WEBB, Sidney & Beatrice; LENIN, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (trans.).

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Teoriya i praktika angliiskago Tred-Yunionizma ("The Theory and Practice of English Trade Unionism"). First edition in Russian of the Webbs' Industrial Democracy, which was translated by Lenin and his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya while they were in Siberia, and which exerted a clear influence on his What Is to be Done? (1902). We locate copies in just four institutions globally (Rome-Sapienza, NYPL, Nanterre, and Bochum).In December 1895, Lenin was arrested in St Petersburg after the police found preparatory material for a workers' news-sheet in his possession. He was held in prison for a year and then exiled to Siberia. While there, he was allowed to continue his correspondence with other revolutionaries, and to live with Krupskaya, whom he married. The two worked on this translation together, despite knowing little English, and the resulting Russian text was edited by the leading Legal Marxist Petr Struve (d. 1944). Olga Nikolaevna Popova, the publisher, also printed Struve's journal The New Word. The Webbs' palpable influence on Lenin comes across in his What Is to be Done?, where he draws on their discussions of "primitive democracy" in English trade unions, the necessity of economic struggle assuming a political character, the importance of the "bourgeois intelligentsia" in informing "socialist production", and "the need for professionalism" (Harrison).

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