The Hague Congress of 1872 occupies a special place in the history of the International Workers ' Association. He was to consolidate the ideological victory of Marxism in the First International and determine the ways of further development of the working-class movement. In the time that has elapsed since the Basel Congress of 1869, an event has taken place that was of great importance for the general Proletarian struggle and for the entire socialist movement. In the spring of 1871, the banner of the first proletarian revolution in the world, the Paris Commune, was flown for 72 days. There was a need to summarize its experience and make changes to the Partnership's program documents in this regard. In the new historical conditions, it was no longer possible to confine oneself to the old forms and methods of organizing the struggle of the working class for its rights. "We must," wrote F. Engels in the summer of 1871 - to go much further. We must develop the positive side of the question - how the emancipation of the proletariat should be realized. " 1 The London Conference of the First International, which met in September 1871, adopted a resolution "On the Political action of the Working Class" and called for its inclusion in the General Charter of the Association. The resolution contained an important provision formulated by the founders of Marxism back in the 1940s about the need to create a proletarian party to fight for the dictatorship of the proletariat. The experience of the Paris Commune clearly proved its correctness. "If we had a workers' political organization, "the communard Longuet declared at The Hague Congress," the Commune, having repelled the invasion, would strengthen itself in Paris and Berlin. The commune fell due to lack of organization. " 2
After the London Conference, the internal struggle in the First International sharply escalated. The main enemy of Marxism at that time was the Bakuninists. As early as 1868, M. A. Bakunin asked the International Workers ' Association to accept the anarchist Alliance of Socialist Democracy, which he had created, as an independent organization. The General Council of the First International demanded the dissolution of the alliance. Formally, this requirement was met. In fact, the alliance was preserved by Bakunin as a secret organization within the Comradeship, whose subversive activities posed a threat to the unity of the ranks of the International. That is why Marx wrote that the Hague Congress would deal with "the life or death of the International." 3
The Congress was preceded by a lot of preparatory work. F. took an active part in it. Engels, who was a member of the General Council of the First International. As the Bakuninists in Spain and Switzerland and the Proudhonists in Belgium insisted on revising the International Charter, the General Council began discussing it. The sectarians demanded autonomy for the sections and the dissolution of the governing body of the International, the General Council, that is, they opposed the organizational and programmatic principles of the emerging proletarian parties. The question of revising the Charter was also raised by representatives of the Marxist, revolutionary wing of the International. They proposed to include in the Charter and Rules of Procedure articles clarifying the political tasks of the International, strengthening the powers of the Council and the General Assembly. protecting the Comradeship from the penetration of petty-bourgeois elements into its ranks. Defending the proposal to expand the powers of the General Council, F. Engels pointed out that control over its actions should also be provided for as a guarantee against abuse: the General Council should be given the right to temporarily exclude sections, but at the same time it should be able to control its actions.-

1 K. Marx and F. Engels, Op. 33, p. 219.

2 "The Hague Congress of the First International 2-7 September 1872, Protocols and Documents", Moscow 1970, p. 60.

3 K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch. Vol. 33, p. 424.

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It can only be used after consultation with the relevant federal council; "in the event of the dissolution of the federation, all federations forming a Partnership will have the opportunity to review the measure adopted." 4
At the Congress, Engels did not speak on the Charter issues, since the majority of delegates adhered to his views. Only records of the Congress ' vote to expand the Council's powers are preserved in the minutes of the Congress.

At the meeting of the General Council, Engels supported the proposal to include a new article in the Charter, which briefly formulated the resolution of the London Conference on the organization of the working class in a special political party. "The motives that led us," said Engels, "to adopt it at the conference remain valid to this day, and therefore we will have to fight for its implementation at the congress." 5 Engels 'correspondence before the Congress shows how much importance he attached to the balance of forces in this forum of the Workers' Association, and how he strove to rally the best proletarian elements around the General Council. Thus, it was extremely important that the German Social-Democratic Workers ' Party, established in 1869, should be represented at the Congress. "We cannot allow the representation of the German workers at the Congress to be disrupted or distorted for reasons unknown to us, but at any rate petty," Engels wrote to W. Liebknecht, explaining this necessity .

One of the main tasks that the members of the General Council faced in connection with the preparation of the congress was to obtain documents confirming the existence of a secret organization within the International-the Bakunin Alliance. Information about this was first presented to Marx and Engels by P. Lafargue in mid-April 1872. In May and August, they began extensive correspondence with their correspondents from different countries. On July 5, Engels pre-reports to the executive body of the General Council, the Sub - Committee, on the data he has received, and on August 6 reports them to the General Council .7 Although his proposal to appeal to all members of the Partnership to expose the alliance, and received support-the report was approved by 12 votes to 8, the publication of the report did not take place. Materials were needed from Spain, where the alliance had entered at the same time as the first sections of the Partnership and, using this, pretended to be one of them. On August 8, Engels, together with Marx, drew up a letter to the Spanish sections of the Association, which was approved by the Sub-Committee. In it, they call on the members of the International to conduct an investigation of the alliance's activities and submit the data to the General Council. This letter had a great influence on the course of the struggle against the alliance in Spain .8 Engels insists that on August 22, the New Madrid Federation decides to hand over to the Council all the documents it has on the alliance's activities, and on August 25 and 26, it sends them to Engels. A few days later, in The Hague, Engels received an official statement about the alliance's activities in Spain from one of its former members, Mesa.

Thus, the most important documents about the Bakunin organization fell into Engels ' hands just before the congress. Within a few days, it was necessary to carry out a huge amount of work: to sort out the materials received, compare them with each other, and find out from them the extent of the alliance's subversive activities. Engels had to do most of this work. He was instructed to draw up a report to the Congress on behalf of the General Council.

On September 2, 1871, at half past nine in the morning, the Fifth Congress of the First International, the most representative in its history, opened in The Hague. It was attended by 65 delegates from 15 countries. For the first time, Karl Marx and Fr. Engels. Most of the delegates rallied around them, including such prominent figures of the international labor movement as the Frenchmen P. Lafargue, Ed Vaillant, E. Dupont, the Pole V. Vrublevsky, the Germans I. Becker, F. Sorge, A. Gepner, T. Kuno, the Hungarians K. Farkas and L. Frankel, and the Irishman J. McDonnell. The congress was attended by many Paris communards. Overwhelming pain-

4 " General Council of the First International. 1871 - 1872. Protocols", Moscow, 1965, p. 178.

5 Ibid., p. 196.

6 K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch. Vol. 33, pp. 394-395.

7 "General Council of the First International", p. 234.

8 Ibid., pp. 345-347.

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Most of them also supported Marx and Engels, who defended the revolutionary line of the General Council. The Congress's minority consisted of delegates from the Swiss, Belgian, and Dutch federations who were anarchist, four Spanish allianists, and several reformists who were aligned with the Bakunin group.

Together with Marx, Engels shared the responsibilities of directing the work of the Congress, and actively participated in all the discussions that took place at it. At the congress, he represented the Breslau section and Section No. 6 of New York. A vivid portrait of Engels at that time was left by the Congress delegate Theodor Kuno: "He was a tall, thin, but healthy-looking man with sharply defined features, with a long reddish beard and blue eyes. His movements and speech were fast and precise, giving others the impression that this person knew exactly what he wanted and what the results of his words and actions would be. From the conversation with him, everyone learned a lot of new and instructive things. His brain is a treasure trove of scientific knowledge. Engels spoke more than a dozen languages. " 9
Engels ' activities at the Hague Congress were extremely diverse and covered a wide range of issues, especially those that were at the center of the ideological struggle between the supporters of Marxism and the Bakunin minority. He was in constant contact with the majority of delegates and carried out active organizational work among them, drawing up individual proposals of supporters of the General Council and rallying them for voting. This can be seen from Engels ' speeches at the meetings, from notes sent by Engels to the delegates or addressed to him. Some of Engels ' speeches dealt with organizational issues (the order of conduct of meetings, the agenda, etc.). Thus, on the first day of the congress, Engels proposed that correspondents of bourgeois newspapers should not be allowed to attend its closed meetings. It was accepted by the delegates. This step was intended to protect the Congress not only from representatives of the bourgeois press hostile to the working-class movement, but also from police spies and provocateurs who tried to infiltrate the meetings under the guise of correspondents (the work of the congress aroused increased interest among the police of many states, who in those days flooded The Hague with their agents).

At the first meeting, on Engels ' proposal, a seven-member mandate commission was elected. It included Marx, communards Ranvier, Derer, Frankel, member of the Dutch Federal Council Gerhard, members of the British Federal Council Englishman Roch and Irishman McDonnell. As Engels had anticipated, the Congress was in a heated debate about the validity of mandates. 10 They lasted for three days. Engels opposed the proposal of the Spaniards, who demanded that the voting at the Hague Congress should take into account the number of members of the Association who elected a delegate. He noted that in the current circumstances, when not every country could withstand the strict rules for sending delegates from a certain number of members of the Partnership, this would be a violation of the principle of international equality and would be contrary to the Charter. Engels convincingly showed that in fact this proposal meant disrupting the work of the Congress. Engels ' speeches on the legitimacy of mandates played an important role in consolidating the majority of delegates around the Marxist platform. In essence, it was not a question of the fate of a particular mandate, but of the most important organizational principles of the proletarian movement, of the norms and rules that must be observed in workers ' organizations, and of the relations between representatives of the various national detachments of the working class. Engels defended the organizational foundations of the revolutionary proletarian movement in opposition to sectarian tendencies; fought against attempts to legitimize the mores of a conspiratorial sect in the International; argued that the Spanish delegates came to the congress not to defend the cause of the International, but in fact as representatives of a secret Bakuninist" organization. He exposed the statement of the Spanish delegates about their non-involvement in the

9 "Memoirs of Marx and Engels", Moscow, 1956, p. 212.

10 Back in the summer, Engels noted in one of his letters: "there is every evidence that in the review of mandates, which this time decides everything, societies that want to impose themselves on the International by force, but have never belonged to it, would be accepted by a majority vote, especially if we take into account how good-naturedly they usually behave workers in such cases" (see K. Marke and F. Engels, Soch. Vol. 33, pp. 428-429).

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the alliance, which, according to them, allegedly existed in Spain only in the past, and indicated that they continue to be part of the alliance, now operating under a different name. At the same time, Engels noted that if we talk about the International Workers ' Association in Spain, its growth was ensured by supporters of the General Council line, who were excluded by the Allianists. At one of the first sessions of the Congress, Engels spoke about the attacks of the allianist Morago on the mandate of P. Lafargue from the New Madrid Federation. Lafargue actively pursued the line of the General Council in Spain, seeking to expose the alliance. For this, the alliance expelled him from the Madrid section, in which they seized key positions. Together with his supporters, Lafargue became the organizer of the New Madrid Federation and was delegated by it to the Hague Congress. The General Council recognized this federation, and therefore its delegate rightfully took his place at the congress as the representative of the Spanish workers united in the ranks of the International.

In the protocol of September 4, there is a terse entry: Engels is "absent for a valid reason" 11 . He's not on the patient list either. It can be assumed that he is preparing for the report of the commission appointed by Congress to investigate the activities of the alliance, studying the documents received. Engels changed the original proposal put forward at the meetings of September 2-3 to exclude the Alliance as a whole from the Partnership and recommended that only its leaders and their mainstay, the Jurassic Federation in Switzerland, be excluded. Engels considered it possible to confine himself to this measure for the time being, although the necessity of expelling the Allianists from the International was clear to him. However, he took into account that the conditions for making such a decision were not yet ripe: far from all members of the International were fully aware of the activities of the alliance, and not all of them were still aware of their inconsistency with the principles of Partnership. The next day, Engels introduces the members of the commission to the report he has prepared and the relevant documents on this issue. These materials showed that the sectarian and schismatic activities of the Bakuninists were incompatible with the principles and goals of the International. At its last, fifteenth session, the Congress heard the commission's report on the alliance's activities, which was based on the material prepared by Engels. As he later wrote, the Paris Communards who were present at this crucial meeting said that no meeting of the Commune had ever made such an extraordinary impression on them as this trial of the Bakuninists .12 According to the commission's report, the Congress decided to exclude the founders of the alliance - Bakunin and Guillaume - from the International.

Even in the course of preparing for the congress, Engels was instructed to draw up a sort of financial report in order, as Serrayer, a member of the General Council, said, to show "how little money the General Council could have had at its disposal and how much it still did, despite their insufficiency."13 Engels drew up the report and delivered it at the thirteenth session of the Congress. He showed the falsity of the accusations made by the Bakuninists that the members of the General Council live on the funds of the workers who are members of the Association. In fact, on the contrary, they often "emptied their pockets and purses in the interests of the organization"14 . As Engels noted, in one year alone, members of the Council spent a significant part of their personal funds on printing its materials. 15
At the end of the Hague Congress, its delegates arrived in Amsterdam at the invitation of the Dutch section. There, a rally was held in Dalrust Hall, where Karl Marx made a speech about the congress. The newspaper report briefly states that F. A. also spoke at this rally. Engels 16 .

In September and October 1872, Engels, together with Marx, was elected to the commission for editing the minutes of the Hague Congress, and prepared its resolutions for publication in French. In connection with the death in December 1872 of the secretary of the alliance commission, Frederick Potel (Luken), Marx and Engels had to take over the preparation of the commission's documents for printing. Engels carefully processes the congress materials. His detailed synopsis of N. I. Utin's report has been preserved, as well as, the original

11 "The Hague Congress", p. 30.

12 See K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch. Vol. 33, p. 495.

13 "General Council", p. 237.

14 "The Hague Congress", p. 136.

15 Ibid.

16 "Het Algemeen Handelsblad", N 12857, 10.IX.1872.

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plan of the pamphlet "Alliance of Socialist Democracy and International Workers 'Association". This pamphlet, written by Engels together with Marx and Lafargue using Utin's materials and published in the summer of 1873, describes the history of the alliance and shows its disorganizing activities in a number of countries. Along with the materials that appeared at the congress, the pamphlet uses new documents about the activities of the Bakuninists in Russia, as well as about their schismatic behavior after the Hague Congress. The publication of the alliance documents dealt a crushing blow to anarchists in the international labor movement. Although the Hague Congress did not definitively resolve the issue of the alliance, it paved the way for further successful struggle against it. Less than a year later, in May 1873, at the suggestion of Marx and Engels, the General Council recorded the fact that the anarchist organizations, by systematically violating the Charter, "have placed themselves outside the ranks of the International Workers' Association and are no longer members of it."17
The victory of Marxism at the Congress, embodied in its resolutions and resolutions included in the Program and Charter of the International (on the dictatorship of the working class, on the need to create proletarian parties, on the expansion of the powers of the governing bodies, on the incompatibility of subversive sectarian and factional activities with membership in workers ' organizations, etc.), was achieved in fierce battles their opponents are anarchists and petty-bourgeois reformists. This victory was greatly facilitated by the energy, self-control and flexibility shown at that time. By Engels. During the preparation of the congress and during the course of it, the remarkable qualities of F. A. were once again revealed. Engels as an indefatigable fighter for the workers ' cause, irreconcilable with the ideological enemies of the proletarian movement.

17 K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch. Vol. 18, p. 653.

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