, Lenin had become a
             revolutionary agitator and a convinced Marxist. He exhibited his new
             faith and his polemical talents in a diatribe of that year against the
             peasant-oriented socialism of the Populists led by N.K. Mikhiaiovsky (Wren,
             While Marxism had been winning adherents among the Russian
             revolutionary intelligentsia for more than a decade previously, a claimed
             Marxist party was bit organized until 1898. In that year a congress of
             nine men met at Minsk to proclaim the establishment of the Russian Social
             Democratic Workers Party. The Manifesto issued in the name of the
             congress after the police broke it up was drawn up by the economist Peter
             Struve, a member of the moderate Legal Marxist group who soon afterward
             left the Marxist movement altogether. The manifesto is indicative of the
             way Marxism was applied to Russian conditions, and of the special role for
             The first true congress of the Russian Social Democratic workers
             Party was the Second. It convened in Brussels in the summer of 1903, but
             was forced by the interference of the Belgian authorities to move to London,
             where the proceedings were concluded. The Second Congress was the
             occasion for bitter wrangling among the representatives of various Russian
             Marxist Factions, and ended in a deep split that was mainly caused by
             Lenin -- his personality, his drive for power in the movement, and his hard
             philosophy of the disciplined party organization. At the close of the
             congress Lenin commanded a temporary majority for his faction and seized
             upon the label 0Bolshevik (Russian for Majority), while his opponents who
             inclined to the soft or more democratic position became known as the
             Mensheviks or minority (Daniels, 19).
             Though born only in 1879, Trotsky had gained a leading place among
             the Russian Social-Democrats by the time of the Second party Congress in
             1903. He represented...