The Provisional Revolutionary Government
and Local Organs of Revolutionary Authority

Whereas:

(1) in developing into armed struggle, the revolutionary movement against the autocratic government has so far taken the form of sporadic local insurrections;

(2) in this open struggle, the elements of the local population that are capable of fighting resolutely against the old regime (almost exclusively the proletariat and the advanced sections of the petty bourgeoisie) have been compelled to set up organisations that in practice have been embryonic forms of a new revolutionary authority—the Soviets of Workers' Deputies in St. Petersburg, Moscow and other cities, the Soviets of Soldiers' Deputies at Vladivostok, Krasnoyarsk and elsewhere, the railwaymens' committees in Siberia and in the South, the peasant committees in Saratov Gubernia, the town revolutionary committees in Novorossiisk and other towns, and lastly, the elected village bodies in the Caucasus and in the Baltic Provinces;

(3) in keeping with the initial, rudimentary form of the insurrection, these bodies were just as sporadic, haphazard, irresolute in their activities, and lacked the support of an organised armed force of the revolution, and were therefore doomed to fall at the very first offensive operations of the counter-revolutionary armies;

(4) only a provisional revolutionary government, as the organ of a victorious insurrection, can completely crush all resistance by reaction, ensure complete freedom for election agitation, convene on the basis of universal, equal and direct suffrage by secret ballot a constituent assembly capable of really establishing the sovereignty of the people and putting into effect the minimum social and economic demands of the proletariat;

We are of the opinion, and propose that the Congress should agree:

(1) that in order to complete the revolution, the urgent task now confronting the proletariat is, jointly with the revolutionary democrats, to help to unite the insurrection, and to set up an organ that will unite it, in the shape of a provisional revolutionary government;

(2) that one of the conditions for the successful fulfilment of the functions of the revolutionary government is the establishment, in all the towns and village communities that have joined the insurrection, of organs of revolutionary local self-government, elected on the basis of universal, equal and direct suffrage by secret ballot;

(3) that the participation of delegates of our Party in the provisional revolutionary government jointly with the revolutionary bourgeois democrats is permissible depending on the alignment of forces, and must formally be made conditional on control of these delegates by the Party and, in substance, on their upholding the independent interests of the working class and staunchly maintaining the independence of the Social-Democratic Party, which strives for the complete socialist revolution and is therefore relentlessly hostile to all bourgeois parties;

(4) that, irrespective of whether it will be possible for Social-Democrats to participate in the provisional revolutionary government or not, propaganda must be carried on among the broadest possible sections of the proletariat to explain that the armed proletariat, guided by the Social- Democratic Party, should bring constant pressure to bear upon the provisional government, with a view to protecting, consolidating and enlarging the gains of the revolution.