V. I. Lenin

Resolution of the Cracow Meeting of the R.S.D.L.P. Central Committee with Party Functionaries{1}

ON THE REORGANISATION AND WORK OF THE PRAVDA EDITORIAL BOARD


Published: First published in 1958 in the magazine Voprosy Istorii No. 11. Printed from a copy written in N. K. Krupskaya’s hand.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1977, Moscow, Volume 41, pages 272.2-273.
Translated: Yuri Sdobnikov
Transcription\Markup: R. Cymbala
Copyleft: V. I. Lenin Internet Archive (www.marxists.org) © 2004 Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.  


1. The Editorial Board lacks consistency of Party principle. The Editorial Board is strongly advised to see to the stricter observance and implementation of all Party decisions. Its proceedings must be conducted, on legal lines.

The C.C. is taking steps to reorganise the Editorial Board.

2. The Editorial Board has failed to provide the necessary response to Party life among Social-Democratic workers in St. Petersburg. Reports or mention of Party resolutions must he unconditionally legal in form.

3. The Editorial Board must give more attention to explaining the error and harm of liquidationism in general and of the sermons of Luch in particular.

4. The Editorial Board must give more attention to campaigning for subscriptions and collections among the workers.

5. The Bolshevik section of the deputies must take part in the paper’s broad editorial collegium and organise systematic and persistent participation in the literary and economic side of the business.

6. The Editorial Board must be especially circumspect in its attitude to its Vperyod contributors to avoid hampering the rapprochement that has begun and to prevent the adoption of an erroneous principled line.

7. Every effort must be made to reduce publishing costs and to set up a small governing collegium (running the whole business) on which there must be at least one representative of the Six.{2}

There is need for a similar governing collegium (economic commission) on which one of the Six must be seated, to handle the economic side of the business.

8. Articles which the C.C. considers obligatory for insertion must be carried immediately (under a code name).{3}

9. While strictly maintaining the newspaper’s legal character, it is necessary to recruit for active participation both in literary work on the newspaper and in its distribution workers’ societies, leagues, committees, groups and individuals in St. Petersburg and in the provinces.

10. Support should be given to the initiative of the group of St. Petersburg Social-Democrats in the publication of a general trade union organ of anti-liquidationist orientation, carefully verifying what is being done on the spot.

11. Measures must be taken to bring the literary and the economic side of the newspaper and the magazine{4} closer together.

12. The starting of a daily workers’ newspaper in Moscow as a branch of the St. Petersburg paper must be vigorously pursued. With this end in view, organisational connections should be established between the Moscow group and the three deputies of the Moscow Region.


Notes

{1} The meeting was held in Cracow from December 26, 1912, to January 1, 1913 (January 8 to 14, 1913). It was attended by V. I. Lenin, N. K. Krupskaya, J. V. Stalin and the Bolshevik deputies to the Fourth Duma, A. Y. Badayev, G. I. Petrovsky, N. R. Shagov, among others. The meeting was also attended by representatives of illegal Party organisations in St. Petersburg, Moscow Region, the South, the Urals and the Caucasus. It was chaired by Lenin, who gave the reports on “The Revolutionary Upswing, the Strikes and the Tasks of the Party” and “On the Attitude to Liquidationism and on Unity” (the text of the reports has not been preserved), and drafted and edited all the resolutions. He also wrote the R.S.D.L.P. Central Committee’s “Notification” about the meeting (see present edition, Vol. 18, pp. 449–55).

The meeting adopted, decisions on the most important aspects of the labour movement: the Party’s tasks in connection with the new revolutionary upsurge and the growth of the strike movement, the build-up of the illegal organisation, the work of the Social-Democratic group in the Duma, the insurance campaign, the Party press, the national Social-Democratic organisations, the struggle against liquidationism, and the unity of the proletarian party (see present edition, Vol. 15, pp. 456–66). The decisions were very important in consolidating the Party and its unity, in extending and strengthening the Party’s ties with the broad masses of working people and in working out new forms of Party work in the conditions of a mounting working-class movement. The resolutions of the Cracow meeting were approved by the R.S.D.L.P. Central Committee. p. 272

{2} A reference to the six Bolsheviks in the Fourth Duma (see Note 208). p. 273

{3} KKK was the code name used to mark articles for obligatory insertion in Pravda. In December 1913, the R.S.D.L.P. Central Committee reaffirmed the decision: “The resolution to the effect that articles marked with the three agreed letters shall be inserted at once and without changes remains in force” (Istorichesky Arkhiv No. 4, 1959, p. 42). p. 273

{4} A reference to the legal theoretical Bolshevik monthly Prosveshcheniye (Enlightenment) published in St. Petersburg from December 1911 to June 1914. It was set up on Lenin’s initiative in place of the Bolshevik journal Mysl (Thought), which had been dosed down by the tsarist government. The printings reached 5,000 copies. Lenin directed its publication from Paris, and then from   Cracow and Poronin. On the eve of the First World War, it was closed down by the tsarist government. In the autumn of 1917 its publication was resumed, but only one (double) issue appeared. p. 273


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