V. I.

Lenin

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

JANUARY 5–17 (18–30), 1912

4

Draft Resolution on Liquidationism and the Group of Liquidators

LIQUIDATIONISM AND THE GROUP OF LIQUIDATORS

Whereas:

(1) The Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party for nearly four years
has been waging a determined fight against the liquidationist trend, which
was characterised at the conference of the Party in December 1908 as “ an attempt on the part of a group of Party intellectuals to liquidate
the existing organisation of the R.S.D.L.P. and to replace it at all costs,
even at the price of downright renunciation of the programme, tactics, and
traditions of the Party, by a loose association functioning legally”; (2) The Plenary Meeting of the Central Committee held in January 1910,
continuing the fight against this trend, unanimously declared it to be “a
manifestation of bourgeois influence upon the proletariat” and demanded,
as a condition for real Party unity and for the fusion of the former
Bolshevik and Menshevik groups, a complete rupture with liquidationism and
the utter rout of this bourgeois deviation from socialism; (3) In spite of all Party decisions, and in spite of the obligation
assumed by the representatives of Menshevism at the Plenary Meeting held in
January 1910, a section of the Mensheviks, grouped around the magazines
Nasha Zarya and Dyelo Zhizni , refused to help restore the
Central Committee (the refusal of Mikhail, Yuri, and Roman, in the spring
of 1910, not only to join the Central Committee but even to attend a single
meeting to co-opt new members); (4) It was precisely after the Plenary Meeting of, 1910 that the
above-mentioned publications definitely turned to liquidationism all along
the line, not only “belittling [contrary to the decision of the Plenary
Meeting] the importance of the illegal Party”, but openly renouncing it,
declaring that the Party was already liquidated, that the idea of reviving
the illegal Party was “a reactionary utopia”, using the columns of
censored magazines to heap ridicule and abuse on it, calling upon the
workers to regard the nuclei of the Party and its hierarchy as “dead”,
etc.;

(5) The few local groups of liquidators, consisting mainly of
representatives of the intelligentsia, continuing their work of destroying
the Party, not only refused to listen to the call, repeated in 1911, to
help revive the illegal Party and convene a Party conference, but, banded
together in entirely independent small groups, they openly began to agitate
among the workers against the illegal Party and launched an open fight
against reviving it—even in those places where the pro-Party Mensheviks
predominated (for example, in Ekaterinoslav, Baku, Kiev, etc.); The Conference declares that by its conduct the above-mentioned group
has definitely placed itself outside the Party.

The Conference calls upon all Party members, irrespective of tendencies
and shades of opinion, to combat liquidationism, explain its great
harmfulness to the cause of the emancipation of the working class, and bend
all their efforts to revive and strengthen the illegal Russian
Social-Democratic Labour Party.

| Written early in January 1912 | |
| --- | --- |
| Published according to the manuscript | |

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