ABSTRACT
In December 1825 a group of young army officers, infected with the revolutionary ideas derived from the French revolution, attempted to overthrow the tsar. Both a sense of the backwardness of Russian political institutions and a revolutionary commitment to change them spread among the Russian intelligentsia. In the mid 1870s tsarist officials made a concerted effort to repress the revolutionary populism. One of the issues of central importance for Russian Marxists concerned the possibilities for revolutionary socialism in backward Russia. Bolshevik appeals to the revolutionary ardor of the workers and peasants were supplemented with coercive force. In the years just prior to World War I socialists could look to the past with pride in what they had achieved and to the future with confidence in their eventual victory. One of the few Social Democratic groups to oppose the war was the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party.
