At the end of his book of 1902, Chto delat?, Lenin declared laconically that the Russian Marxists would have “to liquidate the third period.” The “third period” here meant the years after 1898 when, according to Lenin, organizational fragmentation and ideological confusion had sabotaged the Russian Social Democratic movement. A voluntary federation of the scattered parts of the movement would, in Lenin's view, merely perpetuate in new form the confusion of the “third period.” Not reform but “liquidation” was thus essential. The Russian Social Democratic Labor Party would have to be reconstructed in Russia around the framework of Iskra's agents, who in turn were to be directed by the editors of Iskra abroad.

Here was the justification for the campaign which the leaders of Iskra had already initiated and which they knew among themselves as the “state of siege.“

The Kadet daily Riech’ (1906-18) was a product of the revolution of 1905, which brought Russian political parties into the open. Launched in St. Petersburg in February, 1906, the paper shared the stage with a multitude of opposition organs. Unlike most of these, however, it lived on, and could pride itself on, what was in Russia an unusually long career of frank liberalism. In 1906 alone some three hundred newspapers and journals either were quashed by the censor or died for lack of financial support. Riech’ survived, thanks to its relatively moderate tone, its stable economic organization, and the fact that it was not dependent on political reporting alone. The paper was at its best, not when it stressed politics, as in 1906-7 and 1917, but in the less agitated prewar years, when its cultural columns were second to none.

On the first anniversary of the October Revolution, Lenin admitted to the Sixth Congress of Soviets that a year earlier he had been well aware that workers' control of industry would be “chaotic, shattering, primitive, incomplete.” He had known that the syndicalist flood which burst upon Russia in the spring of 1917 would have to be controlled before it engulfed the revolution itself. Nevertheless, for several weeks after the Bolshevik rise to power, the new regime fostered workers' control in the factories with the aim of consolidating popular support.

Contemporary Soviet historians of biology have attempted to add historical prestige to Trofim Lysenko's controversial theory of evolution by reinterpreting past Russian social thought on evolution. One Soviet historian has not hesitated to go back as far as the eighteenth century to find Russian antecedents of various aspects of Lysenko's theory, although the relevance of this rewriting of history to the scientific merits of Lysenkoism remains at best obscure.

But the attempt does raise several significant questions: What were the major interpretations by pre-Marxist Russian social thinkers of evolution and particularly of Darwinism? What implicit assumptions about the process of evolution and the nature of man do these interpretations contain? What influence did they have on the development of a Russian Marxist interpretation of Darwinism?

It is obviously impossible to answer all these questions in a single article.