Page:Lenin - What Is To Be Done - tr. Joe Fineberg (1929).pdf/168



history of Russian Social-Democracy can he divided into three distinct periods:

The first period covers about ten years, approximately the years 1884 to 1894. This was the period when the theory and the programme of Social-Democracy germinated and took root. The number of adherents to the new tendency in Russia could be counted in units. Social-Democracy existed without a labour movement; it was, as it were, in its period of gestation.

The second period covers three or four years—1894–1898. In this period Social-Democracy appeared in the world as a social movement, as the rising of the masses of the people, as a political party. This is the period of its infancy and adolescence. Social-Democratic ideas spread among the intelligentsia like an epidemic and they became entirely absorbed in the fight against Populism, in going among the workers, and the latter, in their turn, were entirely absorbed in fomenting strikes. The movement made enormous strides. The majority of the leaders were very young people who had by no means reached the "age of thirty-five," which to N. Mikhailovsky appears to he a sort of natural borderline. Owing to their youth, they proved to he untrained for practical work and they left the scene with astonishing rapidity. But in the majority of cases the scope of their work was extremely wide. Many of them began their revolutionary thinking as Narodovolists. Nearly all of them in their early youth enthusiastically worshipped the terrorist heroes. It was a great wrench to abandon the captivating impressions of these heroic traditions and it was accompanied by the breaking off of personal relationships with people who were determined to remain loyal to Narodnaya Volya and for whom the young Social-Democrats had profound respect. The struggle compelled them to educate themselves, to read the illegal literature of all tendencies and to study closely the questions of legal Populism. Trained in this struggle, Social-Democrats went into the labour movement without "for a moment" forgetting the theories of Marxism which illumined their path or the task of overthrowing the autocracy. The formation of the party in the spring of 1898 was the most striking