Site of the First Congress of the RSDLP

The building where the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party held its founding congress in 1898

A nondescript 19th-century house on Vulitsa Lenina marks the location where, in March 1898, nine delegates gathered secretly to found the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party — the organisation that would eventually split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks and that the Bolshevik wing would use to seize power in October 1917.

The building was chosen precisely because Minsk was then a relatively obscure provincial city where the tsarist secret police might not expect revolutionary activity. The meeting lasted three days before dispersing, and most delegates were arrested shortly after by the Okhrana. The historical significance is entirely retrospective — at the time it must have seemed a fairly unremarkable gathering of political dissidents.

The house is now a small museum. However basic the displays, the gap between the modest building and its world-historical consequences is striking. Nearby Vulitsa Lenina is named for the man who was not there.

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A story
The nine delegates who met secretly in this house in March 1898 — in what was then a Jewish merchant's home — would have been astonished to know that their tiny clandestine organisation would, nineteen years later, overthrow the Russian Empire and create the Soviet Union. Lenin himself was not present at the founding congress; he was in Siberian exile at the time. The delegates who were there were arrested within weeks.