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when Marxism began to beat a path for itself in Russia, bourgeois intellectuals, totally alien to the spirit of revolutionary Marxism, began to adopt Marxism in order to disperse the petty-bourgeois Narodniki's conception of the progress of the revolutionary movement in Russia and to prove that Russia must inevitably pass through the stage of capitalist production. This gave rise to the so-called "legal Marxism". Meanwhile, the best Social Democrats were being systematically plucked out of the ranks of the Social Democratic organizations by the Czarist gendarmerie. The intellectuals had managed to permeate the labor movement, to reduce it to a mere trade union movement (economism) and to convert it into an auxiliary weapon in the struggle of the liberal bourgeoisie. The revolutionary Social Democrats were therefore obliged to take up the fight against the intellectuals. The Social Democrats aimed so to train cadres of experienced professional revolutionaries who were to devote their lives entirely to party work, to give them a definite Marxian program and definite tactics, and finally to gather these cadres into a united militant party sufficiently secret to be able to evade the raids of the gendarmerie, but at the same time having sufficient contact with the masses to be able to lead them into the battle at the required moment.

V. L Lenin clearly saw these tasks as early as the end of the ’90’s and the beginning of the 20th century, and consistently advocated them in "Iskra", the organ of the Russian revolutionary Social De-