**Contemporary political situation is characterized by the following features:**

a) The old feudal autocracy is developing, transforming itself into a bourgeois monarchy that conceals absolutism behind pseudo-constitutional forms. The union of Tsarism with the Black Hundreds landowners and the upper echelons of the commercial-industrial bourgeoisie has been openly consolidated and recognized by the State coup of June 3rd and the establishment of the Third Duma. Having necessarily embarked decisively upon the path of capitalist development in Russia and striving to uphold precisely that path which would preserve for the feudal landowners their power and their revenues, the autocracy maneuvers between this class and the representatives of capital. Their petty quarrels are exploited to maintain absolutism, which together with these classes wages a ferocious counter-revolutionary struggle against the socialist proletariat and democratic peasantry, who have demonstrated their strength in the recent mass struggle.

b) The agrarian policy of contemporary Tsarism is distinguished by the same bourgeois-Bonapartist character. It has lost all faith in the naive devotion of the peasant masses to the monarchy. It seeks an alliance with wealthy peasants, surrendering the countryside to them for plunder. The autocracy makes convulsive efforts to quickly destroy all communal-allotment landownership and to entrench exclusively private landed property. Such a policy sharpens a hundredfold all the contradictions of capitalism in the countryside and accelerates the division of the village into an insignificant minority of reactionaries and a revolutionary proletarian and semi-proletarian mass.

c) The liberal bourgeoisie, with the Cadet party at its head, having embarked upon the counter-revolutionary path already at the first major mass uprisings in the revolution, continues along this path, drawing even closer to the Octobrists, and through its Tsarist-nationalist agitation—expressing the growth of self-consciousness of the bourgeoisie as a class—in fact serves absolutism and the feudal landowners.

d) The peasant masses, as is shown even by their suppressed and distorted representation in the Third Duma, continue—despite all persecution of democratic elements in the countryside—to remain, for all their vacillations, on the side of the revolutionary-democratic agrarian upheaval, which, by completely liquidating landlord landownership, would ensure the most rapid, broad, and free development of productive forces in capitalist Russia. The Law of November 9th only accelerates the division of the peasant masses into irreconcilably hostile and consciously political forces.

e) The proletariat has suffered and continues to suffer the greatest blows both from the autocracy and from rapidly unifying and advancing capital. Despite this, the proletariat preserves, in comparison with other classes, the greatest cohesion and the greatest loyalty to its class party, with which the revolution has fused it. The proletariat continues the struggle for its class interests and deepens its socialist class consciousness, remaining the only class capable of consistently leading the new revolutionary struggle.

f) On the whole, it is undoubtedly true that the objective tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia remain unsolved. The continuing economic crisis, unemployment, and hunger strikes show that the autocracy's newest policy cannot ensure the conditions for capitalist development in Russia. This policy inevitably leads to deepening conflict between the democratic masses and the ruling classes, to the growth of discontent among new strata of the population, to the intensification and deepening of political struggle among various classes. A new revolutionary crisis is inevitably ripening under such economic and political conditions.

g) A general intensification on the world market, explained mainly by changes in the industrial situation of Western Europe toward crisis, which passed in 1908 into the form of depression, and by revolutionary movements in the East, signifying the creation of national capitalist states, intensifies competition, leads to a frequency of international conflicts, thereby sharpening the class contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat and making the general international situation increasingly revolutionary.

**Proceeding from such a state of affairs, the All-Russian Conference of the RSDLP recognizes that the basic tasks of the party at the present moment are the following:**

1) Explanation to the broad masses of the people of the meaning and significance of the autocracy's newest policy and the role of the socialist proletariat, which, conducting an independent class policy, must lead the democratic peasantry in contemporary politics and in the forthcoming revolutionary struggle.

2) Comprehensive study and wide popularization of the experience of mass struggle in 1905–1907, which has provided irreplaceable lessons of revolutionary social-democratic tactics.

3) Strengthening of the RSDLP as it took shape during the revolutionary epoch; maintenance of the traditions of its uncompromising struggle both against autocracy and reactionary classes, and against bourgeois liberalism; struggle against departures from revolutionary Marxism, against the curtailment of the slogans of the RSDLP, and against attempts to liquidate the illegal organization of the RSDLP, evident among certain party elements who have succumbed to the influence of disintegration.

It is necessary to bear in mind that only by facilitating the already clearly marked process of transition of party functions into the hands of the workers themselves who are social-democrats, only by creating and strengthening illegal party organizations, can the party be set upon the path of its proper development.

4) Comprehensive promotion of the economic struggle of the working class, in accordance with the resolutions of the London and Stuttgart Congresses.

5) Utilization of the Duma and the Duma tribune for revolutionary social-democratic propaganda and agitation.

6) The order of the day puts forward first and foremost protracted work in the education, organization, and consolidation of the conscious masses of the proletariat. Then, subordinated to this task, it is necessary to extend organizational work to the peasantry and the army, especially in the form of literary propaganda and agitation, with the principal attention to be directed toward the socialist education of proletarian and semi-proletarian elements in the peasantry and army.

Submitted December 23, 1908 (January 5, 1909)

First published in 1929–1930 in the 2nd–3rd editions of the Works of V. I. Lenin, volume XIV

Printed from the text written in an unknown hand (hectographed copy)