Lenin's first book, and it reaches us as a torso. Part I and Part III survive; Part II has never been found. The Progress edition prints the two that exist and records the gap.
He wrote it in 1894, aged twenty-four, against three writers on the Petersburg monthly Russkoye Bogatstvo - Mikhailovsky, the most respected radical thinker of the previous generation, together with Krivenko and Yuzhakov. They held that Russia might reach socialism through the peasant commune without passing through capitalism, and had begun to attack the new Marxist current as foreign, fatalistic and indifferent to the peasantry. The title is sarcastic: the friends of the people are the men who called themselves that.
It could not be legally printed. It was hectographed a few hundred at a time and passed by hand through the study circles of Petersburg, Moscow and the provinces, which is why the text is incomplete - and why the duplicators' own note of 1894, reproduced here, is a document of how illegal publishing actually worked.
What survives is the method rather than the conclusions. The Narodniks are gone, the journal is gone, and whether Russia would develop capitalism was settled by events within a decade. What does not date is the demand that a society be described before it is judged, and the refusal to let a view of human nature stand in for an account of who owns what and who works for whom.
The translation is the Progress version prepared from the fourth enlarged Russian edition; the numbered notes are the Institute of Marxism-Leninism's, kept in their original sequence so a reader can work against the printed Collected Works.
New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.
