EXILE  
Lenin spent most of the years until 1917 in exile in Europe. He returned to Russia after the peak of the 1905 Revolution, but the reaction that descended on the country in 1907 again forced him to flee abroad.

As he wandered through Europe, Lenin lived a hard, bitter existence. He exchanged recriminations with the Mensheviks about the Revolution's failure, and many of his most talented disciples deserted him. At this time he wrote his major philosophical tract, Materialism and Empirio- Criticism (1909). Three years later, at a party conference in Prague, the break between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks became final.

When World War I broke out in 1914, Lenin opposed it on the grounds that workers were fighting each other for the benefit of the bourgeoisie. Instead, he urged socialists "to transform the imperialist war into a civil war". He expounded and systematized Marxist views of the war in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), arguing that only a revolution that destroyed capitalism could bring lasting peace.