One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

No book in the Marxist canon has been more relied upon and less read.

It is remembered as the founding charter of the disciplined party - the text that supposedly licenses a single line, a single centre and unquestioning obedience. What it actually is is narrower and stranger: a furious, forensic, chapter-by-chapter reconstruction of the minutes of one small emigre congress, written by a man who had just lost control of his own newspaper.

The occasion was the Second Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, held in Brussels and London in 1903, at which the party that was meant to be unified split instead - into a majority and a minority, bolshinstvo and menshinstvo, hence Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. The break came, as Lenin insists, not over programme or tactics but over organisation: first over the wording of the first paragraph of the Rules, on whether a member need merely support the party or must belong to one of its organisations, and then over the composition of the Iskra editorial board and the Central Committee.

On the Rules Lenin lost; on the boards he won, only to see the Mensheviks recapture Iskra soon after. He wrote as the aggrieved and outvoted party, hammering at a paper now in his opponents' hands.

The gap between what the pamphlet is and what it was later made to mean is the whole story.

Translated by Abraham Fineberg and Naomi Jochel.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.