Preface

Source : Works, Vol. 3, March - October, 1917
Publisher : Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1954
Transcription/Markup : Salil Sen for MIA, 2008
Public Domain : Marxists Internet Archive (2008). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit "Marxists Internet Archive" as your source.

The third volume contains the major works of J. V. Stalin relating to the preparatory period of the Great Socialist Revolution of October 1917.

J. V. Stalin worked in 1917 in close fellowship with V. I. Lenin, directing the Bolshevik Party and the working class in its struggle for the conquest of governmental power.

An important place in the works contained in the volume is given to the question of Bolshevik leadership of the masses at the time of the June and July demonstrations and of the elections to the Petrograd district and city Dumas (the appeal "To All the Toilers, to All the Workers and Soldiers of Petrograd," and the articles "Against Isolated Demonstrations," "The Municipal Election Campaign," "What Has Happened?" "Close the Ranks!" "This Is Election Day," etc.), at the time of the action to defeat Kornilov's counter-revolutionary attempt ("We Demand!" "The Conspiracy Continues," "Foreigners and the Kornilov Conspiracy," etc.), and in the period of direct preparation for the armed uprising, September-October 1917 ("The Democratic Conference," "Two Lines," You Will Wait in Vain!" "The Counter-revolution Is Mobilizing — Prepare to Resist!" "Forging Chains," "A Study in Brazenness," etc.).

A number of the works in the volume deal with the struggle of the Party to convert the Soviets from organs for the mobilization of the masses into organs of revolt and of proletarian rule (reports at the Emergency Conference of the Petrograd organization of the R.S.D.L.P.(B.) and at the Sixth Congress of the Party, and the articles "All Power to the Soviets!" "Soviet Power," "Blacklegs of the Revolution," "What Do We Need?").

Most of the articles in this volume were reprinted in the book, On the Road to October, published in 1925 in two editions. They were first printed in the Central Organ of the Bolshevik Party, Pravda, which also appeared under other names — Proletary, Rabochy, Rabochy Put — as well as in the Bolshevik papers, Soldatskaya Pravda, Proletarskoye Delo, Rabochy i Soldat, etc.

Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute of the C.P., C.P.S.U.(B.)