In the epoch of the decisive triumph of counter-revolution that followed the dissolution of the Second Duma, the entire party activity was compelled by force of circumstances to set itself the task: despite the efforts of the reaction and amidst a profound decline of the class proletarian struggle, to preserve the party organisation created during the years of the highest upsurge of the proletarian struggle – i.e., as an organisation that consciously stands on the ground of orthodox Marxism and unites all “national” Social-Democratic organisations for the purpose of carrying out a united revolutionary Social-Democratic tactic.

In the course of this two-year struggle for the party and party spirit, there clearly emerged, on the one hand, the delimitation of the party from elements that had been brought into it by the specific conditions of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, and, on the other hand, the further cohesion of the revolutionary Social-Democrats. On the one hand, those former fellow-travellers of Social-Democracy became fully defined who, leaving the party, transferred their activity entirely to various legal organisations (cooperatives, trade unions, educational societies, commissions attached to the Duma group) and there not only failed to carry out party policy, but, on the contrary, fought against the party, striving to detach these organisations from it and counterpose them to it. By making legality a fetish and the narrow forms of activity imposed by the temporary depression and fragmentation of the working-class movement into a principle, these elements – avowed liquidators of the party – have, with full clarity for all, taken their stand on the ground of theoretical and tactical revisionism. The closest connection between organisational liquidationism – the struggle against party institutions – and the principled struggle against Marxist theory and the foundations of the programme of the R.S.D.L.P. has now been demonstrated and proved with complete clarity by the entire history of the imposition of an opportunist line upon our Duma group by its intellectual advisers, by the entire struggle between the liquidators and the party supporters inside the legal workers’ organisations and in the workers’ groups of four congresses: the people’s universities, the cooperative congress, the women’s congress, and the congress of factory doctors.

On the other hand, the left wing of the party, which had the task of leading the party in this period of the decisive triumph of counter-revolution, theoretically recognised and in practice carried out the tactic of expediently combining illegal and legal party work. This includes all party work with the Duma group and all party work in legal and semi-legal proletarian organisations. It is precisely these forms of work that are brought to the fore by the distinctive conditions of the contemporary historical moment, as forms supplementing the basic forms of party work, as forms of the illegal party’s influence upon more or less broad masses. It is precisely in these forms of activity that the party comes into practical, actual confrontation with liquidationism and deals it telling blows. On this same ground, party Social-Democrats of various factions have drawn and are drawing practically closer together.[3] And it is here, finally, on the same questions of tactics and organisation of the party in the conditions of the Third Duma period, that the Bolshevik faction openly dissociates itself from the pseudo-revolutionary, unstable, non-Marxist elements that have come out against the new forms of party activity under the flag of so-called “otzovism”.

At the present time, in outlining the basic tasks of the Bolsheviks, the enlarged editorial board of Proletary states:

1) that in the further struggle for the party and for party spirit, the task of the Bolshevik faction, which must remain the foremost fighter for party spirit and the revolutionary Social-Democratic line in the party, is to give all-round, active support to the Central Committee and the Central Organ of the party. Only the all-party central institutions can, in the present period of regrouping of party forces, appear as the authoritative and strong representative of the party line around which all genuinely party and genuinely Social-Democratic elements would rally;

2) that in the Menshevik camp of the party, with the official organ of the faction, Golos Sotsial-Demokrata, completely captured by the Menshevik liquidators, the minority of the faction, having experienced the path of liquidationism to the end, is already raising a voice of protest against this path and is again seeking party ground for its activity (the letter of the “Vyborg” Mensheviks in St. Petersburg, the split of the Mensheviks in Moscow, the split in the editorial board of Golos Sotsial-Demokrata, the corresponding division in the Bund, etc.);

3) that under such circumstances, the task of the Bolsheviks, who will remain a united vanguard of the party, is not only the continuation of the struggle against liquidationism and all forms of revisionism, but also drawing closer to the Marxist and party elements of other factions, as dictated by the community of goals in the struggle for the preservation and strengthening of the R.S.D.L. Party.