Vpered Publishing House

(Forward Publishing House), the legal Bolshevik publishing house in St. Petersburg established in May 1906 on the initiative of V. D. Bonch-Bruevich. V. I. Lenin assisted in finding financial support, directed the work of the publishing house, and on some occasions served as editor. The Vpered Publishing House was organized out of several small publishing houses belonging to the Party or close to the Party. Its books bore the imprint “United Publishing House of Marxist, Nasha Mysl’ (Our Thought), and Utro (Morning).” Among those who took an active part in its work were V. V. Vorovskii, A. I. Elizarova-Ul’ianova, A. V. Lunacharskii, and M. S. Orminskii. The house published a number of Lenin’s works, including The Social Democrats and Electoral Agreements and A Report on the Unification Congress of the RSDLP. Preparations to publish a six-volume edition of Lenin’s collected works were begun, but this plan could not be carried out. In order to escape reprisals, the Vpered Publishing House published certain books under the imprint of fictitious publishing houses, for example, Proletarskoe Delo (Proletarian Cause) and Novaia Volna (New Wave). Vpered also printed and distributed progressive publications that were non-Bolshevik. Vpered’s publications were printed mainly at the party’s large St. Petersburg printing plant, Delo (Cause) Electroprinting Company, with equipment brought from the illegal Bolshevik Nina printing plant in Baku. The literature was distributed by Vpered’s central warehouse and store, which dispatched the publications to all parts of Russia. The premises of the editorial offices, the warehouse, and the store were also used by the Party for illegal work. Meetings and conferences, as well as sessions of the Bolshevik St. Petersburg committee, were held there, and Bolsheviks hiding from the police lived there. In the summer of 1907, the Vpered Publishing House was liquidated by the police.