The Prague Conference¶
Core Argument¶
The Prague Conference of January 1912 represented the definitive organisational rupture between Bolshevism and Menshevism, formalising a split that Lenin had long deemed unavoidable. The chapter argues that the failure of earlier unity efforts convinced Lenin that a clean break was the only path forward, and he pressed for a new conference “immediately and at all costs”. The conference was held under extreme clandestinity in Prague, with preparations handled by Piatnitsky and Dzerzhinsky aided by Czech Social Democrats; the Okhrana nevertheless knew every detail, and some delegates were arrested en route. Attendance was meagre — only fourteen voting delegates, all but two Bolsheviks — and invitations to the Letts, the Bund, the Polish and Lithuanian Social Democrats, the Caucasian organisations, the Vperyod group, Plekhanov, and Trotsky’s Pravda were all refused. Plekhanov pleaded ill health but, as Lenin had feared, was already getting cold feet. His delegate Zevin read a statement limiting participation to “only part of the party”, revealing the centrist vacillation that Lenin now refused to tolerate.
The chapter highlights significant internal Bolshevik tensions. Several Russian-based delegates, including Ordzhonikidze and Spandaryan, demanded the dissolution of émigré organisations, reflecting a narrow “practico” suspicion of exile intellectuals. Lenin corrected this, arguing that exiles remained linked to Russia by “a thousand threads”. Some delegates even wanted to invite the Menshevik editors Martov and Dan, in open defiance of Lenin’s resolve to exclude the Liquidators formally. Despite these conciliatory pressures, the conference resolved that the Liquidator group around Nasha Zarya and Dyelo Zhizni had “once and for all placed itself outside the party”, and that foreign exile groups could no longer use the RSDLP name. The chapter treats the Pro-Party Mensheviks as a classic centrist current — sincere but vacillating, drawing back at the decisive moment — and presents Lenin’s intransigence as the necessary Marxist response to such opportunism.
Organisationally, the conference stressed opening the party to the newly awakened masses, rotating committee membership to reduce repression risk, and wresting legal organisations from liberal influence. The party press was designated an organiser, with Rabochaya Gazeta as the official organ. Electoral tactics were outlined: opposition to tsarism and bourgeois-landlord parties, exposure of liberal counter-revolutionary democracy, independence from all non-proletarian parties, and fighting agreements only with revolutionary petty-bourgeois groups like the Trudoviks and SRs. The chapter frames the Prague Conference not as an end but as the beginning of a struggle to win the working-class majority, combining a clean organisational break with a strategic orientation toward mass work — the polar opposite of sectarianism.