LENIN ON ORGANIZATION 
The Conditions Under Which the Bolshevik Party 
was Formed. 
The proletarian party in Russia was formed under 
conditions which differed from those in which the 
proletarian parties in the Western countries were 
formed. In the West the Socialist Parties were 
formed under legal conditions, when legal labor or- 
ganizations (trade unions, etc.), bourgeois parlia- 
ments and a minimum at least of liberty for the la- 
bor movement existed; in Russia, however, the pro- 
letarian party was formed prior to the bourgeois 
democratic revolution, under the severest absolu- 
tism, the absence of all liberties, but amidst an exist- 
ing mass labor movement. 
The Russian Social Democratic Labor Party was 
formed in 1898. 
Up to the ’90’s, owing to the backwardness of 
Russia, the Social Democratic movement was main- 
tained principally by intellectuals. Although the 
workers took part in the movement, they did not 
yet have their vanguard in the form of a revolu- 
tionary labor party and the importance of the de- 
veloping labor movement was not sufficiently ap- 
preciated by the revolutionary intellectuals. Among 
the most progressive section of the intellectuals 
predominated the ideas of the so-called Narodniki 
(Populists) who denied that capitalism was develop- 
ing in Russia and who argued that Russia would 
progress towards Socialism by other and less pain- 
ful paths than will the West, i. e., not through cap- 
ttalism and large-scale machine production, but 
through the peasant commune, Hence, in the ’90s, 
R