Lenin debates whether socialists should boycott the Bulygin Duma

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...

Written after the 1903 congress split, Lenin reconstructed the arguments over party membership and central authority from congress minutes and documents. The polemic gave organizational questions a...

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...

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,...

Lenin argued that land reform had to confront landed estates and the survival of feudal relations, while maintaining independent organization for rural workers. His programme sought a worker-peasant...

The RSDLP debated whether to participate in the new parliament created after the 1905 upheaval. Lenin supported using the Duma while maintaining revolutionary opposition, a tactical shift showing that...

Lenin criticized liberal Cadets for seeking constitutional reform while preserving property and landlord power. His analysis framed parliamentary politics as a terrain of struggle, while the Duma’s...

Bolsheviks and Mensheviks disputed whether land should be municipalized, nationalized, or divided among peasants. Lenin’s writing engaged peasants’ immediate demands and competing socialist...