Building the Russian Party.
THE working class will win, but only in the event that it succeeds in creating a strongly united organization which is ideologically homogeneous. The working class canot be victorious without uniting the best, the most class consious ans revolutionary elements. Hence the role of the party as the guiding-force of the revolution. The party is not identical with the working class, but is its natural leader. The party leads the masses only inasmuch as it is organically united with the working class reacting to its everyday life. Without a party the working class cannot make a single step. Without a party the revolution is an empty phrase.
Theoretically this truth was recognized even by Lenin's predecessors, but it was he alone who understood how to translate into practice these theoretical propositions. The history of the Russian Social-Democracy and of the Russian Communist Party is organically bound up with the activities of Lenin. He was the organizer of the party, the educator of a whole generation of party workers and leaders, beginning with the time of underground groups up till the moment when the working class assumed power in the largest country in the world. It was because he understood that the working class cannot live without a party that he devoted his greatest attention to the building up of such a party.
It would be difficult to find another man in the history of parties whose life and activity was so intimately interwoven with the party as was Lenin's with the Russian Communist Party. He was its theoretician, its man of action, agitator, propagandist, organizer and leader. He was soldier and general, teacher and pupil, but never did he get the idea that: "The party, this is I," as his opponents used to reproach him. He realized that the power and greatness of the party depends upon its organic connection with the masses, its collaboration with the creative and progressive elements of the working class.
One can state without exaggeration that the Russian Communist Party was the creation of his spirit, the work of his hands. Such a party could be created by one who is perfectly clear as to what are the mutual relations between the party and the class. Lenin's slogan was: "The party above all." Why? Because the Party is the vanguard of the working class, and as such must know not only how to march forward but, if need be, to go against the spontaneous movements among the workers and at
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