Page:Boris Zakharovich Shumyatsky - The Aims of the Bolsheviki (1919).djvu/5



The Bolsheviki have not appeared suddenly in recent years in the midst of the Russian S.-D. Party. As far back as 1900, after the split in the "Union of Russian Social Democrats," a new political union was formed by the first Russian followers of revolutionary working-class Socialism. It became known as the Revolutionary Organisation and Social Democrat, and was joined by all the members of the first Russian S.D. organisation abroad—the Group of the Emancipation of Labour, people like Plekhanov, Zassulitch, Alexandrov and others.

These workers (or "stariki"=elders, as they were called), who had left the "Union of Russian Social Democrats," had the political emancipation of the people as their aim; they wished to free the people from the position of servitude under the landowners and the autocracy, and by so doing to prepare them for a far greater struggle—the struggle for Socialism. One of these "stariki" was Plekhanov, who in 1914 took up a distinctly hostile attitude to the aspirations of the revolutionary workers.

Those workers who remained in the "Union of Social Democrats" went by the name of "the young ones" (Molodyie). They deemed it necessary for the party organisations of these days to confine their work to an agitation on economic lines in order to wrest from the master class an immediate and certainly partial amelioration of their labour and social conditions. They assumed that the Russian working class was not yet ripe for a wide political struggle.

This was the chief point of disagreement between the two sections. It very soon definitely divided the Russian Social Democrat Workers' Party into two wings. This party had just come into being through the amalgamation of the S.D. group—"Iskra" (= the Spark) and "Zarya" (= the Dawn).