ABSTRACT
Soviet historians of the Communist Party have all made use of one or another of Lenin's formulations. Each of the leaders of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in turn, and each of the contenders for collective leadership, has perforce been a historian of sorts. The author of the habit of "periodization" in Communist Party history is Lenin. In a report prepared under Lenin's direction for the Amsterdam congress of the International, there are four historical periods: pre- Iskra; Iskra period; second congress with its split; post-congress period with the triumphant development of Bolshevism into the true movement. When Lenin begins to lecture left communists in other parties of the Communist International in his Infantile Sickness of Left Communist, he gives a new periodization of the main stages in the history of Bolshevism. Only N. S. Khrushchev remains as the sole rapporteur on the party statutes, from which a seven-line quotation rates inclusion in the pages of history.
