p Lenin’s brilliant analysis of the importance of conscious activity by masses of people and of objective conditions is best illustrated by his solution of the key question of how revolutions originated. Marx and Engels showed the deep-going causes of revolution by pointing to the conflict between the productive forces and the relations of production. But how does revolution originate in the storm of political events, how does the revolutionary drive of the masses gather momentum, what are the conditions in which it originates, which political phenomena lead to revolution when the conflict between the productive forces and the relations of production has come to a head? The answer to these questions was to be found by analysing the new and changing conditions. The opportunists insisted that revolutions cannot be made, that they occur of themselves. The voluntarists held that revolution was made by will and determination. What was the truth?

p From the 1890s, Russia was swiftly advancing towards a bourgeoisdemocratic revolution, which was developing in new historical conditions, and had its own characteristic features: “Objectively, the mass movement was breaking the back of tsarism and paving the way for democracy; for this reason the class-conscious workers led it."  [210•1 

p In 1902, Lenin wrote: “History has now confronted us with an immediate task which is the most revolutionary of all the immediate tasks confronting the proletariat of any country. The fulfilment of this task, the destruction of the most powerful bulwark, not only of European, but (it may now be said) of Asiatic reaction, would make the Russian proletariat the vanguard of the international revolutionary proletariat."  [210•2 

p That was how Lenin saw the reasons why the centre of the world revolutionary movement was shifting to Russia. His approach was based on the scientific theory of social development. Consequently, the point was that in the course of the historical process the Russian proletariat had to tackle the most revolutionary task, which was why it moved into the van of the world revolutionary army.

p Lenin concentrated the full power of his mind on the effort to see the social revolution as a living phenomenon, and relentlessly attacked the doctrinaires. He wrote: “Whoever expects a ‘pure’ social revolution will never live to see it."  [211•3  Lenin ridiculed the doctrinaire notion of socialist revolution: “So one army lines up in one place and says, ‘We are for socialism’, and another, somewhere else and says, ‘We are for imperialism’, and that will be a social revolution!"  [211•4 

Mankind’s political horizon was considerably broadened when Lenin, having studied the new characteristic features of democratic movements and specifics of bourgeois-democratic revolutions under imperialism, and the hegemony of the proletariat in these revolutions, formulated the proposition that society’s political organisation could be structured on new lines when the working class and the peasantry exercised their revolutionary dictatorship, and that the bourgeois-democratic revolution could develop into a socialist one.