Lenin publishes One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

A small congress declared the formation of the RSDLP, although arrests and weak coordination left the organization fragile. Its founding reflected labor, socialist, and national movements across the...

Written during exile and published in 1899, the study used economic data to argue that capitalist relations were expanding in Russia and differentiating the peasantry. Its analysis challenged populist...

Following the end of exile, Ulyanov left Russia and joined a group building Iskra, a newspaper intended to connect socialist circles across the empire. The project relied on editors, couriers,...

The pamphlet argued for a disciplined revolutionary organization able to coordinate under autocratic repression. Its claims about leadership and political consciousness became influential and...

Disputes over membership, organization, and strategy produced factions later known as Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. The labels did not mean fixed, unified camps from the outset: alliances and positions...

Imperial troops fired on a mass procession of workers carrying a petition to the tsar. The killings helped trigger strikes, peasant uprisings, and national movements throughout the empire. Workers and...

Lenin argued that workers and peasants could form a revolutionary alliance against autocracy, while insisting that the coming democratic revolution would not itself abolish capitalism. The text offers...

During the 1905 Revolution Lenin debated what powers a revolutionary government should exercise and how socialists should relate to it. His argument was made amid strikes, mutinies, and popular...

The proposed consultative assembly prompted a tactical dispute over boycott, participation, and revolutionary mobilization. Lenin’s position shifted as the political crisis developed, showing strategy...

Lenin returned as the autocracy faced strikes and the emergence of workers’ councils. He advocated revolutionary organization, but the revolution’s course was made by mass participation across cities,...