V. I. Lenin

Resolution of the Cracow Meeting of the R.S.D.L.P. Central Committee with Party Functionaries {1}

ON THE REORGANISATION AND WORK OF THE PRAVDA EDITORIAL BOARD

1. The Editorial Board lacks consistency of Party principle. The
Editorial Board is strongly advised to see to the stricter observance and
implementation of all Party decisions. Its proceedings must be conducted,
on legal lines.

The C.C. is taking steps to reorganise the Editorial Board.

2. The Editorial Board has failed to provide the necessary response to
Party life among Social-Democratic workers in St. Petersburg. Reports or
mention of Party resolutions must he unconditionally legal in form.

3. The Editorial Board must give more attention to explaining the error
and harm of liquidationism in general and of the sermons of Luch
in particular.

4. The Editorial Board must give more attention to campaigning for
subscriptions and collections among the workers.

5. The Bolshevik section of the deputies must take part in the paper’s
broad editorial collegium and organise systematic and persistent
participation in the literary and economic side of the business.

6. The Editorial Board must be especially circumspect in its attitude
to its Vperyod contributors to avoid hampering the rapprochement
that has begun and to prevent the adoption of an erroneous principled line.

7. Every effort must be made to reduce publishing costs and to set up a
small governing collegium (running the whole business) on which there must
be at least one representative of the
Six. {2}

There is need for a similar governing collegium (economic commission)
on which one of the Six must be seated, to handle the economic side of the
business.

8. Articles which the C.C. considers obligatory for insertion must be
carried immediately (under a code name). {3}

9. While strictly maintaining the newspaper’s legal character, it is
necessary to recruit for active participation both in literary work on the
newspaper and in its distribution workers’ societies, leagues, committees,
groups and individuals in St. Petersburg and in the provinces.

10. Support should be given to the initiative of the group of
St. Petersburg Social-Democrats in the publication of a general trade union
organ of anti-liquidationist orientation, carefully verifying what is being
done on the spot.

11. Measures must be taken to bring the literary and the economic side
of the newspaper and the magazine {4} closer together.

12. The starting of a daily workers’ newspaper in Moscow as a branch of
the St. Petersburg paper must be vigorously pursued. With this end in view,
organisational connections should be established between the Moscow group
and the three deputies of the Moscow Region.

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Notes:
{1}
The meeting was held in Cracow from December 26, 1912, to January 1,
1913 (January 8 to 14, 1913). It was attended by V. I. Lenin,
N. K. Krupskaya, J. V. Stalin and the Bolshevik deputies to the Fourth
Duma, A. Y. Badayev, G. I. Petrovsky, N. R. Shagov, among others. The
meeting was also attended by representatives of illegal Party organisations
in St. Petersburg, Moscow Region, the South, the Urals and the Caucasus. It
was chaired by Lenin, who gave the reports on “The Revolutionary Upswing,
the Strikes and the Tasks of the Party” and “On the Attitude to
Liquidationism and on Unity” (the text of the reports has not been
preserved), and drafted and edited all the resolutions. He also wrote the
R.S.D.L.P. Central Committee’s “Notification” about the meeting (see present edition, Vol. 18, pp. 449–55).

The meeting adopted, decisions on the most important aspects of the
labour movement: the Party’s tasks in connection with the new revolutionary
upsurge and the growth of the strike movement, the build-up of the illegal
organisation, the work of the Social-Democratic group in the Duma, the
insurance campaign, the Party press, the national Social-Democratic
organisations, the struggle against liquidationism, and the unity of the
proletarian party (see present edition, Vol. 15, pp. 456–66).

The decisions were very important in consolidating the Party and its unity,
in extending and strengthening the Party’s ties with the broad masses of
working people and in working out new forms of Party work in the conditions
of a mounting working-class movement. The resolutions of the Cracow meeting
were approved by the R.S.D.L.P. Central Committee.

p. 272

{2}
A reference to the six Bolsheviks in the Fourth Duma (see Note 208).

p. 273

{3}
KKK was the code name used to mark articles for obligatory insertion in
Pravda . In December 1913, the R.S.D.L.P. Central Committee
reaffirmed the decision: “The resolution to the effect that articles
marked with the three agreed letters shall be inserted at once and without
changes remains in force” ( Istorichesky Arkhiv No. 4, 1959,
p. 42).

p. 273

{4}
A reference to the legal theoretical Bolshevik monthly
Prosveshcheniye (Enlightenment) published in St. Petersburg from
December 1911 to June 1914. It was set up on Lenin’s initiative in place of
the Bolshevik journal Mysl (Thought), which had been dosed down by
the tsarist government. The printings reached 5,000 copies. Lenin directed
its publication from Paris, and then from

Cracow and Poronin. On the eve of the First World War, it was closed down
by the tsarist government. In the autumn of 1917 its publication was
resumed, but only one (double) issue appeared.

p. 273