ABSTRACT
The first decade of Russian Marxism had been intellectually lively but organizationally diffuse. There had been too many different kinds of Marxists to allow any unity in the movement. First of all, Marxism was no longer fashionable in intellectual circles. The sociologists, economists, philosophers, and religious searchers had dropped out of the movement to pursue their interests in non-revolutionary directions. Secondly, Marxism lost from its ranks its moderate and gradualist political activists. The Bolshevik faction was Marxist idealism in organizational form. It was entirely natural that when the positivists completed their terms of exile, they would gravitate toward Lenin and the Bolshevik faction of the RSDRP. During the period of their exile in Vologda, A. Bogdanov and A. V. Lunacharsky had come to grips with the philosophical problems they had found in Marxism and had arrived at solutions which only strengthened and reaffirmed their commitment to socialist revolution.
