The Communist Manifesto was a one-party state under the rule of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Unlike their mass-based counterparts of the Second International, the CPSU and other Leninist parties like it in the Third International expected their members to know the classic works of Marx, Engels and Lenin. Further, party leaders were expected to base their policy decisions on Marxist-Leninist ideology. Therefore works such as the "Manifesto" were required reading for the party rank-and-file. Therefore the widespread dissemination of Marx and Engels' works became an important policy objective; backed by a sovereign state, the CPSU had relatively inexhaustible resources
The Communist Manifesto section III ... in the last issue of his [short-lived] London magazine". Over the next two decades only a few new editions were published; these include an (unauthorised and occasionally inaccurate) 1869 Russian translation by Mikhail Bakunin in Geneva and an 1866 edition in Berlin—the first time the "Manifesto" was published in Germany. According to Hobsbawm, "By the middle 1860s virtually nothing that Marx had written in the past was any longer in print." However John Cowell-Stepney did publish an abridged version in the "Social Economist" in August/September 1869, in time for the Basle Congress. In the early 1870s, the