NOTES
[104] The article "Forms of the Working-Class Movement (The Lockout and Marxist Tactics) " was written in connection with the lockout declared by St. Petersburg factory owners on March 20 (April 2), 1914.
In March 1914 mass cases of poisoning occurred among the women employed at the Treugolnik Mills in St. Petersburg, evoking general indignation and strikes of protest on the part of the workers in the capital. The St. Petersburg factory owners retorted by a lockout, as many as 70,000 workers being thrown out in a single day. The aim was to provoke the workers to a mass strike, the better to be able to make short work of the labour movement. But, led by the Bolsheviks, the workers refused to be provoked. In view of the lockout, the declaration of a mass strike was considered inadvisable, and
Pravda called the workers to other forms of struggle, such as mass meetings at the factories and revolutionary demonstrations in the streets. The St. Petersburg Committee of the R.S.D.L.P. issued a leaflet calling upon the workers to take part in a demonstration to be held on April 4, 1914, the second anniversary of the Lena shootings.
On the appointed day the newspaper Put Pravdy came out with an editorial by Lenin -- "Forms of the Working-Class Movement". This article, in a form adapted to the conditions of the
page 588
existing censorship, urged the workers to carry out the decisions of the Cracow meeting of the C.C. of the R.S.D.L.P. held jointly with Party workers, which mentioned the need to discover "new forms of struggle against lockouts" and to replace political strikes "by revolutionary meetings and revolutionary street demonstrations". Lenin laid special emphasis on the importance of revolutionary demonstrations as a time-tested form of struggle.
The workers responded to the Party's appeal with a powerful revolutionary demonstration, which was reported by all the bourgeois newspapers. Reporting the demonstration, the liquidationist
Severnaya Rabochaya Gazeta made no mention of the leaflets distributed by the St. Petersburg Committee, and even attacked Lenin's article "Forms of the Working-Class Movement". At a time when the workers were engaged in a sharp struggle against the capitalists, the liquidators called upon the workers to "calm down" and attacked the Bolsheviks for organising the revolutionary demonstration. Lenin called the liquidators' behaviour monstrous, and described their attitude to the Fourth of April demonstration as a typical instance of wrecking illegal work. In the report of the C.C. of the R.S.D.L.P. to the Brussels Conference, Lenin devoted a good deal of space to exposing the activities of the liquidators. (See pp. 495-535 of this volume.) [Transcriber's Note: See Lenin's "Report of the C.C. of the R.S.D.L.P. to the Brussels Conference and Instructions to the C.C. Delegation". --
DJR]
[p. 209]
[105] The reference is to the
Conference of the C.C. of the R.S.D.L.P. with Party workers, called, for reasons of secrecy, the "February" meeting. It was held in Cracow on December 26, 1912-January 1, 1913 (January 8-14, 1913), and was attended by Lenin, N. K. Krupskaya, the Bolshevik deputies to the Fourth Duma A. Y. Badayev, G. I. Petrovsky, N. R. Shagov, and others. The illegal Party organisations of St. Petersburg, the Moscow region, the South, the Urals and the Caucasus were represented at the meeting. In the chair was Lenin, who made reports on the subjects "The Revolutionary Upswing, Strikes and the Tasks of the Party", "The Attitude to the Liquidators and Unity" (the texts of these reports are missing), drafted and edited all the resolutions, and wrote the "Report" of the meeting by the C.C. of the R.S.D.L.P.
The Conference adopted decisions on the most important issues of the working-class movement, namely: the tasks of the Party in connection with the new revolutionary upswing and the growing strike movement, the building-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.
The Conference's decisions played an important part in strengthening the Party and its unity, in extending and consolidating the Party's contacts with the masses, and evolving new forms of Party work adapted to the rising wave of the working-class movement.
[p. 211]
[106] See Note 40.
   
[Note 40: Insurance campaign refers to the struggle which developed in connection with the elections to the insurance agencies. The campaign started in the autumn of 1912 following the introduction by the tsarist government on June 23, 1912, of a workers' insurance law affecting only twenty per cent of the workers. The Bolsheviks used these elections for revolutionary propaganda and launched a campaign for the winning over of legal workers' organisations and legal workers' associations. By combining legal and illegal activities, the Bolsheviks succeeded in winning influence in the insurance bodies. Elections to the Insurance Board were held in March 1914, and a workers' group on insurance affairs was formed under the Board, which recognised as its official organ the Bolshevik journal
Voprosy Strakhovania (Insurance Questions ).]
[p. 211]