August Bloc

Formation and character

The Vienna conference of August 1912 brought together regional organisations from across Russia and representatives of several factions. Among the participants listed are organisations of St Petersburg, Moscow, Odessa, Sevastopol, Krasnoyarsk and Baku, Menshevik 'initiative groups', the Latvian Social-Democracy (SDLK), the Polish Socialist Party, the Lithuanian Social-Democratic Party, the Bund, the Ukrainian 'Spilka', Georgian Social-Democrats, the Vperyod group, Golos Sotsial-Demokrata, the Moriak union and the Vienna paper Pravda. Besides Trotsky, those taking part included Akselrod, Aleksinsky, Martov, Martynov, Uritsky and Larin, and Semkovsky became secretary of the Organising Committee elected in Vienna.

Not only the Bolsheviks but also the Bolshevik conciliators, the Menshevik 'Party men' (Plekhanovists) and the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) stayed away. Plekhanov sent a mockingly polite refusal.

The dispute over the national question

At the request of the Caucasian delegation the conference adopted a declaration that cultural-national autonomy 'does not contradict the precise meaning of the programme' recognising every nationality's right to self-determination, while expressly refusing to judge the demand on its merits. Stalin attacked the declaration as the liquidators' conference giving 'in a diplomatic way' its sanction to nationalist vacillation.

Item 9 of Lenin's Theses on the National Question (June 1913) records that at the August 1912 conference of the liquidators Bund separatists, liquidators and some Caucasian liquidators tried to insert 'cultural-national autonomy' into the party programme 'without any defence of its substance'. The same author states concretely that 'In August 1912, the liquidators' conference raised the national question officially', and treats Semkovsky, the Organising Committee's secretary, as the principal opportunist critic of clause 9. Lenin contrasted the clause's meaning, that self-determination is the right to secession, settled by the seceding region's own parliament or referendum, with Semkovsky's confusion, insisting the clause cannot be read as sanctioning cultural-national autonomy. Item 7 of the Theses records the Social-Democratic attitude to cultural-national autonomy as negative, because it contradicts proletarian internationalism, facilitates bourgeois-nationalist influence and distracts from consistent democratic transformation of the state.

Stalin's Marxism and the National Question shows Caucasian Social-Democrats linked with the Russian liquidators demanding regional autonomy for the Caucasus plus cultural-national autonomy for its nations; Stalin argues this was unsuitable and in the Caucasus senseless and reactionary.

Practical work and finances

The bloc's practical work began with Trotsky and Semkovsky planning a 'Vestnik Organizatsionnogo Komiteta' and other publications. After many Organising Committee members were arrested, the bloc was directed by its Foreign Secretariat, whose members as of 1913 were Martov, Martynov, Akselrod, Semkovsky and Astrov.

Financially, the German Social-Democratic Party (SPD) supported the bloc with 80,000 marks in total before and after the conference, with additional funds from the Austrian Social-Democrats (10,000 crowns) and Lev Deutsch's collection in the USA ($5,000).

Assessment and disintegration

The immediate occasion of the bloc's collapse was the February 1914 decision of the Latvian Social-Democracy (SDLK) congress to withdraw its representatives because the bloc had not dissociated itself from the liquidators. Lenin called this a 'death blow' to Trotsky's bloc, and Trotsky himself had already broken away. Even afterwards, until the February Revolution, the Organising Committee led only part of the Menshevik organisations.

Lenin called Trotsky more 'base and harmful' than the open liquidators, saying he deceived the workers, and also used the epithet 'Judas'. Stalin and other Bolsheviks likewise criticised the bloc for supporting the Menshevik liquidators. Martov argued that Trotsky himself well understood the inevitable temporariness of his bloc with the Mensheviks, whom he treated condescendingly, and did not conceal this. Soviet-era scholarship called the body the 'August anti-Party bloc'; because of its association with Trotsky the Vienna conference and the union created there were barely studied in Soviet times and assessments were 'far from objectivity and historicism'. The label 'August Bloc' itself is still absent from the conference's own early-21st-century published materials and later attached to the Vienna conference's supporters; the Bolshevik Central Committee and Plekhanov condemned the conference as 'liquidatorist'. Trotsky reassessed the Bloc in his autobiography My Life (1929-1930), and Amiantov and Rozental noted that World War I 'shuffled all the cards', making assessment of the Bloc's potential prospects harder.