My first attempt at a TL. Please be kind. Or not.
"...It is easy--all too easy--to undervalue Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov's influence on the SD in light of his premature death in 1907. Virtually overnight he changed from one of the most influential men in the Party to an afterthought, a historical curiosity. Casual historians, glancing at the Party history of those days, finds themselves buried in obscure doctrinal disputes, involving incomprehensible factions such as the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks--things that are not merely hard to understand, but hard to care about. The temptation to say, as Khrushchev did, that ‘Lenin was mad, and while he lived, he drove those around him mad’ is understandable. And yet the fact remains--during his life, Ulyanov did not merely participate in SD party politics--he dominated them. His disputes, obsessions, and preoccupations were at the center of Marxist politics in Russian politics for years. And yet in the end, they were a slender thread that snapped with his passing…
“A question one finds oneself asking, when considering things, is what would have happened had Ulyanov lived? This is difficult to answer. History involves so many contingencies, it is hard to be sure what might happen if events changed in even the slightest degree. My personal suspicion is that the SD, assuming it survived the near constant infighting he engulfed it in--and that is a major assumption--would have been completely sidelined during the February Revolution, and had little-to-no effect in Russian politics during the Provisional Government and Civil War, though again, this is merely supposition on my part…”
--Transcribed from the lecture “Lenin: the Forgotten Man”, by Professor Joseph McCarthy, 1952, Marquette University