COMMUNISTS: The Necessary Measures

Neues Deutschland, organ of the Communist Party in Soviet-occupied Eastern Germany, deemed it a good moment to publish Joseph Stalin's own 1925 "Twelve Pre-Conditions for the Development of a [Communist] Party of a New Type."

As printed, Pre-Condition No. 9 read: ". . . It is necessary for the party [to enlist] the best elements of the progressive fighters, who possess enough devotion to be the real representatives of the reactionary proletariat." Next day the paper apologized for "an unforgivable error in our typesetting department [which] confused the sense. [It] should of course have read: 'the revolutionary proletariat.' The editorial...

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