League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class

It was founded in St. Petersburg by Vladimir Lenin, Julius Martov, Gleb Krzhizhanovsky, Anatoly Vaneyev, Alexander Malchenko, P. Zaporozhets and V. Starkov in the autumn of 1895.

[1] Towards the end of 1895, the League had prepared the first issue of their new newspaper, Rabocheye Delo; it was ready to go to press when it was seized by the gendarmes during a raid on the house of Vaneyev, on December 20.

Those members of the group still at large however scored a great success organising a strike of the textile workers in St Petersburg in May 1896.

This industrial action lasted three weeks and spread to twenty other factories in Russia in what became the greatest strike in Russian history up to that date.

[5] In 1897, the League created Sankt-Peterburgskiy Rabochiy Listok (Russian: Санкт-Петербургский Рабочий Листок, Saint Petersburg Workers' Paper).