The Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party

Summary

The Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party was published in Geneva in 1904, under the title K voprosu o rabotakh vtorogo s”ezda RossiiskoiSotsial-Demokraticheskoi Rabochei Partii. Hitherto it has not been republished.

Most of the footnotes are editorial and are keyed into the text by numerical indicators. Akimov's notes to the Russian edition of 1904 are keyed into the text by symbols. Where it was found necessary to enlarge upon Akimov's notes, the additions are enclosed in brackets.—Ed.

PREPARATORY MANOEUVRES AND THE SPLIT

In June 1902 the Iskra group published in its newspaper a draft programme for the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Iskra, no. 21). During the following year, no ‘critical comments’ or ‘proposed amendments’ were published by anyone (with the exception of a short article by the Latvian comrades in Zhizri'). However, ‘resolutions’ expressing full agreement with the views of Iskra were passed by some fifteen committees. This in itself showed that the comrades did not approach the complex, difficult, and important matter of drafting a Party programme with sufficient care and attention.

In publishing the draft programme, its authors wrote, quite properly, that ‘the Party programme should embody the collective thought of the Party’. ‘This means’, they went on, ‘that all the active Party groups should help to draft it.’ Yet the fact is that for the whole year no other group took any part in the preparation of the programme, and the work which should have been collective remained individual.