10th Congress

Tenth Congress of the RCP (b). March 8 — March 16, 1921

The tenth congress of the RCP (b) was held in Moscow on March 8-16, 1921. The congress was attended by 717 delegates with a casting vote and 418 with an advisory vote, representing 732,521 party members.

According to the report of the credentials committee, 694 delegates with decisive votes passed through the commission, 296 people with an advisory committee. The list of delegates, compiled on the basis of questionnaires by the Statistical Department of the Central Committee, includes 690 delegates with a decisive vote (Kamenev, Lenin, Stalin, and other delegates are not on this list) and 248 with an advisory vote. The lists of delegates with a casting vote and an advisory vote, preserved in the archives of the 10th Congress, include 724 and 449 people, respectively, with some names on both lists.

The Tenth Congress of the RCP (B) took place in a difficult historical situation of the transition from an aggravated civil war to peaceful economic construction, when the party that victoriously ended the civil war faced with all its urgency the question of strengthening the alliance of the working class with the main mass of the peasantry, the question of ways and the forms of building socialism in our country. The Minutes of the X Congress were for the first time "published by the editorial committee of the Congress in 1921 (The Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party - verbatim record on March 8-16. Moscow. State Publishing House. 1921).

The Tenth Congress in the history of our Party, in the history of its struggle to strengthen the dictatorship of the proletariat and to build socialism, is of world-wide historical significance.

The congress took place in a difficult historical situation of the transition from an aggravated civil war to peaceful economic construction, when the party, which victoriously ended the civil war, faced with all its urgency the question of strengthening the alliance of the working class with the main masses of the peasantry, the question of the ways and forms of building socialism in our country. ...

On the eve of the congress and at the congress itself, the party carried out a decisive battle for its unity and for its Leninist line against a number of opposition factional groupings (Trotsky's group, Bukharin's "buffer" group adjoining it, the "Workers' Opposition" group, the "Democratic Centralism" group, etc.) P.). In the course of this struggle, the overwhelming majority of the Party rallied around the Leninist line, around the Leninist core of the Central Committee. The congress, according to the Central Committee's report, recognized its policy on the whole as correct and, taking into account the experience of the trade union discussion, and in order to further ensure the Bolshevik monolithicity and strengthen the ties of the Central Committee with the broad proletarian masses, elected a new composition of the Central Committee, introducing into it workers who had been nominated for mass party work ...

The Tenth Congress adopted a number of major decisions of world historical significance.

According to the report of V. I. Lenin, the congress adopted a decision to replace the surplus appropriation system with a tax in kind, which meant the transition from "war communism", "forced by war and ruin", to a new economic policy, the only correct economic policy of the victorious proletariat, designed to destroy classes, to building socialism. According to JV Stalin's report, the congress generalized the experience of the victorious proletariat in the national question - one of the most important questions of the proletarian revolution - and outlined the further tasks of the national policy of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The congress sanctioned the establishment of new - as a result of the collapse of the intentional policy of imperialism - "peaceful" trade relations of the Soviet Republic to the "capitalist encirclement" and approved the foundations of the foreign policy of the Soviet power, the policy of trade treaties, agreements rf concessions, which is essentially "the continuation of the war only in a different form "(Lenin). The congress summed up the results of the discussion about the trade unions and the overwhelming majority took the Leninist point of view on the role and tasks of the trade unions, proceeding from Lenin's characterization of them as a school of communism, as the main driving belt through which the party contacts the working class.

The changed historical situation and the tasks facing the dictatorship of the proletariat demanded, above all, the strengthening of the party as the main instrument of the dictatorship. On the issues of party building, the congress adopted a number of important decisions on the development of intra-party democracy, on raising the ideological and political level of party members, on bringing them to active participation in general party life, on strengthening the party's influence on the non-party masses and on bringing the party into combat readiness to fight the forces of counter-revolution and with biases within the party. According to the report of V.I. Lenin, the congress recognized the propaganda of the ideas of the syndicalist and anarchist deviation (Shlyapnikov and others) as incompatible with belonging to the party and made a special decision on the unity of the party, strictly forbidding the creation of factions and groupings within our party - a decision of tremendous importance for the entire subsequent struggle of the party for Leninist unity.

The party adopted all these decisions at the 10th Congress under the leadership of V.I. Lenin at the most important historical stage of the revolution - the stage of the victorious exit from the civil war in the firm belief that "the communist system, the way of life can be created by the proletariat that won the war" (Lenin and) that "a socialist revolution can not only begin in a backward country, but also be crowned with success, move forward, serving as an example for the capitalistically developed countries" (Stalin). Under the leadership of Lenin's faithful comrade-in-arms and his best disciple, the leader of the party Stalin, the party unswervingly and consistently carried out Lenin's instructions and directives, fought resolutely for the Leninist line, for the purity and development of the theory of Leninism against various anti-party deviations and groupings. Having summed up the results at the joint plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission in January 1933 of its victorious struggle for the Leninist line, for the completion of the first five-year plan, the party enters the second five-year plan, firmly and confidently moving towards the fulfillment of the greatest historical task of building a classless socialist society.

The Minutes of the X Congress were for the first time "published by the editorial committee of the Congress in 1921 (the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party - 'verbatim report March 8-16. Moscow. State Publishing House. 1921).

This edition is based on the text of the first edition of the minutes of the X Congress, carefully verified with the main stenographic record kept at the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, which was kept at the Congress, edited (except for a few passages) and approved by the editorial committee of the Congress. The text of this edition is more complete than the first edition. However, in this edition, as in the first, there are no minutes of closed meetings since no transcripts or secretarial notes were kept at these meetings. The text of speeches by a number of speakers contains amendments found in the archives of the Tenth Congress and proposed by them at the Congress, but not included in the first edition. and restored from resolutions, archival materials, etc., the full text of certain passages, documents cited by the speakers, or speeches and brochures, each time with a corresponding reservation in a footnote. Draft resolutions that were not read out textually at the congress, but defended at it on behalf of the Central Committee or representatives of factions, were included in Section II of the Materials of the Congress. In a few cases, the full text of a paragraph of a draft resolution quoted in excerpts is provided in a footnote (for the convenience of the reader only).

All inaccuracies of a factual nature were corrected in footnotes, and only in some cases that did not raise doubts were corrections made to the text itself. Unclear or questionable passages in the transcripts were accompanied in the notes by a reference to the original. Spelling errors and obvious misprints both in the text and in the documents were corrected without reservation. Introduced, stylistically absolutely necessary, individual words, as well as the initials of some speakers are included in square brackets.

The Appendices section included: the most important of the draft resolutions that appeared in the pre-congress discussion, but were not defended at the congress, and other pre-congress documents, notices of the congress and greetings to the congress (in the first edition of these annexes are not available), a list of organizations and questionnaires.

N. Lukina-Bukharina carried out the preparation for publication of this publication. May 1, 1933