ABSTRACT
Russia was drawn into the First World War completely unprepared—psychologically, politically and even militarily. The political parties gained an increasing hold on the masses, even in the non-partisan Soviets. The ill-fated Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1905 was the prelude to the Revolution of 1905, and the semi-constitutional regime. In the heated atmosphere generated by any revolution, social processes tend to develop much more rapidly than in a normal time of peace. It was in this psychological atmosphere that the Soviets and the socialist parties began to develop into mass organizations, embracing millions of workers, soldiers, and peasants under the leadership of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia. The revolutionary socialists, at the outbreak of the February revolution, fell into two main groupings: the Socialist Revolutionaries, founded in 1900 and representing the so-called populist or agrarian outlook, and the two Marxist parties, known as the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks.
