Autocracy left educated Russians with no lawful way to change their country. Many of them turned to radical ideas instead. The word "intelligentsia" itself comes from Russia, where it meant educated people who felt a duty to criticize the state and serve the people. The movements they built in the nineteenth century supplied the parties, arguments and leaders of 1917.

The Populists

The first great radical current was Populism. Its thinkers, such as Alexander Herzen, admired the peasant commune, with its shared land and village assemblies. Populists hoped the commune could become the basis of a socialist Russia that skipped the capitalist stage altogether, sparing Russia the misery of Western factory towns. Nikolai Chernyshevsky's novel What Is to Be Done? (1863), written in a prison cell, gave young radicals a model of the disciplined, selfless "new person."

In the summer of 1874 thousands of students "went to the people," dressing as peasants and walking into villages to spread socialism. The campaign failed. Many peasants distrusted the strangers, and some turned them over to the police. Hundreds were arrested and tried. Some radicals concluded that if the people would not rise, a small group must strike at the state directly. The secret society Land and Liberty split in 1879, and its terrorist wing, People's Will, went on to kill Alexander II.

Russian Marxism

Other radicals drew a different lesson. Georgi Plekhanov founded the first Russian Marxist group, the Emancipation of Labour, in Geneva in 1883. He argued that the commune was already breaking up and that Russia, like the West, would pass through capitalism. The force for socialism would be the new industrial working class, not the peasantry. In 1898 a small congress in Minsk founded the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, though police soon arrested most of its delegates.

Vladimir Ulyanov, who wrote as Lenin, was born in 1870 in Simbirsk on the Volga. In 1887 his older brother Alexander was hanged for plotting to kill Alexander III. Lenin became a Marxist lawyer and organizer, was exiled to Siberia, and then lived mostly abroad. In his pamphlet What Is to Be Done? (1902), which borrowed Chernyshevsky's title, he argued that workers left to themselves would fight only for better wages and conditions. Socialist consciousness had to be brought to them by a disciplined party of professional revolutionaries. "Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement," he wrote.

Bolsheviks and Mensheviks

At the party's Second Congress, held in Brussels and London in 1903, the delegates split. The first open quarrel was over who should count as a party member. Lenin wanted membership limited to those who personally took part in one of the party's organizations. Julius Martov wanted to include anyone who gave the party regular help under its direction. Martov won that vote. But after several delegates walked out, Lenin's side won key votes on the party's leadership, and he called his faction the Bolsheviks, from the Russian word for majority. His opponents became the Mensheviks, the minority, a name that stuck even when they outnumbered him.

The split deepened over time. Most Mensheviks believed Russia first needed a bourgeois revolution and a period of capitalism, during which socialists should work with liberals and build a broad workers' movement. Bolsheviks put more faith in a centralized party and grew suspicious of liberals.

Socialist Revolutionaries and liberals

The Populist tradition did not die. The Socialist Revolutionaries, founded in 1901 to 1902, carried Populism into the twentieth century. They wanted the land handed to those who worked it, and they became the most popular party among peasants. Their Combat Organization carried out assassinations, including that of the interior minister Vyacheslav Plehve in 1904. Meanwhile, professionals and zemstvo activists built a liberal movement that wanted a constitution, civil rights and an elected parliament. In 1905 many of them founded the Constitutional Democrats, known as the Kadets, led by the historian Pavel Milyukov.

Worked example: one line in the party rules

In 1903 the fight over the first paragraph of the party rules looked like hairsplitting. Martov's version would let a sympathetic teacher who passed money and messages count as a member. Lenin's version would not. Behind the wording lay two pictures of a party. Martov imagined something like the mass socialist parties of Germany: open, broad and rooted in workers' own organizations. Lenin argued that under a police state an open party would be riddled with spies, and that only a tight body of committed revolutionaries could survive and lead.

Each side had a point. Lenin's model fit the conditions of illegality and would later help the Bolsheviks act quickly in 1917. Critics, including some fellow Marxists at the time, warned that a party run from the top would end up substituting its own will for that of the workers. That warning would return, much louder, after 1917. The example shows how a small dispute about organization could carry large questions about democracy.