Left opposition in the Soviet Union
The term Left Opposition refers to those groups within the CPSU (B) that stood in left-wing ideological opposition to Josef Stalin's doctrine and the associated rise of the bureaucracy in the Soviet party and state apparatus in the 1920s . In contrast, there were groups around Nikolai Bukharin , Alexei Rykow and Mikhail Tomski , who were described by Stalin as "right-wing deviants" (right-wing opposition). The so-called Left Opposition initially included the supporters of the founder and Commander-in-Chief of the Red Army , Leon Trotsky ( Trotskyists ). In April 1926 they united with the supporters of the chairman of the Communist International , Grigory Zinoviev , and the chairman of the Politburo , Lev Kamenev , under the name of United Opposition . Later on, Timofei Sapronov's radical group of "democratic centralists" was added. After the United Opposition was largely organizationally smashed at the end of 1927, the socialist- motivated resistance against the Stalin regime in the following period mostly came from underground groups working in conspiracies and from the Siberian places of exile of the opposition, where they organized themselves in the Gulag camps . With a few exceptions, all supporters of the Marxist -oriented anti-Stalinist opposition were murdered in the course of the Great Terror of 1936–1938.
Lenin's death and the will
After the death of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin , the undisputed leader of the Bolshevik movement and the initiator of the October Revolution of 1917, on January 21, 1924, a struggle for political power in the Soviet state apparatus took place. Alongside Lenin, the People's Commissar for Warfare and civil war hero Leon Trotsky was the best-known and most popular Soviet leader, especially since he had already been chairman of the Petrograd Soviet during the 1905 revolution and had prepared the overthrow of the Provisional Government by the Bolsheviks in October 1917 . The assumption of Lenin's successor by Trotsky was therefore considered the most likely option in large parts of the Soviet party and the world communist movement . However, Trotsky met with suspicion because of his earlier membership of the Mensheviks, which rival the Bolsheviks, as well as his long and often bitter arguments with Lenin before 1917. In addition, in the last years of Lenin's life, conflicts between Trotsky and other party leaders regarding substantive differences had already begun. While Trotsky, with his consistent internationalism and the theory of permanent revolution, stood for the fastest possible spread of revolutionary uprisings and conquests of power by communist movements within the framework of the world revolution that took place in various European countries from 1917 onwards , Stalin and Bukharin, for example, took significantly more moderate positions and drew a comprehensive one Consolidation of Soviet power in Russia before an international revolutionary strategy. Not least because of this, the de facto successor to Lenin went in the spring of 1924 to a college made up of Zinoviev, the chairman of the Executive Committee of the Communist International and head of the Petrograd Soviet, Kamenev, a close colleague of Lenin, and Stalin, who had always remained in the background until then. The latter quickly secured the leading role in this triumvirate , the sole aim of which was to keep Trotsky from taking over the party leadership .
Lenin himself had left a will that was read for the first time in the party's governing bodies in May 1924. Although no successor was personally named here either, Trotsky still had to be treated as a favorite, especially since Lenin's judgment of him was viewed as overall more positive (“the most capable man in the present Central Committee”) than that of Stalin.
“Comrade Stalin, after becoming Secretary General, has an immeasurable power concentrated in his hands, and I am not convinced that he will always be able to use this power carefully. On the other hand, as his fight against the Central Committee on the question of the People's Commissariat for Transport has already shown, Comrade Trotsky is not only distinguished by excellent skills. Personally, he is probably the most capable man in the current Central Committee, but also a person who has excessive self-confidence and an excessive preference for purely administrative measures. "
Not least because of the negative assessment of Stalin and the criticism of other high-ranking party leaders, for example the economic theorist Bukharin ("His theoretical views can only be counted with very great reservations about the completely Marxist, because there is something scholastic in him (he never has the dialectic studied and, I think, never fully understood) ”), the will was kept under lock and key and not made publicly available to the party. For Trotsky's position in the power struggle for Lenin's successor, this represented a severe setback.
Stalin's power and the rise of the bureaucracy
Stalin's growing power rested ostensibly on the wealth of information that his office in the Workers 'and Peasants' Inspection gave him. Stalin was able to look into all departments and branches of administration and collect information that he used against his opponents. In addition, there was the initially rather insignificant post as general secretary of the party, who was at the XI. Congress was created in 1922, and which soon represented a link between the Central Control Commission (ZKK) and the Central Committee (ZK) or the Politburo of the Central Committee. This also gave Stalin influence on the - initially harmless and harmless for party members - party purges .
The social causes for the rise of Stalin and the bureaucracy as a social class in post-revolutionary Russia were, however, analyzed much more thoroughly by Trotsky and the Left Opposition (if only in the beginning of the later - complete - Trotsky analysis of Stalinism from the 1930s). Trotsky blamed the devastation of the country by a total of seven years of war, the economic backwardness of Russia in comparison to the highly developed capitalist states of Western and Central Europe or North America and the imperialist encirclement of the only workers' state worldwide for a general emergency situation, as a result of which the Political rule is no longer exercised by the working class and its representatives, but by a new layer of bureaucrats from the party functionaries, the management level of the factories and the army. While - according to Trotsky - the social foundations of the October Revolution continue to be preserved (nationalization of industry, approaches to a planned economy and state foreign trade monopoly), a counterrevolutionary process is taking place at the political level, which is expressed in the shift in power from the mass of workers and peasants the small caste of the bureaucracy finds. Accordingly, the representatives of the bureaucracy in the party leadership do not represent revolutionary politics on an internationalist and class-struggle basis, but are primarily interested in maintaining the status quo and their own power and privileges. Stalin functions as the ideal advocate of the bureaucracy and is its best expression in the leadership of the Communist Party. The thesis of “building socialism in one country ” should also be seen in this context , which is an expression of Great Russian chauvinism and national narrow-mindedness and therefore stands in opposition to the revolutionary-socialist claim and program of the Bolsheviks.
The Left Opposition 1923–1927
Lenin's warnings against Stalin's hegemonic role within the Communist Party, which were already put forward in his will, were anticipated on October 15, 1923, when 46 high-ranking Soviet party functionaries in the so-called " Declaration of 46 " faced increasingly recognizable upheavals and abuses in the party and state warned that came with the rise of bureaucracy:
"Party members who are dissatisfied with this or that ordinance of the Central Committee or even a government committee, who have this or that doubt, or who register this or that mistake, inconsistency or grievances for themselves, are afraid to speak about this at party meetings - even more, they are afraid to talk to each other if the person you are talking to is not a completely reliable person, ie not a 'talkative' person. The free discussion within the party has effectively ceased, public opinion of the party has fallen silent. In our day the government committees and the Central Committee of the KPR are not established and elected by the party and not by its masses. On the contrary: the secretary hierarchy of the party is increasingly electing the participants for conferences and party congresses, which are increasingly becoming assemblies at which this hierarchy determines. The regime that has established itself within the party is completely unbearable: it kills the independence of the party and replaces the party with a selected bureaucratic apparatus. "
This declaration can be seen as the starting point for the organized internal party opposition to the emerging Stalinism that will begin from now on . Based on the criticism expressed in it, the left opposition developed around Leon Trotsky within the CPSU (B), which was contrary to Stalin's economic, state and foreign policy. Initially as a rather loose grouping around Trotsky, the opposition became organizationally more stable and appeared more unified with the increasing displacement of Trotsky from the front row of the Bolshevik Party from the beginning of 1925 and the later transition to Zinoviev and Kamenev. Increasingly, she took a general and public position on fundamental issues of Soviet policy, which was increasingly directed by Stalin and the ranks of party officials around him. Central demands were made by the opposition on questions of the economy, how to deal with the peasantry, internal party democracy and the international situation.
| economy | Peasantry | Political party | Foreign policy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Improving conditions for urban workers; Increase in wages; Billing of overtime; Improvement of the housing situation; Increase in unemployment benefit; Equal pay for equal work for women; Free choice of union officials; Independence of the factory committees and trade unions from the management at all levels | "Class struggle in the countryside": The party must be at the head of the farm workers and the poor and middle peasants in the fight against exploitation by the kulaks (rich peasants) | Since there are more functionaries than workers in the party (462,000 functionaries and 445,000 workers in January 1927), the degeneration of the party leadership must be stopped: restoring democracy within the party; End of the "opposition bait" in party education; End the threat and repression of dissidents | End of the tutelage of the KI sections by the party leadership in Moscow; Ending the alliances of convenience between communist parties and bourgeois forces (for example in China) |
Overall, rapid industrialization and the rapid collectivization of agriculture, while at the same time placing a greater burden on the wealthier farmers, should improve the situation of the population. The increasing bureaucratization of the state apparatus was answered with the return to council democracy . The failures in foreign policy, for example the failure of the first Chinese revolution , were attributed to the Stalinist work in the Communist International.
In January 1925, Leon Trotsky was removed from the post of People's Commissar for Warfare, with which his person had been inextricably linked until then. In the period that followed, his increasing isolation in party and state continued. While Trotsky was still the leader of millions of soldiers in the Red Army and millions more in the Communist International until the beginning of 1925, from May of that year he had to deal with the posts of chief of electrical engineering and of the scientific and technical administration of industry give up, comparatively low areas of activity for the world-famous revolutionary. A significant turning point did not take place until the spring of 1926. The differences in the triumvirate of Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev had already broken out in the previous year, and the latter moved away from Stalin. The possibility of an opposition bloc from the Left Opposition Trotsky and Zinoviev and Kamenev, who largely had control over the largest party branches Leningrad and Moscow, was now discussed more openly, but initially met with opposition in the Trotsky camp. In his autobiography, he reports, among other things, that during internal discussions about the question of joining forces with Zinoviev and Kamenev, some opposition members even briefly considered the formation of a Trotsky-Stalin bloc against Zinoviev-Kamenev, which, however, was quickly rejected due to fundamental political considerations be. As the year went on, the struggle between the Stalin faction and the now United Opposition intensified. On October 16, 1926, the opposition had to make a statement in which they promised to refrain from actions that could create the danger of splitting the party. At the turn of the year 1926/1927 it was - according to Trotsky - largely weakened and Zinoviev and Kamenev were on the verge of surrendering to the Stalinists. It was not until the catastrophe in China in early 1927 that the internal party struggle took on a new and previously unknown level.
Stalin saw no socialist perspective in China, despite the labor struggles that flared up again and again. Because of this, he forced the Chinese Communist Party into an anti-imperialist alliance with the bourgeois right-wing Kuomintang . Over the years, especially after the change in leadership from Sun Yat-sen to Chiang Kai-shek , the Kuomintang used this alliance to crack down on the communists. In April 1927, she murdered around 2,000 Chinese Communists in Shanghai in a planned massacre. The CCP party structures in Shanghai have been completely shattered.
At a meeting of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, which took place in Moscow in the second half of May 1927, this failure in Soviet China policy came to light. The Stalinist apparatus came under increasing pressure. A declaration passed on May 26, 1927, which was joined by 83 opposition party functionaries, increased the pressure on Stalin's apparatus. The opposition propaganda consequently became more and more intense; it flooded the organizations in the form of leaflets, brochures and other materials and called for the authority of the Central Committee to be dismantled. Only the fear of sanctions prevented many from expressing their opinion. At that time the United Opposition consisted of up to 8,000 supporters, mainly in the large party organizations in Moscow and Leningrad. The strength of the opposition in the internal party debate also led to isolated demands from their ranks to found a new party. Trotsky, however, opposed these plans because a new party would not have a mass base and the bureaucracy was only a transitional regime.
To pressure from the Left Opposition, Stalin and his supporters responded with a shift to the left to buy some time. This was also followed by defamation of the opposition in the press and party: at the end of July 1927, Stalin described them as the “leader of the fascists”. Meetings of the opposition had to be held more and more conspiratorially as public rallies were regularly dispersed by the GPU secret police . Trotsky described the situation in his autobiography Mein Leben in the late summer and autumn of 1927 as follows:
“The closer the party got to the Fifteenth Congress, which was scheduled for the end of 1927, the more it felt at a historic crossroads. A deep unrest shook through their ranks. Despite the tremendous terror, the party wanted to hear the voice of the opposition. That could only be achieved illegally. Secret meetings of workers and students took place in several places in Moscow and Leningrad, where twenty to one hundred and two hundred people came together to hear a representative of the opposition. In the course of a day I attended two, three and sometimes four such meetings. They usually took place in workers' apartments. Two little rooms were crammed full, the speaker was standing in the door between the rooms. Sometimes everyone sat on the floor; more often you had to stand up because of a lack of space. Occasionally, representatives of the control commission appeared with the request to the assembly to part. They were invited to take part in the discussion. If they interfered, they were put in front of the door. In total, about twenty thousand people attended such meetings in Moscow and Leningrad. The influx grew. The opposition had cleverly prepared a large meeting in the technical college hall, which was occupied from inside. The hall was crowded with two thousand people. A large crowd still remained on the road. Attempts by the administration to interfere were unsuccessful. I and Kamenev talked for about two hours. The Central Committee has now issued a call to the working class that the meetings of the opposition must be dispersed by force. This call was only a mask for the carefully prepared raids by GPU raiders on the opposition. Stalin wanted a bloody solution. We gave the signal to suspend the large gatherings. But that was after the demonstration on November 7th. "
In a meeting of the joint plenary session of the Central Committee and Central Committee in Moscow in the same year of Stalin's statement, an attempt was made to force the opposition to cooperate in the apparatus and to issue a public apology in order to prevent an open break (for the time being). The opposition refused to respond to this demand. The plenary therefore decided to vote for the expulsion of Trotsky and Zinoviev from the Central Committee, as many state officials had previously called for.
Suppression and action after 1927
At the beginning of September 1927 the opposition submitted a platform for the United Opposition to the party leadership for discussion. Among other things, a reform of the cumbersome party apparatus and economic administration was called for. From this point on, the massive reprisals of the Stalinist regime increased. House searches and arrests took place again and again, there was agitation in the press against the opposition, opposition workers were fired from the factories, and party expulsions occurred. The distribution of the September pamphlet was banned. Any attempt at oppositional demonstrations was nipped in the bud.
The XV. The party conference on December 2, 1927 was used to exclude all opposition members from the party leadership. They were eventually banished. The Zinovievists and Kamenevists joined the Stalinists under the pressure of massive reprisals. The end of the opposition as a unified organization was sealed.
The so-called Right Opposition, which had spoken out against the end of the New Economic Policy (NEP) and the forced collectivization of agriculture , was crushed by Stalin and his supporters in early 1929, although their protagonists had previously participated in Stalin's campaign against Trotsky's left opposition. With the surrender of the right, the last official internal party resistance to Stalin's unqualified claims to power had failed.
Although the organized oppositional currents in the Soviet Communist Party were eliminated by the end of the 1920s, their activities did not end, but instead only increasingly shifted underground due to the increased state reprisals, whereby a differentiation and fragmentation can be ascertained, which is associated with the The accompanying circumstances of the political work associated with illegalized activities can be explained. The connections between the opposition groups in the individual cities and regions were severed, their leaders either had to surrender and were therefore no longer available for resistance work, or had been driven into exile (for example Leon Trotsky himself). The critics of Stalinist rule had to work on their own from now on and no longer received any instructions from a political leadership, which made uniform political actions and analyzes almost impossible.
Nevertheless, opposition activities reached a new high point in the early 1930s with the increasingly noticeable deterioration of the economic situation in the USSR and peasant uprisings in their rural regions (as a result of the hasty collectivization campaign of the Stalinist leadership from 1929) and strikes in the industrial centers. In this context, the Russian historian Vadim S. Rogovin reports on a meeting of members of the opposition in a Moscow apartment in 1932, in which Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev were also said to have admitted that their surrender to Stalin five years earlier was their worst mistake Life and now must be looked for ways to contact Trotsky and remove Stalin. As early as 1931, the former People's Commissar for Post and Telegraphs and Trotsky supporter Ivan Smirnov had made contact with Trotsky's son, Leo Sedov , at an official meeting in Berlin and explored various possibilities for cooperation between Trotsky and his underground Soviet supporters. These examples clearly show that there can be no talk of an end to the activities of the Left Opposition after its official defeat in 1927.
Another important attempt to organize socialist opposition to Stalin can also be found in 1932. The party functionary Martemjan Nikititsch Ryutin appeared in 1927 as a bitter opponent of the Left Opposition and an ally of Stalin in the fight against them. Nevertheless, he got into sharp conflicts with the Stalin leadership and began to develop opposition activities underground. On August 21, 1932, in the village of Golovino near Moscow, a meeting took place at which Ryutin and his followers founded their own group under the name “Union of Marxist-Leninists” and wrote a manifesto, which was later mainly held in Moscow Institute of the Red Professorship circulated. It said, among other things: “The state has been muzzled, there is injustice, arbitrariness and violence everywhere, every worker and farmer is threatened. Revolutionary justice is trampled underfoot! [...] The crisis of Soviet power in the narrower sense of the word is primarily expressed in the crisis of Soviet democracy. Soviet democracy has been ousted and replaced by Stalin's personal dictatorship. ”The GPU quickly exposed Ryutin's organization and arrested him on September 22, 1932. He was sentenced to ten years in prison, but shot in 1937.
Supporters of opposition circles uncovered by the GPU or party members who were suspected of being in contact with them were usually sent into exile in Siberia or Central Asia. It was only with the onset of the Great Terror that immediate executions became standard practice for opposition communists. In the Siberian camps themselves, there was lively political activity in the early 1930s, which has been widely documented. For example, the Yugoslav left-wing communist Ante Ciliga reports in his book "In the Land of Confusing Lies", which deals with Ciliga's political experiences and camp stays in the USSR, of the prison in Verkhniy Uralsk, where 120 out of 140 communists when he arrived in 1930 Prisoners were Trotskyists (supporters of the left opposition). Articles and magazines by opposition leaders such as Trotsky and Rakovsky were freely accessible and were lively discussed and commented on by the prisoners. Ciliga divides the Trotskyists again into different directions that would have developed over time. The main points of contention for them were the correct interpretation of the wording in Trotsky's writings arriving from exile. In her publication “Stolen Life - Fate of a Political Emigrant in the Soviet Union”, the German communist Susanne Leonhard made famous the Soviet Trotskyist Jelena Ginsburg, who was also imprisoned as a left opposition in various camps before she was shot in the winter of 1937.
Almost all leading members of the former Left Opposition were murdered in the Moscow trials during the Great Terror . Leon Trotsky himself escaped the show trials only because he was banished from the USSR in 1929. In the following period he developed his own further development of Marxism, Trotskyism , which included a social and political analysis of the Stalinist system in the Soviet Union. In exile he tried to continue the work of the Left Opposition; In 1929 he founded the magazine "Бюллетень оппозиции" ( Opposition Bulletin ) in Paris . His theories led to the foundation of the Fourth International in Paris in 1938 . Trotsky was finally murdered in August 1940 by an agent of Stalin in Mexico, which eliminated the last and most important head of the Left Opposition.
According to some reports, anti-Stalinist opposition groups on a Marxist basis stayed underground until the German attack on the USSR in 1941. Oppositionist Eduard Dune, who was imprisoned in the Vorkuta labor camp and fled the Soviet Union during the Second World War, confirmed such opposition activities from the surrounding area of the “Democratic Centralists” in 1947 in a Menshevik exile magazine.
In the course of the “ de-Stalinization ” after Stalin's death in 1953, none of the members of the Left Opposition were rehabilitated. This fact is related to the fact that the demands of the Trotskyists, even after Stalin's demise, touched the substantial foundations of the “ real socialist ” states (rule of the bureaucracy over state and society, suppression of free speech and a few others) and were therefore viewed as dangerous by the respective rulers were.
Leaders of the left opposition
- Leon Trotsky († 1940), Russian revolutionary and close companion of Lenin, founder of the Red Army and “leader” of the Left Opposition, founder of the Marxist analysis of Stalinism and the Fourth International
- Christian Rakowski († 1941), Bulgarian revolutionary and Soviet diplomat
- Adolf Joffe († 1927), Russian revolutionary, Soviet diplomat and close companion of Trotsky
- Yevgeny Preobrazhensky († 1937), economic theorist and political bureau member
- Vladimir Antonov-Ovsejenko († 1938), Chief Political Commissioner of the Red Army and diplomat
- Nikolai Muralov († 1937), commander of the Red Army and commander of the Moscow garrison during the 1917 revolution
- Jakob Drobnis († 1937), Deputy Chairman of the Small Council of People's Commissars
- Timofei Sapronow († 1937), leader of the group "Democratic Centralists" with which he joined the United Opposition
- Georgi Pyatakov († 1937), Commissar of the Red Army and party functionary in various functions
- Iwar Smilga († 1937), Latvian revolutionary and Soviet economic theorist
- Ivan Smirnow († 1936), People's Commissar for Post and Telegraphs between 1923 and 1927, tried to organize internal party opposition until the early 1930s
- Vladimir Smirnov († 1937), Commissar of the Red Army.
- Georgi Oppokow († 1938), People's Commissar for Justice after the October Revolution and candidate of the Central Committee of the CPSU (B)
- Karl Radek († 1939), journalist and communist politician who worked in Poland, Germany and the Soviet Union
- Victor Serge († 1947), journalist, writer and inner-party companion of Trotsky
See also
literature
- Vadim S. Rogovin : Was there an alternative to Stalinism? ; ISBN 978-3-88634-068-2
- Ulf Wolter: The Left Opposition in the Soviet Union , 5 volumes
- Robert V. Daniels: The Conscience of the Revolution, Communist Opposition in the Soviet Union ; ISBN 3-921241-41-3
Individual evidence
- ^ Peter Taaffe : Die Internationale - History of the Committee for a Workers' International , brochure of the SAV , February 2000, p. 35.
- ↑ Martin Suchanek: The Revolution Betrayed - Trotsky's Analysis of Stalinism. In: Revolutionary Marxism 32, Winter 2001/2002 (online)
- ^ Tariq Ali & Phil Evans: Trotsky for Beginners , Rowohlt Taschenbuchverlag, September 1987, p. 117.
- ↑ Leon Trotsky: "My Life - An Attempt at an Autobiography", Chapter 42 (The Last Period of the Struggle Within the Party) (online)
- ↑ Article on the 1927 CCP uprising in Shanghai on socialismus.info (online)
- ^ Tariq Ali & Phil Evans: Trotsky for Beginners , Rowohlt Taschenbuchverlag, September 1987, p. 116.
- ↑ Vadim S. Rogovin : Was there an alternative to Stalinism? , Mehring Verlag, 1996, p. 41.
- ↑ The heroic deed of Martemjan Nikititsch Ryutin (PDF; 60 kB), UTOPIE Kreativ No. 81/82, 1997, p. 105.
- ↑ Ante Ciliga: "In the Land of Confusing Lies", p. 66f. (on-line)
- ↑ Susanne Leonhard about Jelena Ginsburg (online)
- ↑ Report by Eduard Dunes on the activities of the group “Democratic Centralists” in Sozialistitscheski Westnik, 1947 (online)