“For the time being Russian Marxism scarcely went beyond the confines of an extremely narrow circle of intellectuals and of educational propaganda in small workers’ circles. In legal literature it was also represented almost exclusively by activities of a purely scientific, apolitical nature. Here an eminent place was occupied by the books and articles of Professor N. Ziber, who accepted Marx’s economic doctrine but ascribed no importance to his teachings of the class struggle, and in general interpreted Marxism in the spirit of a fatalistic automatism. The Russian translation of the first volume of ‘Capital’, which had been done by German Lopatin, a member of the People’s Freedom, and had come out as early as 1872 in 3,000 copies, had long since vanished, and reprinting it was forbidden. Marxism was barred from legal journalism; for the matter, too, the narrowly propagandistic activity of its first followers among the intelligentsia necessarily concentrated their thinking more on questions of Marx’s economic and sociological theory than on the application of that theory to the analysis and elucidation of current Russian life” [Theodore Dan, a cura di Joel Carmichael, The Origins of Bolshevism, 1964]