Kamenev’s Speech in the CEC on the Stockholm Conference¶
Core Argument¶
Kamenev’s speech to the Central Executive Committee on 6 August 1917, advocating Bolshevik participation in the proposed Stockholm international socialist conference, is subjected to a devastating polemic. Lenin opens by declaring that the speech cannot meet with anything but reproof from all Bolsheviks faithful to their party and principles. The core of the indictment is procedural and political. Kamenev spoke “on his own behalf”, a breach of party discipline, and ignored a binding Central Committee decision against attending the conference, a decision published in Pravda and reinforced by the party’s threat to withdraw from the Zimmerwald Conference if it endorsed Stockholm. By failing even to mention this decision, Kamenev directly violated party will and spoke against the party.
Lenin then attacks the substance of Kamenev’s argument. Kamenev claimed that the Stockholm Conference had ceased to be a “blind instrument of the imperialist countries”. Lenin dismisses this as unsupported by a single fact. The refusal of Anglo-French social-imperialists to attend while German social-imperialists did attend represented no change in principle from an internationalist standpoint. Lenin reminds Kamenev of the party conference decision of 29 April on the analogous case of the Danish social-imperialist. Kamenev’s rhetoric about a “broad revolutionary banner” waving over Stockholm is condemned as a meaningless declamation in the spirit of the Menshevik and SR ministers Chernov and Tsereteli. In reality, Lenin insists, the banner over Stockholm is one of deals, amnesty for social-imperialists, and bankers’ negotiations over annexed territory.
The polemic draws on the theoretical context of the struggle to build a Third International, free from compromise with social-chauvinists. Lenin argues that the party of internationalists cannot wink at the “dirty tricks” of Russian and German social-imperialists who serve bourgeois imperialist governments. The chapter thus constitutes a sharp internal party intervention against what Lenin sees as a slide towards opportunism and a betrayal of revolutionary internationalism, with Kamenev’s speech serving as the immediate target. The editorial note confirms that the Central Committee reaffirmed its decision not to attend, and the conference never met. The appended letter on the Kornilov revolt, written days later, extends the same logic of principled tactical flexibility without compromise: the Bolsheviks must fight Kornilov but not support Kerensky, exposing his weakness while pressing revolutionary demands from below.