Southern Bureau of the Central Committee of the RSDLP

formed in Odessa in February 1904 by a directive of the foreign section of the Central Committee (CC) of the RSDLP and consisting of the Bolsheviks V. V. Vorovskii, I. Kh. Lalaiants, K. O. Levitskii, and P.I. Kuliabko.

The bureau maintained continuous contact with V. I. Lenin and was the rallying point of the Bolshevik organizations in southern Russia. It coordinated the work of the Odessa, Nikolaev, and Ekaterinoslav committees of the RSDLP and assisted several other RSDLP groups in the South by supplying party cadres and literature. The bureau had its own printing press. It made an important contribution by explaining to the RSDLP committees the true reasons for the intraparty disagreements after the Second Congress of the RSDLP. It fought for the convocation of the party’s third congress and against the Mensheviks and conciliationists, who had taken over the CC as well as the party’s central organ and Council and who opposed the convocation of the congress.

In July 1904 the Southern Bureau organized a conference of the southern committees of the RSDLP that called for convocation of the congress. In August 1904 the conciliationist CC disbanded the Southern Bureau for agitating in favor of the congress. This caused protests on the part of the local RSDLP organizations. The bureau continued to function as the Southern Bureau of Bolshevik Committees, or Southern Bureau of the Committees of the Majority; it participated in the founding of an all-Russian Bolshevik center—the Bureau of the Committees of the Majority—which convened a conference of the southern Bolshevik committees in September 1904.

After the Third Congress of the RSDLP (1905), the party’s Bolshevik CC charged G. M. Krzhizhanovskii, Z. P. Krzhizhanovskii, and A. M. Essen with reorganizing the Southern Bureau of the CC of the RSDLP in Kiev in order to direct the activities of the Bolshevik committees in the South during the Revolution of 1905–07. The new bureau, however, was unable to carry out its work; until January 1906, some of its functions were performed by the Bolshevik members of the Southern Technical Bureau of the CC of the RSDLP in Kiev, which had been organized to prepare an armed uprising. In January 1906 the Southern Technical Bureau was incorporated into the Southern Bureau of the united CC of the RSDLP, headed by the Bolsheviks. On Apr. 13 (26), 1906, the bureau’s members were arrested by the police.