V. I.

Lenin

Second Congress of the R.S.D.L.P.

July 17 (30)-August 10 (23), 1903

3. Draft Resolution on the Attitude Towards the Student Youth

The Second Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party welcomes
the growing revolutionary initiative among the student youth and calls
upon all organisations of the Party to give them every possible assistance
in their efforts to organise. It recommends that all student groups and
study circles should, firstly, make it the prime object of their
activities to imbue their members with an integral and consistent
socialist world outlook and give them a thorough acquaintance with
Marxism, on the one hand, and with Russian Narodism and West-European
opportunism, on the other, these being the principal currents among the
conflicting advanced trends of today; secondly, that they should beware of
those false friends of the youth who divert them from a thorough
revolutionary training through recourse to empty revolutionary or
idealistic phrase-mongering and philistine complaints about the harm and
uselessness of sharp polemics between the revolutionary and the opposition
movements, for as a matter of fact these false friends are only spreading
an unprincipled and unserious attitude towards revolutionary work;
thirdly, that they should endeavour, when undertaking practical
activities, to establish prior contact with the Social-Democratic
organisations, so as to have the benefit of their advice and, as far as
possible, to avoid serious mistakes at the very outset of their work.

| Written in June-July 1903 | Published according to the manuscript |
| --- | --- |
| First published in Geneva in 1904 in the Minutes of the Second Regular Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. | |

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