In 1913 a split occurred among the Social-Democratic deputies to the State Duma. On one side were 7 supporters of opportunism, led by Chkheidze. They had been elected from 7 non-proletarian gubernias, with a total of 214,000 workers. On the other side were 6 deputies, all from the workers’ curia, elected from the most industrial centres of Russia, which had a total of 1,008,000 workers.

The main point of divergence was: the tactics of revolutionary Marxism or the tactics of opportunist reformism. In practice, the divergence manifested itself most of all in the sphere of extra-parliamentary work among the masses. If those conducting this work wished to remain on revolutionary ground, it had to be carried on illegally in Russia. The Chkheidze faction remained the most faithful ally of the liquidationists, who repudiated illegal work, and defended them in all discussions with the workers, at all meetings. Hence the split. The 6 deputies formed the R.S.D.L. Faction. A year’s work showed irrefutably that it was they who had the support of the overwhelming majority of the Russian workers.

At the beginning of the war the divergence manifested itself with the utmost clarity. The Chkheidze faction confined itself to the parliamentary arena. It did not vote for the credits, because otherwise it would have called forth a storm of indignation from the workers. (We have seen that in Russia even the petty-bourgeois Trudoviks did not vote for the credits.) But it also did not take any action to protest against social-chauvinism.

The R.S.D.L. Faction, which expressed the political line of our party, acted differently. It carried its protest against the war into the very thick of the working class, it carried its propaganda against imperialism to the broad masses of the Russian proletarians.

And it met with a very sympathetic response from the workers – which frightened the government and compelled it, in flagrant violation of its own laws, to arrest our comrade deputies and sentence them to lifelong exile and settlement in Siberia. In its very first official announcement of the arrest of our comrades, the tsarist government wrote:

“A quite special position in this respect has been taken by certain members of Social-Democratic societies, who have made it the aim of their activities to undermine Russia’s military power by agitation against the war, through underground leaflets and oral propaganda.”

To the well-known appeal by Vandervelde to “temporarily” cease the struggle against tsarism – and it is now known from the testimony of the tsarist envoy to Belgium, Prince Kudashev, that Vandervelde drew up this appeal not alone, but in collaboration with the aforementioned tsarist envoy – only our party, in the person of its Central Committee, gave a negative reply. The leading centre of the liquidationists agreed with Vandervelde and officially declared in the press that it “does not counteract the war in its activities”.

The tsarist government first and foremost accused our comrade deputies of having propagandised among the workers this negative reply to Vandervelde.

The tsarist prosecutor, Mr. Nenarokomov, at the trial held up the German and French socialists as an example to our comrades. “The German Social-Democrats,” he said, “voted for the war credits and turned out to be friends of the government. That is what the German Social-Democrats did, but not so the sorry knights of Russian Social-Democracy... The socialists of Belgium and France amicably forgot their quarrels with the other classes, forgot party disputes, and without hesitation rallied to the banner.” But the members of the R.S.D.L. Faction, obeying the directives of the Central Committee of the party, had acted quite differently, so he argued...

The trial unfolded an imposing picture of the extensive illegal agitation of our party among the proletarian masses against the war. The tsarist court, of course, managed to “discover” far, far from all the activities of our comrades in this field. But even what was discovered showed how much had been accomplished in the short space of a few months.

At the trial, illegal leaflets of our groups and committees against the war and in favour of internationalist tactics were read out. Threads stretched from the class-conscious workers of all Russia to the members of the R.S.D.L. Faction, and to the best of their ability they tried to help them appraise the war from the standpoint of Marxism.

Comrade Muranov, a deputy from the workers of Kharkov Gubernia, said at the trial:

“Realising that I was sent by the people to the State Duma not just to sit in a Duma seat, I travelled around the localities to familiarise myself with the mood of the working class.” He also admitted at the trial that he had undertaken the functions of an illegal agitator of our party, that in the Urals he had organised a workers’ committee at the Verkhne-Isetsk Plant and in other places. The trial showed that after the outbreak of the war the members of the R.S.D.L. Faction, for propaganda purposes, travelled through almost the whole of Russia, that Muranov, Petrovsky, Badayev and others organised numerous workers’ meetings at which resolutions against the war were passed, etc.

The tsarist government threatened the defendants with the death penalty. In connection with this, not all of them at the trial spoke out as courageously as Comrade Muranov. They tried to make it harder for the tsarist prosecutors to convict them. This is now being basely used by the Russian social-chauvinists to obscure the essence of the question: what kind of parliamentarism does the working class need?

Parliamentarism is recognised by Südekum and Heine, Sembat and Vaillant, Bissolati and Mussolini, Chkheidze and Plekhanov. And parliamentarism is also recognised by our comrades from the R.S.D.L. Faction, by the Bulgarian and Italian comrades who have broken with the chauvinists. There is parliamentarism and parliamentarism. Some use the parliamentary arena to ingratiate themselves with their governments, or, at best, to wash their hands of the matter, like the Chkheidze faction. Others use parliamentarism in order to remain revolutionaries to the end, in order to fulfil their duty as socialists and internationalists under even the most difficult circumstances. The parliamentary activity of some leads them to ministerial chairs, the parliamentary activity of others leads them – to prison, to exile, to hard labour. Some serve the bourgeoisie, others the proletariat. Some are social-imperialists. Others are revolutionary Marxists.