ABSTRACT
Mensheviks working inside Russia, the so-called praktiki, had to display as much personal courage and 'professionalism' as the Bolsheviks, but they refused to make a virtue out of conspiracy and used legal methods when they were possible — as they became, at least partially, after 1905. Mensheviks had arrived at the conclusion that no socialist revolution would take place until the working class was strong enough to carry it out. Marxism was but one of several currents within the Russian revolutionary movement of the nineteenth century. The writings of Marx and Engels became available in Russian translation in 1872, but the prevailing revolutionary trend at that time was populism, which invested its revolutionary hopes mainly in the peasants. Marx's predictions presupposed an established bourgeois society with a legal order and with political freedoms, and a 'class-conscious' proletariat engaged in a 'class war' with the bourgeoisie.
