The social composition of female RSDRP members (who constituted between 11% and 15% of the total party membership) prior to 1917 is analyzed using prosopographic methods. The analysis reveals that women social democrats tended to come from higher social classes, and to have a higher educational attainment, and professional occupations. Thus, it is misleading to characterize the RSDRP as a “workers' party”, for only its male contingent was composed mostly of workers.

The analysis of the process of radicalization reveals the cultural barriers whioch these women had to overcome before they would join the party. Breaking free from their role in society meant, for them, leading fuller lives as women and an oppurtunity to dedicate themselves to the people.

Historians have traditionally overlooked the role of women in Russian Social Democracy. This article, based on archival as well as published sources, examines the radicalization of E.D. Kuskova (1860–1958), a long neglected participant in the Russian Marxist movement during its formative years.

Kuskova was attracted to radicalism by its promise of a fulfilling life of service to society, and as an escape from the traditional, confining roles for women in prerevo-lutionary Russia. She came to Social Democracy after concluding that it provided a more satisfactory Weltanschauung and a more accurate diagnosis of Russia's socio-economic ills than did its ideological alternatives.

Tito rose to lead the Yugoslav Communist Party by stressing his loyalty to Lenin. As a “Left” critic of “Right Liquidationism” his views coincided with the Left turn in the Comintern which climaxed with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. During the “imperialist” war, Tito, like Lenin, wrote only of the armed uprising and the proletarian revolution; for him this began with the German invasion of April 1941. However, Tito's experiences in Moscow during the height of the purges enabled him to get the measure of Stalin. Twice he emerged unscathed from accusations of Trotskyism, and in his writings began to explore the differences between Leninism and Stalinism.

The issue of “spontaneity versus organisation” has provoked constant controversy within labour movements, at least since the polemic between Lenin and Luxemburg in the first years of this century. The rise of mass social-democratic parties and national industrial unions generated a familiar dilemma for the left: an apparent contradiction between direct, localised and immediate collective expressions of working-class experience and aspirations – with the virtues of authenticity and self-activity – and the centralised, co-ordinated and disciplined institutions which strategic efficacy seemingly required. Experience of the particularly bureaucratic and authoritarian German movement helped inspire Michels' eloquent thesis that hierarchical organisational structures were unavoidable, yet inevitably resulted in conservative and anti-democratic outcomes. Others – most notably, perhaps, the Webbs – insisted that oligarchy could be avoided by appropriate organisational engineering; yet others, implicitly endorsing Michels' equation, proposed syndicalist strategies for avoiding institutional discipline. Subsequently the Third International, with its concept of “democratic centralism”, sought to dissolve the whole issue by what critics regarded as a definitional sleight-of-hand.