BY SARA LOBMAN
Pathfinder Press has announced a major effort to promote its newest title, Lenin's Final Fight: Speeches and Writings, 1922-23. More than 50 copies of Lenin's Final Fight were sold as part of a special pre-publication offer at an April 22 program in New York City on Cuba that took up how working people in that country are using their socialist revolution to fight the effects of the international crisis of capitalism.

Mary-Alice Waters was the featured speaker at the April 22 forum. Waters has edited several Pathfinder titles including, most recently, the Bolivian Diary of Ernesto Che Guevara. "It is important to all of us who need to learn our history as we prepare for fights today," Waters said, holding up a copy of Lenin's Final Fight. It will be read with great interest by those in Cuba who are grappling-in living practice - with many of the questions that confronted Lenin and the Bolshevik Party, she said.

Lenin's Final Fight follows the final political battle waged by V.I. Lenin to maintain the communist course that had led the workers and peasants of Russia to power five years earlier and given a giant impulse to workers' struggles the world over. Spanning from Lenin's report to the 11th congress of the Russian Communist Party in March 1922 until a stroke a year later effectively ended his political life, Pathfinder has included many of the letters, speeches, resolutions, and memos by the revolutionary leader.

It is the first time in any language that all these materials have been pulled together in chronological order, allowing the readers to follow for themselves this life-and- death fight. Everything that Lenin is known to have written from Dec. 21, 1922, until his last letter of March 6, 1923, is included; several items are published in English for the first time and one for the first time in any language.

A cloth edition of the book will be available in early May. Pathfinder is offering it at a special pre-publication discount of $25, half off the cover price, for members of the Pathfinder Readers Club.

Pathfinder has sent out nearly 100 copies of the book to prominent review journals, as well as professors, authors, newsletters, and magazines that specialize in the history of the Russian revolution and Slavic studies. Many of these magazines have reviewed other Pathfinder titles, and professors and other prominent individuals have prepared short comments that can be used in promoting the book in the coming weeks.

Pathfinder is also advertising with several book wholesalers, who sell to many chains and independent bookstores in the United States. These include Baker and Taylor's monthly catalog and a promotional piece being prepared by Inland for distribution at the American Booksellers Association trade show and convention in June.

Doug Hord, a Pathfinder sales representative in Boston, has pulled together a list of people who specialize in acquiring books on Russian studies for libraries. "Right now we could send information via electronic mail to 50 or 60 of these individuals to whom Lenin's Final Fight would be of direct interest," Hord noted.  
 
 
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