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tions of organization, to which, already at that time, Comrade Lenin attached enormous and even decisive importance.

The Russian Social Democratic Labor Party at that time was only in the process of formation and it was particularly important to determine on what basis it was being formed. Martov, P. Axelrod and several other old "Iskra-ists" were carried away by the tide of petty-bourgeois influence and desired to form the Party on a wide basis: They proposed that even those who did not directly belong to any branch of the party, but merely helped the party, be regarded as party members. By this they opened wide the doors to the near-the-Party petty-bourgeois intellectuals, who shrank from Party discipline and active revolutionary struggle. They were of the opinion that every man that went on strike could declare himself a Party member. They subordinated the element of consciousness in the proletarian struggle to the element of spontaneity. This explains the fact that the Mensheviks always dragged at the tail of the movement and did not lead it. Holding this point of view the Mensheviks were quite consistent when, in 1908–1909, the period of black reaction which followed the revolution of 1905, they advocated the liquidation of the illegal party and the formation as a substitute for it of an amorphous body "at all costs working within the bounds of legality."

At the Second Congress Lenin said: "The Party must be really the vanguard, the leader of the enormous masses of the working class, the whole of