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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 capitalism and large-scale machine production, but through the peasant commune. Hence, in the ’90s,