LENIN ON ORGANIZATION
workers will the Party be able to lead them into
the battle at the necessary moment. Already In
1902 he recommended that “factory circles” be
formed in the various enterprises, which later on
became the factory nuclei. “Every factory must
be our fortress”’—he wrote, and returned again and
again to this question.
However, it was not possible at one stroke to
make the factory nuclei the basis of the Party organization
even in the Bolshevik Party. In 1907, in
an article entitled “The Petersburg Split” Lenin
wrote as follows concerning the then existing
Petersburg organization:
“We see that in St. Petersburg (and probably in
a majority of towns in Russia), district, sub-district,
and subordinate nuclei are formed not only on territorial
(local) lines, but also on industrial and on
national lines. For example, in St. Petersburg
there is a railway district; it is organized on the industrial
basis. Also there are Lettish and Esthonian
district and military organizations.”
Thus we had various forms of subordinate Party
organization which were preserved right up to
1917. This shows how difficult it is to overcome
old organizational forms. It was decided to liquidate
the special Party organizations of the railwaymen,
postal workers, and the military only at the
Eighth Congress of the Russian Communist Party
(March 1919). It must be admitted that these organizations,
in their time, played an extremely important
role in the effort to spread the influence of
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