Russian Social Democratic Labor Party
The Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party ( SDLPR ), Russian Российская социал-демократическая рабочая партия ( РСДРП / RSDRP ) was a Marxist political party founded in Minsk in 1898 . In 1903 the party split into Mensheviks and Bolsheviks . In 1912, the remaining Mensheviks were excluded from the party and the party was now given the addition (Bolsheviks) SDLPR (B) , which was then renamed the Communist Party of Russia (Bolsheviks) in 1918, which later became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union .
prehistory
In view of the political oppression, socialist ideas from the West could only spread sporadically in the Russian Empire . Nevertheless, since the 1870s, attempts have been made by various groups to form organizations that see themselves as social democrats, deal with the literature of Karl Marx and other socialist theorists, and support spontaneous strikes. The first of these completely new organizations for Russia was the South Russian Workers' Union , which was founded by Yevgeny Saslavski (1844–1878) in Odessa in 1875 and dissolved by the tsarist police after the arrest of most of its members. In 1878 the Northern Federation of Russian Workers was founded in Saint Petersburg , which was also dissolved by the police in 1880.
In 1883 Georgi Plekhanov , Pawel Axelrod , Wera Sassulitsch and others founded the “ Labor Liberation Group ” in Geneva , which set itself the goal of systematically disseminating Western socialist literature in Russia. Plekhanov had close ties to Friedrich Engels and was a co-founder of the Second International. At the same time, the Bulgarian Dimitar Blagoew (1856-1924, later co-founder of Social Democracy in Bulgaria) founded the organization “For a Party of Russian Social Democrats” in St. Petersburg, which distributed social democratic newspapers until it was broken up in 1887. From 1885 until its dissolution by the police in 1888, the "St. Petersburg Factory Workers' Association" was active, familiarizing hundreds of workers with social democratic ideas. The "Workers' Association Saint Petersburg" was the first solid social-democratic organization with around 20 district groups, which organized the first May rally in Russia on May 1, 1891 outside the city gates. However, police spies were there, so that the organization was dissolved a year later by mass arrests by the police. In 1895 the “ Combat League for the Liberation of the Working Class ” was founded in Saint Petersburg , to which Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) belonged. Despite the arrest of around 40 members, including Lenin, the police did not succeed this time in breaking up the organization. This led to the fact that in many other cities small groups of social democratic workers based on the example of St. Petersburg also founded fighting alliances, which in most cases could not withstand the police arrests so successfully and therefore disappeared again. In 1897 the General Jewish Workers' Union was founded in Lithuania, Poland and Russia (Bund for short). In the Ukrainian city of Kiev, the social democratic workers' newspaper came into being at the same time . Its editorial team built up a network of individual workers and small groups.
Party formation
In 1898 a total of nine people who represented six organizations that saw themselves as social democrats met in Minsk. These were the "combat leagues" from Saint Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev and Yekaterinoslav, the General Jewish Workers 'Union and the editorial staff of the Kiev workers' newspaper . These nine representatives from six small organizations decided to found the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party (RSDLP), declared themselves to be the First Congress and elected a three-member Central Committee consisting of Boris Eidelman (1867-1939), Arkadi Kremer (1865-1935) and Stepan Radchenko (1869–1911) existed.
News of the "establishment of the RSDLP," which was basically just a bold statement by nine people, spread across Russia and resulted in the creation of dozens of newspapers, committees and groups that understood themselves as local alliances of the RSDLP . Social-democratic workers in the vast Russian Empire had assumed until 1898 that they were all alone with their views; However, when they found out that a party had been founded, they wanted to join it and make sure that this RSDLP is represented locally and is known among the workers. Many of the resulting groups were not very stable, and many were broken up by the police.
Since 1900 the illegally published newspaper Iskra ( Der Funke ), on which Lenin and the "Group for the Liberation of Labor" around Plekhanov worked, developed into a discussion forum for the social democracy, in whose editorial office there were serious differences of opinion between the more revolutionary social democrats around Lenin and the more moderate " economists " around Julius Martow (1873-1923) and Georgi Plekhanov appeared.
The Second Party Congress in 1903
In 1903 there were 26 organizations in Russia that sent delegates to the Second Party Congress of the RSDLP, which was held in Brussels and London . The party had around 5000 members at that time. The meeting began in secret on July 30, 1903 in Brussels. However, it had to be moved to London after a short time because the police asked the delegates to leave Belgium .
At the party congress there were arguments about organizational and strategic issues between the more radical and more moderate branches of social democracy. A sharp dispute over the party statutes concerned the question of whether it should be sufficient for membership in the party that someone supports the party, for example financially, or whether personal active participation in a party organization should be required, i.e. the RSDRP as a cadre of professional revolutionaries should be. A background to this question was the number of delegate votes that a party organization was entitled to based on the number of its members. Finally, on August 23, 1903, Lenin's group was in the majority; it has since been called the faction of the majority (Russian: Bolsheviks ). Their internal party opponents were referred to as minority groups (Russian: Mensheviks ). According to the historian Manfred Hildermeier, the decision to become a cadre party and to build up conspiratorial structures accordingly hindered internal party democracy ; instead, the RSDLP “duplicated the characteristics of the state under attack”. According to the party statutes, Lenin was appointed by the members of the Central Committee (ZK) as a further member of the Central Committee at the end of 1903. Party congress in London elected to the Central Committee, but left the Central Committee at the end of 1905.
At the party congress, the General Jewish Workers' Union split off from the SDAPR. It resulted from the fact that the federal government demanded autonomy for itself within the party. Above all, the group around Lenin opposed this demand with the argument that this was national policy and thus incompatible with the principles of the RSDLP.
Both wings of the party were in agreement on the program: It saw itself as a Marxist party that, after a revolution of the industrial workers, wanted to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat that would result in a classless society . The only problem was that, according to Marx's historical materialism , a bourgeois revolution had to take place before the proletarian one, which would remove the remnants of feudalism . In the tsarist empire at the turn of the century, however, the wealthy bourgeoisie was still very weak in numbers and not at all opposed to the regime. The RSDLP found itself in the paradoxical situation of holding the stirrup to the bourgeoisie, which it actually saw as a class enemy . The peasants, who made up the vast majority of the population of the agricultural country Russia, were of only secondary interest to the party ideologically. The farmers wanted to benefit with the return of the so-called “cut pieces”, the land that the village communities had lost through enclosures since the abolition of serfdom. So later after the October Revolution the decree on land was implemented.
Revolution from 1905–1907
In the first and bloodily suppressed Russian Revolution 1905–1907 , the RSDLP tried to gain a leadership role among the insurgent workers. She succeeded in doing this in some major cities in Russia.
In April 1906 the fourth (unification) party congress of the RSDLP took place in Stockholm, at which 62 party organizations of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were represented. The party congress passed the statutes of the party in accordance with the demands made by the Lenin group in 1903 and carried out the union with the national social democratic parties in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Finland and the Ukraine, which at that time belonged to the Russian Empire, as well as with the “General Jewish workers' union in Lithuania, Poland and Russia ”. The Social Democrats boycotted the parliamentary elections for the first Duma (April – July 1906), which they rejected as a sham parliament of the dictatorial tsarist empire. They were not represented until the second Duma (February – June 1907). The second Duma was dissolved on the pretext that the Social Democrats were allegedly planning a coup in the army, for which falsified documents were presented. Under a new electoral law that favored landowners and wealthy sections of the population, the Social Democrats were only represented with 19 seats in the third Duma (1907–1912).
Development up to the October Revolution 1917
After a period of strong suppression of all democratic efforts in the Russian Empire, a party conference of the RSDLP took place in Prague in 1912, at which only about 20 party organizations were represented, mainly Bolsheviks. Some of the Mensheviks, who at that time had poorly organized party structures, met on the initiative of Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) in Vienna. So the Mensheviks were in fact forced out of the party, which from now on referred to itself with the enlargement "Bolsheviks" as RSDLP (B). Lenin, who had not been a candidate for the Central Committee with voting rights since 1907, was elected to the Central Committee. According to the party statutes, the Central Committee took Josef Stalin (1878–1953) and Jakow Swerdlow (1885–1919) into the Central Committee. At that time, the party only had around 10,000 active members, some of whom lived in Russia and some in exile. The Bolsheviks around Lenin attributed a tenth of that to themselves.
Shortly before the fall of the tsarist rule on March 15, 1917 (the so-called February Revolution according to the old Russian calendar), the Central Committee of the RSDLP (B) set up a special office that was supposed to ensure the connection to the many new party organizations that were forming all over Russia. Jelena Stassowa (1873–1966), who had been a member of the Central Committee since 1912, was appointed secretary of this office . From 1917 the party published several daily newspapers; The central organ was Pravda ( The Truth ). In August 1917, the VI. Party congress of the RSDLP (B) Sverdlov in the Central Committee and entrusted him with the organizational management of the party. The party congress accepted some groups ( Meschrajonzy ) into the party who had not joined the Mensheviks or the Bolsheviks since 1912, but had taken an independent intermediate position, including the group around Trotsky.
After the fall of the tsarist rule, the membership of the RSDLP (B) grew to 240,000 members in the course of 1917. For this reason, the office previously headed by Stasova was enlarged and converted into a secretariat, which was run by Sverdlov as the "senior secretary". He led the party work in preparation for the October Revolution and chaired the historic meeting when the Bolshevik Central Committee decided on October 23, 1917 that "the armed uprising is inevitable and fully matured." Trotsky later referred to Sverdlov as the “real general secretary of the year of the revolution”, while Lenin was the undisputed political party leader, strategist and theoretician of the RSDLP (B).
At the Soviet Congress immediately after the victory of the October Revolution of November 7, 1917 (according to the old Russian calendar October 25), Sverdlov was the parliamentary leader of the SDLPR (B) and was elected a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (GZEK). Shortly afterwards he was elected chairman of the GZEK as the successor to Lev Kamenev . While Sverdlov led the party organizationally as the "leading secretary of the Central Committee" and was the head of state of Soviet Russia as chairman of the GZEK, Lenin exercised the function of head of government as chairman of the Council of People's Commissars and had the highest political authority within the SDLP (B), although he was officially only a member of the Central Committee. In the disputes over the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918 and the signing of the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty in March 1918, Lenin and Sverdlov took the same position in the dispute with internal party critics.
Renaming in 1918
In March 1918, Sverdlov led the negotiations at the Seventh Party Congress, which decided to rename the party the Communist Party of Russia (Bolsheviks) , KPR (B). According to the changed party statutes, he has since been chairman of the secretariat of the Central Committee of the KPR (B). After Sverdlov died in 1919 as a result of the Spanish flu and Lenin's illness, Stalin succeeded in being elected general secretary of the party in 1922. The sick Lenin warned: "After becoming General Secretary, Stalin concentrated an immeasurable power in his hands". and proposed that Stalin be voted out of office. However, this did not happen because of Lenin's death in 1924.
Individual evidence
- ^ Astrid von Borcke: The origins of Bolshevism. Berchmans, Munich 1977, ISBN 978-3879041213 , p. 510.
- ↑ Manfred Hildermeier, The Russian Revolution 1905-1921 , Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 1989, p. 40
- ↑ YIVO | Federation. In: www.yivoencyclopedia.org. Retrieved May 19, 2016 .
- ↑ Manfred Hildermeier, The Russian Revolution 1905-1921 , Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 1989, p. 41
- ↑ Gerd Koenen : The color red. Origins and history of communism . Beck, Munich 2017, p. 627 f.
- ↑ Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Works , Vol. 26, p. 178
- ↑ Vladimir Ilyich Lenin: Works , Vol. 36; P. 579