The January Plenum¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter Digest: The January Plenum
The January 1910 Plenum of the RSDLP Central Committee, convened in Paris, represents the high-water mark of conciliatory sentiment within the Russian revolutionary movement during the period of reaction following 1905. The chapter argues that this gathering was doomed from the outset, not by Lenin’s supposed intransigence, but by the irreconcilable nature of the factions assembled. The prevailing conditions of tsarist repression had fostered a desperate yearning for unity at any price, a mood that temporarily overrode principled political divisions. Lenin opposed the Plenum precisely because he understood that formal unity without theoretical agreement could only produce an explosive mixture of incompatible elements. Outvoted within his own Bolshevik faction by conciliators like Nogin and Germanov, he was compelled to participate against his better judgement.
The Plenum’s central contradiction is laid bare: it passed a resolution condemning both liquidationism and otzovism as bourgeois influences, yet the Menshevik camp, where liquidationism reigned supreme, could never genuinely enforce such a condemnation without an act of self-immolation. The Bolsheviks, having already expelled their own otzovist wing, could vote for the resolution in good faith; the Mensheviks could not. The chapter draws on Trotsky’s Stalin and Lenin’s correspondence to illustrate the tensions, including Lenin’s sarcastic observation that Trotsky was in a bloc with people “with whom he agrees on nothing theoretically but in everything practically.” This polemic targets the unprincipled nature of conciliationism, which sought unity on the basis of ignoring fundamental differences.
A bitter dispute over money poisoned the proceedings. The Mensheviks raised a scandal over Bolshevik funds obtained through ‘expropriations’ and the controversial Schmidt inheritance—a fortune left to the Bolsheviks by a murdered factory owner’s nephew, secured through a fictitious marriage. Against Lenin’s protests, the Bolsheviks paid a heavy price for the semblance of unity: they ceased publication of their organ Proletary and handed their funds to a trusteeship committee of the Socialist International composed of Mehring, Zetkin, and Kautsky. The Mensheviks, however, did not reciprocate by winding up their own factional centre or ceasing publication of Golos Sotsial-Demokrata. The agreement proved a dead letter, and the deposited funds were eventually impounded by the German Treasury after the outbreak of war, used to finance the Kaiser’s war effort. The chapter concludes by refuting the notion that Lenin’s intransigence caused the failure; rather, the Mensheviks, as Martov later admitted, only agreed to the Plenum’s decisions because they were too weak to risk an immediate split. The January Plenum was not a resolution of differences but a temporary retreat, whose contradictory decisions could not be carried out.