V. I.

Lenin

Notification and Resolutions of the Cracow Meeting of the Central Committee of the R.S.D.L.P. and Party Functionaries [3]

NOTIFICATION

A meeting of the C.C. R.S.D.L.P. and Party functionaries
was held in February this year. The Central Committee succeeded in securing
the attendance of members of the illegal Party organisations of
St. Petersburg (five persons), the Moscow Region (two), the South (two),
the Urals and the Caucasus. Elections from the local organisations could
not be held, and the meeting was therefore not constituted a
conference. Some of the members of the Central Committee were unable to
attend because of police measures.

Nearly all the participants in the meeting had been playing a prominent
role in various legal workers’ societies and in the use of so-called
“legal opportunities”. Thus the composition of the meeting ensured an
accurate picture of the whole of Party work in all the principal areas of
Russia.

The meeting held eleven sittings, and drafted resolutions on the
following items of the agenda:
(1) The revolutionary upswing, the strikes and the tasks of the Party.
(2) Building the illegal Party organisation.
(3) The Duma Social-Democratic group.
(4) The 2arty press.
(5) The insurance campaign.
(6) The attitude to liquidationism. The issue of unity.
(7) The non-Russian Social-Democratic organisations.

The resolutions were adopted unanimously, the only exception being the
abstention of one comrade on two clauses of the “insurance” resolution,
and of another on particulars of the resolution on the non-Russians.

Endorsed by the Central Committee, the resolutions of the meeting
provide a summary of Party experience and a guiding line on all the major
questions of Social-Democratic work in present-day Russia.

*     * *
Taking systematic stock of the experience of 1912 is a most important
task of the Social-Democrats, for that year saw a great, a historic change
in Russia’s working-class movement. The point is not merely that decline
and disintegration are giving way to a revival. The working class has gone
over to a massive offensive against the capitalists and the tsarist
monarchy. The wave of economic and political strikes has surged so high
that in this respect Russia is once more ahead of all the
countries of the world, including the most developed of them.

This fact will not, of course, make any class-conscious worker forget
how very far ahead of us are the proletarians of the free countries in
regard to organisation and class education of the masses. But this fact has
proved that Russia has entered a period of the growth of a new revolution .

The working class is faced with the great task of bringing about the
revolutionary awakening of all the democratic masses and of educating them
in the struggle, of leading them to the powerful onslaught which must bring
Russia freedom and a republic by destroying the Romanov monarchy. The
fundamental task of the moment is to give the utmost support to the open
revolutionary struggle of the masses, to organise, extend, deepen and
intensify it. Anyone who has failed to realise this task, who does not work
in an illegal organisation, group or nucleus promoting the cause of the
revolution, is not a Social-Democrat.

*     * *
The revolutionary upswing of the proletariat in 1912 was the main cause
of the universally recognised change in the mood of the democrats. Both in
the elections to the Fourth Duma and in the matter of founding a legal
working-class press that advocates at least the basic elements of Marxist
theory, the Social-Democrats achieved important victories. The tsarist government was unable to prevent these achievements
solely because the open revolutionary struggle of the masses had altered
the entire social and political situation. While continuing its steadfast,
persevering and systematic work of using absolutely all “legal
opportunities”—ranging from the platform of the Black-Hundred Duma to a
simple temperance society—the R.S.D.L.P. does not for one moment forget
that only he is worthy of the lofty name of Party member who really carries
on his entire work among the masses in the spirit of the Party decisions
that were thought out and adopted from the standpoint of the growing
revolution and not of June Third “legality”. Our task is not to succumb
to the disorder and disintegration left over from the period of 1908–11,
but to fight against them. Our job is not to swim with the stream of
chaotic and unprincipled legalism, but to use every legal possibility for
gradually grouping all live elements around the illegal Party. Our slogan
is: no peace with those who misuse legalism to sow scepticism and
indifference to the revolutionary struggle of the masses or even to hamper
it outright.

We cannot guarantee the realisation of our demands by reducing them, by
curtailing our programme, or by adopting the tactics of attracting
unenlightened people with the deceptive promise of easy constitutional
reforms under Russian tsarism. We can guarantee it only by educating the
masses in the spirit of consistent democracy and awareness of the falsity
of constitutional illusions. The guarantee lies in the revolutionary
organisation of the foremost class, the proletariat, and in the great
revolutionary enthusiasm of the masses.

The period of rampant counter-revolution has left us a heritage of
ideological disorder and disruption, organisational disintegration in many
centres of the working-class movement, primitive methods and forced
isolation from the Party on the part of some, and a scornful, or even
malicious, attitude to the “underground” that preserves the behests of
the revolution and elaborates revolutionary tactics, on the part of
others. The liquidators’ break-away from time Social-Democratic Party,
their virtual isolation, and in some cases departure from Social-Democratic principles and disintegration of the non-Russian Social-Democratic
organisations have all accentuated the demand for unity to the
utmost degree.

Unity of the Social-Democratic proletariat is a necessary condition for
its victories.

Unity of the Social-Democratic proletariat is impossible without the
unity of its Party, the R.S.D.L.P.

And here we see at once that we cannot decide the question of unity
without deciding—not merely in words but by deeds as well—the question
of the need for an illegal Party. Anyone who speaks of unity and yet
advocates an “open workers’ party” deceives himself and the
workers. Anyone who speaks of unity, pretending that this question can be
decided, cleared up, or at least raised, within the bounds of legality,
deceives himself and the workers.

What will solve the problem of unity is certainly not meaningless
phrases about “unity” in the legal press, nor agreements with various
“straggling” little groups of intellectuals, nor yet the diplomacy of
negotiations abroad, but solely unity in the localities, the
actual fusion of all worker members of the
R.S.D.L.P. into an integral illegal organisation.

The workers have already started of their own accord, from below, on
the solution of the problem of unity, the only solution that is serious and
realistic. This meeting calls on all Social-Democrats to take the same
path.

Worker Social-Democrats everywhere are re-establishing integral illegal
organisations of the R.S.D.L.P. in the form of factory nuclei and
committees, district groups, town centres, Social-Democratic groups in
all kinds of legal institutions, etc. Let all who do not wish to
doom themselves to the role of powerless individuals join these
organisations, where the recognition of the illegal Party and support for
the revolutionary struggle of the masses take place under the control of
the workers themselves.

*     * *
The period of disintegration is passing. The time has come to gather
our forces. Let us, then, rally in the illegal organisations of the
R.S.D.L.P. They do not close the door to any Social-Democrat who wishes to work in them, who wishes to help the
organisation of the proletariat, its struggle against capital, and the
revolutionary onslaught against the tsarist monarchy that it has begun.

A nation-wide political crisis is slowly but steadily maturing in
Russia. The June Third system was the last attempt to rescue the tsar’s
Black-Hundred monarchy, to renovate it by an alliance with the upper ranks
of the bourgeoisie, and that attempt fell through. The new democratic
forces are growing and gathering strength daily and hourly among Russia’s
peasantry and town bourgeoisie. The number of proletarians in town and
country is growing faster than ever, they are becoming more organised, more
united, and more confident of their invincibility, and their confidence is
strengthened by the experience of mass strikes.

The R.S.D.L.P., in organising the foremost contingents of this
proletariat into an integral whole, must lead it into revolutionary battle
in the name of our old revolutionary demands.

Central Committee of the R.S.D.L.P.

February 1913

RESOLUTIONS

The Revolutionary Upswing, the Strikes, and the Tasks of the Party

1. The outstanding fact in the history of the working-class movement
and the Russian revolution in 1912 was the remarkable development of both
the economic and the political strike movement of the proletariat. The
number of political strikers reached one million.

2. The character of the strike movement of 1912 deserves special
attention. The workers in a number of cases put forward economic and
political demands simultaneously; the period of economic strikes was
succeeded by a period of, political strikes and vice versa. The struggle
against the capitalists for the gains of 1905 taken away by the counter
revolution, and the growing cost of living, aroused more and more sections
of the workers, confronting them with political issues in the sharpest
form. All these forms of combination, and intertwining of the economic and
political struggle are a condition for and an earnest of the might of the
movement, giving rise to revolutionary mass strikes.

3. The beginning of outbursts of discontent and of revolts in the Navy
and the Army, which marked the year 1912, was undoubtedly linked with the
revolutionary mass strikes of the workers, and indicated the growing
ferment and indignation among large sections of the democrats, in
particular among the peasantry, who supply the bulk of the troops.

4. All these facts, combined with the general swing to the left in the
country, which had its effect on the elections to the Fourth Duma despite
the most shameless rigging of them by the Black-Hundred tsarist government, showed beyond all doubt
that Russia had once more entered a period of open revolutionary struggle
by the masses. The new revolution, the beginning of which we are
experiencing, is an inevitable result of the bankruptcy of the June Third
policy of tsarism. This policy was unable to satisfy even the most
compliant big bourgeoisie. The mass of the people has become still more
enslaved, particularly in the case of the oppressed nationalities, and the
peasantry has again been reduced to a state where millions upon millions
are starving.

5. Under these circumstances, revolutionary mass strikes are of
exceptional importance also because they constitute one of the most
effective means of overcoming the apathy, despair and disunity of the
agricultural proletariat and the peasantry, rousing them to independent
political activity and drawing them into the most concerted, simultaneous
and extensive revolutionary actions.

6. The Party organisations, in extending and intensifying their
agitation for the immediate demands of the R.S.D.L.P.—a democratic
republic, an eight-hour working day, and confiscation of all the landed
estates for the benefit of the peasantry—must make it one of the prime
objects of their activity to give all-round support to revolutionary mass
strikes, and to develop and organise all forms of revolutionary action by
the masses. In particular, an essential current task is to organise
revolutionary street demonstrations both in combination with political
strikes and as independent actions.

7. The fact that some capitalists resort to lock-outs (mass dismissals)
against the strikers confronts the working class with new tasks. It is
necessary to take careful account of the economic conditions of strikes in
every area, every industry and every particular case, find new forms of
struggle (such as stay-in strikes) to counteract the lock-outs, and replace
political strikes by revolutionary meetings and revolutionary street
demonstrations.

8. Some legal press organs are carrying on general agitation against
revolutionary mass strikes, irrespective of their appraisal of this or that
strike. Besides the liberal press, such agitation is being carried on, for
example, by the group of liquidators in the newspaper Luch , against the will
of a substantial section of those workers who sup port the newspaper in one
form or another. In view of this, the task of all pro-Party worker
Social-Democrats is:
(1) to wage a determined struggle against that group; (2) systematically and perseveringly to explain the harm of the
above-mentioned agitation to all workers, irrespective of their leanings,
and (3) to rally all proletarian forces for the furtherance of revolutionary
agitation and revolutionary action by the masses.

Building the Illegal Organisation

1. In summing up the working-class movement and the Party’s work in
1912, this meeting finds that—the new wave of revolutionary actions by
the masses that has begun has fully borne out the previous decisions of the
R.S.D.L.P. (particularly those of the January 1912 Conference) as regards
building the Party. The course of the strike movement in 1912, the
Social-Democrats’ campaign in the elections to the Fourth Duma, the course
of the insurance campaign, etc., have shown beyond doubt that the only
correct type of organisational structure in the present period is an
illegal party as,the sum total of Party nuclei surrounded by a network of
legal and semi-legal workers’ associations.

2. It is absolutely obligatory to adapt the organisational forms of
illegal building to local conditions. A variety of forms of cover for
illegal nuclei and the greatest possible flexibility in adapting forms of
work to local and general living conditions guarantee the vitality of the
illegal organisation.

3. The chief immediate task in the field of organisational work at the
present time is to establish in all factories purely Party illegal
committees consisting of the most active elements among the workers. The
tremendous up swing of the working-class movement creates conditions in
which factory Party committees can be restored and the existing ones
strengthened in the vast majority of localities.

4. The meeting points out that it has now become essential in every
centre to form a single leading organisation out of the disconnected local
groups.

In St. Petersburg, for example, a leading City Committee, formed by
combining the principle of election by district nuclei and the principle of
co-option, has emerged as a type of city-wide organisation.

This type of organisation makes it possible to establish a very close
and direct connection between the leading body and the primary nuclei, and
at the same time to create a small, mobile, particularly well disguised
executive body, authorised to act at any moment on behalf of the entire
organisation. The meeting recommends this type for other centres of the
working-class movement as well, with such modifications as may be prompted
by local and general living conditions.

5. With a view to establishing close links between local organisations
and the Central Committee, as well as to guiding and unifying Party work,
this meeting deems it imperative to organise regional centres in the
principal areas of the working-class movement.

6. A system of authorised nominees is proposed as a most important
practical factor in establishing a permanent living link between the
Central Committee and local Social-Democratic groups, as well as in
devising flexible forms of directing local work in the major centres of the
working-class movement. Nominees should be recruited among workers in
charge of local work. Only advanced workers can by themselves strengthen
and consolidate the central apparatus of the Party locally, and throughout
Russia.

7. This meeting expresses the wish that the Central Committee should
confer as frequently as possible with local Party functionaries active in
various fields of Social-Democratic work.

8. This meeting stresses the repeated Party decisions to the effect
that the workers’ party cannot exist unless there are regular membership
dues and contributions by workers. In the absence of such contributions,
particularly in present conditions, the existence of a central (local or all-Russia) Party body, however modest, will be absolutely impossible.

9. ( Not to be published.)

The Social-Democratic Group in the Duma

1. This meeting notes that despite unheard-of persecution and the
rigging of the elections by the government, and despite the Black-Hundred
and liberal bloc against the Social-Democrats that in many places assumed a
very definite character, the R.S.D.L.P. won tremendous victories in the
elections to the Fourth Duma. The Social-Democrats polled an increased
number of votes almost every where in the second urban curia, which they
are wresting more and more from the liberals. In the worker curia, which is
the most important for our Party, the R.S.D.L.P. retained its undivided
supremacy, the working class emphasising with particular unanimity, by
electing none but Bolshevik deputies in the curia, its unshakable loyalty
to the old R.S.D.L.P. and its revolutionary behests.

2. This meeting hails the vigorous activity of the Social-Democratic
deputies to the Fourth Duma, which found expression in a number of speeches
in the Duma, the sub mission of interpellations and the reading of a
declaration which in general correctly expressed the fundamental principles
of Social-Democracy.

3. This meeting recognises that our Party’s established tradition, by
which the Duma Social-Democratic group is a body subordinate to the Party
as a whole, in the shape of its central bodies, is the only correct one,
and finds that in the interests of the political education of the working
class and the proper organisation of the Party’s work in the Duma, careful
attention should be paid to every step of the Social-Democratic group, and
in this way Party control exercised over the group.

4. This meeting cannot but regard the resolution concerning Jagiello as
a direct violation of Party duty by the Social-Democratic group. That
resolution backs the disruptive move of the Bund, which entered into an
agreement with a non-Social-Democratic party (the P.S.P.) against the Polish Social-Democrats and elected Jagiello, a non Social-Democrat, in
opposition to all the Social-Democratic electors, who were in the majority
among the working-class electors. The group thereby aggravated the split
among the workers in Poland and hampered the cause of unity in the Party as
a whole.

5. Comrade Chkhenkeli’s defence, on behalf of the group, of cultural
national autonomy under the guise of “establishing the necessary
institutions for the free development of each nationality” is a direct
violation of the Party

Programme. [4] The Second Congress of the Party, which adopted the

Programme, [5] rejected by a special vote what was in effect an
identical formulation. Concessions to nationalist sentiment, even in this
disguised form, are impermissible for a proletarian party.

6. The Social-Democratic group’s vote in favour of the Progressist (in
reality Octobrist) formula of procedure with regard to the declaration of
the Minister, and the failure to introduce an independent Social-Democratic
formula are a blunder which should be noted by the Party in view of the
malicious comments of the liberal press. [6]

7, 8 and 9. (Not to be published.) [7]

Illegal Literature

Having discussed the necessity for all-round development of illegal
publishing and worked out a number of concrete instructions on the matter,
this meeting insistently calls upon all local organisations of the Party,
all workers’ nuclei and individual workers to show greater independence and
initiative in the matter of transport and contacts with the Bureau of the
Central
Committee [8] for the distribution of illegal literature.

The Insurance Campaign

Noting that the working class and its Party, despite all persecution,
have displayed great energy in upholding proletarian interests in
connection with the introduction of the insurance law, this meeting
considers:

1. It is necessary to wage the most determined and concerted struggle
against attempts by the government and the capitalists to make the workers
elect their delegates to the sick benefit funds blindly, without allowing
workers’ meetings.

2. Despite the prohibition, workers should everywhere try to hold
spontaneous meetings for the preliminary nomination of the candidate
delegates they want.

3. Workers should organise revolutionary meetings to protest against
the violence and outrages accompanying the introduction of the insurance
laws.

4. It is at all events necessary to draw up beforehand a workers’ list
of candidate delegates from among the more influential worker
Social-Democrats and by concerted effort to champion the list also where no
meetings can be held.

5. This meeting considers it inadvisable and harmful to boycott the
election of delegates. At present the capitalists are devoting their main
efforts to preventing the workers from gaining ascendancy in certain
proletarian factory nuclei, such as the workers’ sick benefit funds should
become. A boycott, which at the present time would disunite the workers,
would only assist the above-mentioned efforts of the capitalists.

6. The struggle for the proper election of delegates to sick benefit
funds must not cease for one moment. While using every opportunity in every
way and with the utmost energy, not for a moment allowing the employers to
consider the normal course of production assured, and extending and
developing the workers’ struggle, we must not refrain from securing that
the Social-Democratic list is adopted despite all obstacles. Elections do
not preclude further development of the struggle. On the contrary, by
securing the election of staunch worker Social-Democrats as delegates, we
shall facilitate the further struggle for proper elections, in which the
delegates will give the utmost assistance to the workers.

7. Wherever elections take place without meetings, it is necessary to
carry on agitation for the re-election of delegates through genuinely free
elections, with the workers holding meetings by every means available.

8. The Social-Democratic Duma group must immediately make a new
interpellation on the banning of workers’ election meetings.

9. All agitation on the introduction of insurance must be closely
combined with a description of the entire state of affairs in tsarist
Russia, explaining our socialist principles and revolutionary demands.

The Attitude to Liquidationism, and Unity

1. The Party’s four years of struggle against liquidationism have
proved the absolute correctness of the definition given by the December
1908 Party Conference of the R.S.D.L.P., which said:

“ Attempts by a certain section of intellectuals in the Party to
abolish the existing organisation of the R.S.D.L.P. and replace it by an
amorphous association within the framework of legality at all costs, even
at the price of a down right repudiation of the programme, tactics and
traditions of the Party.”

Consequently, the liquidators are condemned not for stressing the
necessity of legal work, but for renouncing and destroying the illegal
Party.

The founding of the first Marxist workers’ daily newspaper in Russia
and the election of none but Bolshevik deputies in the worker curia proved
beyond all doubt that the Party was able to cope with legal activity,
having pushed aside the liquidators.

2. By withdrawing from the illegal Party and grouping themselves
separately from the local organisations, the liquidators brought about a
split, which they confirmed by setting up so-called initiating groups in a
number of localities, above all in St. Petersburg. The January 1912
Conference of the R.S.D.L.P., which decided that the liquidationist group
of contributors to Nasha Zarya and Dyelo Zhizni —a group
forming the core of the initiating groups—had “definitely placed itself
outside the

Party”, [1] thereby merely registered the split effected by the liquidators.

3. The August 1912 conference, which named itself a “conference of
organisations of the R.S.D.L.P.”, proved in fact to be a liquidationist
conference, since its principal and leading section was the literary group
of liquidators which had broken away from the Party and was cut off from
the mass of the Russian workers.

4. The devotion of the overwhelming majority of the foremost workers to
the illegal Party compelled the August conference to make seeming
concessions to Party principle and profess recognition of the illegal
Party. In reality, however, all the resolutions of that conference are
permeated through and through with liquidationism, and immediately after
the conference Nasha Zarya and Luch , which announced its
adherence to the August decisions, intensified their liquidationist
propaganda— ( a) for an open party; ( b) against the underground; ( c) against the Party Programme (defence of cultural national autonomy,
revision of the agrarian laws enacted by the Third Duma, shelving the
slogan of a republic, and so on); ( d) against revolutionary mass strikes; ( e) for reformist, exclusively legalist tactics.

Hence one of the Party’s tasks is still to wage a determined struggle
against the liquidationist group of Nasha Zarya and Luch ,
and to make clear to the mass of the workers the great harm of the
liquidators’ propaganda.

5. The “unity” campaign launched by the liquidators in the legal
press evades and obscures the main issue, that of joining the illegal Party
and working in it; thus it misleads the workers, for this issue cannot even
be raised in the legal press. In reality the liquidators still behave as
splitters, which became only too obvious during the elections in
St. Petersburg, for when the electors were divided into two equal groups,
it was the liquidators who rejected the proposal for drawing lots, the only
means of doing away with the disunity of the workers in the face of the
bourgeois parties.

6. Provided the illegal organisation of the R.S.D.L.P. is recognised
and joined, the unity of worker Social-Democrats of all trends and shades
is an absolute necessity dictated by all the interests of the working-class
movement.

Unification on these very principles has already been effected in the
Narva district organisation of St. Petersburg and in a number of provincial
organisations.

7. This meeting most emphatically supports such unification and
recommends that the same thing should immediately be begun everywhere from
below, in factory committees, district groups, etc., the worker comrades
verifying whether the recognition of the illegal organisation and readiness
to hack the revolutionary struggle of the masses and revolutionary tactics
are really put into effect. Only to the extent that this unity from below
is actually established will the final unification of the Party and
complete consolidation of unity on an all-Russia scale be accomplished.

Non-Russian Social-Democratic Organisations

1. The experience of 1912 fully confirmed the correctness of the
decision which the January (1912) Conference of the R.S.D.L.P. adopted on
this

question. [2]

The Bund’s support of the nomination of Jagiello, a non-Social-Democrat,
against the Polish Social-Democrats, and the violation of the Party
Programme in favour of nationalism by the August (1912) conference of the
liquidators, the Bund and the Lettish Social-Democrats revealed with
particular clarity the complete bankruptcy of the federalist principles of
organising the Social-Democratic Party and the great harm which the
isolation of the non-Russian Social-Democratic organisations does to the
proletarian cause.

2. This meeting therefore calls earnestly on the workers of all the
nationalities of Russia to rebuff the militant nationalism of the
reactionaries with the utmost determination, to combat all manifestations
of a nationalist spirit among the working masses. It calls on the worker
Social-Democrats locally to display the closest solidarity, and to merge
into integral organisations of the R.S.D.L.P. working in all the languages
spoken by the local proletariat and achieving real unity from below, as has
long been done in the Caucasus.

3. This meeting expresses deep regret at the split in the ranks of the
Polish Social-Democrats, which greatly weakens the struggle of the worker
Social-Democrats of Poland. The meeting is compelled to state that the
Executive of the Polish Social-Democrats, which today does not represent
the majority of the Social-Democratic organisations of the Polish
proletariat, resorts to impermissible methods in combating that majority
(for example, groundlessly suspecting the entire Warsaw organisation of
provocation). The meeting calls on all the Party organisations which come
in contact with the Polish worker Social-Democrats to help them in
establishing genuine unity among the Polish Social-Democrats.

4. This meeting points out in particular the extreme opportunism and
liquidationism of the decisions adopted by the latest (ninth) conference of
the Bund, which with drew the slogan of a republic, pushed illegal work
into the background and was oblivious of the revolutionary tasks of the
proletariat. Equally reprehensible is the Bund’s resistance to the
unification of all worker Social-Democrats in the localities (Warsaw, Lodz,
Vilna and elsewhere), a unification which the R.S.D.L.P. has repeatedly
urged at its congresses and conferences since 1906.

5. This meeting greets the revolutionary worker Social-Democrats of the
Lettish organisation, who perseveringly carry on anti-liquidationist
propaganda, and expresses regret that the Central Committee of the Lettish
Social-Democrats is inclined to support the anti-Party moves of the
liquidators.

6. This meeting expresses firm confidence that the revolutionary
upswing which has begun, and the mass economic and political strikes,
street demonstrations and other forms of open revolutionary struggle by the
masses will help in completely unifying and merging the worker
Social-Democrats in the localities without any distinction between the
nationalities, thereby strengthening the onslaught against tsarism, which
oppresses all the peoples of Russia, and against the bourgeoisie of all the
nations of Russia, which is in the process of uniting.

---
Notes:
[1]
See present edition, Vol. 17, p. 481.— Ed .

[2]
See present edition, Vol. 17, pp. 464–65.— Ed .

[3]
The Meeting of the C.C. of the R.S.D.L.P. and Party functionaries , called the “February” Meeting for conspiratorial
reasons, was held in Cracow from December 26, 1912 to January 1,1913
(January 8–14, 1913). Participants in it included Lenin, N. K. Krupskaya
and the Bolshevik deputies to the Fourth Duma:

A. Y. Badayev, G. I. Petrovsky and N. R. Shagov. It was also attended by
delegates from the illegal Party organisations of St. Petersburg, the
Moscow Region, the South, the Urals and the Caucasus.

The preparations for the Meeting were made by Lenin himself, who also
presided over it. He spoke on a number of items and wrote the
“Notification and Resolutions of the Meeting”.

The Meeting adopted decisions on major issues of the working-class
movement, It discussed reports by delegates on the state of local Party
organisations, and the work of the editorial boards of Pravda and
Prosveshcheniye .

The resolutions of the Meeting were endorsed by the Central Committee
and were hectographed. In the first half of February they were published
together with the Notification as a separate pamphlet in Paris. In
April 1913 the Central Committee Bureau Abroad circulated a letter to the
Party organisations, delegates of the C.C. and individual Party
functionaries, calling on them to discuss the decisions of the “February” Meeting in their committees, Party nuclei
and groups. In a letter to Maxim Gorky, Lenin pointed out that the Meeting
“was a great success and will play a definite role”.

[4]
This refers to the statement which A. I. Chkhenkeli, a Menshevik member
of the Duma, made on the government declaration at the Duma sitting on
December 10 (23), 1912.

[5]
The formulation rejected by the Second Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. was
the proposal made by Goldblatt, a Bundist, for incorporating in Clause
Eight of the Party Programme—on “the right of all the nations included
in the state to self-determination”—the following addition: “and to the
establishment of institutions guaranteeing complete freedom of their
cultural development”.

[6]
At the fourteenth sitting of the Duma on December 15 (28), 1912,
following the debate on the Government Declaration, the Cadets,
Progressists, Trudoviks and nationalists proposed draft formulas of
procedure to the next business. The Progressist formula was carried by
majority vote. It expressed confidence that the government would implement
the Manifesto of October 17, 1905. Members of the Social-Democratic group
voted for this formula. After wards they admitted their vote to have been
ill-advised.

[7]
The unpublished clauses (7, 8 and 9) of the resolution on the work of
the Social-Democratic Duma group called on the Bolshevik deputies to
achieve equality in the group with the seven Mensheviks, strike their names
off the list of contributors to the liquidationist Luch and rally
together for Party work. The text of these clauses has not been preserved.

[8]
The Bureau of the Central Committee —the Russian Bureau of
the C.C. of the R.S.D.L.P., the Bolshevik Party’s practical centre for
leading revolutionary struggle in Russia. It was established by the Sixth
(Prague) All-Russia Conference of the R.S.D.L.P. in January 1912. Among its
members were members of the Central Committee G. K. Orjonikidze,
Y. M. Sverdlov, S. S. Spandaryan and J. V. Stalin, and alternate members of
the C.C. M. I. Kalinin and Y. D. Stasova. Later on, owing to frequent
arrests of Party functionaries in Russia, the composition of the Russian
Bureau underwent changes more than once, new members being co-opted to
replace those who had dropped out.

The Russian Bureau was led by the Central Committee of the Party headed
by Lenin. Its tasks were to carry out the decisions of the Prague
Conference of the R.S.D.L.P., rally the local Party organisations to the
Central Committee ideologically and organisationally, strengthen Party
unity, and combat opportunist trends. The Bureau did a great deal in the
way of publishing and distributing Bolshevik leaflets, appeals and other
illegal literature. It was an important connecting link between the Central
Committee and local Party organisations. It ceased to function after the February
bourgeois-democratic revolution of 1917.