Bolshevik party organisation in Russia 1907-1912

Abstract

Marxist ideas became a subject of discussion in the circles of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia in the eighties of the last century. Until that time the hopes of Russian revolutionaries had rested upon the peasantry as the class through which a socialist system would be established. Although polemics between populists and Marxists continued for some years, populism was a declining intellectual force and most of the younger members of the intelligentsia turned to Marxism, with the result that a fundamental re-evaluation of the perspectives and activity of the revolutionary movement took place. Attention was now directed to the small but rapidly growing urban working class. The early Russian Marxists whose social origins were far removed from those of the proletariat faced the same task as the populists of a generation earlier - of ’going to the people’, that is, of establishing links with the revolutionary class and formulating the programme on which it was to go into struggle. The political activity of the first Marxist groups was confined to propaganda classes for the most advanced workers and the composing and printing of agitational leaflets which the worker members of the groups distributed in the factories.