By the time the Congress was convened, the overwhelming majority of the local Social Democratic organisations in Russia had agreed to support Iskra, approved its programme, organisational plan, and tactical line, and accepted it as their directing organ. It looked as though Lenin’s goal of a centralised RSDLP comprised of professional revolutionaries, with its guiding light a regular newspaper, was being achieved and close to formal endorsement. The years 1900-03, during which Lenin was building Iskra and creating a national network of professional revolutionaries as the backbone of the future party, coincided with a massive upsurge in revolutionary feeling in Russia. In a sense, Lenin was pushing on an open door since his natural constituency – the workers – were, year on year, an increasing proportion of the revolutionary movement until, in about 1903, they became the largest single grouping, replacing intellectuals and students[31]. Railway strikes, factory strikes, mass demonstrations of workers in St Petersburg, street barricades in Moscow, political strikes in Baku – for the first time workers became the main active political opponents of Tsarism.
The Second Congress of the RSDLP was held from 17 July to 10 August, 1903. Rarely can there have been any party Congress that began with such high hopes and ended in such acrimony. Lenin was the motor force driving the Congress, he played the key role, drew up the outline of the report on the work of the Iskra organisation, composed the draft party rules, the agenda and the standing orders of the Congress, and drafted a number of resolutions. He was elected to the Bureau of the Congress and was a member of the three main committees: Programme, Rules and Credentials. He took the foremost part in a number of debates and spoke on almost all the subjects on the agenda. Given his input to, and expectations of, the Congress, the outcomes can be seen as a personal and political disaster for him.
In his Account of the Second Congress of the RDSLP[32], Lenin reports that there were thirty-three delegates with one vote each, nine delegates with two votes each, and ten delegates who could not vote but could contribute to the discussions. Lenin undertook considerable preparatory work among the delegates, determining the general situation and state of organisation in various parts of the country, and discussing many of the problems confronting the Congress. This made it possible for him to ascertain the political stance of each delegate prior to the opening of the Congress. Present were:
The Bund, a movement of Jewish workers that could be described as more akin to a trade union than a revolutionary party. The Bund was politically nearer the reformist Economists than Iskra, but the First Congress had constituted it a section of the party so it had to be invited to the Second, 5 votes.
The paper Workers Cause delegates. These were strongly inclined towards Economism, definitely cuckoos in the nest of the Congress, 3 votes.
The paper Southern Worker delegates. This paper, based in the Ukraine, tended to be ‘soft’ on the liberals and intended to continue as a separate publication no matter what the outcome of the Congress. Plekhanov, in particular, wanted this paper represented at the Congress against the opposition of Lenin, Martov and Trotsky, 4 votes.
The “Marsh”. This was the name given by Lenin to the indecisive and wavering elements, 6 votes.
Iskra supporters, 33 votes. Largely representatives from SD groups within Russia.
The first thirteen sessions of the Congress were held in Brussels, but owing to difficulties created by the Belgian police, the Congress moved to London. The most important sessions for the future of the RSDLP were: the party programme, party organisation (confirmation of the party rules), elections to the Central Committee, and elections to the editorial board.
Lenin wrote a long and detailed report of the Congress in One Step Forward, Two Steps Back[33], in which he describes the disruptive tactics used knowingly from the start by the Bund and Workers Cause delegates, and possibly unwittingly by the Southern Worker delegates – the former because of their reformist politics and opposition in principle to the kind of party Lenin was working towards, the latter to preserve its independence, individualism and parochial interests and to prevent it from being swallowed up in a disciplined party. There was no suggestion that the early sessions, held in Brussels, indicated any serious differences between Lenin, Martov and Trotsky. This was confirmed by Krupskaya who said that, at that time, Lenin and Trotsky were considered so close that Trotsky was commonly known as Lenin’s cudgel. “Indeed, Lenin himself, at that time least of all thought Trotsky would waver”[34]. Trotsky in My Life says that “Lenin’s schemes of organisation aroused certain doubts in me. But nothing was farther from my mind than the thought that the Congress would blow up on those very questions”[35].
Just over two weeks into the Congress, a number of minor differences among the Iskraists had emerged on secondary issues. Then on 2 August, at the 22nd session, the discussion and vote on Paragraph 1 of the party rules, which defined the conditions of membership, took place. Here, for the first time, a rift appeared between Lenin and Martov. Martov wanted to dilute, in an individualistic way, Lenin’s proposal that a member of the RDSLP was a person who not only accepted its programme and supported the party financially, but participated personally in one of the party organisations under its discipline. Martov’s alternative tended to blur the differences between members and sympathisers, defining participation as regular personal co-operation under the direction of one of the party organisations. Lenin wanted clear-cut, definite relationships within the party. Martov tended toward more diffuse forms. With the support of 14 votes from the Bund, the Workers Cause, the Southern Worker, and the ‘Marsh’, Martov’s proposal gained an overall majority. Those Iskraists who remained loyal to Lenin’s view of how revolutionary SD should be structured found themselves in the minority.
On the day after the vote on Paragraph 1 of the rules, the ‘hard’ Iskraists held a meeting, with Trotsky in the chair, to determine their position on the editorial board elections. It could be argued that it was at this meeting that the coming split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks first took shape. By a substantial majority, the meeting decided to support Lenin’s proposal to reduce the membership of the editorial board to three – Lenin, Martov and Plekhanov. Thus, Martov was de facto elected to the editorial board at a meeting, to which he had demanded entry but from which he had been excluded for being too ‘soft’!
Before it devoted itself to organisational matters, the Congress voted for the dissolution of all independent party organisations and their fusion into a single party; seven of the eight delegates from the Bund and the Workers Cause withdrew. The issues implicit in the vote on Paragraph 1 of the rules now came to the fore in a much more developed form on the question of membership of the editorial board. Through a special resolution the Congress adopted the newspaper as the central organ of the RDSLP and approved an editorial board consisting of Lenin, Plekhanov and Martov.
Lenin believed he had the support of Martov and Plekhanov that the editorial board be reduced from six to three. He argued that in the three years of its operation, 99% of all political decisions had been made by himself, Martov and Plekhanov[36]; and that in the literary work the same three had predominated; in 45 issues of Iskra, Martov had written 39 articles, Lenin – 32, Plekhanov – 24, and between them Zasulich, Axelrod and Potresov had written only 1837. To move towards a more professional organisation, and away from personality politics, it was sensible to recognise these facts and re-constitute the editorial board accordingly.
Frantic pressure from Zasulich persuaded Martov, Potresov and Trotsky to change their minds[38]. Trotsky moved a counter resolution, based not on the needs of the party but to protect the feelings of Zasulich, that the original editorial board be retained. Before the London Congress in 1903, Lenin’s centralism had been theoretical, and many, Trotsky included, had failed to draw the necessary practical conclusions. But now the Iskra ‘hards’ were in the majority and the new editorial board consisting of Lenin, Martov and Plekhanov was approved on 7 August. It is from this vote that the Bolsheviks (majority) and the Mensheviks (minority), derived their names. Despite the decision of the Congress, Martov refused to participate in the editorial board, and Nos. 46 to 51 of Iskra were edited by Lenin and Plekhanov.
The split within the RDSLP came unexpectedly. Lenin did not foresee it, and certainly did not want it. The vote on Plekhanov’s programme, which Lenin defended, was passed with only one vote against. Apart from subsequent changes by Lenin to the section on the agrarian question, which he had written, this remained the RDSLP programme until after October 1917, both Mensheviks and Bolsheviks agreed with its basic formulations. Of particular importance for us, is that the programme clearly separated the bourgeois and the socialist revolutions[39].
Trotsky had attended the RDSLP Second Congress as a delegate from Siberia, his place of exile and from which he had recently escaped. Almost immediately after the Congress he wrote his Report of the Siberian Delegation[40] in which he characterised Lenin as the “party dis-organiser” who would “mercilessly tramp over Iskra’s editorial board” using his “iron fist” to impose a “state of siege” on the party[41]. Trotsky placed personal feelings before politics[42] and failed to appreciate the necessity of an organised, disciplined, centralised cadre party for the success of an armed uprising against the autocracy. What the young Trotsky saw was two groups professing the same principles and policy, separated only by Lenin’s apparent ruthlessness in dealing with such dear comrades as Vera Zasulich. He expressed this new hostility to Lenin in his report of the Congress with his usual flair and style. Trotsky ceased to contribute to Iskra and became a member of the Menshevik shadow Central Committee and, with Martov, drew up the resolution expressing the Menshevik boycott of Iskra[43].
Lenin had attended the Second Congress as a representative of the League of Russian Revolutionary Social Democrats Abroad and gave his report on the Congress to a meeting held in Geneva in October. The Mensheviks held a majority in the League and considerable time was taken up with a reply from the floor by Martov, in which he made a scathing attack on Lenin. Martov flatly rejected Bolshevik statements that he had been party to Lenin’s ‘intrigues’ against Axelrod, Potresov and Zasulich, giving his own version of private conversations with Lenin. His speech further personalised the discussion. Getzler says “Martov’s indictment of Lenin was greeted by calls of ‘Bravo!’ and ‘Shame!’ from the party elite, sitting almost as a court of honour. Lenin had no answer but to walk out from one of the great humiliations of his life”[44].
Trotsky was a leading figure in all of this, co-authoring with Martov, the resolution passed at the meeting. Alongside Axelrod, Dan, Martov and Potresov, he was elected a member of the Menshevik ‘bureau’, a body that was clearly intended to be the core of any leading committee of a new party if the split led to formal separation of the two factions[45]. Trotsky was identified as a leading anti-Bolshevik.
Martov’s boycott was soon successful. Plekhanov proved unable to make the transition to the new historical period, one of active preparation for revolution, which demanded a new ‘Leninist’ type of party and leadership. The evening of 18 October saw Plekhanov’s break with Lenin and the majority of the party. He presented an ultimatum to Lenin, that the old editors be reinstated or he would resign from the editorial board. Plekhanov’s decision was a heavy blow. By 13 November, Plekhanov had co-opted the old editorial board, and Lenin resigned shortly afterwards, after the publication of issue No 51 of Iskra, in order not to stand in the way of possible peace in the party[46]. However, his supporters immediately co-opted him onto the Central Committee which he then used as a base to conduct a campaign to win back Iskra.
However, the co-option of the old editors onto the editorial board gave the minority control of the new Iskra. The central organ and public face of the RDSLP was now a Menshevik paper with Martov the de-facto editor. The Central Committee was Bolshevik, but it was deprived of a public voice. Gradually, the new Iskra ceased to publish the copy sent in by the supporters of the majority, and the position of Lenin looked extremely bleak.
At this point Trotsky wrote a series of articles for the new Iskra on Menshevik policy towards the Russian liberal bourgeoisie, his analysis was a penetrating condemnation of Menshevik strategy. Plekhanov, to whom support for the liberal bourgeoisie was the key to the success of the Russian Revolution, threatened to resign from the editorial board in protest when Iskra continued to publish articles by Trotsky[47]. Rather than lose their most important member the editorial board attempted, unsuccessfully, to persuade Trotsky to agree to tone down his views and, gradually, Trotsky’s articles ceased to appear.
Yet, even as he was leaving the Menshevik ranks, in August 1904, Trotsky published Our Political Tasks, in which he reviled Lenin’s brochure One Step Forward Two Steps Back, and made reconciliation between them virtually impossible[48]. Deutscher described the pamphlet as the “pent-up emotion of the romantic revolutionary … (Trotsky’s) inclination, his tastes, his temperament revolted against the prosaic and business-like determination with which Lenin was setting out to bring the party down from the clouds of abstraction to the firm ground of organisation”[49]. A more experienced revolutionary would not have been so publicly venomous or personally hurtful. Through his youth and inexperience, Trotsky made a serious enemy of Lenin, who for the next thirteen years considered him one of the most vicious of the Mensheviks. The resulting mutual hostility helped block any possible collaboration between the two men for well over a decade, and required the momentous events of 1917 to overcome it.
In later years Trotsky accepted that his 1904 disagreement with Lenin was, at root, concerned with differences over a “philosophy of history and political conception”, while its form took the appearance of differences over the roles and qualities of individuals – which, due to the inexperience of many of those involved, tended to make the discussion over-heated and personal[50].
By the end of 1904, and the start of 1905, Trotsky was more or less on his own, at loggerheads with virtually everybody, politically isolated. Whatever his intentions, Trotsky was now outside the two major groupings within the RDSLP and, while a brilliant journalist and great speaker, had not shown any significantly greater political insight than his contemporaries.
For Lenin the situation seemed grim. Everything which had been expected of the Second Congress was in ruins. With the capture of Iskra, the Mensheviks had achieved a substantial victory. The great majority of the party activists understood that there had been significant differences over the composition of the editorial board of the party’s paper, but didn’t accept that they were serious enough to justify the split, and so rejected it. Even leading Bolsheviks close to Lenin did not fully understand the differences and tended to play them down which made the split look even less justified. Indeed, Lenin, himself, later confirmed that the political differences between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks only emerged clearly well after the Second Congress[51], and explained the forces which lay behind the split as due to the opposition of, primarily, intellectuals whose conditions of life and work naturally inclined them against the necessary discipline of a revolutionary party[52]. Plekhanov’s defection made things appear even more complicated, but at grass roots level increasing numbers of local Social Democratic committees were expressing support for Lenin’s call for a new Congress as the only way of resolving the crisis.
By the autumn, the prospects for the Bolsheviks were looking brighter. Lenin put together a new leading team, encouraging reports were received from Russia, where Lenin’s agents had managed to distribute To the Party to many local RDSLP committees. By the end of 1904 a Bolshevik Organising Centre had been established in Russia, with the backing of thirteen party committees. Despite their lack of resources, the Bolsheviks had managed to launch a new paper, Vperyod (Forward), and at a meeting in Geneva on 3 December, an editorial board was elected with Krupskaya as secretary:
“The first issue of the first truly Bolshevik newspaper duly rolled off the press on 22 December 1904. Just over a fortnight later, the Russian émigrés were amazed to hear the newspaper boys on the streets of Geneva: ‘Revolution in Russia! Revolution in Russia!’”[53].
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Cliff, T., op cit, p98
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Lenin, V.I., Account of the Second Congress of the RDSLP, Sept 1903, CW 7:19-34
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Lenin, V.I., One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, May 1904, CW 7:201-423
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Krupskaya, N., op cit, p86
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Trotsky, L.D., My Life, Penguin Books, 1984, p162
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Lenin, V.I., Letter to Alexandra Kalmykova, Sept 1903, CW 34:162
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Woods, A., op cit, p145
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Wolfe, B.D., op cit, p272
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Trotsky, L.D., Report of the Siberian Delegation, New Park Publications, London, 1979
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Deutscher, I., op cit, p86
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Trotsky, L.D., My Life, Penguin Books, 1984, p167
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Deutscher, I., op cit, p84 – 85
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Getzler, I., Martov, Cambridge University Press, 1967, p84
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Deutscher, I., op cit, p85
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Lenin, V.I., Why I Resigned From Iskra Editorial Board, Dec 1903, CW 7:118-124
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Deutscher, I., op cit, p86-87
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Thatcher, I. D., Trotsky, Routledge, London and New York, 2003, p32
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Deutscher, I., op cit, p88-97
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Trotsky, L.D., Stalin, Hollis and Carter, London, 1947, p50
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Lenin, V.I., Historical Meaning of the Inner Party Struggle in Russia, April 1911, CW 16:380
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Lenin, V.I., To the Party, Aug 1904, CW 7:452-459
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Woods, A., op cit, p166