Russian Social Democratic Labour Party

Founding

The RSDLP (РСДРП) was founded in March 1898 at an underground conference in Minsk. The congress was convened by three major social-democratic groups: the St. Petersburg League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class, the General Jewish Labour Bund (which sponsored the congress) and the Kiev-based Rabochaya Gazeta organization; nine delegates attended. It adopted the party name, elected a three-member Central Committee (Stepan Radchenko, Boris Eidelmann/Arkadi Kremer) and issued a Manifesto, but established neither a programme nor statutes. The Manifesto was written by Peter Struve at Radchenko's request.

Repression followed at once. Within a month of the congress five of the nine delegates were arrested by the Okhrana, and the ensuing wave of police repression prevented the party from functioning as a cohesive body for several years. Its programme rested strictly on the theories of Marx and Engels, holding that despite Russia's agrarian character the true revolutionary potential lay with the industrial working class, then about three million workers, roughly 3 per cent of the population.

Congresses and the split

The Second Congress met from 17 July to 10 August 1903. After Belgian police attention the sittings moved from Brussels to London (13 sessions were held in Brussels); the agenda covered the programme, the rules and the election of central bodies. The congress unanimously adopted a 'minimum programme' of immediate proletarian tasks in a bourgeois revolution and a 'maximum programme' aiming at socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. On 17 November, however, a vote on the Iskra editorial board divided it into the Bolsheviks (bolshinstvo, 'majority') headed by Lenin and the Mensheviks (menschinstvo, 'minority') headed by Julius Martov. Confusingly, the Mensheviks were actually the larger faction, and Lenin's faction remained smaller until the 1917 revolution.

The central organizational issue was the definition of party membership. Martov proposed a broad definition admitting those who accepted the programme and supported it materially and by regular cooperation under one of the party's organizations, winning 28 to 23 initially; Lenin proposed a stricter definition requiring personal participation in one of the party's organizations. The departure of the Bundist and Economist delegates then left Lenin's definition in the majority, yielding the names 'Bolshevik' and 'Menshevik'.

During and after the 1905 Revolution the party operated both legally and underground, publishing newspapers, infiltrating trade unions and agitating among industrial workers. Reunification attempts and further splits followed. The 4th Congress (Stockholm, 1906) formally reunified the factions with the Mensheviks in the majority; the 5th Congress (London, 1907) consolidated Bolshevik supremacy; Bogdanov's Vpered subfaction split from the Bolsheviks in 1909; and from late 1908 the Mensheviks divided into the 'Pro-Party Mensheviks' under Plekhanov and the 'Liquidators'. In 1912 Lenin's Bolshevik group called a conference in Prague and expelled the liquidators, ultimatists and recallists, leaving a separate RSDLP (Bolsheviks) while the Mensheviks continued as the RSDLP (Mensheviks).

1917 and dissolution

After the February Revolution of 1917 some Mensheviks supported cooperation with the Provisional Government, which the Bolsheviks opposed in favour of 'all power to the soviets'. After the Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution the party was effectively dissolved, and in 1918 the Bolshevik party formally renamed itself the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), later the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

A dating conflict

The end of the party is documented in conflicting ways. One record lists it as 'Dissolved 1912', taking that year's formal split as the endpoint, while other accounts place the effective dissolution after the October 1917 seizure of power and the March 1918 renaming of the Bolshevik party to the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) as the endpoint. The 1912 split and the 1917–1918 dissolution and renaming are therefore documented alternatives that should not be forced into a single exact end year.

Examples and names

The congress chronology provides concrete instances. The 2nd Congress ran from 17 July to 10 August 1903; the 4th (Unity) Congress in Stockholm in 1906 brought 112 voting delegates from 57 local organizations plus national organizations (Polish-Lithuanian, Bund, Latvian, Ukrainian and Finnish Social Democracies); and the 5th Congress in London in 1907 had 336 delegates representing more than 147,000 members. Members were popularly labelled esdeki (singular esdek), from the Russian initials S and D standing for 'Social Democrats'.

Distinctions and relations

The RSDLP was not the first Russian Marxist group; the Emancipation of Labour group had formed in 1883. It was created to oppose the revolutionary populism of the Narodniks, later represented by the Socialist Revolutionary Party, and it rejected the populist idea that the peasant commune (mir) could bypass the capitalist stage, holding that Russia could achieve socialism only after developing a bourgeois society with an urban proletariat. Bolshevik and Menshevik strategy diverged on this ground: the Bolsheviks held that only the workers backed by the peasantry could carry out the bourgeois-democratic tasks, which would provide incentive to socialist revolution in Germany, France and Britain, while the Mensheviks sought enlightened allies in the liberal bourgeoisie; both agreed that the coming revolution in Russia would be 'bourgeois-democratic'.

Internationally the party was affiliated with the Socialist International. Organizationally it merged the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class, the Emancipation of Labour group and the Jewish Labour Bund; at the 4th Congress the Social Democracy of Poland and Lithuania and the Latvian Social-Democratic Labour Party joined as territorial organizations, with the Bund, the Ukrainian Social Democratic Labour Party and the Finnish Labour Party also represented. The Bund's claim to be the sole representative of the Jewish proletariat and its demand for federated attachment were defeated at the 1903 congress, when its five delegates alone voted for the proposal, after which it withdrew from the RSDLP; that departure helped leave Lenin's supporters in the majority. In Marxist historiography the Second Congress is presented as a turning point that divided principled Marxism from opportunism, prefiguring the split in the Second International over the First World War; its 1903 split was followed by the 1912 Prague Conference, which consolidated the victory of the Bolsheviks and drove the Menshevik-liquidators out of the party. Within this lineage the predecessor was the Emancipation of Labour group (1883), the factions spawned Vpered (1909), the Pro-Party Mensheviks and the Liquidators, and the successors were the RSDLP (Bolsheviks) and the RSDLP (Mensheviks), the former renamed the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1918.