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From New International, Vol. XIV No. 2, February 1948, p. 34.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
It wasn’t an easy decision, but we made it ... Beginning next month, the NI will begin the serialization of at least the most important parts of a book which long ago deserved to be made known to the English-reading public: Victor Serge’s The Year One of the Russian Revolution ... Published in French in 1930, this work describes what no other book now available even attempts to provide – a factual, detailed, vivid picture of the Bolsheviks in power, and of the problems they faced in the first crucial year of the Soviet regime ...
Frankly, it wasn’t an easy decision because it means devoting a good slug of space month after month, for over a year, to this purpose ... We felt the material had to be good, and of first-rate importance, to justify that ... Well, it is good ... But we might as well own up in public that how far we go with it will still depend on you and your response ...
Notes of the Month were crowded out of this issue particularly by the sensational publication of the new Stalin-Nazi Pact documents ... We’re aiming at full coverage of the invaluable historical material uncovered by this falling-out of the imperialist thieves ... In fact, next month’s issue will have a supplementary article (continuing the job done in this issue by Saunders and Erber) dealing with the picture that emerges from the documents of the role of Stalin himself in the whole deal, and of the political ideology behind the Moscow-Berlin partnership ...
This isn’t supposed to be a horn-tooting column, but the truth is the truth ... The NI’s new look, sprung upon an unsuspecting public last month, has met with so close to a unanimously favorable response that we can’t persuade ourselves to conceal the fact ...
There’s plenty of room for the NI to grow ... A friend at the University of Chicago writes: “The last two issues (December and January) have been received with nothing but praise from all quarters. Even the U. of C. book store, which never sells more than two of its ten-copy bundle, sold out in two weeks. Not more than thirty copies were sold on campus but they were very well circulated among the politicals.” ... We also want to mention particularly the receipt of similar sentiments from the Bay Area (California) ... Sales are up all over, certainly wherever our agents have given just a little push ... That constitutes a hint to other agents ...
Incidentally, Business Manager Paul Bern is interested at the moment in getting the NI into more libraries and getting more agents on university campuses ... Write to him if you’re interested ...
Now we have to report a terrible discovery ... It all came about because our business department has compiled and mimeographed a complete list of all issues of the NI published since our first number in July 1934. They also mimeographed an inventory of all single issues and complete volumes, bound and unbound, now in stock. ... That was done to permit our readers to check whether they have a complete file and, if they haven’t, to complete it. (The lists will be sent you on request.)
The discovery was a by-product of this worthy endeavor ... If you’ll look at the column to the left, you’ll notice that this issue is down as Whole Number 124, whereas a month ago it was Whole Number 122 ... It seems that in the December 1940 issue, a mistake was made on this number and, what is worse, never corrected. ... Of course, this did not and does not affect the number of copies sent to our subscribers, but we’re keeping the record straight for the sake of all future historians and Marx-Engels-Lenin-Trotsky Institute librarians.
Among our contributors in this issue ... Max Shachtman is, of course, the national chairman of the Workers Party ... Ernest Erber and Ricky Saunders are the New York organization’s contribution to this number; they are respectively the organizer and assistant organizer of the WP in the city ... Wang Ming-yuen (the article is signed M.Y. Wang) is one of the leaders of the Internationalist or New Banner Group in China (Fourth International) ... Ernest Rice McKinney, the national secretary of the Workers Party, is at work on an article for the NI dealing with the civil-rights issues now before Congress.
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Last updated on 22 December 2015