The Seventh Conference of the RSDLP (the first one to be held under legal conditions) was held in late April , with delegates representing 80,000 members.

Beforehand, Lenin openly published his “Letters on tactics”
These criticised the doctrinaire “ Old Bolsheviks” – specifically Kamenev- who argued that the Democratic revolution had yet to be completed.

At the conference Lenin said:-
“I think that our differences with Comrade Kamenev are not very great, because *by agreeing with us* he has changed his position.”

Lenin accepted that at this point, the slogan “Down with the Provisional Government” was an adventurist one. The correct one to use was “Long live the Soviets of Workers and Soldiers Deputies”

He also said that:-
“The bourgeois-democratic dictatorship of the peasantry is an old formula.”

This was because the peasantry *as a whole* was supporting defencism.
(continuing the war, despite the fact the Provisional government was composed of landowners and capitalists)

The main political representatives of defencism in the Soviets were the Menshevik Defencists and the Social Revolutionary Party.
Political unity with these parties was not possible, but “closer relations and unity with groups and trends that have adopted a real internationalist stand” was.

The main political task was to win a Bolshevik majority in the Soviets before they could take power.
Once a Soviet government was in place, it would need to introduce ‘transitional measures’, which led in the direction of socialism.