Lenin Collected Works:
Volume 2

Preface by Progress Publishers

Volume two contains Lenin's works of the 1895-97 period. The first group of works in the volume, namely, Frederick Engels, Draft and Explanation of a Programme for the Social-Democratic Party, The Tasks of the Russian Social-Democrats, and The Heritage We Renounce—is devoted to an elaboration of the tasks of the Russian Marxists as far as their programme, tactics and organisation are concerned.

A considerable part of the present volume is made up of Lenin's economic writings directed against the Narodniks: A Characterisation of Economic Romanticism, The Handicraft Census of 1894-95 in Perm Gubernia and General Problems of “Handicraft” Industry, Gems of Narodnik Project-Mongering, etc.

The third group contains agitational works by Lenin—the pamphlets Explanation of the Law on Fines Imposed on Factory Workers, and The New Factory Law, the leaflets To the Working Men and Women of the Thornton Factory and To the Tsarist Government, and the article What Are Our Ministers Thinking About?

In 1897 and 1898, when preparing the legally published editions of A Characterisation of Economic Romanticism, Lenin was compelled, because of the censorship, to replace the words “Marxist theory” by “modern theory”; to replace “Marx” by “a well-known German economist," and “this socialism” by “this doctrine," etc. For the 1908 edition, Lenin either corrected a considerable number of these expressions in the text or explained them in footnotes. In the second and third Russian editions of the Collected Works these corrections of Lenin's were given as footnotes. In the present edition they have been included in the text itself. In the previous editions of V. I. Lenin's Collected Worksthe text of The Tasks of the Russian Social-Democrats was taken from a copy of Lenin's manuscript. The copy contains slips of the pen and other mistakes by the copier. In the present edition the text of the pamphlet published in 1902, which was read and corrected by Lenin, has been used.