8th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)

The Congress agenda was: Vladimir Lenin's opening words were dedicated to Yakov Sverdlov, who had died on 16 March.

Mikhail Kalinin replaced Sverdlov as Soviet head of state, a position he held till his death in March 1946.

The congress adopted Lenin's proposal to include in the program in addition to a definition of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism, the description of industrial capitalism and simple commodity production contained in the old program adopted at the 2nd Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.

Nikolai Bukharin, however, proposed that the clauses dealing with capitalism, small commodity production, the economy of the middle peasantry, should have been left out of the program.

Lenin's rejection of the standpoints of Bukharin and Pyatakov was accepted After the first Politburo was created in October 1917, in order to manage the Revolution, this second Politburo was voted by the Congress of the party, and appointed with five full members (Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev and Nikolay Krestinsky) and three non-voting members (Grigory Zinoviev, Nikolai Bukharin and Mikhail Kalinin).