The First Congress of the RSDLP¶
Core Argument¶
The First Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, convened in Minsk in March 1898, was a clandestine gathering of nine delegates from Social Democratic groups in Moscow, Kiev, Petersburg, and Yekaterinoslav, alongside the Jewish Bund. Held under the constant threat of police raids, the congress succeeded in formally establishing the Party, electing a Central Committee of three, adopting a Manifesto written by Struve, and recognising Rabochaya Gazeta as its official organ. Yet the chapter argues that this achievement was almost entirely formal and symbolic. Within weeks, five of the nine participants were arrested, and the Central Committee was effectively destroyed. The congress could not impose any real unity or discipline on the fragmented local committees, which continued to operate in isolation, producing leaflets for the strike movement but lacking any political centre.
The chapter draws heavily on the role of the Bund, the Jewish Social Democratic organisation, which at the time was the largest and best-resourced component of the nascent party, with fourteen local committees. The congress was held in Minsk precisely because only the Bund had the organisational capacity to arrange it. However, the chapter is sharply critical of the Bund’s structure and politics. It characterises the Bund as more akin to a trade union movement than a revolutionary party, organised on an un-Marxist basis with workers and intellectuals confined to separate, watertight compartments. The Bund’s leadership is accused of developing a narrow nationalist standpoint that perpetuated divisions between Jewish and non-Jewish workers. The chapter cites Osip Piatnitsky’s recollection that the Bund’s leadership refused to organise among non-Jews and that, in western Russia, not a single trade union accepted workers of all nationalities. The concession granted at the congress—that the Bund would enter the party as an autonomous organisation independent in questions relating to the Jewish proletariat—is presented as a concession to national prejudice that would later provoke major polemics, with Lenin insisting on the unity of workers’ organisations against any division on national lines.
The chapter also polemicises against Economism, the reformist tendency that downplayed political struggle. It quotes the extreme Economist Akimov admitting that Vilna workers themselves demanded more political agitation, while the leadership hesitated, fearing the workers were not politically educated enough. The chapter denounces this as a contemptuous attitude that lacked confidence in the working class. The congress’s other concession—allowing local committees to refuse to carry out Central Committee demands—is presented as evidence of the organisational chaos and amateurish methods that prevailed. Trotsky, who heard about the congress while in prison, is quoted to the effect that a few months later no one talked about it anymore. The chapter concludes that the congress could only point the way; the real work of building a viable revolutionary party would have to be done abroad, in exile, where the forces of revolutionary Marxism could regroup under conditions of relative security.