After the Paris meeting, Lenin wrote to his sister Anna Ilyichna:

We have been having ‘stormy’ times lately, but they have ended with an attempt at peace with the Mensheviks – yes, yes, strange as it may seem; we have closed down the factional newspaper and are trying harder to promote unity. We shall see whether it can be done. (Letter to his Sister Anna, 1 February, 1910, LCW, vol. 37, p. 451.)

The tone of this letter shows that Lenin was sceptical from the beginning about the prospects for unity, and it is also clear from the reference to things being “stormy” that there were sharp words on the subject between Lenin and his conciliator colleagues. But in the end he had to give way, and, while sceptical, was prepared to give it one last try (“We shall see whether it can be done”). In order to convince his colleagues, it was necessary to pass through the experience. “Ilyich believed that the utmost concession should be made on organisational issues without yielding an inch on fundamental issues,” writes Krupskaya. (NK Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin, p. 206.)

Immediately after the Plenum Lenin summoned a meeting of the Bolshevik faction. This very fact shows that the two factions continued to operate exactly as before. In other words, the Plenum had solved precisely nothing. Any agreement with the Menshevik-Liquidators could only be temporary and would inevitably break down. It was as impossible to mix revolutionism and reformism as to mix oil and water. The growing divergence between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks made a nonsense of the January Plenum, leaving Trotsky in an unnatural bloc with the Mensheviks, with whom, politically, he had nothing in common. Pravda continued to appeal for unity, but the whole position had been rendered obsolete by life itself. Trotsky tried to call a Party conference for November 1910. Lenin called Trotsky’s position “unprincipled adventurism”. Having gone through the experience of attempting to unify the Party ever since 1906, Lenin must have already made up his mind that a split was, sooner or later, inevitable. The behaviour of the Menshevik-Liquidators was now an obstacle in the path of the working class. Lenin was never afraid to draw bold conclusions when the interests of the movement demanded it. But he had to carry his followers with him. It was a path they were not eager to tread.

This growth of the revolutionary movement led to a further sharpening of the contradictions within the Party. As the masses were moving left, so the Menshevik-Liquidators were veering to the right. Matters were clearly leading in the direction of a split. This showed the futility of conciliationism and the ‘January Plenum’. Lenin’s appraisal of the Plenum was confirmed by events. The Liquidators, as we have seen, naturally, broke all the agreements. The factions maintained their separate factional centres and apparatuses, while loudly proclaiming the virtues of unity. The very day after swearing their unshakable allegiance to unity, the Liquidators began to organise a public faction around the legal journals Nasha Zarya and Dyelo Zhizni. These people (Potresov, Levitsky, etc.) represented the extreme right-wing tendency in Menshevism. The other Menshevik faction around Golos Sotsial-Demokrata, Martov, Dan, and Axelrod, were only ‘shamefaced liquidators’, standing far closer to the former than to the genuine revolutionary wing of the Party. On the ‘left’, the Vperyodists (Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, Alexinsky) continued their factional activities, having virtually split off from the Bolsheviks, organising their own factional ‘schools’. Ironically, the ultra-left Vperyodists frequently found themselves in an unprincipled bloc with the Mensheviks against the Bolsheviks.

Behind the façade, the factional struggle not only continued, but was intensified, moving inexorably in the direction of a split. The Menshevik Golos continued to appear, with attacks on the underground party groups and Pro-Party Mensheviks; Martov, Dan, Axelrod, and Martynov published a kind of ‘manifesto’ calling for the establishment of a ‘legal-open party’; and so on. In other words, the agreements reached by the January Plenum were not worth the paper they were written on. By the end of 1910, Lenin was already demanding the return of the Bolshevik funds, not surprisingly without success. Lenin was not in the least surprised at this outcome. He had predicted it. He had only gone through the experience of the Plenum, which he personally regarded as ‘idiotic’ and ‘fatal’, (See LCW, Letter to A. Rykov, 25 February, 1911, vol. 34, p. 443.) to convince his conciliationist colleagues of the impossibility of agreement. Lenin warned Kamenev:

I do not see any possibility of carrying on fruitful work with the Liquidators, on the Right and on the Left, especially with Trotsky, but I do not object to your going to Vienna to give you a chance to see for yourself that I am right. (O Vladimire Ilyiche Lenine. Vospminaniya, 1900-1922.)

Lenin was soon shown to be right. Kamenev, who had quarrelled with Trotsky, handed in his resignation from the Pravda editorial board on 13 August, 1910.

Even after it became clear that the Mensheviks were not going to respect the decisions of the plenum, the Bolshevik conciliators still kept up their futile attempts to get ‘unity’. The Bolshevik members of the Central Committee carried on endless negotiations with the Liquidators with the aim of organising the CC, but never got anywhere. In his memoirs, Piatnitsky describes the euphoria of the conciliator Nogin after the January Plenum:

While Nogin was telling me about the decisions of the Plenum he was almost speechless with joy at the fact that it had at last been possible to unite the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks for practical work in Russia (the Plenum had vigorously denounced the Liquidators and recallism-ultimatism) and that henceforth the ‘Nationals’ were to participate in the work. Only one thing worried him: Comrade Lenin firmly opposed all the resolutions of the Plenum which made concessions to the Mensheviks and those decisions which hampered the work of the Bolsheviks by making them dependent on chance representatives of the ‘Nationals’, although he submitted to the majority of the Bolshevik CC membership. Nogin told me with bitterness that Lenin did not understand the vital importance of Party unity for work in Russia. (O. Piatnitsky, Zapiski Bol’shevika, p. 153.)

These illusions were completely unfounded. The ink was not dry on the paper, when the decisions of the January Plenum began to unravel rapidly. The Bolsheviks were in a weaker position than before. They were now dependent on the representative of the Social Democrats of Poland and Lithuania to get decent policies through the editorial board of Sotsial Demokrat. Financially they were much worse off, and depended on the Foreign Bureau of the CC for cash. It was an intolerable position. To make matters worse, the Bolsheviks were the only ones to carry out the decisions of the Plenum. The balance sheet of conciliationism was entirely negative. In 1911, Lenin commented, with some justice, that the Plenum had drained the Party of its strength for over a year. However, the setback for the Bolsheviks was more apparent than real. What was decisive was not the artificial combinations at the top, but what was taking place in the Party’s grass roots in Russia. After the failure of the January adventure, the process of rapprochement of Bolsheviks and Pro-Party Mensheviks was resumed all over Russia: Ukraine, Saratov, Urals, Nizhny Novgorod, Latvia, and other centres, the real forces of the Party were involved in a process of regroupment. Inside Russia the big majority of worker Mensheviks supported Plekhanov, and these now moved closer to the Bolsheviks in joint action.

One important side effect of these events was that they played a role also in Lenin’s growing awareness of opportunism as an international phenomenon because of the role of the International leaders in the Russian inner-Party dispute. Up until this moment, Lenin had regarded himself as an orthodox ‘Kautskyite’, in the period when Karl Kautsky stood – or at least seemed to stand – on the left of the Second International. But Kautsky’s temporising role in relation to the struggle between the right and left wings of the RSDLP raised serious doubts in his mind. Lenin was taken by surprise by the conduct of the leaders of the Socialist International. He was deeply shocked and offended by the unprincipled behaviour of Kautsky and the other representatives of the International who in practice backed the conciliators, publishing their articles in the international Social Democratic press. These doubts were substantiated after August 1914 when Kautsky, along with all the other leaders of the German SPD, with the honourable exception of Karl Liebknecht, shamefully betrayed the cause of international socialism.

Lenin’s extremely sharp tone is explained by the fact that he was completely isolated, even within his own faction. He could see further ahead than the others, but was powerless to act on his own instincts. Lenin himself reached the conclusion that a split was inevitable only after much hesitation. The dividing line for Lenin was probably 1910. But even so, the formal split did not occur until two years later. This was not accidental. Lenin was consistently outvoted in the leadership of the Bolshevik faction. In a way, this was not surprising. It should not be forgotten that the idea of a split between revolutionary and reformist Social Democrats was an entirely new one (except for France, which had earlier experienced the split between the supporters of Guesde and Jaurès, and Bulgaria, with the split of the ‘broad’ and ‘narrow’ socialists which did not exactly fit this pattern, but these were exceptions to the rule). On an international scale the split did not happen until 1914-15. The trauma of August 1914 still lay in the future.