Meanwhile, events were moving rapidly. The class struggle was proceeding at an ever-accelerating pace. In the whole of Russia during 1913 about one million workers had participated in strikes; of these over half a million were involved in political strikes. By the summer of 1913 Russia was in the throes of a political crisis. At a Party meeting in Polish Galicia (then under Austrian rule), the perspective of a new revolution was placed on the order of the day. “The question of a new revolution is uppermost in the political life of the country.” (See KPSS v. rezoluitsiakh, vol. 1, p. 302.) In the context of general radicalisation, the Menshevik influence was in steep decline. The Bolsheviks were rapidly becoming the dominant force in the organised working class in Russia. Badayev reports that: “Party work had been strengthened, extended and consolidated, new groups had been formed and the old ones had grown larger and more effective.” (AY Badayev, Bolsheviks in the Tsarist Duma, p. 116.) Given the way in which Party membership was now calculated, it is difficult to say exactly how many members the Bolsheviks had at this time. Even Lenin didn’t know, as the following extract written in September 1913, shows:
The party was 150,000 in 1907 (according to the estimate approved by the London Congress). Right now, you can’t say how many… Probably a lot fewer, but 30 or 50,000. It’s impossible to be exact… The Party is the conscious and advanced layer of the class, its advance guard. The strength of this vanguard is ten or a hundred times greater than its numerical strength. Can the strength of hundreds be greater than that of thousands? Yes, it can be greater, when that hundred is organised. Organisation increases your strength tenfold. (V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, in Russian, vol. 24, p. 34.)
It was now urgent that all the disputed questions be resolved as quickly as possible. A new conference was held, this time at Poronino, a village not far from Kraków, where Lenin and a few members of the central committee were staying. In order to mislead the police, the Poronino conference was always referred to as the August conference, although it actually took place at the end of September 1913. Twenty-five to thirty representatives from the larger party organisations were present. In addition to Lenin, Zinoviev, and Krupskaya, who were living in Galicia, Kamenev, Shotman, Inessa Armand, Troyanovsky, Rozmirovich, Hanyecki, and other party workers also attended, as well as all the Duma Bolsheviks except Samoilov, who was ill. At the Poronino conference, a resolution was passed on the party press which marked a new departure:
1. The conference recognises the enormous importance of a legal press for the cause of Social Democratic agitation and organisation and therefore calls on all party organisations and class-conscious workers to lend their wholehearted support by distributing papers as widely as possible, by organising mass collective subscriptions and by the payment of regular dues. The conference once more emphasises that the said dues are membership dues to the party.
2. Special attention should be paid to the strengthening of the legal workers’ paper in Moscow and to the speedy establishment of a paper in the south.
3. The conference desires to bring about the closest cooperation between the existing legal papers by means of mutual exchange of information, the holding of conferences, etc.
4. Recognising the importance and the necessity of a theoretical Marxist organ, the conference desires party and trade union papers to call the attention of the workers to the journal Prosveshtchenye (Enlightenment), and to appeal to them to subscribe regularly and support it in a systematic fashion.
5. The conference calls the attention of party publishing organisations to the necessity for a wider circulation of popular pamphlets for agitation and propaganda.
6. In view of the recent development of the revolutionary movement and of the importance of analysing it thoroughly, in the complete manner which is impossible in the legal press, the conference draws special attention to the necessity of extending our illegal publishing work and recommends that, in addition to illegal pamphlets and leaflets, a central illegal party paper should be issued regularly at short intervals. (Quoted in A.Y. Badayev, Bolsheviks in the Tsarist Duma, p. 120, my emphasis.)
The influence of the Bolsheviks was growing far faster than the Party’s actual membership. Krupskaya says in a letter that:
At the conference the reports from the locals were very interesting. Everybody was saying that the masses have now grown up… During the elections it had become apparent that there were self-made workers’ organisations everywhere … For the most part they are not connected with the Party, but they are of the Party in spirit. (Quoted in L. Trotsky, Stalin, p. 149.)
In the new conditions, with large numbers of fresh workers coming into the Party’s orbit, it was necessary to introduce drastic changes in the approach to recruitment, to open the doors to the workers. Here once more we see how flexible Lenin was on organisational questions. The Party is, after all, a living organism which will change and adapt itself to changing conditions. Thus, the very same Lenin who in 1903 argued against Martov’s attempt to dilute the Party by blurring the distinction between a member and a sympathiser, now advocated an entirely different approach, whereby any regular reader of Pravda should be regarded as a member (money paid regularly to Pravda should be considered as equivalent to “membership dues to the party”). There is, in reality, no contradiction between the two positions. They merely reflect a change in the objective situation, from a relatively small, embryonic party, which, of necessity must have the character of a cadre party, and a mass workers’ party.