Iskra was a fortnightly political newspaper of Russian socialist emigrants established as the official organ of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP).

Vera Ivanovna Zasulich was a Russian socialist activist, Menshevik writer and revolutionary. She is widely known for her correspondence with the late Marx, in which she put in question the necessity of a capitalist industrialisation prior to socialism, in the context of the fact that there already were living farmer communities in Russia that had developed practices and cultures that had a communist component.