Illegal VI. The Congress of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Russia (RSDDS) took place in this house from 18 to 30 January 1912 (sometimes nicknamed the Prague Conference). The congress is used by all 18 delegates, which were except for two representatives of the Bolshevik faction, led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The host of all was the Czechoslovak Social Democratic Workers’ Party.

Bolsheviks against the Mensheviks

The division of the Russian Social Democrats into “Mensheviks” and “Bolsheviks” took its origins at the party’s congress in London in 1903, where a majority (Russian “Bolsheviks”) of delegates joined Lenin’s view that a change in conditions in Russia but that this change should take place at once in the form of a violent revolution, ie a professionally organized and systematically prepared coup. The minority, led by Julius Osipovich Martov, emerged from the minority, which was for a more moderate path.

He escaped punishment. The sadistic investigator Grebeníček was saved by a lazy judge

When in January 1905, after the so-called Bloody Sunday, there were a number of strikes, demonstrations and riots that escalated into the first revolution, Martov stood by the Russian side of the Bolsheviks and supported the revolution, but in 1907 the two factions separated again. In 1911, relatively shortly before the Prague Conference, Martov published two pamphlets in which he openly criticized the Bolshevik practices – one called “Saviors or Destroyers?”, The other “Who and How Destroyed the RSDDS.”

Martov pointed out that a “Bolshevik center” had formed within the party, a conspiratorial organization not run by official party bodies, which he said had spoken out against social democracy and often used criminal means to enforce its intentions.

One hundred years since the Red Light above Kladno. At that time, the republic was still defending itself against the Communists

“The more the ‘professional revolutionaries’ of the Bolshevik Center became self-interested and isolated from the real workers’ movement, the more they managed to turn their supporters into a submissive clientele lacking an elementary democratic feeling, and the more they began to exercise their conspiracy skills not in the fight against the police, but in the fight against their opponents in the workers’ movement, “wrote Martov in the first of the two brochures.

According to him, the Social Democratic Workers ‘Party of Russia thus disintegrated into “those who want an underground struggle and those who want an open workers’ movement.” Lenin categorically condemned both of Martov’s pamphlets.

In Prague under supervision

The predominance of the Bolsheviks at the Prague conference was reflected not only in the fact that Lenin chaired the conference (but he spoke under the pseudonym Mayer because the whole conference was illegal), but also in the election of the party’s central committee, which the Bolsheviks completely controlled.

In addition to Lenin, it included Filippo Isaevich Goloshokkin, later chairman of the Central Committee of the St. Petersburg Bolsheviks, Grigory Zinoviev, later head of the Comintern liquidated in 1936 by Stalin, Grigory Konstantinovich Ordzhonikidze, another politician who later paid for close relations with Stalin when he was forced to do so. 1936 1937 to suicide, Suren Spandaryan, Armenian revolutionary and literary critic, and finally Roman Vaclavovich Malinovsky, a dual figure who at the time was already acting as a spy of the Tsarist Police. She arrested him in 1910 and the promise of cooperation was a condition of his release.

He helped unleash terror, it swept him away. The head of the NKVD Jagoda was cut off by a bloody shrimp

Thanks to Malinovsky, the Tsarist police always had detailed information about how and where the conference took place and what they were delegating. It is worth noting that Martov began to suspect Malinovsky and in 1913 he openly accused him of delivering, but Lenin defended his collaborator. Malinovsky then went into exile, from where he returned only after 1918. Shortly afterwards, he was again accused of collaborating with the Security Guard, this time Zinoviev, and this time he failed – he was arrested, sentenced to death and shot.

The Prague conference was the last at which both parties, the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, sat down at a joint negotiating table. However, the contradictions soon proved to be insurmountable. For example, the Bolshevik majority under Lenin’s leadership approved a resolution that excluded the so-called liquidators, which was just another name for the Mensheviks under Martian leadership. It was a harbinger of the party’s impending complete control of Lenin’s clique.

Lenin and Prague

Lenin’s visit to Prague was not limited to the People’s House. Thanks to the choirmaster of the National Theater Opera Choir František Pick, the delegates obtained tickets to one performance, which they gladly used, and also found time for the sights of Prague. It was also said that Lenin had a cold in Prague when he went secretly skating on the Vltava at night.

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After 1948, Lenin’s stay in Prague became part of a new communist cult. The People’s House was therefore rebuilt in 1951 and 1952 by architects Jan Feigl and Jindřich Halabala to the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Museum, and the aforementioned Lenin bust by sculptor Jan Lauda, ​​a memorial plaque commemorating the conference and six revolutionary attic fighters were added to its façade. In 20 halls, 17,000 “works of art in memory of the people” were erected, and the hall in which Lenin conducted the conference was also opened.