Mezhraiontsy

Is a party without factions possible?

Once the Prague Conference of 1912 made the Bolsheviks a party of their own in practice, there remained activists who regarded the schism as the party's self-destruction. The Interdistrict Committee formed in Petersburg in November 1913, the Mezhraiontsy, was the organisation of these unifiers; the name means a committee linking the city's districts (raions) rather than belonging to any one. They largely shared the Bolsheviks' underground organisation and revolutionary programme, but demanded the liquidation of factions and the rebuilding of a single workers' party. Never large, the group had a base among the capital's metalworkers, and when war came it held an internationalist line against defencism.

Why did Trotsky go there?

When the émigrés returned after the February Revolution of 1917, the Mezhraiontsy were the natural place for Trotsky, who had long walked a non-factional road. Back in Russia in May, he joined the organisation and became its spokesman in practice. By then Lenin's April Theses had closed almost all the political distance between the Bolsheviks and the Mezhraiontsy: power to the soviets, opposition to the war, no confidence in the Provisional Government. What remained was the form of the merger. At the Sixth Party Congress, held under the repression that followed the July Days, the roughly four thousand Mezhraiontsy joined the Bolshevik party, and Trotsky was elected to the Central Committee while in prison.

What did it leave behind?

The Mezhraiontsy existed for less than four years, but the merger changed the composition of the leadership that made October. Besides Trotsky, this was the road by which Ioffe, Uritsky, Lunacharsky and Volodarsky entered the party and took senior posts in the revolution and the early Soviet government. In the later inner-party struggles Stalin's side used the fact that Trotsky had joined only in 1917 to argue that his Bolshevism was borrowed; Trotsky's side answered that the internationalism of the Mezhraiontsy had been the same thing as post-April Bolshevism. Since the organisation itself dissolved into the merger, its history is remembered mainly through the later trajectories of its members.