Resolution on Attitude to the Provisional Government
Резолюция об отношении к Временному правительству
Date: 1917
Source: PSS vol 31
Translated by: AI (Claude)

The All-Russian Conference of the RSDLP recognizes:

1) The Provisional Government by its character is an organ of the domination of landowners and the bourgeoisie;

2) it and the classes it represents are inseparably connected economically and politically with Russian and Anglo-French imperialism;

3) even the program announced by it, it implements only incompletely and only under the pressure of the revolutionary proletariat and partly the petty bourgeoisie;

4) the organizing forces of bourgeois and landlord counterrevolution, hiding behind the banner of the Provisional Government, with the obvious assistance from the latter, have already begun an attack against revolutionary democracy: thus, the Provisional Government delays the appointment of elections to the Constituent Assembly, prevents the universal arming of the people, counteracts the transfer of all land into the hands of the people, imposing on them the landlord's way of solving the agrarian question, hinders the introduction of the 8-hour working day, connives at counterrevolutionary agitation (Guchkov and Co.) in the army, organizes the upper ranks of the army command against soldiers, etc.;

5) protecting the profits of capitalists and landowners, the Provisional Government is incapable of taking a series of revolutionary measures in the economic sphere (food supply, etc.), which are absolutely and urgently necessary in view of the immediately threatening economic catastrophe;

6) at the same time this government relies at the present moment on trust and on direct agreement with the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, which until now is the leading organization for the majority of workers and soldiers, i.e., the peasantry;

7) each step of the Provisional Government both in the sphere of foreign and domestic policy will open the eyes of the proletarians of city and countryside and semi-proletarians and will force various strata of the petty bourgeoisie to choose one or another political position.

Proceeding from the above-stated provisions, the conference decrees:

1) Prolonged work is necessary to clarify class proletarian consciousness and unite the proletarians of city and countryside against the vacillations of the petty bourgeoisie, for only such work will ensure the successful transfer of all state power into the hands of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies or other organs directly expressing the will of the majority of the people (organs of local self-government, Constituent Assembly, etc.).

2) For such activity, comprehensive work is necessary within the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, increasing their number, strengthening their force, uniting within them the proletarian, internationalist groups of our Party.

3) For the immediate consolidation and expansion of the conquests of the revolution locally, it is necessary, relying on a solid majority of the local population, to comprehensively develop, organize and strengthen spontaneous actions aimed at implementing freedoms, at removing counterrevolutionary authorities, at carrying out measures of an economic character - control over production and distribution, etc.

4) The political crisis of April 19-21, created by the note of the Provisional Government, showed that the governmental party of Cadets, organizing in fact counterrevolutionary elements both in the army and on the streets, is moving to attempts to shoot workers. Due to the unstable position resulting from dual power, repetition of such attempts is inevitable, and the party of the proletariat is obliged with all energy to tell the people that it is necessary to organize and arm the proletariat, its closest union with the revolutionary army, a break with the policy of trust in the Provisional Government to prevent the seriously threatening danger of such mass shootings of the proletariat as in the June days in Paris in 1848.

"Pravda" No. 42, May 10 (April 27) 1917
Printed from the typed copy of the protocol record