The Sixth All-Russia Conference of the R.S.D.L.P. (Prague)

The Sixth All-Russia Conference (Prague) of the R.S.D.L.P. convened between January 5 to 17 (Russian calendar January 18 to 30), 1912 in Prague, and actually assumed the character of a Party congress. The meeting of delegates was attended by representatives of more than 20 party organizations who came from Petersburg, Moscow, Central Industrial Regions, Saratov, Tbilisi, Baku, Nikolaev, Kazan, Kiev, Ekaterinoslav, Dvinsk, and Vilno. Due to police persecution and other difficulties. On the other hand, representatives of the Party organizations in Ekaterinburg, Tyumen, Ufa, Samara, Sharovgorod, Solmovo, Luhansk, Rostov-on-Don, and Barnaul were unable to attend the meeting, but all these organizations sent written statements so as to participate the decision making. The meeting was also attended by representatives of the editorial board of the central organ Sotsial-Demokrat led by Lenin, the editorial board of Rabochaya Gazeta, the R.S.D.L.P. Organization Abroad, “the transport group” of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party and other units.

Two of the delegates were Menshevik, the rest were Bolsheviks. A group of delegates to the Conference and the representatives of the Russian Organizing Commission had written to the Central Committee of the Social-Democratic Party of the Territory of Latvia, the Central Committee of the Bund, the General Executive Committee of the Social-Democratic Party of Poland and Lithuania, as well as to various groups abroad, asking them to send representatives to the Conference, but they refused. Maxim Gorky, who was not present at the meeting due to illness, had written to the delegates to congratulate them.

The issues included in the agenda of the Conference were: reports (reports of the Russian organizing commission, reports of local and central organs and other units); on the constitution of the conference; tasks of the party in the present situation; elections to the Fourth Duma; the social-democratic group in the Duma; the party’s attitude to the workers’ state insurance duma bill; strike and trade unions; the “Petition Campaign”; liquidationism and the group of liquidators; the tasks of social-democracy in the struggle against the famine; party publications; organizational issues; the party organisation abroad; elections; miscellaneous.

Lenin represented the Editorial Board of the Central Organ at the meeting of delegates and led the work of the conference. Lenin was the leading figure at the Conference. Opening the Conference, he defined the terms of reference, spoke on the current situation and the tasks of the Party, the work of the International Socialist Bureau, made, some informative reports and took part in the discussions on the work of the Central Organ, on the tasks of Social-Democracy in the struggle against the famine, on the organisational question, on the work of the Party Organisation Abroad, and on a number of other questions. It was Lenin who drafted the resolutions on the major questions on the conference agenda.

The Conference made 23 sessions and the motions were discussed in detail (the resolution “The Character and Organisational Forms of Party Work” was the common resolution of the organizational issues on the agenda along with the two issues of the strike movement and trade unions). The minutes of the meeting have not been found so far, but only very imperfect records preserving certain fragments of the meeting. The resolutions of the conference were published by the Central Committee in Paris in 1912 in the form of a pamphlet.

The Prague Conference restored the Party, elected the Central Committee, and re-established the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee. The following were elected to the Central Committee: Lenin, F.I. Goloshchekin, G.Y. Zinoviev, G.K. Ordzhonikidze, S. Spandaryan, D.M. Schwartzman, R.V. Malinovsky (later discovered to be a spy). The plenary session of the Central Committee held at the end of the Conference decided to add I. S. Belostotsky and Stalin as members of the Central Committee. After a while, G.I. Petrovsky and Y.M. Sverdlov were added to the Central Committee. The delegates' meeting also decided that Andrei Bubnov, M.I. Kalinin, A. Smirnov, E. Stasova, and S. Shahumyan would be candidate members of the Central Committee. The delegates' conference elected the editorial board of the Sotsial-Demokrat headed by Lenin and elected Lenin as the representative of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party to the International Bureau of the Socialist Party.

This Conference, which defined the political line and tactic of the party under the new conditions and decided to expel the liquidators from the party, was decisive for the further development of the new political party of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party and the consolidation of its unity. The Bolsheviks expelled the Mensheviks from the Party, which showed that Marxists should uncompromisingly oppose opportunism to the point of even completely breaking with it including organizationally.