Published:
Speeches, reports, resolutions, and draft resolutions first published in 1905 in the book The Third Regular Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. Full Text of the Proceedings.
Published by the Central Committee, Geneva.
Published according to the text of the book The Third Regular Congress of the R.S.D.L.P., 1905 edition, and the manuscript text.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Foreign Languages Publishing House,
1962,
Moscow,
Volume 8,
pages 359-424.
Translated: Bernard Isaacs and The Late Isidor Lasker
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Public Domain:
Lenin Internet Archive
(2003).
You may freely copy, distribute,
display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and
commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
Archive” as your source.
• README
[1] The Third Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. was held in London between April 12 and 27 (April 25 and May 10), 1905. The Congress was organised and convened by the Bolsheviks under the direction of Lenin. It was the first Bolshevik congress.
The agenda, drawn up by Lenin and approved by the Congress, consisted of the following items: (I) Report of the Organising Committee. (II) Questions of Tactics: 1) the armed uprising; 2) attitude towards the government’s policy on the eve and at the moment of the revolution (this point was devoted to two questions: a. attitude towards the government’s policy on the eve of the revolution b. the provisional revolutionary government); 3) attitude towards the peasant movement. (III) Organisational Questions: 4) relations between workers and intellectuals in the Party organisations; 5) the Party Rules. (IV) Attitude Towards Other Parties and Trends: 6) attitude towards the breakaway group of the R.S.D.L.P.; 7) attitude towards the non-Russian Social-Democratic organisations; 8) attitude towards the liberals; 9) practical agreements with the Socialists-Revolutionaries. (V) Internal Questions of Party Life: 10) propaganda and agitation. (VI) Delegates’ Reports: 11) report of the Central Committee; 12) reports of the delegates of the local committees. (VII) Elections: 13) elections; 14) procedure for publishing the resolutions and the proceedings of the Congress and for the assumption of office by the newly elected functionaries.
On all the basic issues dealt with by the Third Congress Lenin had written the draft resolutions, which he substantiated in articles published in Vperyod prior to the Congress. Lenin spoke at the Congress on the question of the armed uprising, on the participation of Social-Democrats in the provisional revolutionary government, on the attitude towards the peasant movement, on the Party Rules, and on a number of other questions. The proceedings of the Congress record 138 speeches and motions made by Lenin.
The Congress amended the Party Rules: a) it adopted Lenin’s wording of Clause 1; b) it defined precisely the rights of the Central Committee and its relations with the local committees; c) it modified the organisational structure of the Party’s central bodies: in place of the three centres (the Central Committee, the Central Organ, and the Council of the Party) the Congress established a single competent party centre—the Central Committee.
On the work and the significance of the Third Party Congress see Lenin’s article “The Third Congress” (pp. 442-49 of this volume) and his book Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution.
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