Social-democracy in Russia arose before the bourgeois-democratic revolution (1905) in our country and grew stronger during the revolution and counter-revolution. The backwardness of Russia explains the extraordinary abundance of tendencies and shadings of petty-bourgeois opportunism among us, while the influence of Marxism in Europe and the solidity of the legal S.D. parties before the war made our model liberals into almost worshippers of "rational," "European" (non-revolutionary), "legal" "Marxist" theory and social-democracy. The working class in Russia could not form its party except through a decisive, thirty-year struggle against all varieties of opportunism. The experience of the world war, which brought the shameful collapse of European opportunism and cemented the alliance of our national-liberals with social-chauvinist liquidationism, further strengthens our conviction that our party must continue along the same consistently revolutionary path.