Dear Friends of the Turtle,

This is the first of what we hope will become a monthly circular bringing you up to date with the most recent activity on The Voice of the Turtle site.

Probably the two highlights of the month reflect a Bolshevising tendency within our ranks. September saw the launch of the regular "Bolshevik Soundbite of the Week" feature, that graces the front page of the Cyber-Turtle; and we were delighted to post an original translation of a fine piece of Russian verse, "Leonid Brezhnev: You Are Always With Us".

Thanks are due especially -- perhaps we should say, entirely -- to Caroline Brooke for her unstinting support and ability to locate the unlikeliest inspirational material with which to stoke the blast furnaces of resistance. More links occasionally appear: we are all delighted to see the Fabian Tortoise join us on our Page.

But we have to be careful to identify which Bolshevik currents we embrace, and this may be the moment where we pass from a Trotskyist enthusiasm for permanent revolution into a more Stalinist phase of consolidating the substantial gains of the recent past. Contributions have been slow to come in: we suspect (and hope) that this owes more to the start of a new academic year and the general confusion that ensues, more than to a general apathy. The Turtle does, however, need to adapt to the changed political climate, and we recognise that -- alas! -- we will not have 10,000 new words of copy to post to the site every month. Of crucial importance, of course, is that a "slowdown" does not become "stagnation": it is vital that the Turtle is always able to fulfil its quota -- and it will obviously only be able to manage this with the solidarity and the contributions of its friends and allies.

Remember that contributions do not have to be semi-scholarly, they do not have to be long, and they certainly don't have to be in prose. We will welcome poetry, cartoons, jokes, nifty bits of HTML code to enhance the site, the submission of picture files with which to beautify our pages, as well as suggestions for links, soundbites and NewsFlashes. Even if your article is only the product of an hour's drunken rage, it can always be passed through the dialectical filters of the Turtle-O-Matic, an extraordinarily powerful editorial tool, to improve style and refine thought.

Some work does claim to be in the pipeline. Raj is planning an overdue attack on ex-Balliol economist Wilfred Beckerman; and Chris will shortly be writing on the achievements of Perry Anderson, reviewing new work by and about the Man with the Large Vocabulary. Articles on impending cryptography legislation, Blair's Third Way, Gordon Brown's Eurogenous Zones, and the strange bonds between the San Francisco discipline scene and British tea-drinking habits are all believed to be in the offing and -- of course -- George Speight's Personal Finance Page will surely soon be with us [alas -- few of these efforts ever arrived - Ed.]. With luck, Palash will soon be liberating another continent on our behalf (see paper Turtle #4), and we look forward to reading his reportage.

What else might we like? The usual guidelines apply, and your own ideas will be much more fruitful than anything we can throw your way. Mini-essays, around 750 words, offering pithy summaries, witty encapsulations or thumbnail sketches of the achievements of Popular Heroes of the Past would be a tremendously useful addition to the Turtle's ongoing project of historical revisionism and popular education; more reviews of books, films and exhibitions would be crucial in our struggles for cultural hegemony. Scientific analysis of the crisis in Russia is overdue; and the short space between the party conferences and the new parliamentary session may prove a good time for a review of the British political scene. If you can obtain an interview with anyone worthwhile, or simply want to celebrate an anniversary, the time is ripe and the web-space is amply available. We can also provide space for advertising your own organisations, projects, aspirations and telephone numbers...

The number of subscribers is small, but it is an important base on which to build. When you encourage friends and colleagues to browse the site, ask them also to subscribe: it sends valuable information to us as to who might be reading the Turtle, and it widens the pool of people to lean on for contributions.

The future is certain; the past is known: only the present is occasionally confusing... Avanti popolo! To Build Socialism on one Website!

Fraternal greetings:

The Editorial Collective.