Liquidationism

Conditions after 1905

After the defeat of the 1905 revolution the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party fell into an organizational crisis. Under Stolypin's reaction the underground organization was broken up and membership collapsed, while at the same time new fields of work existed in the State Duma, legal trade unions, insurance bodies, cooperatives, and the legal press. These two conditions produced the fork in organizational lines.

The Menshevik right held that maintaining an underground organization was unrealistic and that the party had to be reconstituted around legal work. Potresov and others developed this position around the journal Nasha Zarya, looking toward a transition to an open workers' party on the European model.

The dispute

Lenin defined the position as liquidationism and attacked it relentlessly. His case was that dissolving the underground amounted to abandoning revolutionary aims. Because political demands could not be raised through legal work alone under tsarism, the use of legal space retained a revolutionary character only if it presupposed an illegal organization.

There was a third position in the dispute. Some Mensheviks, Plekhanov among them, opposed liquidationism and granted the necessity of the underground; they were known as party Mensheviks. Trotsky attempted to preserve organizational unity and won support from neither side.

Organizational separation

The Prague Conference of January 1912 expelled the liquidators from the party. The conference was directed by the Bolsheviks and the legitimacy of its composition was itself contested, but in effect it completed the organizational separation of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. The two currents afterwards ran separate newspapers, Duma fractions, and union organizations.

The problem the liquidationism dispute left behind was the relation between organizational form and political aim. Whether an expansion of legal work requires a revision of aims, or whether the form of work can be adjusted while the aims are kept, is a question that recurred in socialist movements elsewhere. In this respect the liquidationism dispute is treated as another form of the same problem as the revisionism debate in Western Europe at the same time.