1912

Prague Conference

Lenin’s Prague Conference opens

Two Mensheviks attended the meeting routinely described as the moment the Bolsheviks broke away from the Mensheviks.

January 5 and January 18, the same morning

The Sixth All-Russia Conference of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party opened in Prague, Austria-Hungary, on 18 January 1912 in the Gregorian calendar — 5 January under the Julian calendar then used in Russia.

Vladimir Lenin represented the editorial board of the party's central newspaper, opened the meeting and drafted its principal resolutions. The Russian Organising Commission had convened it after tsarist repression and factional conflict left the RSDLP Central Committee effectively defunct.

The gathering was overwhelmingly Bolshevik, but two "pro-Party" Mensheviks also attended.

It claimed the party rather than leaving it

Lenin's delegates did not announce that they were quitting the RSDLP. The conference constituted itself as the general RSDLP conference and the party's supreme authority.

Its resolution on liquidationism said the Nasha Zarya and Dyelo Zhizni group had placed itself outside the party — a specified group, not every person identified as a Menshevik.

A conference resolution claimed to have united more than twenty organisations.

One day, or thirteen

18 January was only the opening. The session ran to 30 January Gregorian, and the decisions attributed to "the Prague Conference" accumulated across it: a new Bolshevik-controlled Central Committee, a Russian Bureau and revised organisational rules.

Historians commonly treat this as the effective creation of a separate Bolshevik party organisation, while noting that Lenin's organisation kept using the RSDLP name and that Menshevik and other anti-Lenin groups held their own conference in Vienna in August 1912.

The factions that had emerged in 1903 reunited organisationally at the 1906 Unification Congress, and efforts to maintain common party bodies continued through 1910.

Sources

Researched 24 Aug 2026 5 sources not yet audited Date corrected

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →

Date corrected. The research places this at 1912-01-18.

What the sources leave uncertain

January 18 was only the opening day. The resolutions and organizational changes attributed to the “Prague Conference” accumulated over its January 18–30 Gregorian session.
The calendar conversion is not disputed: contemporary Russian dates were January 5–17 Julian, equivalent to January 18–30 Gregorian.
Interpretation is contested. The conference called itself the supreme authority of the existing RSDLP and its formal resolution targeted “liquidators,” not every Menshevik. Historians nevertheless commonly regard the 1912 parallel Bolshevik and Menshevik conferences as producing two effective parties.