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Building the Bolshevik Party:
Some organisational aspects
By Brian Pearce
In discussions about the best form of organisation for a
Marxist
workers' party, reference is often made, in one spirit or another to
the experience of Russia. Sometimes such reference is made confusedly.
Three distinct entities are mixed up: the Russian Social-Democratic
Labour Party of 1903-1911, within which various factions strove for
ascendancy, the Bolshevik faction in that “Party”, and the Russian
Social-Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks) formed in 1912. Often
misunderstood, also, are the two fundamental presuppositions made by
Bolsheviks in their approach to organisational problems.
The first of these was that the working class would have to
undertake a struggle for power in which both legal and illegal activity
would be involved, a struggle in which all kinds of persecution by the
ruling class would have to be faced, a struggle which must culminate in
the forcible seizure of power and the forcible defence of the power
thus seized against counter-attack. In a word, the Bolsheviks saw
before them, and before the workers of every country the prospect of
revolution, and therefore the need for a party capable of preparing the
carrying through of a revolution. The special features of Tsarist
Russia in the early 20th century were not decisive in relation to this
point: in any case, these features fluctuated and changed, and the
Bolsheviks' concrete ideas about party organisation in Russia were
modified accordingly, but without the fundamental principle being
affected.
The second presupposition was that the working class
everywhere
needs not less but much more “party organisation” in order to conquer
power than was needed by the bourgeoisie in its great revolutions of
the 17th and 18th centuries. Trotsky (who arrived late at an
understanding of this point but thereafter defended the Bolshevik
position most staunchly) put it thus in his Lessons
of October
(1924): “the part played in bourgeois revolutions by the economic power
of the bourgeoisie, by its education, by its municipalities and
universities, is a part which can be played in a proletarian revolution
only by the party of the proletariat”. That is to say, the bourgeoisie
while still an oppressed class acquires wealth, and important footholds
in the institutions of the old regime, but the working class lacks
these advantages and has to compensate by intense organisation of those
forces which it does possess. In Lenin's words, “in its struggle for
power the proletariat has no other weapon but organisation”.
When the Russian Marxists were still operating through the
rudimentary forms of study circles, living separate lives in the
principal cities, and just beginning to apply themselves to study of
the detailed problems of their actual setting and to intervention
through leaflets in the current struggles of the Russian workers, Lenin
raised (in 1894) the question of working towards the formation of a
“socialist workers’ party”. The first coming together of
representatives of local Leagues of Struggle for the Emancipation of
the Working Class, at Minsk in 1898, the so-called First Congress of
the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, achieved nothing in the
organisational sphere and was followed by arrests and police
repressions of a devastating character. Preparations for another,
similar gathering, led to further arrests, and drew from Lenin in 1900
the observation that "congresses inside autocratic Russia are a luxury
we can't afford". Instead, he and his associates got down to the
publication outside Russia of a newspaper, Iskra, to be smuggled into
the country and serve as the means to prepare for another congress.
Around the work for this paper, cadres of revolutionaries organized
themselves in an all-Russia network, and through this paper a
clarifying discussion was carried on for two years about the political
tasks and functions of the party to be created.
Already, before the Second Congress met, Lenin had outlined.
particularly in A
Letter to a Comrade on Our Organisational Tasks (1902), as well
as in the more famous What Is To Be Done?
his conception of what a revolutionary party must be like. Its dominant
characteristic should be centralism, the concentration in the hands of
a stable, continuing leadership of all the resources of the Marxist
movement, so that the most rational and expedient use might be made of
these resources. Party membership must be strictly defined so that the
leadership knew exactly who was who and what forces they possessed at
any given moment. In the then existing conditions there could be little
democracy in the party, desirable as this was, without over-simplifying
the task of the police. The local “committees” of the party would have
to be appointed from above and consist entirely of professional
revolutionaries, and each of the party organisations in the factories
and elsewhere (“every factory must be our fortress”) would operate
under the instructions of the local committee, conveyed through one of
the committee members who would be the organisation's only contact, for
security reasons.
When at last the Second Congress met, in 1903 (at first in
Brussels,
later moving to London), and got down to settling organisational at
well as political problems, the political differences among the Russian
Marxists arising from their different estimates of the course of
development and relationship of class
forces1
at once found reflection in the sphere of organisation, although not in
a clear-cut way, there being at this stage much cross-voting. Lenin and
Martov confronted each other with their opposing formulation for Rule
One, defining what constituted Party membership. Lenin wanted a tight
definition obliging members not merely to acceptance of the Party
program and the giving of financial support, but also to “personal
participation in one of the Party's organisations”, whereas the
Congress agreed with Martov that “the rendering of personal assistance
under the direction of one of the Party's organs” was sufficient. In
Lenin's difference with Martov on this point was expressed Lenin's
conviction that “the party, as the vanguard of the class, should be as
organised as possible, should admit to its ranks only such elements as
lend themselves to at least a minimum of organisation”, because, “the
stronger the party organs consisting of real Social-Democrats are, the
less instability there is within the party. the greater will be its
influence on the masses around it”. Connected with the divergence of
views about what should constitute party membership was a more
fundamental difference which was to emerge more and more clearly in
subsequent years – about the character of the party structure. Lenin’s
conception was one of “building the party from the top downwards”,
starting from the party congress and the bodies set up by it, which
should be possessed of full powers, with “subordination of lower party
bodies to higher party bodies”. Martov revealed already at this stage a
conception of each party organisation as being “autonomous”. On the
internal political life of the party Lenin's view was that “a struggle
of shades is inevitable and essential as long as it does not lead to
anarchy and splits, as long as it is confined within bounds approved by
the common consent of all party members” (One Step Forward,
Two Steps Back (1904).
In spite of the defeat on Rule One, Lenin and his associates
carried
the majority with them in the voting on the main political questions
(as a result of which they thereafter enjoyed the advantage in the
party of the nickname of Bolshevik or majority), but the deep
divergences which had revealed themselves were reflected in the
Congress decisions on the central party bodies. A sort of dual power
was set up, equal authority being accorded to the editorial board of
the party paper, Iskra, residing abroad, and to the Central Committee,
operating underground inside Russia. A Party Council, empowered to
arbitrate in any disputes that might arise between these two centres of
authority, was to consist of two members representing the editorial
board, two from the Central Committee, and one elected directly by the
party congress. At first the Bolsheviks appeared to dominate both
editorial board and Central Committee, but very soon after the Second
Congress a shift of allegiance by a few of the leaders of what was then
a very small group of people enabled the Mensheviks (“minority”) to
turn the tables. The Bolsheviks mustered their forces into a faction.
set up a “Bureau of the Committees of the Majority” to lead it,
produced a faction paper, Vperyod, and conducted a campaign
within the party for the convening of a fresh, Third Congress. By early
1905 they had the majority of the local Committees on record in favour
of such a congress, and according to the party rules adopted in 1903
the Party Council should thereupon have convened the congress, but the
Mensheviks in control of that body found pretexts not to do so.
Accordingly the Bureau of the Committees of the Majority went ahead and
convened the Third Congress on its own initiative.
This purely Bolshevik gathering decided to abolish the
“bi-centrism”
established in 1903. The editorial board of the party paper had proved
to be unstable, while the party organisations inside Russia had grown
and become strong. A central committee with full, exclusive powers,
including the power to appoint the editorial board, was elected. All
party organisations were instructed henceforth to submit fortnightly
reports to the central committee: “later on it will be seen how
enormously important it is to acquire the habit of regular
organisational communication”. As regards the Mensheviks, their right
and that of all minorities to publish their own literature within the
party was recognised, but they must submit to the discipline of the
Congress and the Central Committee elected by it. A special resolution
charged all party members to “wage an energetic ideological struggle”
against Menshevism, while at the same time acknowledging that the
latter’s adherents could “participate in party organisations provided
they recognise party congresses and the party rules and submit to party
discipline”. Party organisations where Mensheviks were predominant were
to be expelled only if they were “unwilling to submit to party
discipline”.
The Mensheviks refused to recognise the authenticity of the
Third
Congress and held a parallel congress of their own, which set up a
rival leading body called the Organisational Committee. To this they
accorded only vague and limited powers, and they introduced some
ultra-democratic provisions into party life, such as that every member
of a local organisation was to be asked to express an opinion on every
decision of the appropriate local committee before this could be put
into force.
With the revolutionary events of 1905, the situation in and
around
the party changed very rapidly. Great numbers of workers joined its
ranks, the opportunities for party work became greater and more diverse
and de facto civil liberty expanded, enabling the party to show itself
more openly. Lenin led the way in carrying through a reorganisation of
the party on more democratic lines, so as to meet and profit by the new
situation. Larger and looser party organisations were to be created,
and the elective principle was introduced in place of the old tutelage
by committees of professionals. Such changes were possible, Lenin
stressed, only because of the work done in the preceding phase. “The
working class is instinctively, spontaneously, social-democratic2,
and the more than 10 years of work put in by the social democrats has
done a great deal to transform this spontaneity into class
consciousness”. (The latter part of this sentence, from Lenin's article
on The
Reorganisation of The Party
(November 1905), is sometimes omitted when it is quoted by unscrupulous
anti-Leninists.) There need be no fear that the mass of new members
would dilute the party, because they would find themselves under the
influence of the “steadfast. solid core” of party members forged in
those previous 10 years. At the same time, there could be no question
of liquidating the secret apparatus the party prepared for illegality;
and in general, Lenin warned, it was necessary to “reckon with the
possibility of new attempts on the part of the expiring autocracy to
withdraw the promised liberties, to attack the revolutionary workers
and especially their leaders”. It was to the important but carefully
considered changes made at this time that Lenin was mainly referring
when he wrote in 1913 (How Vera Zasulich
Slays Liquidationism)
that, organisationally, the party, “while retaining its fundamental
character, has known how to adapt its form to changing conditions, to
change this form in accordance with the demands of the moment”.
The newly recruited worker-members showed themselves somewhat
more
resistant to the guiding influence of the old cadres than Lenin had
hoped and, unable to grasp what all the “fuss” was about between
Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, brought strong pressure to bear for
immediate reunification of the party. The very successes achieved by
the revolution, with such comparative ease, caused many workers to see
the Bolsheviks as gloomy, peculiar folk obsessed with non-existent
problems. Zinoviev recalls in his lectures on party history how there
was a period in those days when Bolshevik speakers found it hard to get
a hearing in the Petersburg factory district called “the Vyborg side”
of the River Neva) which was to become a Bolshevik stronghold in 1917.
It proved impossible not to yield to the pressure from below for
“unity”, in spite of prophetic misgivings. A joint central committee
was set up, composed of both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. and proceeded
to convene a new party congress.
This congress, the Fourth, or “Unity” congress, held at
Stockholm,
was elected more democratically than its predecessors, full advantage
being taken of the easier conditions for open activity. Thirty-six
thousand members took part in the election of the delegates, and one
delegate was elected for every 250-300 members – really elected by the
rank and file, not, as on previous occasions, chosen by the local
committees of professionals. As a result, the Mensheviks found
themselves with a majority on the most important political questions –
although they were obliged to accept Lenin's formulation of the rule
regarding party membership, which they had successfully voted down in
1903! A central committee consisting of six Mensheviks and three
Bolsheviks was elected.
Following the Congress, those delegates “who belonged to the
‘Bolshevik’ faction”, issued (May 1906) an appeal to the party
membership, in which they declared: “We must and shall fight
ideologically against those decisions of the Congress which we regard
as erroneous. But at the same time we declare that we are opposed to a
split of any kind”. To work for another congress with a Bolshevik
majority, Lenin and his associates formed a secret factional centre –
what Zinoviev called “an organisation which was doubly illegal: in
relation to the Tsarist regime and in relation to the Mensheviks”.
Those local party committees which had Bolshevik majorities sponsored a
paper called Proletary, and the editorial board of this paper
functioned as the leadership of the Bolshevik “double underground”.
This was an extremely difficult period for the Bolsheviks in
the
party, but they were saved from it by the development of events in
Russia in general, and among the Mensheviks in particular, in ways
which they had foreseen. Evidence accumulated that political progress
was not, after all, going to proceed as smoothly as the Mensheviks had
claimed, while at the same time some of the Menshevik leaders came out
more and more openly as people who were ready to destroy the
independence of the party and even the party itself for the sake of a
coalition with bourgeois liberals. Already, before 1906 was out,
proposals began to be canvassed in Menshevik circles for dissolving the
RSDLP in a “broad Labour congress” modelled on the British Labour Party
of that time – a loose, comprehensive body which would embrace the
trade unions, the co-operatives, petty-bourgeois radical groups, etc.
In Petersburg the local Mensheviks defied the views of their Bolshevik
comrades in the “united” party organisations and linked up electorally
with the liberals. Lenin's reply to this was to publish a pamphlet
attacking the Mensheviks for treason to the common cause. Summoned
before a party court on a charge of violating discipline, he showed
himself quite unrepentant and aggressive. There was no real unity in
the party, he said, and a de facto split had taken place. “What is
impermissible among members of a united party is permissible and
obligatory for the parts of a party that has been split.” The
Mensheviks of the party court had better think carefully before coming
to a decision to expel him: “Your judgement will determine whether the
shaken unity of the RSDLP will be weakened or strengthened.” Lenin was
not expelled.
The balance of support within the party was now moving slowly
but
steadily towards the Bolsheviks again, as fair-weather members dropped
away and the more stable of the new members learned from experience,
observed the conduct of the Menshevik leaders and absorbed the
influence of the old cadres. The Fifth (London) Congress, held in 1907,
and elected no less democratically than the Fourth, proved to have a
small pro-Bolshevik majority. It was at this congress that the party
adopted as Rule Two of its organisational statute: “All party
organisations are built on the principles of democratic centralism.” A
number of decisions in the direction of further democratisation were
taken: a congress was to be held every year, with one delegate for
every 1000 members, and an all-Russia conference every three months,
with one delegate for every 5000 members.
No congress could in fact be held thereafter until 1917, owing
to
the onset of reaction. Only two days after the close of the Fifth
Congress came the Tsarist coup d’etat of June 3, 1907, and a more
severe reign of terror than ever began. The central committee elected
by the Congress, although predominantly pro-Bolshevik, was very mixed,
and the Bolshevik faction decided to keep its secret. leading centre in
being.
In the second half of 1907 Lenin prepared for publication a
collection of his writings to be titled Twelve Years.
Only one and a half of the three projected volumes were actually
published, and these were seized by the police. (A few copies
circulated illegally, but not until 1918 did Twelve Years
appear again, in full and openly.) Mw preface which Lenin wrote for
this collection, in September 1907, is often referred to by opponents
of Leninism as proof that at this time (the opening of the period of
blackest reaction!) Lenin repudiated the ideas on party organisation
which he had expounded in 1902 in What Is To Be Done? and
elsewhere. To show the mendacity of this allegation and to present
Lenin's own estimation of the balance sheet of the “twelve years” from
the organisational standpoint, here is a lengthy quotation from the
preface in question:
“The basic mistake which is made by people who nowadays
polemicise against What Is To Be Done?
consists in their completely detaching this work from its connection
with a definite historical situation – a definite, and now already
long-past period in the development of our party. This mistake was
strikingly committed by Parvus, for example (not to mention innumerable
Mensheviks), when he wrote, many years after the appearance of this
pamphlet, about its incorrect or exaggerated ideas regarding the
organisation of professional revolutionaries.
“At the present time such statements make a frankly comical
impression. It is as though people want to brush aside a whole phase in
the development of our party, to brush aside those conquests which in
their day cost a struggle to achieve but which now have long since
become consolidated and done their work. To argue today about Iskra's
exaggerations (in 1901 and 1902!) of the idea of an organisation of
professional revolutionaries is the same as though after the
Russo-Japanese War, one were to reproach the Japanese for having
exaggerated the strength of Russia’s armed forces, for having been
exaggeratedly anxious about the war and the struggle against these
forces. The Japanese had to summon up all their strength against the
maximum possible power of Russia, so as to ensure victory.
Unfortunately, many people judge our party from outside, without
knowing what they are talking about, without seeing that now the idea
of an organisation of professional revolutionaries has already won
complete victory. But this victory would have been impossible unless
this idea had been put in the forefront in its day, so as
“exaggeratedly” to make those people grasp this idea who were hindering
its realisation.
“What Is To Be Done? is a summary of the Iskra
group's
tactics and organisational policy in 1901 and 1902. Just a summary, no
more and no less. Whoever will take the trouble to familiarise himself
with the lskra of 1901 and 1902 will undoubtedly convince himself of
that. And whoever judges this summary without knowledge of Iskra's
fight against the then predominant economism3
and without an understanding of this struggle is merely talking through
his hat. Iskra
fought for the creation of professional revolutionaries, fighting
especially energetically in 1901 and 1902; overcame the economism which
then predominated; created the organisation at last in 1903; upheld
this organisation in spite of the subsequent split in the Iskra
group, in spite of all the troubles of this period of storm and stress,
upheld it during the whole of the Russian revolution, upheld and
preserved it from 1901-02 through to 1907.
“And behold, now, when the fight for this organisation has
long
since been concluded, when the ground has been sown, when the grain has
ripened and the harvest has been reaped, people appear and announce
that there has been: ‘an exaggeration of the idea of an organisation of
professional revolutionaries’! Isn't it laughable?
“Take the entire pre-revolutionary period and the first
two-and-a-half years of the revolution (1905-1907) as a whole. Compare
for this period our Social-Democratic Party with the other parties,
from the standpoint of cohesion, organised character, continuity of
purpose. You will have to acknowledge from this standpoint the
superiority of our party over all the others – the Cadets, the SRs and
the rest – has been indubitable. The Social Democratic Party worked out
before the revolution a program which was formally accepted by all
members and, while making amendments to it, never broke away from this
program. The Social-Democratic Party (in spite of the split from 1903
to 1907 (formally from 1905 to 1906), made public the fullest
information about its internal situation, in the minutes of the Second
(general) congress, the Third (Bolshevik) congress. and the Fourth or
Stockholm (general) congress. The Social Democratic Party, in spite of
the split, utilised the momentary gleam of freedom earlier than any of
the other parties to introduce an ideal democratic structure for its
open organisation, with an elective system and representation at
congresses according to the number of organised members of the party.
Neither the SRs nor the Cadets have done this yet – these almost-legal,
very well organised bourgeois parties which possess incomparably
greater financial resources, scope in use of the press and possibility
of functioning openly, than ourselves. And did not the elections to the
Second Duma, in which all parties took part, show graphically that the
organisational cohesion of our party and our Duma group is higher than
that of any other?
“The question arises – who achieved, who realised this greater
cohesion, stability and staunchness of our party? This was done by the
organisation of professional revolutionaries created above all with the
participation of Iskra. Whoever knows the history of our party well,
whoever has himself lived through the building of our party, needs only
to take a simple glance at the composition of the delegation of any
faction, let us say, at the London congress, to be convinced, to note
at once the old basic nucleus which, more diligently than anybody else,
cherished and reared the party. The basic condition for this success
was, of course, the fact that the working class, the flower of which
created the Social Democratic Party, is distinguished, owing to
objective economic causes, from all other classes in capitalist society
by its greater capacity for organisation. Without this condition the
organisation of professional revolutionaries would have been a toy, an
adventure, a meaningless signboard, and the pamphlet What Is To Be
Done?
stresses repeatedly that only in connexion with a ‘really revolutionary
class which spontaneously rises in struggle’ does the organisation
which this pamphlet defends make sense. But the objectively very great
capacity of the proletariat to be organised is carried out by living
people, is carried out not otherwise than in definite forms of
organisation. And no other organisation than that put forward by Iskra
could, in our historical circumstances, in the Russia of 1900-05, have
created such a Social Democratic Workers' Party as has now been
created. The professional revolutionary has done his job in the history
of Russian proletarian socialism. And no power will now disrupt the
work which has long since outgrown the narrow limits of the ‘circles’;
no belated complaints about exaggerations of the fighting tasks by
those who in their day could only by struggle ensure a correct approach
to the fulfilment of these tasks will shake the significance of the
conquests which have already been achieved.”
With the advance of reaction and dissipation of the rosy
illusions
of 1905 the Bolshevik proportion in the ranks of the party continued to
grow. At the party conference held in November 1907, the Bolsheviks
were able to secure the passing of resolutions which subordinated the
Social-Democratic group in the Duma to the Central Committee and
forbade party members to contribute articles to the bourgeois press on
inner-party questions. At the party conference held in December 1908,
in view of the now intense police terror in Russia, the elective
principle in organisation was sharply modified and the party regime of
before 1905 was in the main restored. This conference also passed a
resolution condemning “liquidationism” (advocacy of dissolving the
party in a broad Labour Congress), a political disease now spreading
very rapidly in the upper circles of the Menshevik faction.
While extreme right-wing tendencies grew among Mensheviks, an
ultraleft tendency appeared in the ranks of the Bolsheviks under these
conditions of reaction. This took the form of Otzovism (recallism), a
system of ideas justifying withdrawal from all attempts to work in the
Duma and other legal organisations and concentration of activity
exclusively on underground work. At a meeting of the editorial board of
Proletary (the secret Bolshevik faction leadership) in the
summer of 1909 Otzovism was condemned as having nothing in common with
Bolshevism, and members of the faction were called upon to fight
against it. So far as the leading Otzovist, Bogdanov, was concerned, it
was resolved that the fraction took no further responsibility for his
doings (he had set up a “party school” at which he propounded his
doctrines); but it is not correct to say that the Otzovists were
expelled from the Bolshevik faction. On the contrary, the factional
leadership stated that it aimed at avoiding an organisational split
with the 0tzovists and would strive to win them back to Bolshevism.
(They themselves broke away, trying to form a faction of their own
around a paper they called Vperyod, after the Bolshevik
factional paper of 1904; but this did not win much influence, and most
of the Otzovists found their way back to Bolshevism in due course.)
At this same meeting a decision was taken against agitation
for a
separate Bolshevik congress to be convened at once, as advocated by
some comrades indignant with the degeneration of the Mensheviks into
“liquidationism”. The latter development had aroused misgivings among
many of the Menshevik rank and file, who although they disagreed with
the Bolsheviks on some important political points, shared with them the
conviction that the workers must retain an independent party of their
own, organised for illegal as well as legal activity. If the Bolsheviks
played their cards properly they could win over a substantial section
of this Menshevik rank and file; at this stage it would be wrong to
take the initiative in splitting the party, although a split was
inevitable in the not too distant future. A fight must be waged under
the slogan of “preservation and consolidation of the RSDLP”.
One of the most influential Menshevik leaders, the veteran
propagandist of Marxism, Plekhanov, came out against “liquidationism”
and gathered around him these Mensheviks who regarded the continued
existence of the party as sine qua non. With these “pro-party
Mensheviks” Lenin formed an alliance for the specific purpose of
fighting the “liquidators”. Plekhanov had played a negative role in
1904-1908 and was to return to that role later, but, in Zinoviev's
words, “during the difficult years 1909, 1910 and 1911 Plekhanov
rendered invaluable services to the party”. Through his alliance with
Plekhanov Lenin was able to make contact with wide sections of the
Menshevik workers whom otherwise he could not have approached so easily.
The Bolsheviks’ striving to isolate and eliminate the
liquidators
was for a time complicated by the appearance in their own ranks of a
“conciliationist” tendency which, demoralised by the shrinking in the
size and influence of the RSDLP under the blows of reaction, and by the
sneers of outsiders, including the spokesmen of the Second
International, at the “faction-ridden” state of the Russian workers’
movement, wearily urged the dissolution of all factions, “mutual
amnesty” and general brotherhood at the expense of all differences of
principle. At a meeting of the Central Committee in January 1910, these
“conciliationists” carried a resolution obliging everybody to dissolve
their factions and close down their factional papers. The Bolsheviks
fulfilled their obligations under this resolution, but the liquidators
failed to do so. This open flouting of the party finally exposed the
liquidators in the eyes of numerous Mensheviks, and Lenin and Plekhanov
made the most of the situation. At the end of 1910 the Bolsheviks
announced that they regarded themselves as released from the
undertaking they had given in January, and launched a weekly paper, Zverzda,
which was edited jointly with the pro-party Mensheviks.
Zvezda functioned in the years 1910-12 as Iskra
had
functioned in 1900-03, as the organiser of a regrouping of political
forces on a basis that it helped to clarify. The task, said Lenin was
not to “reconcile certain given persons and groups, irrespective of
their work and attitude”, but to organise people around a “definite
party line”. “Unity is inseparable from its ideological foundation.”
The Bolsheviks were aided in their work now by the revival of the
working-class movement, which was beginning, favoured by the boom that
had started in 1909. With less danger of unemployment – and with the
paralysing shock of the reaction of 1907 somewhat worn off – the
workers began to recover their militant spirit. Strikes increased, and
in 1912 the shooting down of some strikers in the Lena goldfields was
to enable the Bolsheviks to infuse political consciousness into this
militancy on a large scale. Pressed between the increasingly restive
working class on the one hand and the grim wall of Tsarism on the
other, the liquidators were obliged to move ever faster and show their
full intentions without dallying any longer. In June 1911, Martov and
Dan, leading liquidators, resigned from the editorial board of the
official organ of the RSDLP and declared the latter to be no longer
existent so far as they were concerned.
The moment had come to carry out the reconstitution of the
party on
new lines. In December 1911 Lenin was in a position to record that the
Bolsheviks and pro-party Mensheviks had formed an Organisation
Committee to prepare for a special party conference; that in the course
of joint work these two factions had practically fused in such key
centres as Baku and Kiev; and that “for the first time after four years
of ruin and disintegration”, a Social Democratic leading centre had met
inside Russia, issued a leaflet to the party, and begun the work of
re-establishing the underground organisations that had broken up under
the combined action of police terror and liquidationist propaganda.
When the special party conference met in Prague in 1912 it was
found
to be the most representative party gathering since the Second
Congress. Every faction in the RSDLP had been invited, but only the
Bolsheviks and pro-party Mensheviks attended; the underground
organisations on which the conference was based were now practically
entirely in the hands of these two factions. The conference took to
itself all the rights and functions of a party congress, and formally
expelled the liquidators from the RSDLP. A new central committee was
elected to replace the one elected in 1907, which had collapsed after
the fiasco of 1910; this central committee was entirely Bolshevik in
composition except for one pro-party Menshevik. The faction of
pro-party Mensheviks disappeared soon afterwards; while Plekhanov and a
few other leaders broke with the Bolsheviks, the bulk of the rank and
file came over completely to the Bolshevik position, as Lenin had
foreseen. Henceforth, until it changed its name to Communist Party in
1918, the party was the RSDLP (Bolsheviks), with the Petersburg daily
Pravda as its central organ. The Bolshevik faction had at last
completed its development into the Bolshevik party – the party that,
after fusing in 1917 with Trotsky’s Mezhrayontsi (inter-ward group),
led the great October proletarian revolution.
First published in Labour Review (Britain), 1960
Brian Pearce was one of the talented group of historians
who
formed the British Communist Party Historians Group, and who later left
the CP en masse during the upheaval surrounding Krushchev's secret
speech and the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. The historians who left
the CP also included E.P. Thompson.
Brian Pearce joined the British Trotskyist group led by
Gerry
Healy at a time when that group was oriented to the crisis in Stalinism
and before its later degeneration into extreme sectarianism.
Pearce wrote an informative column, The Constant Reader,
for the
SLL's magazine, The Newsletter, published by Peter Fryer. The Constant
Reader offered commentary on a vast range of political, literary and
historical matters. The SLL also had a theoretical magazine, Labour
Review.
Pearce was a capable linguist and translated a number of
important Marxist works from various languages into English.
This article provides an important insight into an often
neglected aspect of the history of the Bolshevik Party. Pearce is also
the author, along with Michael Woodhouse, of a book of essays on
British communist and labour movement history, which achieved the
unusual feat of first being published by the SLL's New Park and later
republished by the British SWP's Bookmarx.
Notes
1. These political differences, which
are
largely outside the scope of this article, were largely concerned with
relations with the bourgeois liberals.
2. Until 1918 the name social democrats
was common to Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.
3. The view that the activity of the
party would be limited to “strike making” on immediate economic issues.
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