Russian Socialist Federation

[1] To this end, various branches of Russian-speaking revolutionary socialists began to be formed in those areas of the country with a significant émigré population.

The Russian Socialist Federation maintained its own daily newspaper called Novyi Mir (New World), published in New York.

[6] In the words of historian Theodore Draper: "The supreme lesson seemed to be that a small party could seize power if only it had enough revolutionary zeal and purity of doctrine.

[9] Socialist Gregory Weinstein — editor of Novyi Mir and later a founding member of the Communist Labor Party of America — was elected chairman of the session.

Inspired by the November 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and disgruntled over the largely ineffectual Socialist Party electoral campaign of 1918, this group began to unite around the February 1919 elections of members of the 15-member National Executive Committee which governed the SPA.

A programmatic document called the Left Wing Manifesto, written by a committee in New York and thoroughly revised by Louis Fraina, began to be circulated among locals and branches of the Socialist Party for their approval.

A new weekly publication called The Revolutionary Age, edited in Boston by Louis Fraina, was established to advance the Left Wing cause.

The outgoing National Executive Committee, dominated by older and more cautious adherents of the Socialist Party's traditional electoral approach to the winning of state power, were not about to surrender without a fight, however.