ABSTRACT
After their expulsion from the Bolshevik faction, the first independent activity of the left Bolsheviks was to establish a "Propagandistic-Agitational School for Workers". The idea to form a special school to train Social-Democratic propagandists and agitators first arose as a solution to the disintegration of the party that had followed the collapse of the 1905 Revolution. Since Gorky, A. Bogdanov, Anatoly Vasilevich Lunacharsky, and G. Aleksinsky were all on the organizing committee, it must have seemed obvious to Lenin that the party school would never represent Social-Democracy as he conceived it. Taking over the leadership of the Bolshevik faction seems to have been Bogdanov's intention. After all, Bogdanov and the school committee--and indeed all the Bolsheviks who had been excluded by the Bolshevik Center in the June schism--did not act as if they had been expelled from anything. In December, 1909, the group petitioned the Central Committee to recognize them as a "literary group" publishing the journal Vpered.
