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 organizations
 (trade unions, etc.), bourgeois parliaments
 and a minimum at least of liberty for the labor
 movement existed; in Russia, however, the proletarian
 party was formed prior to the bourgeois
democratic revolution, under the severest absolutism,
 the absence of all liberties, but amidst an existing
 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 maintained
 principally by intellectuals. Although the
workers took part in the movement, they did not
yet have their vanguard in the form of a revolutionary
 labor party and the importance of the developing
 labor movement was not sufficiently appreciated
 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 developing
 in Russia and who argued that Russia would
progress towards Socialism by other and less painful
 paths than will the West, i. e., not through capttalism
 and large-scale machine production, but
through the peasant commune, Hence, in the ’90s,

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