Page:Vladimir Ilyich Lenin - On Organization (1926).pdf/18

the Bolshevik Party among the respective categories of workers.

But the Bolshevik Party always concentrated its attention on the work in the factories, and on establishing nuclei in them. Already in the period of the 1905 revolution and after, the Party Committee

knew precisely how many workers there were employed at a particular factory, what were their conditions, and how many members of the Bolshevik Party, the Menshevik Party, and Social Democrats, and the sympathisers with the respective Parties there were in the factory. It was in the factories that the Bolsheviks conducted their work principally. There they led the strikes and all the conflicts of the workers with the employers (mass trade unions arose in Russia only at the time of the 1905 revolution). This gave the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party the opportunity to take the lead of the working class struggle and induce the masses of the workers to follow it. The Party organized meetings in the factories, or at the factory gates, and it was from the factories that the workers streamed out to demonstrations or to the barricades.

With the commencement of the black reaction, after the 1905–06 revolution, the Party, after a brief period of semi-illegal existence, was again forced to go underground. Again it had to reorganize itself. Referring to the new conditions, Lenin in 1908 wrote:

"Strongly organized underground Party centres, systematic illegal publication of literature and espe-