United Opposition

Origins and formation

The Bolshevik party banned factional activity at its Tenth Congress in 1921, but informal factions persisted. In the autumn of 1923 the Declaration of the Forty-Six attacked bureaucratization and censorship inside the party, and from 1925 the positions of Trotsky's Left Opposition and the New Opposition of Zinoviev and Kamenev began to converge, merging into a single opposition bloc in early 1926. The immediate occasion was a proposal from Smirnov's Group of Fifteen, which left soon after its formation over the disagreement about whether the Soviet Union was still a workers' state.

In May 1926 eighty-two people, Trotsky and Zinoviev among them, signed a declaration attacking the Stalin leadership; two months later the Central Committee demanded its withdrawal and the opposition refused. The United Opposition made its public appearance as the Declaration of the Thirteen at the joint plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission on 14-23 July 1926.

Programme

The United Opposition demanded wider freedom of expression inside the party, the dismantling of the NEP, expanded development of heavy industry and a reduction of bureaucracy. Its 1926 platform explicitly criticized the lack of inner-party democracy and debate, noting that "everywhere resolutions are adopted only unanimously", and held that the influence of workers and rank-and-file members was steadily shrinking.

In 1927 the United Opposition issued a new official platform, which demanded a workers' majority at trade-union congresses, including the all-union congress, an increase to one third in the share of non-party workers in those elected bodies, and legal protection of workers' right of criticism, that is, of independent initiative. The September platform criticized the NEP for allowing capitalist influence to seep in and concluded that the party was departing from genuine Leninism. The Platform of the Joint Opposition was organized in sections on the situation of the working class and the trade unions, the agrarian question and socialist construction, state industry, the soviets, the national question, the party, the Communist Youth League, the international situation and the danger of war, and the Red Army and Red Navy; its cover listed signatories including Trotsky, Kamenev, Ioffe, Pyatakov, Radek, Rakovsky, Zinoviev, Smilga, Preobrazhensky and Lashevich.

Activity and repression

Blocked in the Central Committee, the United Opposition held open meetings in factory districts in late September 1926, but within a month it came under attack from Stalin supporters and Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev publicly recanted. Krupskaya lent it brief support before leaving in the autumn of 1926, saying the opposition "had gone too far". At the July 1926 plenum the opposition raised as its main grievance that state industry could not keep pace with economic development, so that shortages of goods persisted, and the Central Committee charged Zinoviev with violating the ban on factions and removed him from the Politburo. In October that year Trotsky was removed from the Politburo, Zinoviev lost his Comintern leadership post and Kamenev lost his candidate membership of the Politburo.

On 7 November 1927, the tenth anniversary of the revolution, the opposition held a demonstration on Red Square in Moscow together with Krupskaya and illegally distributed Lenin's "testament", but it remained a distinct minority within the party and police began arresting many of its members. In October 1927 all three were removed from the Central Committee; Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the party in November and Kamenev in December. The Fifteenth Party Congress (December 1927) ruled that opposition views were incompatible with party membership and expelled them, and in January 1928 Trotsky was exiled to Alma-Ata.

Relations and aftermath

The United Opposition fought the Stalin-Bukharin majority, but by mid-1927 most supporters of the Kamenev-Zinoviev group and many former members of the Workers' Opposition had returned to supporting Stalin under political pressure and left it. Under the impact of the 1927 grain-procurement crisis, Stalin is judged to have effectively taken over the opposition's slogans on industrialization and collectivization, after which the Bukharin group, an ally of yesterday, was labelled a "right deviation". In 1928 Bukharin sought an alliance with Zinoviev and Kamenev against Stalin but received no help, and Stalin used the meeting as evidence of a conspiracy between the two.

The Left Opposition was a faction formed around Trotsky in 1923, whereas the United Opposition was a coalition created in 1926 when the Left Opposition merged with the New Opposition. Russian-language accounts describe the 1926-1927 merger of Trotskyists, Zinovievists and remnants of the old Democratic Centralists and the Workers' Opposition, and judge that this combination of yesterday's ideological adversaries weakened their cause and drew accusations of "unprincipled" conduct aimed only at seizing power.

At the end of the 1936 show trial Zinoviev and Kamenev were sentenced to death and shot, an event often taken as the starting point of the Great Purge. In 1940 Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico by a Soviet agent. By the end of 1941 almost all former supporters of the United Opposition had been executed or assassinated on Stalin's orders.