August Bloc

8월 블록

The anti-Bolshevik bloc formed at the conference Trotsky convened in Vienna in August 1912 (the 'August Conference'), uniting the Liquidators, the Bund, Caucasian Mensheviks and part of the Latvian Social-Democracy under the banner of 'unity' against the Bolsheviks, who had expelled the Liquidators at the Prague Conference that January. On the national question the conference, at the request of the Caucasian delegation, declared cultural-national autonomy 'not contrary to the precise meaning' of the party programme, in effect sidestepping the self-determination clause. Stalin's Marxism and the National Question (section VI) and Lenin's The Right of Nations to Self-Determination attacked this decision as a diplomatic sanction of nationalist vacillation. Internally heterogeneous, the bloc had effectively collapsed by 1913–1914, which Lenin took as proof of the bankruptcy of Liquidationism as a whole.