Then the proletariat would be mature and ready to overthrow the bourgeoisie and institute the purest form of government: communism.
Vladimir Lenin was born in Russia in 1870 and joined the rise of the anti-tsarist movement at an early age. Lenin was drawn to the plight of the factory worker by the death of his brother, who was executed for his role in a plot to overthrow Alexander III. After being exiled to Siberia in 1895 for five years he left Russia for Switzerland where he developed a strong tie to the exiled Russian Social Democrats. This was Lenin's first exposure to the ideas of Marx. This movement regarded themselves as Marxists, but they differed on how Marxism could be applied to Russia's different set of circumstances. After disagreements arose at the London Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party in 1903, Lenin and his following split away from the Mensheviks who were the classical Marxists and formed the Bolshevik Party. The Mensheviks "took the logical position in the Soviet of 1917 that it was premature to attempt to implement Marxism in the Russia of that time for the obvious reasons that capitalism had not matured there and thus there was no proletariat majority."" In contrast, the Bolsheviks were insistent on changing the pace of history and forcing Marxism on an economically, socially and politically backward Russia. .
One factor of paramount importance was the fact that Marx's audience was the highly civilized and developed Western Europe. Ragsdale, in The Russian Tragedy, asks, "What does the doctrine of Marxism have to do with Russia?- He answers, "Nearly nothing. The economics of Marxism and the five stages of history related with some degree of verisimilitude to the experience of Europe, but they were decidedly Eurocentric."" The proletariat in most western European countries consisted of a majority of the population, whereas, the proletariat in Russia was a minority of the population and the peasantry was the majority.
