ABSTRACT
The revolutionaries got their chance to strike at the autocracy because the economic and social developments that took root during the 1890s also enabled their underground groups to regenerate and mature. By 1901, the new generation of believers in peasant socialism had organized a new party, the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs). The SRs were worthy heirs to Russia’s native revolutionary tradition. By the 1880s the Russian intelligentsia had discovered Marxism, the revolutionary theory that was to become, in one or another of its multiple permutations, the central article of faith for twentieth-century revolutionary socialists all over the world. It is impossible to understand the Russian Revolution and the society that emerged from it without first understanding Lenin and his political incarnation, the Bolshevik Party. Leninism is best summed up as an adaptation of Marxism to Russian conditions by fusing traditional Marxism and the Russian revolutionary tradition.
