New Opposition
신반대파
The opposition inside the Soviet party formed in 1925 by Zinoviev and Kamenev against the Stalin leadership; resting on Zinoviev's base in the Leningrad party organisation, it is also called the Leningrad Opposition. It attacked the doctrine of socialism in one country and the NEP line of conciliating the kulak, and was joined by Krupskaya and Sokolnikov. Routed in the votes at the Fourteenth Party Congress in December 1925, it saw the Leningrad organisation purged to the point of reconstruction, and the next year joined forces with the Left Opposition to form the United Opposition.
In depth
Why did yesterday's allies turn?
After Lenin's death the party was led by the triumvirate of Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin, built to contain Trotsky. Once the Left Opposition was beaten in the debates of 1923–24 the triumvirate lost its reason for being, and through 1925 the alliance came apart from within. There were two issues. One was the doctrine of socialism in one country, refined by Bukharin and adopted by Stalin; Zinoviev attacked it as the claim that socialism could be completed without international revolution, a revision of Leninism. The other was rural policy under NEP: the line of conciliating the kulak, symbolised by Bukharin's slogan 'enrich yourselves', which the opposition saw as a road to capitalist restoration. Beneath both lay alarm at the drift of power into the Secretariat.
What happened at the Fourteenth Congress?
At the Fourteenth Party Congress in December 1925 Zinoviev broke precedent by delivering a co-report against the Central Committee's. Krupskaya and Sokolnikov took the opposition's side, and Kamenev said plainly from the floor that he opposed the concentration of power in Stalin personally. But the votes were overwhelming, because the delegates themselves came from provincial organisations managed by the Secretariat. The opposition's one base was the Leningrad organisation Zinoviev controlled, and immediately after the congress Kirov was sent there and rebuilt it within months. Its footing gone, the New Opposition combined in the spring of 1926 with yesterday's enemy, Trotsky's Left Opposition, to form the United Opposition.
What does it show?
The episode compresses the mechanics of the inner-party struggles of the 1920s: contests that looked programmatic were decided by control of the apparatus, the Secretariat's power over appointments and hence over who became a delegate. Official Soviet historiography recorded the New Opposition as factionalism sliding into Trotskyism. Later research treats the issues it raised as serious ones, while noting that Zinoviev and Kamenev had used the same apparatus methods against Trotsky only two years earlier. The ends of the participants are well known: Zinoviev and Kamenev were executed after the first Moscow trial in 1936, and Sokolnikov did not survive the purges either.
Related terms
Related people
Sources
- E. H. Carr, Socialism in One Country 1924–1926, vol. 2 (Macmillan, 1959)
- Robert V. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia (Harvard University Press, 1960)
- Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky 1921–1929 (Oxford University Press, 1959)