Resolution of the Central Committee of the RSDLP(B)¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter is the text of a resolution adopted by the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party on 21 April (4 May) 1917, in direct response to a political crisis in Petrograd. The crisis was triggered by the Provisional Government’s “imperialist, annexationist and predatory Note” of 18 April, which provoked mass meetings and demonstrations on 20 April. The resolution’s core argument is a sharp polemical defence of the Bolshevik position against accusations that the party is fomenting civil war. The Central Committee denounces this charge as a “despicable lie” spread by capitalist newspapers and their supporters. It argues that civil war is a nonsensical concept at a moment when the capitalists “cannot and dare not use force against the masses,” and when soldiers and workers freely express their will and can elect or displace authorities. The real threat, the resolution insists, comes from the Provisional Government and its backers, who are an “insignificant minority” refusing to submit to the will of the majority.
To ascertain that will, the resolution proposes an immediate popular vote across all districts of Petrograd and its suburbs to gauge attitudes toward the government’s Note, the strength of various parties, and the type of Provisional Government desired. This vote is to be organised through peaceful discussion, demonstrations, and meetings, with strict order and comradely discipline. The resolution also rebuts the slander that the Bolsheviks favour a separate peace with Germany. It equates Wilhelm II with Nicholas II and the German capitalists with their Russian and British counterparts, all denounced as “annexationists, robbers and imperialists.” The party’s position is for negotiation and fraternisation with revolutionary workers and soldiers of all countries, not with capitalists. The resolution speculates that the Guchkov-Milyukov government is escalating the situation because it knows a workers’ revolution is beginning in Germany.
The chapter draws on the immediate historical context of the April Crisis of 1917, the dual power arrangement between the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet, and the ongoing imperialist war. Its polemics are directed squarely at the capitalist press, the Provisional Government, and the “profoundly erroneous” policy of the Menshevik and Narodnik (Socialist Revolutionary) leaders who dominate the Soviet. The resolution accuses these leaders of pursuing a policy of “confidence in and compromise with the capitalist government,” which it dismisses as producing only “useless scraps of paper and useless delays.” This policy, it warns, threatens to create a divergence between the Soviet’s will and that of the majority of revolutionary soldiers and workers. The resolution concludes by calling for new elections to the Soviet, sending only delegates who will hold to a “quite definite opinion” consonant with the actual will of the majority.