Delivered: April 24–29, 1917
Published: [See end of each document.].
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1964, Moscow, Volume 24, pages 225-313.
Translated: Isaacs Bernard
Transcription: Anonymous
HTML Markup: B. Baggins and D. Walters
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive 1999 (2005). 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.
[1] The Conference was attended by 133 delegates with a vote and 18 delegates with a consultative voice, representing 80,000 members of the Party. It was the first legal conference of the Bolshevik Party to be held in Russia, and was equal, in point of significance, to a party congress.
The Conference discussed the following questions: (1) The current situation (the war and the Provisional Government, etc.). (2) The peace conference. (3) The attitude to the Soviets. (4) Revision of the Party programme. (5) The situation in the International and the tasks of the Party. (6) Unity of the Social-Democratic internationalist organisations. (7) The agrarian question. (8) The national question. (9) The Constituent Assembly. (10) The organisational question. (11) Reports from the regions. (12) Election of the Central Committee. Lenin made reports and spoke on all the main questions on the agenda. All his speeches were based on the April Theses. Lenin was opposed at the Conference by Kamenev and Rykov. They declared, with the Mensheviks, that Russia was not yet ripe for a socialist revolution. Lenin exposed the capitulatory, anti-Party position of Kamenev and Rykov, who denied the possibility of socialism being victorious in Russia. Lenin also scathingly criticise Pyatakov, who opposed the Party’s policy on the national question and who, already during the war, had adopted together with Bukharin a national-chauvinist stand. Pyatakov and Bukharin were opposed to the right of nations to self-determination if that right included secession. This point of view meant, in effect, refusal on the part of the proletariat to utilise the revolution’s reserve forces as represented by the various nationalities, and doomed the revolution to defeat. Lenin strongly condemned Zinoviev’s speech in favour of the Bolsheviks co-operating with the Zimmerwaldists and against the organisation of a new, Communist, International.
The April Conference unanimously adopted Lenin’s draft resolutions on the war, on the attitude towards the Provisional Government, on the current situation, on the revision of the Party programme, on the agrarian question, on the Soviets, on the national question and others. The Conference elected a Central Committee headed by Lenin. The decisions of the Conference showed the working class and all the working people that struggle for the victory of the socialist revolution was the only way to get rid of exploitation, to lead the country out of the war and save it from ruin and the threat of enslavement by the foreign imperialists. The Conference equipped the Party with a plan of action for developing the bourgeois-democratic revolution into a socialist revolution.
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