Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 3 - From Marx to Mao

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just be in time for this season.” (See present edition, Vol. 37.)
Much time was needed to give the manuscript the finishing
touches and the job was completed at the end of January 1899.
Lenin paid careful attention to the remarks of comrades and
relatives who read The Development of Capitalism while it was still
in manuscript. Each chapter was copied into a separate little
notebook, and, apart from Krupskaya, was read and discussed
by other Social-Democrats who were in exile at that time in
the Minusinsk area. “We were the ‘first readers,’ so to speak,
of The Development of Capitalism in Russia,” wrote G. M. Krzhizhanovsky
in his reminiscences (he lived in exile not far from
Shushenskoye village). “Whatever was sent to us, we read carefully
and returned it to Lenin with our comments. He took our
comments very much into consideration.”
The Development of Capitalism in Russia came off the press
at the end of March, 1899, under the pseudonym of “Vladimir
Ilyin.” The issue of 2,400 copies was sold out very quickly
and circulated mainly among the Social-Democratic intelligentsia,
the student youth, and also through the medium of
propagandists in workers’ study circles.
The bourgeois press tried to pass over Lenin’s monograph
in silence, and the first reviews did not appear until the autumn
of 1899. One of them received a crushing retort from Lenin in
his article “Uncritical Criticism,” which was printed in the magazine
Nauchnoye Obozreniye (Scientific Review) for May-June
1900 (see pp. 609-32 in this volume).
A second edition of The Development of Capitalism in Russia
appeared in 1908.
Since the establishment of Soviet power The Development of Capitalism
in Russia has, according to data as of October 1, 1957,
been published 75 times, in a total of 3,372,000 copies and in
20 of the languages of the Soviet peoples. In addition it has
appeared in the English, French, German, Spanish, Chinese, Czech,
Hungarian, Japanese, Turkish and other foreign languages.
Part of the preparatory work for The Development of Capitalism
in Russia, which shows the volume of the research done
by Lenin, and the methods he employed, has been published
in the Lenin Miscellany XXXIII.
The present volume follows the second, 1908, edition, which
was published after the text had been corrected and supplemented
by Lenin. In addition, account has been taken of all the
author’s remarks concerning the first, 1899, edition. p. 21
V. V.—pseudonym of V. P. Vorontsov.
N. —on or Nikolai —on, pseudonym of N. F. Danielson.
Vorontsov and Danielson were the most prominent ideologists of
liberal Narodism in the 80s and 90s of the 19th century. p. 25
In February or at the beginning of March 1899, when in exile,
Lenin received a copy of Die Agrarfrage (The Agrarian Question)
by Kautsky, then still a Marxist. By then, the greater