Abstract
Mainly as the result of the preparatory work done by the Iskra group, the second congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party met in July and August 1903 under the chairmanship of Plekhanov, first in Brussels (whence it fled for fear of police persecution) and then in London. It was the real foundation congress of the party: but it also saw the famous split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks which widened and deepened until it led to complete formal separation after 1912. The congress was attended by representatives of 25 recognized social-democratic organizations, each having 2 votes except the Jewish workers’ organization, the Bund, which had 3 in virtue of the special status as an autonomous section of the party accorded to it by the first congress. As some organizations sent only one delegate the congress was actually composed of 43 voting delegates disposing in all of 51 votes. In addition there were 14 delegates from various organizations with consultative, but without voting, rights. Of the full delegates more than 30 were professed adherents of Iskra, and the congress was completely dominated by the Iskra group. So long as the Iskra-ites remained united, the only concerted opposition came from the delegates of the Bund, who were interested almost exclusively in the rights of national minorities and in upholding their own autonomous status in the party, and from two delegates with “Economist” leanings, Akimov and Martynov, who represented the Union of Russian Social-Democrats Abroad.
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Notes
- 2.Trotsky came to Lenin in London in October 1902 and quickly attracted attention by his literary talent. Twice in the spring of 1903 Lenin proposed that he should be coopted on to the board of Iskra, but met a firm veto by Plekhanov (Krupskaya, Memories of Lenin [i] (Engl. transl. 1930), pp. 85–86, 92). According to Krupskaya, Lenin at the congress “least of all thought that Trotsky would waver” (ibid. p. 99).Google Scholar
- 4.N. Trotsky, Nashi Politicheskie Zadachi (Geneva, 1904). Trotsky at first used the initial N. with his pseudonym, later reverting to his own initial L.; Lenin also sometimes used the fictitious initial N.Google Scholar
- 5.It is fair to recall Trotsky’s final verdict on this controversy nearly thirty years later: “It was not for nothing that the words ‘irreconcilable’ and ‘unsparing’ occurred so frequently in Lenin’s vocabulary. Only the highest concentration on the goal of revolution, free from everything pettily personal, can justify this kind of personal ruthlessness. … His behaviour seemed to me inadmissible, terrible, shocking. Yet at the same time it was politically correct and therefore indispensable from the point of view of organization” (L. Trotsky, Moya Zhizn (Berlin, 1930), i, 187–188).Google Scholar
- 1.R. Michels, Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens (2nd ed. 1925), pp. 278–280, quotes striking instances of these sentiments from German, French and Belgian sources. He also uses the term “democratic centralism” (ibid. p. 227) in a way which suggests that it was in current use in the early 1900s in the German Social-Democratic Party.Google Scholar
- 1.This is the basis for the assertion of the former Menshevik leader Dan, that the Bolsheviks represented “the general-democratic and political tendencies of the movement”, the Mensheviks “its class and socialist tendencies”(F. Dan, Proiskhozhdenie Bol’shevizma (N.Y., 1946), p. 291).Google Scholar