Prospects for Overcoming Communist Multipartism in Russia [in Rus.] // Komsa. 1998. August. No. 3 (3). P. 6. ↩

21. - Ibid. ↩

22. - Kirov Region, 60 per cent of whose industry at that time consisted of defence enterprises. ↩

23. - In the 1990s. ↩

24. - Following the conversion campaigns of the second half of the 1980s. ↩

25. - Salnikov S. Why There Are No Strikes in Kirov: Thoughts Aloud [in Rus.] // Left.ru. 2000. 2 October. No. 4 (4).URL: https://left.ru/2000/4/PochemuKirov.htm. ↩

26. - K. Marx. Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood (Proceedings of the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly. Third Article) // Marx Engels Archive. URL: https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1842/10/25.htm ↩