VoLUME II of the Selected Works of Lenin covers the period from 1900 to 1904 inclusive. During these five years Lenin wrote some of his most inportant works, in which he form ulated the programme, the tactics and the organisational prin.

ciples of revolutionary Social-Democracy.The initial period of the history of Russian Social-Democracy ended at about the turn of the century. Lenin divided this period into the following subdivisions: 1) approximately from 1884 to 1894, the period of“the rise and consolidation of the theory and programme of Social-Democracy”; 2) the period from 1894 to 1898, in which Social-Democracy appears “as a social movement, as a rising of the masses of the people and as a political party,”and 3) the period from 1897 to 1898, which was a period of "dispersion, dissolution and vacillation” in the ranks of Social-Democracy, and the period of the determined struggle against this “dispersion and dissolution" that was waged by the revolutionary Marxists. The fight culminated in the rise and growth of the Iskra-ist trend in Russian Social-Democracy which ushered in the Iskra period in the history of the Party.It was in this period that Bolshevism took shape. At the Second Congress of the Party it was already, to use Lenin's words, “a school of political thought, a political party.”

The Second Congress of the Party and the period following it was marked by the struggle between the majority and the minority which was in fact the struggle between the two tendencies in Russian Social-Democracy, namely, the proletarian revolutionary tendency and the petty-bourgeois reformist tendency.