(1) The Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party for nearly four years has been waging a determined fight against the liquidationist trend, which was characterised at the conference of the Party in December 1908 as
“an attempt on the part of a group of Party intellectuals to liquidate the existing organisation of the R.S.D.L.P. and to replace it at all costs, even at the price of downright renunciation of the programme, tactics, and traditions of the Party, by a loose association functioning legally”;
(2) The Plenary Meeting of the Central Committee held in January 1910, continuing the fight against this trend, unanimously declared it to be “a manifestation of bourgeois influence upon the proletariat” and demanded, as a condition for real Party unity and for the fusion of the former Bolshevik and Menshevik groups, a complete rupture with liquidationism and the utter rout of this bourgeois deviation from socialism;
(3) In spite of all Party decisions, and in spite of the obligation assumed by the representatives of Menshevism at the Plenary Meeting held in January 1910, a section of the Mensheviks, grouped around the magazines Nasha Zarya and Dyelo Zhizni, refused to help restore the Central Committee (the refusal of Mikhail, Yuri, and Roman, in the spring of 1910, not only to join the Central Committee but even to attend a single meeting to co-opt new members);
(4) It was precisely after the Plenary Meeting of, 1910 that the above-mentioned publications definitely turned to liquidationism all along the line, not only “belittling [contrary to the decision of the Plenary Meeting] the importance of the illegal Party”, but openly renouncing it, declaring that the Party was already liquidated, that the idea of reviving the illegal Party was “a reactionary utopia”, using the columns of censored magazines to heap ridicule and abuse on it, calling upon the workers to regard the nuclei of the Party and its hierarchy as “dead”, etc.;
(5) The few local groups of liquidators, consisting mainly of representatives of the intelligentsia, continuing their work of destroying the Party, not only refused to listen to the call, repeated in 1911, to help revive the illegal Party and convene a Party conference, but, banded together in entirely independent small groups, they openly began to agitate among the workers against the illegal Party and launched an open fight against reviving it—even in those places where the pro-Party Mensheviks predominated (for example, in Ekaterinoslav, Baku, Kiev, etc.);
The Conference declares that by its conduct the above-mentioned group has definitely placed itself outside the Party.
The Conference calls upon all Party members, irrespective of tendencies and shades of opinion, to combat liquidationism, explain its great harmfulness to the cause of the emancipation of the working class, and bend all their efforts to revive and strengthen the illegal Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party.
| Written early in January 1912 | |
| First published in 1929–30, in 2nd and 3rd editions of Collected Works of V. I. Lenin, Vol. XV | |
| Published according to the manuscript |
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