This Conference endorses, first and foremost, the resolution adopted at the Party Conference in December 1908 on “The Tasks of the Party in the Present Situation”. This Conference points to the extreme importance of that resolution, whose provisions relating to the historical meaning and class essence of the entire June Third regime on the one hand, and the growing revolutionary crisis on the other, have been fully confirmed by the events of the past three years.
Of these events the Conference particularly notes the following:
(a) The agrarian policy of tsarism, with which both the government parties of the landowners and big bourgeoisie and the counter-revolutionary liberals have bound up their counter-revolutionary interests, has not led to the creation of anything like stable bourgeois relations in the village, nor has it relieved the peasantry of mass hunger, which reflects the extreme worsening of the condition of the population and an enormous loss of productive forces.
(b) In view of its impotence in the face of the world competition of the modern capitalist states and being pushed more and more into the background in Europe, the tsarist autocracy in alliance with the reactionary nobility and the growing industrial bourgeoisie, is now endeavouring to satisfy its predatory interests by means of crude “nationalist” politics, directed against the more cultured regions (Finland, Poland, North-Western Area), and, through colonial conquest, against the peoples of Asia (Persia and Mongolia) who are waging a revolutionary struggle for freedom.
(c) The developing economic advance is largely offset by the complete disruption of peasant economy, by the rapacious budgetary policy of the autocracy and the absolute corruption in the bureaucratic apparatus; on the other hand, the increasing cost of living intensifies the poverty of the working class and the broad masses of the population.
(d) In view of this the broad masses of the population have become convinced, during the five-year existence of the Third Duma, that it is unwilling, unable, and powerless to do anything to improve their conditions, and that the parties predominating in the Duma are anti-popular in character.
(e) The onset of a political revival is to be noted among broad democratic circles, chiefly among the proletariat. The workers’ strikes of 1910–11, the beginning of demonstrations and proletarian meetings, the start of a movement among urban bourgeois democrats (the student strikes), etc., all these are signs of the growing revolutionary feelings of the masses against the June, Third regime.
This Conference, proceeding from all these facts, confirms the tasks confronting the Party as outlined in detail in the resolution of the December 1908 Conference, and draws the particular attention of comrades to:
(1) The fact that, as heretofore, the first task on the order of the day is the continued work of the socialist education, organisation, and unification of the politically-conscious masses of the proletariat;
(2) The necessity for intensive work to re-establish the illegal organisation of the R.S.D.L.P., which more than ever before takes advantage of all and every legal possibility, which is capable of leading the economic struggles of the proletariat, and which is the only party able to take the lead in political actions by the proletariat that are growing more frequent;
(3) The necessity to organise and extend systematic political agitation and to give wholehearted support to the incipient mass movement and secure its development under the banner of full implementation of the Party slogans.
Propaganda for a republic, and against the policy of the tsarist monarchy, must be given special prominence to counteract, among other things, the widespread propaganda in favour of curtailed slogans and adaptation to existing “legality”.
| Written early in January 1912 | |
| First published in 1941 in Proletarskaya Revolutsia, No. 1 | |
| Published according to the manuscript |
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