History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

[4] Writing to Maxim Gorky at the beginning of 1912, on the results of the Prague Conference, Lenin said: At last we have succeeded, in spite of the Liquidator scum, in restoring the Party and its Central Committee.

The RSDLP(b) delegate Maxim Litvinov, on Lenin's instructions, spoke at this conference demanding that the Socialists should resign from the national governments of Belgium and France, completely break with the imperialists and refuse to collaborate with them.

A most energetic and persistent drive was made to win over the troops, especially by the working women, who addressed themselves directly to the soldiers, fraternized with them and called upon them to help the people to overthrow the tsarist autocracy.

Lenin made a speech at the congress in which he declared that 'only a government of Soviets could give bread to the working people, land to the peasants, secure peace and lead the country out of chaos'.

The party was opposed to armed action at that time, for it considered that the revolutionary crisis had not yet matured, that the army and the provinces were not yet prepared to support an uprising in the capital, and that an isolated and premature rising might only make it easier for the counter-revolutionaries to crush the vanguard of the revolution.

The congress advanced the slogan of fighting for the complete abolition of the dictatorship of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie and for the proletariat winning power in alliance with the peasant poor, through an armed uprising.

"It is only the revolutionary proletariat," said the resolution "The Political Situation", "that can accomplish this task—a task set by the new upswing-provided it is supported by the peasant poor"[21] The question whether Lenin should appear in court was one of the first items discussed by the congress.

Volodarsky, I. Bezrabotny (D. Z. Manuilsky) and M. Lashevich spoke in favour of Lenin appearing in court (provided his safety was guaranteed, the trial was public and representatives of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets attended it), and moved a resolution in that sense.

The congress made all its decisions subordinate to the chief objective, which was to train the working class and the peasant poor for an armed uprising to bring about the victory of the socialist revolution.

In a manifesto addressed to all working people, all workers, soldiers and peasants of Russia, it called on them to gather strength and prepare, under the banners of the Bolshevik Party, for the decisive battle with the bourgeoisie.

Lenin sent numerous letters to the Central Committee and to St. Petersburg party activists urging them to abandon the parliamentary path and overthrow the Provisional Government by means of an insurrection.

The resolution of the Central Committee of the Party, drafted by Lenin, stated: The Central Committee recognizes that the international position of the Russian revolution (the revolt in the German navy which is an extreme manifestation of the growth throughout Europe of the world Socialist revolution; the threat of conclusion of peace by the imperialists with the object of strangling the revolution in Russia) as well as its military position (the indubitable decision of the Russian bourgeoisie and Kerensky and Co. to surrender Petrograd to the Germans), and the fact that the proletarian party has gained a majority in the Soviets– all this, taken in conjunction with the peasant revolt and the swing of popular confidence towards our Party (the elections in Moscow), and, finally, the obvious preparations being made for a second Kornilov affair (the withdrawal of troops from Petrograd, the dispatch of Cossacks to Petrograd, the surrounding of Minsk by Cossacks, etc.

Considering therefore that an armed uprising is inevitable, and that the time for it is fully ripe, the Central Committee instructs all Party organizations to be guided accordingly, and to discuss and decide all practical questions (the Congress of Soviets of the Northern Region, the withdrawal of troops from Petrograd, the action of our people in Moscow and Minsk, etc.)

Kliment Voroshilov, Vyacheslav Molotov, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, Sergo Ordjonikidze, Sergei Kirov, Lazar Kaganovich, Valerian Kuibyshev, Mikhail Frunze, Yemelyan Yaroslavsky and others were specially assigned by the party to direct the uprising in the provinces.

Wary of a preemptive counterattack of the Kerensky government, the Central Committee of the party decided to initiate the uprising before the appointed time, and set its date for the day before the opening of the Second Congress of Soviets.

Kerensky began his attack on the early morning of October 24 (November 6) by ordering the suppression of the central organ of the party, Rabochy Put (Workers' Path), and the dispatch of armoured cars to its editorial premises and to the printing plant of the Bolsheviks.

The congress called upon the belligerent countries to conclude an immediate armistice for a period of not less than three months to permit negotiations for peace to put an end to the ongoing World War.

While addressing itself to the governments and peoples of all the belligerent countries, the congress at the same time appealed to 'the class-conscious workers of the three most advanced nations of mankind and the largest states participating in the present war, namely, Great Britain, France and Germany.'

The Moscow Regional Bureau of the party, of which the 'Left Communists' (Bukharin, Ossinsky, Yakovleva, Stukov and Mantsev) had temporarily seized control, passed a resolution of no-confidence in the Central Committee.

In response to the military threats against the Soviet Republic the RCP(b) proclaimed the country an armed camp and placed its economic, cultural and political life on a war footing.

The Soviet Government now annulled its commitment to the Brest-Litovsk agreement and initiated a military and political struggle to reclaim Estonia, Latvia, Byelorussia, Lithuania, Ukraine and Transcaucasia.

In the new situation in Europe, with Soviet rule established in Russia and revolutionary uprisings taking place in Germany, Austria and Hungary, and with the traditional Social Democracy divided in many countries, a constitutive congress of the Communist International was held in March 1919.

[46] On March 25, 1919, the Central Committee elected by the 8th congress appointed a Politburo consisting of Kamenev, N. Krestinsky, Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky, and with Bukharin, Zinovyev and Kalinin as candidate members.

The conflict erupted at the Fourteenth Party Congress held in December 1925 with Zinoviev and Kamenev now protesting against the dictatorial policies of Stalin and trying to revive the issue of Lenin's Testament which they had previously buried.

In the 1930s other senior Communists, many of whom had been Stalin's allies were removed and many of them were executed or died in mysterious circumstances, including Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev, Alexei Rykov and Nikolai Bukharin.

According to Molotov's memoirs as well as other reports, a number of party members at the Congress had approached Kirov with the proposal that he run for the position of General Secretary against Stalin.

Stalin claimed that Kirov's assassin, Leonid Nikolaev, was part of a larger conspiracy led by Zinoviev, Kamenev and ultimately Leon Trotsky against the Soviet government.

This bureau consisted of Stalin, Lavrentiy Beria, Georgy Malenkov, Nikita Khrushchev, Nikolai Bulganin, Kliment Voroshilov, Lazar Kaganovich, Maksim Saburov, and Mikhail Pervukhin, with future decision-making limited in practice to the first four or five of these.

Beria not only publicly denounced the Doctors' plot as a "fraud" but he instigated the release of hundreds of thousands of political prisoners from the gulags (prisoners he had had a hand in arresting in the first place), brought in a liberal policy towards non-Russian nationalities in the Soviet Union thus reversing decades of Russification and persuaded the Presidium and the Council of Ministers to urge the Socialist Unity Party regime of Walter Ulbricht in East Germany to slow down the "construction of socialism" and institute liberal economic and political reforms.

His final years were marked by an attempt to create a personality cult around himself as well as growing corruption within the party as members increasingly paid lip service to socialist ideas and instead saw their positions as a route to self enrichment.