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evolution, and, lastly, social-democrats or marxists ofvarious brands.Lenin's Bolshevik party emerged from this last trend,which in 1898 took shape in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party. For the next twenty yearsit made comparatively little headway, partly becausemost of its work was illegal and therefore underground,partly because of internal divisions, particularly as toorganization. These gave rise to the formation of theBolshevik group under Lenin in 1903, and in 1912 toits complete separation from its main social-democraticrivals, the Mensheviks. The Bolsheviks were far toofew to play a large part in the 1905 Revolution, thoughthey were in the forefront of the Moscow rising. Despitetheir name, meaning majority men, they had feweradherents than the Mensheviks, the minority men, whileboth were inferior in number of supporters to theSocial-Revolutionary party, whose appeal was above allto the peasantry. The Bolsheviks, however, though atiny handful, alone had a real organization; they weredevoted to their cause; they were formidable undergroundfighters; and they had in Lenin a leader of genius.A month after the outbreak of the revolution in March1917 Lenin, then aged forty-seven, returned to Petrogradafter eleven years of exile abroad. Nobody was less ofa refugee than Lenin (or of the middle-class intellectualwhich he was by birth and early education), and nobodycombined more ardently grasp both of the internationaland the national. A Russian from the middle Volga,he had a wide knowledge and a deep understanding ofRussia, and he had never lost touch with her. He wasthe undisputed leader of the Bolshevik party, then acatalytic drop of 80,000 organized workers in the swellingocean of revolution. He was also from the start arevolutionary hero for Petrograd, and he rapidly showedhimself to be not only the ablest theoretician and themost trenchant pamphleteer—as which he was alreadywell known—but the most incisive and compellingspeaker, the hardest worker, the ablest man of action,and the most iron-willed of all the workers' leaders.With the Bolshevik coup d'etat in November 191759