The founders of the newspaper were a group of Kolpino, an industrial suburb of Saint Petersburg, formed by the workers Jakov Andreev (1873–1927), the two Dulashev brothers, Efimov, Vlasov, Vetts, and by the employees Fel'dman, Vaneev and Ivanov.

According to Semenov, they were unknowingly influenced from the so-called "legal Marxism" of Peter Struve and Mikhail Tugan-Baranovsky, which led them to Bernstein's revisionism and to the economism of Yekaterina Kuskova and Sergei Prokopovich.

[5]An article in the first issue denounced the current weakness of the workers' movement, at the "mercy of tsarism" and unable to fight "against the despotism of capitalists and the government" until it was established in "a compact force, the conscious strength of autonomy of the working class".

[7] During 1896–1897, a long series of strikes forced the government to grant, on 16 June 1897, the law that lowered the duration of the working day to 11.5 hours.

[8] In order to conduct these battles, a political party was apparently not necessary, as it was not included among the means indicated in the 4th issue of the newspaper (October 1898) to "move the movement forward".

As he wrote to Apollinariya Yakubova, "the inevitable divergences, substantial and not secondary, with the positions of the editors of the Rabochaya Mysl would only bring confusion in the social-democratic movement".