405
23rd Congress March-April 1966 Moscow
4620
323
24th Congress March-April 1971 Moscow
4740
223
25th Congress February-March 1976 Moscow
4998
non-voting 26th Congress February-March 1981 Moscow
4994
non-voting 27th Congress February-March 1986 Moscow ca. 5000 non-voting 19th Conference June 1988 Moscow
4976
non-voting 28th Congress July 1990 Moscow
4863
non-voting SOURCE: Courtesy of the author. first in 1905 to the nineteenth in 1988, were smaller and less authoritative gatherings, usually held midway in the interval between congresses. Like the congresses, they issued policy declarations in the form of resolutions, but did not conduct elections to the top party leadership.
Before the Revolution of 1917 and for the first few years thereafter, party congresses and conferences were marked by lively debate. The transcripts of those proceedings, published at the time and republished during the 1930s, are important sources concerning the problems the country faced and the viewpoints of the various party leaders and factions. With the ascendancy of Josef Stalin, however, party congresses and conferences became creatures of the central party leadership. As
1137
described by the concept of the circular flow of power, local officials who were de facto appointed by the center handpicked their delegations to the national congress, which in turn endorsed the makeup of the Central Committee and the central leadership itself, thus closing the circle.
The meeting that is traditionally considered the First Party Congress was an ephemeral gathering in Minsk in March 1898 of nine Marxist under-grounders who managed to proclaim the establishment of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party (RSDWP) before they were arrested by the tsarist police. Before the Revolution, there were four more congresses and numerous conferences, distinguished by struggles between the Bolshevik and Menshevik wings of the party that led up to their ultimate split. The Second Party Congress, convened in Brussels in July 1903 with fifty-seven participants but forced to move its proceedings to London under threat of arrest, was the first true congress of the RSDWP. It saw the outbreak of the Bolshevik-Menshevik schism when Vladimir Lenin tried to impose his definition of party membership as a core of professional revolutionaries rather than the broad democratic constituency favored by the Menshevik leader Yuly Martov.
The next congress, later counted by the Communists as the Third, was an all-Bolshevik meeting in London in April 1905, with just twenty-four voting delegates plus invited guests. The First Party Conference (as counted by the communists) was a gathering in December 1905 of forty Bolsheviks and a lone Menshevik in the city of Tammerfors (Tampere) in Russian-ruled Finland. They endorsed reunification with the Mensheviks and supported boycotting the tsar’s new Duma (over Lenin’s objections). At this meeting, Stalin made his initial appearance at the national level and first met Lenin face-to-face.
Following the abortive revolutionary events of 1905, the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks came together in Stockholm in April 1906 for the Fourth Party Congress (by the Bolshevik enumeration), styled the Unification Congress, with a Menshevik majority among the 112 voting delegates. The two factions met together again in London in April and May 1907; this Fifth Party Congress was the last embracing both wings, and the last before the Revolution. Small meetings later considered by the Bolsheviks as their Second through Fifth Party Conferences were held between 1906 and 1909, mostly in Finland, with Bolshevik, Menshevik, and other Social-Democratic groups represented. These gatherings continued to revolve around the questions of party unity and parliamentary tactics.
In 1912, going their separate ways, the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks held separate party conferences. Twelve Bolsheviks plus four nonvoting delegates (including Lenin) met in Prague in January of that year for what they counted as the Sixth Party Conference. Excluding not only the Menshe-viks but also the Left Bolsheviks denounced by Lenin after the Fifth Party Conference in 1909, this gathering established an organizational structure of Lenin’s loyalists (including Grigory Zinoviev), to whom Stalin was added soon afterwards as a co-opted member of the Central Committee. The Sixth Party Conference was the real beginning of the Bolshevik Party as an independent entity under Lenin’s strict control.
FROM THE REVOLUTION TO WORLD WAR II
Shortly after the fall of the tsarist regime in the February Revolution of 1917 (March, New Style), but before Lenin’s return to Russia, the Bolsheviks convened an All-Russian Meeting of Party Workers of some 120 delegates. Contrary to the stand Lenin was shortly to take, this March Conference, of which Stalin was one of the leaders, leaned toward cooperation with the new Provisional Government and reunification with the Mensheviks. For this reason, the March Conference was expunged from official communist history and was never counted in the numbering.
A few weeks later the Bolsheviks met more formally in Petrograd, with 133 voting delegates and eighteen nonvoting, for what was officially recorded as the Seventh or April Party Conference. On this occasion, by a bare majority, Lenin persuaded the party to reject the Provisional Government and to oppose continued Russian participation in World War I. Unlike postrevolutionary party conferences, the Seventh elected a new Central Committee, with nine members, including Lev Kamenev and Yakov Sverdlov along with Lenin, Zi-noviev, and Stalin.
The Sixth Party Congress, all-Bolshevik, with 157 voting delegates and 110 nonvoting, was held in the Vyborg working-class district of Petrograd
1138
in August 1917 under semi-clandestine conditions, after the Provisional Government tried to suppress the Bolsheviks following the abortive uprising of the July Days. Lenin and other leaders were in hiding or in jail at the time, and Stalin and Sverdlov were in charge. The congress welcomed Leon Trotsky and other left-wing Mensheviks into the Bolshevik Party, and Trotsky was included in the expanded Central Committee of twenty-one. However, the gathering could hardly keep up with events; it made no plans directed toward the Bolshevik seizure of power that came soon afterwards.
Four congresses followed the Bolshevik takeover in quick succession, all facing emergency circumstances of
