Conference of RSDLP Sections Abroad

held on Feb. 14–19 (Feb. 27-Mar. 4), 1915, in Bern, under the leadership of V. I. Lenin. Called during World War I (1914–18), it assumed the importance of an all-party conference.

The Conference of RSDLP Sections Abroad was attended by representatives of the Central Committee of the RSDLP, of the central organ (the newspaper Sotsialdemokrat), and of the Geneva Social Democratic organization, by delegates from the Paris, Zurich, Geneva, Bern, Lausanne, and London sections, as well as from the Baugy group (Baugy, Switzerland), and by delegates of the RSDLP Organization Abroad. The main point on the agenda, on which Lenin delivered a report, was the war and the party’s tasks in connection with it. The report and the resolutions of the conference set forth the tasks and tactics of the Bolsheviks under the conditions created by the imperialist war and showed means of transforming the war into a civil war.

N. I. Bukharin and A. A. Troianovskii, the leaders of the Baugy group, opposed Lenin’s slogan urging that socialists favor the defeat of their own countries’ bourgeois governments in the imperialist war. However, the participants in the conference supported the resolutions submitted by Lenin. In its resolutions on the collapse of the Second International and the struggle to form a Third International, the conference analyzed the social and economic roots of opportunism, which had caused the downfall of the Second International, and urged the formation of a new, Third International.

The Conference of RSDLP Sections Abroad defined the Bolsheviks’ tactics toward the Socialist Revolutionaries, the Menshevik-Liquidators, the Bund, and several other groups, emphasizing that the party as an organization must decisively separate itself from the social chauvinists. In addition, it censured manifestations of defensism and left-sectarian distortions in questions of war, peace, and revolution. A special resolution urged the party’s organizations abroad to assist its central institutions in uniting all Bolshevik sympathizers who were living in foreign countries at that time, to give financial support to the Central Committee and the central organ, and to strengthen the ties of the central institutions of the party with Russia. A new Committee of the Organization Abroad was elected at the conference.