Russian Social Democratic Labour Party

The Social Democratic Workers' Party of Russia (SDAPR), 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 expelled from the party and the party was now suffixed (Bolsheviks) SDAPR(B), which was then renamed the Communist Party of Russia (Bolsheviks) in 1918, which in turn later became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Party Formation

In 1898 a total of nine people met in Minsk, representing six organizations that saw themselves as social-democratic. These were the "fighting alliances" from St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev and Ekaterinoslav, the General Jewish Workers' League and the editorial board of the Kiev Workers' Newspaper. These nine representatives of six small organisations decided to found the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (SDAPR), declared themselves the I Party Congress and elected a Central Committee consisting of three members, Boris Eidelman (1867-1939), Arkady Kremer (1865-1935) and Stepan Radchenko (1869-1911).

News of the "founding of the SDAPR," which was basically just a bold declaration by nine people, spread throughout Russia and led to the creation of dozens of newspapers, committees and groups that saw themselves as local associations of the SDAPR. Workers of a Social Democratic persuasion in the vast Russian Empire had assumed until 1898 that they were alone in their views; but when they learned that a party had been formed, they wanted to belong to it and to see that this SDAPR was represented locally and became known among the workers. Many of the groups thus formed were not very stable, and many were also dissolved by the police.

From 1900 the illegally published newspaper Iskra (The Spark), in which Lenin and the "Group for the Liberation of Labour" around Plekhanov collaborated, developed into the discussion forum of Social Democracy, in whose editorial board serious differences of opinion also arose between more revolutionary-minded Social Democrats around Lenin and the more moderate "economists" around Julius Martov (1873-1923) and Georgi Plekhanov.

The II Party Congress 1903

In 1903 there were 26 organizations in Russia that sent delegates to the II Party Congress of the SDAPR, which was held in Brussels and London. The party had about 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 ordered the delegates to leave Belgium.

At the party congress, disputes arose between the more radical and more moderate directions of social democracy over organizational and strategic questions. One sharp dispute over the party statutes concerned the question of whether it should be sufficient for membership in the party for someone to support the party financially, for example, or whether personal active participation in a party organization should be required, i.e., whether the SDAPR should become a cadre party of professional revolutionaries. A backdrop to this line of questioning was also the number of delegate votes a party organization was entitled to based on the number of its members. Eventually, on August 23, 1903, Lenin's group found itself in the majority; it has since been called the Majority Faction (Russian: Bolsheviks). Their inner-party opponents were called Minoritarians (Russian: Mensheviks). According to historian Manfred Hildermeier, the decision to become a cadre party and to build correspondingly conspiratorial structures hindered inner-party democracy; instead, the SDAPR "duplicated essential features of the embattled state". In accordance with the party statutes, Lenin was appointed another CC member by the members of the Central Committee (CC) at the end of 1903 and elected to the CC by the III Party Congress in London at the beginning of 1905, but left the CC again at the end of 1905.

The party congress also saw the secession of the General Jewish Workers' League from the SDAPR. This resulted from the League's demand for autonomy within the party. Lenin's group in particular opposed this demand, arguing that it was national policy and thus incompatible with the principles of the SDAPR.

Programmatically, however, both wings of the party were in agreement: it saw itself as a Marxist party that wanted to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat after a revolution of the industrial workers, which would lead to a classless society. The only problem was that, according to Marx's historical materialism, a bourgeois revolution would have to precede the proletarian one, eliminating the remnants of feudalism. But the propertied bourgeoisie was still very weak in numbers in the tsarist empire at the turn of the century, and was not at all opposed to the regime. The SDAPR thus found itself in the paradoxical situation of holding the stirrup to the bourgeoisie, which it actually regarded as the class enemy. The peasants, who constituted the vast majority of the population of agrarian Russia, were of only secondary ideological interest to the party. The peasants were to be favored with the return of the so-called "cut pieces," the land that village communities had lost through enclosure since the abolition of serfdom. This is how the decree on land was later implemented after the October Revolution.