At the end of his book of 1902, Chto delat?, Lenin declared laconically that the Russian Marxists would have “to liquidate the third period.” The “third period” here meant the years after 1898 when, according to Lenin, organizational fragmentation and ideological confusion had sabotaged the Russian Social Democratic movement. A voluntary federation of the scattered parts of the movement would, in Lenin's view, merely perpetuate in new form the confusion of the “third period.” Not reform but “liquidation” was thus essential. The Russian Social Democratic Labor Party would have to be reconstructed in Russia around the framework of Iskra's agents, who in turn were to be directed by the editors of Iskra abroad.

Here was the justification for the campaign which the leaders of Iskra had already initiated and which they knew among themselves as the “state of siege.“