VI (Prague) All-Russian Conference of the RSDLP

Sent to Russia to work on the convocation of the conference, authorized by the ZOK (Foreign Organizing Commission for the convocation of the conference), headed by Comrade. Sergo Ordzhonikidze toured a number of places and prepared the election for the conference. The largest underground organizations called for the immediate convocation of an All-Russian conference. The first meeting of the Russian Organizational Commission was held in October 1911. The meeting was designed as a Russian organizational commission for convening a general party conference (ROC). The resolution “On Designing” said: “... the meeting of delegates (Baku, Tiflis, Kiev, Yekaterinoslav, Yekaterinburg organizations) considers it its duty to design the Organizational Commission for the convening of the conference, to take all measures to replenish its composition and actively take up the preparation and convocation conference ". 7 - 30 (14 - 17) December 1911 in Paris a meeting of the foreign Bolshevik groups took place, Lenin delivered a report on the state of affairs in the party. In the resolution proposed by Lenin and adopted by the meeting, it was said: “Uniting into a single social democratic organization of foreign beks, the meeting places responsibility for the ongoing schism abroad on those groups that do not want to support the Russian center, ROCK or continue to“ play an agreement ” those who have broken away from Russia, while supporting non-social democratic groups that have broken away from the Russian work ” ^[3] .

The conference was attended by 14 delegates with a decisive vote from organizations of St. Petersburg , Moscow , the Central Industrial District, Baku , Tiflis , Kiev , Yekaterinoslav , Nikolayev , Kazan , Saratov , Vilna and Dvinsk , including 10 workers. 12 of them were Bolsheviks , two of them were Menshevik party members (Plekhanovites). The delegates with a deliberative vote were four Bolshevik emigrants, but according to police data, Lenin (representing the editorial board of the Social Democrat) was nevertheless granted the right to vote.

Some delegates did not participate in the conference right from the start. So, the Moscow delegate R.V. Malinovsky arrived when she came to an end. Prior to that, Malinowski was a non-factional social democrat and declared only in Prague that he had become a Bolshevik. There were no more trade union functionaries as famous as Malinowski in Prague. Two Bolshevik deputies from the Social Democratic faction of the Third State Duma N. G. Poletaev and V. Ye. Shurkanov were late for the conference.

General party conference

All national organizations and other party groups, as well as personally invited G. V. Plekhanov and M. Gorky, declined the invitation to the conference on the grounds that it was convened by some of Lenin’s supporters. Nevertheless, the conference was constituted as a general party conference of the RSDLP, which is the supreme body of the party and has the significance of a congress. The Plekhanovist Ya. D. Zevin opposed the constitution of the conference as All-Russian and All- Party , who suggested calling it the “Conference of Representatives of Russian Organizations”. The conference rejected this offer. Zevin’s proposal was urgently rejected to convene a meeting of representatives of all social democratic movements, which would take measures to replenish the composition of the delegates so that the conference would become general party.

The conference, in which there were no representatives of all the national organizations that were part of the party and other party groups except the Bolsheviks and the Menshevik party members, declared itself at the insistence of Lenin as a general party and supreme party body. In fact, in Prague, as E. Ginowiev wrote later, “a real Bolshevik congress” took place , whereas “without Lenin this would have been an ordinary meeting of relatively young Bolshevik practitioners” .

The order of the day

• The constitution of the conference;
• Reports (reports from the floor, report of the ROC [Russian Organizational Commission for the Convening of the Conference], the Central Organ [of the central body], etc.);
• The modern moment and the tasks of the party;
• Elections to the IV State Duma ;
• Duma faction;
• State insurance of workers;
• Strike movement in trade unions (this item was connected with the item “Organizational issues”, and a general resolution was issued on them - “On the character and organizational forms of party work”);
• "Petition Campaign";
• On liquidationism ;
• The tasks of social democracy in the fight against hunger;
• Party literature;
• Organizational matters;
• Party work abroad;
• Elections;
• Miscellanea.

A total of 23 meetings took place, the delegates met twice a day. The conference was held under the leadership and chairmanship of V. I. Lenin. He also spoke on the current situation and the tasks of the party, on the constitution of the conference, on the International Socialist Bureau and on other issues. The draft resolutions and resolutions adopted by the conference were drafted by Lenin.

In the resolution on the issue “On the present moment and the tasks of the party,” the conference indicated that “the task of conquering power by the proletariat, leading the peasantry, remains the task of a democratic coup in Russia”.

The Prague Conference outlined the tactics of the party in the elections to the fourth State Duma. The party has put forward the main electoral slogans: the democratic republic , the 8-hour working day , the confiscation of landowner land. The general tactical line of the party in the elections was as follows: a merciless war against the tsarist monarchy and the parties of landowners and capitalists, the steady exposure of counter-revolutionary views and false democracy of bourgeois liberals - with the party of the Cadets at their head, separating the party from all non-proletarian, petty-bourgeois parties.

In the resolution on the tasks of social democracy in the fight against hunger, the conference noted that social democracy should exert all its strength to expand propaganda and agitation among the broad masses of the population, and especially the peasantry; to explain the connection between the famine and tsarism and all its policies, to disseminate the political demands of social democracy: the overthrow of the royal monarchy, the establishment of a democratic republic, the confiscation of landowner land; support the workers' desire to help the starving, to direct democratic excitement about the famine in the direction of demonstrations, rallies, extras and other forms of mass struggle against tsarism.

In the resolution on the attitude to the Duma draft law on state insurance of workers, the conference outlined a program of requirements that workers must put forward in the struggle for state insurance under capitalism, proposed to launch a wide campaign against the Duma bill violating the interests of the working class, and in the case of adoption of the law - to deploy in hospital box office vigorous promotion of social democratic ideas and "to transform in such a way this law, which is the purpose of enslavement and oppression of the proletarians and in the development of an instrument of its class consciousness, strengthening its organization, strengthen its struggle for complete political freedom and socialism. "

The conference discussed the issue “On liquidationism and on the group of liquidators” . In a resolution on this issue, the conference noted that the RSDLP had for about 4 years been waging a resolute struggle against the liquidationist trend, which at the December 1908 conference was defined as “an attempt by some part of the party intelligentsia to eliminate the existing organization of the RSDLP and replace it with a shapeless association within the framework of legality whatever it is, even if the latter was bought at the price of an explicit rejection of the program, tactics and traditions of the party. ” “The conference, ” the resolution says, “ calls on all party members, without distinction of currents and shades, to fight against liquidationism, explain all its harm to the cause of liberating the working class and exert all efforts to restore and strengthen the illegal RSDLP” .

In the resolution “On the Russian government’s attack on Persia,” the conference protests against the rogue gangs of the tsarist gang, who decided to stifle the freedom of the Persian people , and expresses its full sympathy to the struggle of the Persian social democracy, which suffered so many victims in the fight against the tsarist tyrants.

In the resolution "On the Chinese Revolution" the Prague Conference of the RSDLP notes "... the world significance of the revolutionary struggle of the Chinese people , carrying the liberation of Asia and undermining the domination of the European bourgeoisie, welcomes the revolutionaries of the Republicans of China, demonstrates the deep enthusiasm and full sympathy with which the proletariat of Russia monitors success revolutionary people in China and stigmatizes the behavior of Russian liberalism, which supports the policy of seizing Tsarism . ”

In the resolution “On the Tsarist policy towards Finland,” the conference expressed its full solidarity with the fraternal Finnish Social-Democrats. Party, stressed the unity of the workers of Finland and Russia in the fight against the Russian counter-revolutionary government and the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie, violating the rights of the people, and expressed its firm conviction that only "... the joint efforts of the workers of Russia and Finland can be achieved overthrow of tsarism and freedom of the Russian and Finnish peoples " .

The Prague Conference of the RSDLP sent greetings to the fraternal German Social Democracy, which won the Reichstag elections in January 1912, "a brilliant victory over the entire bourgeois world."

The Prague Conference overturned the decision of the January Plenum of the Central Committee (1910) to support Leonid Trotsky 's newspaper Pravda, published in Vienna .

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The Central Committee of the RSDLP, elected at the Fifth Congress , actually ceased to exist by 1912 (its last plenary meeting was held in January 1910 ) and the party was left without an official leading center. The conference elected the Bolshevik Central Committee of the Party, which included F. I. Goloshchekin , G. E. Zinoviev , V. I. Lenin , R. V. Malinovsky (since 1910, secret officer of the Moscow Security Department, since 1912. - Police Department; Deputy of the IV State Duma), G. K. Ordzhonikidze , S. S. Spandaryan , D. M. Schwartzman. The Central Committee was granted the right to co-optation of new members by a simple majority. On the days of the conference, I. S. Belostotsky and I. V. Stalin were co-opted into the Central Committee, and later G. I. Petrovsky and Ya. M. Sverdlov . A. S. Bubnov , M. I. Kalinin , A. P. Smirnov , E. D. Stasova , S. G. Shaumyan were identified as candidates for cooptation as members of the Central Committee in the event of the arrest of any member of the Central Committee. The Russian Bureau of the Central Committee of the RSDLP (which ceased to exist in March 1911, after the arrest of Nogin and Leyteisen) was recreated for practical leadership of party work in Russia. Its structure included the elected at the conference and later co-opted by I. S. Belostotsky, F. I. Goloshchekin, R. V. Malinovsky, G. K. Ordzhonikidze, G. I. Petrovsky, Ya. M. Sverdlov, S. S. Spandaryan, I. V. Stalin, D. M. Schwartzman, A. E. Badayev , M. I. Kalinin, A. S. Kiselev , E. D. Stasova, A. V. Shotman . V.I. Lenin was elected representative of the RSDLP in the International Socialist Bureau .

After its resolutions became known about the conference in Prague and its resolutions were made public in February 1912, the idea of ​​convening another party conference was supported by the " front ", Menshevik party members and Bolshevik conciliators, who did not want to recognize the conference from one of Lenin’s supporters. Together with other participants convened on March 12 (February 28), 1912 in Paris on the initiative of the Trotsky meeting, they condemned the Prague Conference as a factional one. The conference they convened was held in Vienna from August 26 (13) to September 2 (August 20), 1912. A total of 16 meetings were held, not counting the two that were not recorded, the day before the official opening. According to the minutes, 18 delegates with a decisive and 11 with an advisory vote, as well as 5 guests with an advisory vote, attended the meetings. According to police data, there were also guests without the right to participate in the debate - up to 7 people. Of the 29 delegates, 12 were represented by three national organizations, 9 by other organizations in Russia, and the three mandates from Russia were transferred to the Social Democrats who lived in emigration; in total, 11 delegates were “foreigners”. 2 delegates represented the organizing committee.

Just as in Prague, none of the members of the Duma faction of the party came to Vienna. Thus, “foreigners” were more than the delegates who came from the Russian provinces. Some delegates were unable to travel to Vienna due to arrests. The refusal to send delegates was motivated by the fact that “by chance a conference with delegates of non-existent organizations had never produced the desired results.” As a result of all this, the conference considered it possible to be constituted only as a “conference of organizations of the RSDLP” - something between the initial plan of the All-Russian conference and the demand of G. A. Aleksinsky (representing the group “Forward” at the conference in Vienna) that the participants declare themselves a meeting.

According to the calculations published after the Vienna Conference, its delegates included 10 Mensheviks (5 with a decisive vote and 5 with an advisory), 4 Bolshevik party members (3 and 1), 2 Menshevik party members (1 and 1) and 17 non-factional social democrats (9 and 8), in particular, all the Bundists and Latvians were assigned to them. In addition, 4 representatives of the PPS and 1 representative of the Lithuanian Social Democratic Party had the status of guests with a deliberative vote. Compared with the Prague Conference, the composition of the participants in Vienna was clearly more diverse in the party-factional respect. At the same time, there were less workers than intellectuals, and the representation of Russian illegal organizations was less.

The Vienna Conference stated that there is no basis for a split in the RSDLP, that it is only necessary to realize the harm done to the cause of the proletariat by a multi-year party crisis; the constant promotion of the unifying tasks of the class struggle of the proletariat will lead to the complete unification of the party forces, while the resolution of the Prague Conference emphasized that the condition for party unity is a break with liquidationism and its “final overcoming”, that is, victory over it.

Comparing the resolutions of both conferences, it is easy to notice that they were based on fundamentally different assessments of the situation in the country. The Bolshevik assessment was more definite, the Menshevik assessment more blurred. In a resolution of the Prague Conference "On the Current Moment and Tasks of the Party", adopted on the report of Lenin, the analysis of the political and economic situation was concluded with a conclusion about the "growing revolutionary mood of the masses against the regime of June 3. " Later, Lenin regarded the mass movement of protest against the shooting of workers at the Lena mines as the beginning of a new revolutionary upsurge.

The Vienna Conference did not adopt a special resolution on the situation in the country. Both conferences, with all the differences between them, focused the Social Democrats primarily on active participation in the election campaign for the elections to the IV State Duma. The Prague Conference devoted two resolutions to this topic. Vienna - three. The documents of the conference featured the requirements of a democratic republic, an 8-hour working day, the elimination of landowner land tenure and the demands arising from them: universal suffrage, freedom of coalition, insurance of workers by the state, etc.

A comparative analysis of the resolutions confirms that the conflict in the RSDLP was a conflict between two revolutionary movements, between revolutionaries more radical - the Bolsheviks - and more moderate - the Mensheviks, and the Mensheviks, moderate by the standards of Russia, were more radical than the leaders of the majority of the Second International parties.

As a result of the Prague Conference, the main goal pursued by Lenin, the creation of an independent party, was achieved.

The Vienna Conference failed to restore the organizational unity of the RSDLP, especially since many of its participants did not hope for it. The main result of the conference was the strengthening of the consolidation of Menshevism. This result was primarily due to Martov , who had already seen Bolshevism, even reconciliation, a great danger to the labor movement in Russia.

On the eve of the First World War , judging by the well-known data on the material support of the legal social democratic newspapers by collective gatherings, the Bolsheviks had a clear and growing advantage over the Mensheviks. The Bolsheviks were ultimately better prepared for the extraordinary situation of 1917 created by the war and the fall of the monarchy - first of all by building a rigidly centralized party focused on seizing power and establishing their dictatorship on behalf of the proletariat . In March 1917, Lenin for the first time called it a new type party.

• R.V. Malinovsky and Romanov, members of the Bolshevik Party, who participated in a secret service in the security department, took part in the Prague Conference ^[4] .

• Conference of the RSDLP 1912. Documents and materials. - M .: Russian Political Encyclopedia (ROSSPEN), 2008. - 1120 p. - (Series "Political parties of Russia. End XIX - first third of the XX century. Documentary heritage") - ISBN 5-8243-0390-8 , ISBN 978-5-8243-0954-6