People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Left critics of Bolshevism 1873–1928

The man who made Lenin furious over philosophy, then died swapping his own blood: a forerunner of cybernetics

Every organisation, on achieving decisive influence in society, inevitably — regardless of how democratic its programme — tries to impose its own internal structure on the whole social order. Every collective recreates the social environment in its own image and likeness.

Bolshevik co-founder and Lenin's early philosophical rival. His 'Tektology,' a universal organizational science, made him a forerunner of systems theory and cybernetics. Founder of the world's first blood transfusion institute, he died in 1928 during an exchange transfusion self-experiment.

Soviet Ukraine state institutions Left critics of Bolshevism 1873–1941 ✕ Executed

From Balkan revolutionary to head of Soviet Ukraine: the diplomat who became an opposition theorist

"Our misfortune is that we held responsible posts and power turned our heads." Final plea at the 1938 Moscow trial

A pan-European revolutionary of Bulgarian ethnic origin who also held Romanian citizenship, Rakovsky founded the Balkan Social Democratic Federation. As chairman of the Ukrainian Council of People's Commissars from 1919 to 1923 he helped build the Ukrainian Soviet state, and he later served as Soviet ambassador to Britain and France. A Left Opposition theoretician who challenged Stalin's nationalities policy and party bureaucratisation, he was expelled in 1927, admitted his errors to Stalin in 1934 and was readmitted in 1935. Sentenced to 20 years at the Third Moscow Trial in 1938, he was shot at Oryol on 11 September 1941 and rehabilitated on 4 February 1988.

General Confederation of Labour (CGT, France) Left critics of Bolshevism 1877–1964 ○ Natural causes

From syndicalism through the Comintern to the Fourth International: a French internationalist across a century of revolution

Lenin described Rosmer as "a man who knows how to keep his mouth shut in five or six languages." — quoted in Philippe Robrieux's internal history of the French Communist Party

American-born French revolutionary syndicalist and a key figure in the Comintern leadership. With Pierre Monatte he published La Vie ouvrière and organised anti-war internationalism; he spent seventeen months in Moscow helping found the Red International of Labour Unions (Profintern). A Political Bureau member of the French Communist Party, he was expelled in 1924 for defending Trotsky, thereafter committing to the Left Opposition and Trotskyism. In 1938 he hosted the founding conference of the Fourth International at his home in Périgny. In his later years he signed the Manifesto of 121 against the Algerian War and wrote the classic memoir Lenin's Moscow.

Soviet Union state institutions Left critics of Bolshevism 1879–1940 ✕ Assassinated · Mexico

The orator who built the Red Army, felled by an ice axe

25 October 1917, the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets in Petrograd. As Menshevik and Right SR delegates walked out in protest against the Bolshevik insurrection, Trotsky declared of them from the chair: 'Go where you belong from now on, into the dustbin of history!'

Born on 7 November 1879 (O.S. 26 October) in Yanovka, Kherson Governorate, in the Russian Empire, into a Jewish farming family. After the February Revolution of 1917 he joined the Bolsheviks and, as chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, helped lead the October rising. As People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs he negotiated the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and from 1918 to 1925 he headed Military and Naval Affairs, building the Red Army and leading it to victory in the Civil War. From 1923 he led the Left Opposition, but Stalin outmanoeuvred him: expelled from the party in 1927, exiled to Alma-Ata in 1928, deported in 1929, and stripped of Soviet citizenship in 1932. In exile he argued in The Revolution Betrayed (1936) that the USSR had become a degenerated workers' state, and founded the Fourth International in 1938. He was killed in Mexico City in August 1940 by the NKVD agent Ramón Mercader.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Left critics of Bolshevism 1881–1936 ✕ Executed

The Siberian Bolshevik of the Left Opposition

Stripped of his commissar post in 1927, Smirnov, penniless, went to the labor exchange to register as an unemployed precision mechanic. When he wrote 'People's Commissar of Posts and Telegraphs' in the box marked 'last position held,' the petty clerk at the window stared dumbfounded at the tall, greying man with lively eyes standing before him.

A Bolshevik who joined the RSDLP in 1899, he endured seven arrests and years of prison and exile in service of the revolutionary movement. A Civil War-era party organizer in the Urals and Siberia and chairman of Sibrevkom, he played a decisive role in defeating Kolchak's White forces. In the 1920s, he became a leading figure of the Left Opposition. Even after his 1927 expulsion, he led a clandestine opposition group from 1931, reestablishing contact with Trotsky via Berlin, and was arrested in 1933, sentenced to death at the first Moscow Trial in 1936, and executed.

Party of Left Socialist Revolutionaries Left critics of Bolshevism 1883–1918 ○ Typhus

Left SR People's Commissar in the first Soviet coalition: 'the core of the party'

'Proshyan succeeded in doing more to strengthen the Soviet power before July 1918 than he did after July 1918 to undermine it.' — Lenin, 'In Memory of Comrade Proshyan,' December 1918

Core leader of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party and People's Commissar for Posts and Telegraphs in the first Soviet coalition government, serving alongside Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin on the Provisional Executive Committee of the Council of People's Commissars (February 1918). As commissar (December 1917–March 1918) he broke the postal-telegraph sabotage and normalized communications, while also serving as political commissar to the Supreme Military Council and member of the VTsIK Presidium. He resigned in protest against the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and became one of the leaders of the July 1918 Left SR uprising; he died of typhus while underground. Maria Spiridonova called him 'the internal builder, the main spring, the core of the Left SR party.'

Soviet Union state institutions Left critics of Bolshevism 1884–1928 Death circumstances disputed

Bolshevik military leader of 1917 and the Civil War

On the evening of 24 October 1917, Lashevich ordered A. V. Belyshev, the Military Revolutionary Committee commissar aboard the cruiser Aurora, to restore traffic across the Nikolaevsky Bridge that junkers had drawn apart the day before, and the task was carried out.

Born in 1884 in Odessa, in the Russian Empire, into a Jewish merchant family; he joined the RSDLP in 1901 and was a Bolshevik from 1903. In 1917 he took part in the October rising in Petrograd, and in the Civil War he commanded the 3rd Army. In 1925 he became First Deputy Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs and Deputy Chairman of the USSR Revolutionary Military Council. After joining the United Opposition in 1926 he was demoted and worked at the Chinese Eastern Railway in Harbin until his death in 1928.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Left critics of Bolshevism 1884–1937 ✕ Executed

Editor of Krasnaya Nov, Marxist critic who discovered Babel and Pasternak and led Pereval against RAPP

1921, in Lenin's Kremlin apartment. At the founding meeting of Krasnaya Nov, Gorky showed a collection of Indian tales. Lenin cut him short: "We pay for this in gold currency. This year there will be famine." Voronsky recalled: "Two truths collided — one said man does not live by bread alone, the other answered: but what if there is no bread?"

Marxist critic who founded Krasnaya Nov and discovered Babel and Pasternak. As leader of the Pereval group, he championed art as cognition of life against RAPP's class-war aesthetics. Joined the Left Opposition in 1923; executed in 1937.

Party of Left Socialist Revolutionaries Left critics of Bolshevism 1884–1941 ✕ Executed

Face of the Left SR Party and peasant tribune: the last revolutionary opposition leader to challenge the Bolsheviks from the left

"I undertook this sentence because my heart was tearing from pain... it was shameful and hard to live, hearing what was happening in the villages after Luzhenovsky." — Trial statement, 1906

A leading woman revolutionary of the Russian movement. Born in Tambov into a non-hereditary noble family, she left gymnasium in 1902 before joining the SRs. In 1906 she assassinated Tambov official Luzhenovsky over his suppression of peasants and became a national hero; her death sentence was commuted to lifetime hard labor at Nerchinsk. Freed by the February Revolution, she became a leader of the Left SR Party and chaired the All-Russian Peasant Congresses, and was nominated for Chair of the Constituent Assembly with Bolshevik support (153 votes to Chernov's 244). She broke with the Bolsheviks in 1918 and joined the Left SR uprising, then endured decades of arrest and exile. Rearrested in Ufa in 1937, she was sentenced to 25 years and shot near Oryol on 11 September 1941; Russian sources record 157 political prisoners executed there.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Left critics of Bolshevism 1885–1937 ✕ Executed

Leader of the Workers' Opposition, defeated by Lenin, devoured by the Purge

At his closed Military Collegium trial on 2 September 1937 he pleaded not guilty, refusing to confess to the terrorist conspiracy or to implicate others. He maintained that the programme of the Workers' Opposition had been right.

A skilled metal turner born into a poor Old Believer family in Murom, he joined the RSDLP in 1901 and sided with the Bolsheviks after the 1903 split. Working in French, German and British factories, he absorbed the European labor movement firsthand and ran the party's clandestine Scandinavian courier network during the war. In February 1917 he was the most senior Bolshevik in the capital, active in the Russian Bureau of the CC and the Petrograd Soviet's executive committee. After October he became the first People's Commissar of Labor, laying the foundations of the eight-hour day; at the end of the Civil War he and Kollontai led the Workers' Opposition, which Lenin defeated at the Tenth Congress in 1921. Sidelined into diplomacy, expelled in 1933 and imprisoned in 1935, he was executed on 2 September 1937 on fabricated charges. Rehabilitated in 1963 and restored to the party in 1988.

Party of Left Socialist Revolutionaries Left critics of Bolshevism 1885–1938 ✕ Executed

Co-founder and chief theoretician of the Left SR Party: from coalition with the Bolsheviks to the July 1918 uprising

"We, as political actors, at a moment when an event of immense historical significance is taking place, could least of all occupy ourselves with moral characterization. It was clear to us that our place was with the revolution." — First PLSR Congress, November 1917

Co-founder and chief theoretician of the Left SR Party. Entered coalition with the Bolsheviks, then led the July 1918 uprising against the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. After its suppression he endured repeated exile and was executed in 1938.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Left critics of Bolshevism 1886–1937 ✕ Executed

The theorist of primitive socialist accumulation

Victor Serge recalled: "He had driven himself so hard that during meetings it seemed he might at any moment drop off to sleep; but his brain was still fresh, and crammed with statistics."

A Bolshevik economic theorist and co-author, with Bukharin, of The ABC of Communism (1919), the foundational textbook of early communist parties worldwide, he served as a Central Committee Secretary during state-building. As an initiator of the Declaration of 46 (1923) and the Left Opposition's chief polemicist, he formalized the theory of 'primitive socialist accumulation' in The New Economics (1926), arguing that surplus must be transferred from the peasant sector to fund industrialization, framing the NEP debate. He returned to the Stalin line in 1929 but soon broke over collectivization violence, joined an underground opposition group, and was executed in 1937.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Left critics of Bolshevism 1887–1937 ✕ Executed

Leader of the 'Democratic Centralists' who demanded inner-party workers' democracy

'To call such an economy socialist means committing a crime before the working class and discrediting the ideas of communism.' From 'The Agony of Petty-Bourgeois Dictatorship', written December 1931, published 1932

Born into a Russian peasant family in the village of Mostaushka, Tula Governorate, he worked as a house painter from the age of 15, joined the revolutionary movement in 1905 and became a Bolshevik in 1912. After the October Revolution he served as chairman of the Moscow Provincial Executive Committee and of the Kharkov provincial revkom, deputy chairman of VSNKh, secretary of VTsIK and chairman of the Small Sovnarkom. In the early 1920s he led the 'Democratic Centralists' demanding inner-party democracy, was expelled at the 15th Party Congress in 1927 and exiled, and later became a key theoretician of the Left Opposition. In December 1931 he wrote 'The Agony of Petty-Bourgeois Dictatorship', analysing the Soviet system as a 'deformed state capitalism'; he was executed in Moscow on 28 September 1937.

Soviet Union state institutions Left critics of Bolshevism 1887–1937 ✕ Executed

From Moscow uprising artillery commander to Left Communist and Democratic Centralist

Building socialism in pre-industrial Russia alone was 'a side turning off the main highway of European socialism' — foredoomed to failure.

A Moscow law student and Bolshevik from 1907, he formed a Marxist theorists' trio with Nikolai Bukharin and Valerian Osinsky. In October 1917 he commanded the heavy artillery that secured Bolshevik victory in Moscow, and served as People's Commissar of Trade and Industry in early 1918. A Left Communist opponent of Brest-Litovsk, he spent the next decade in successive oppositions (Democratic Centralist, signatory of the Declaration of 46, and United Opposition ally of Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev) consistently pressing for party democracy. From 1921–1927 he sat on the Gosplan Presidium, chaired the Vesenkha financial commission, served on the Council of Labor and Defense, and edited Pravda. He regarded Russian socialism in isolation as 'a side turning off the main highway of European socialism, foredoomed to failure,' and after expulsion declared the revolution dead under Stalin.

Party of Left Socialist Revolutionaries Left critics of Bolshevism 1888–1957 ○ Natural causes

First People's Commissar of Justice under Lenin: the Left SR who defended revolutionary legality against the Cheka

"Then why bother with a Commissariat for Justice? Let's call it frankly the Commissariat for Social Extermination!" — to Lenin, protesting a Cheka summary-execution clause, February 1918

Left SR lawyer, first People's Commissar of Justice in Lenin's coalition government. He championed revolutionary legality against the Cheka and resigned over the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. In exile he was a Yiddish writer and territorialist activist.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Left critics of Bolshevism 1889–1945 ✕ Executed

Worker-Bolshevik who demanded press freedom from Lenin, sparking the 'myasnikovshchina' polemic

'Seventeen, then. Too many. But there is no other way. Revolution is not a ball.' — Myasnikov, planning the execution of Mikhail Romanov, 1918.

A Russian revolutionary and Motovilikha metalworker. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1905 and as deputy chairman of the Perm Cheka organized the execution of Grand Duke Mikhail Romanov in 1918. After the Civil War he openly attacked party censorship, demanding press freedom 'from monarchists to anarchists inclusive', a challenge that provoked Lenin's direct rebuttal and was branded 'myasnikovshchina.' Expelled from the RCP(b) in 1922, he founded the Workers' Group. In French exile he published 'The Latest Deception,' theorizing the USSR as state capitalism. He returned in 1944, was arrested, and executed the following year.

Soviet Ukraine state institutions Left critics of Bolshevism 1890–1937 ✕ Executed

The Bolshevik between revolution and the industrial plan

January 1937, in the dock at the second Moscow trial. The German writer Lion Feuchtwanger recorded: "I shall never forget how Georgy Pyatakov, a gentleman of medium height, middle-aged, with a small bald patch and a reddish, old-fashioned, trembling pointed beard, stood before the microphone and calmly, diligently narrated how he had wrecked the industry entrusted to him. He explained, pointing with an outstretched finger, like a university lecturer — a historian delivering a report on the life and deeds of a long-dead man named Pyatakov, striving to clarify every detail, seized by the single desire that his listeners and students should understand everything correctly."

A Bolshevik revolutionary and the first head of Soviet Ukraine. As a Left Communist, he fiercely opposed Lenin over the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and the national question, and was one of only six Bolsheviks named in Lenin's Testament. Expelled as a Left Oppositionist, he recanted and returned to drive the Five-Year Plans as Deputy Commissar of Heavy Industry, before becoming chief defendant at the second Moscow show trial and being executed in 1937.

Soviet Ukraine state institutions Left critics of Bolshevism 1890–1937 ✕ Executed

Founder of Ukrainian Bolshevism, signatory of the Declaration of the 46

Sentenced to death by Petliura's forces, he escaped wounded at the last moment and hid until the Red Army arrived.

Yakov Drobnis was a Jewish worker-revolutionary who joined the Bolsheviks in 1906 at age sixteen, helped found the Ukrainian Communist Party in 1918 and served on its Central Committee through five convocations. During the Civil War he organized partisan detachments against Petliura and Denikin, chaired the Poltava and Odessa soviets, and served as secretary of the Ukrainian CP Central Committee in 1922. A signatory of the 1923 'Declaration of the 46', the founding document of the Left Opposition, he was expelled in 1927, reinstated in 1930, and executed in 1937 as a defendant at the second Moscow Show Trial.

Socialist Workers Party (United States) Left critics of Bolshevism 1890–1974 ○ Natural causes

The labor organizer who read Trotsky's critique in Moscow and founded the American Trotskyist movement

“They had expelled the heart of their party; Trotsky had won over all the serious young activists, leaving only a dead husk.” — after the Socialist Party expelled the Trotskyists, 1937

A Kansas-born labor organizer of Irish descent, James P. Cannon helped found the Communist Party of America in 1919 and was elected to the Comintern Presidium in 1922. In 1928, after reading a misdirected critique of the Comintern by Trotsky in Moscow, he turned to the Left Opposition, was expelled from the CPA, and co-founded the Communist League of America. He led the landmark 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strike, and in 1938 founded the Socialist Workers Party, becoming its first National Secretary. Imprisoned for 18 months under the Smith Act for opposing U.S. entry into World War II, he remained a central leader of the Fourth International and shaped the American Trotskyist tradition across four decades.

Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) Left critics of Bolshevism 1892–1937 ✕ Murdered

The Marxist who linked the Russian and Spanish revolutions, founder of the POUM

“The working class has solved the problem of the Church simply by not leaving even one of them standing.” — La Vanguardia, August 1936

Catalan Marxist revolutionary. After serving as CNT General Secretary, he joined Trotsky's Left Opposition in Moscow and later founded the anti-Stalinist POUM. He was also the first to translate Russian literature directly into Catalan.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Left critics of Bolshevism 1892–1937 ✕ Executed

The young oppositionist of the Revolutionary Military Council

On 7 November 1927, the tenth anniversary of the Revolution, Smilga hung portraits of Lenin, Trotsky and Zinoviev from his apartment opposite the Kremlin with a banner reading 'Let's Fulfill Lenin's Testament.' Stalin's supporters broke in and wrecked the apartment; beaten in the street and arrested, he escaped custody later that day.

A Latvian-born Bolshevik revolutionary and economist. He joined the party at fourteen and was elected to the Central Committee at twenty-four in 1917, becoming Lenin's key collaborator during his Finnish hideout. During the October Revolution he transported pro-Bolshevik troops from Finland to Petrograd; in the Civil War he served as a Revolutionary Military Council member on every major front and as head of the Red Army's Political Directorate. A principal leader of the Left Opposition, he led its last public demonstration in November 1927. After renouncing Trotskyism in 1930 he was reinstated, but secretly continued in Ivan Smirnov's underground opposition organisation. He was executed in January 1937.

Kronstadt Provisional Revolutionary Committee Left critics of Bolshevism 1892–1947 ✕ Died in prison

The sailor who led the Kronstadt rebellion, became a Soviet spy, and died in a camp

March 1921, Kronstadt. The newspaper of Petrichenko's Provisional Revolutionary Committee declared: 'Here in Kronstadt has been laid the first stone of the third revolution, striking the last fetters from the laboring masses and opening a broad new road.'

Stepan Petrichenko was a senior clerk aboard the Baltic Fleet battleship Petropavlovsk who proclaimed the 'Soviet Republic of Soldiers and Fortress-Builders of Naissaar' on an Estonian island in December 1917, serving as its chairman. In March 1921, he emerged as leader of the Kronstadt rebellion, chairing the Provisional Revolutionary Committee and demanding an end to 'the dictatorship of the Communists', the most dramatic internal challenge to Bolshevik rule. After the rebellion was crushed by Trotsky's forces, Petrichenko fled to Finland and, in 1922, was recruited by Soviet intelligence, serving as a secret agent for over 20 years. Arrested and extradited to the USSR in 1945, he was sentenced to 10 years for 'counter-revolutionary terrorist organization' and died during a prison transfer in 1947.

French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO) Left critics of Bolshevism 1895–1984 ○ Natural causes

The only non-Bolshevik on all three leading Comintern bodies. And author of the first critical Stalin biography.

Ten days after the Bolsheviks seized power, the twenty-two-year-old Souvarine wrote on 17 November 1917: "It is to be feared that, for Lenin and his friends, the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' must be the dictatorship of the Bolsheviks and their leader. This could become a calamity for the Russian working class, and eventually, for the world proletariat. […] What we wish is agreement among socialists to organise a stable power that truly becomes the power of the people and not the power of a man." — 'La Commune maximaliste,' *Ce qu'il faut dire*, No. 78

The only non-Bolshevik to serve on all three leading Comintern bodies. Expelled in 1924 for defending Trotsky, he turned independent anti-Stalinist and published the first critical biography of Stalin (1935), remaining a pioneering Sovietologist throughout his life.

Comintern Left critics of Bolshevism 1897–1935 ✕ Suicide

Comintern architect of the Canton uprising who led the first party-apparatus challenge to Stalin's collectivization

At the 16th Party Congress in 1930, he took the podium and openly assailed Stalin's forced collectivization. When he finished, the hall fell silent — his was one of the few speeches not greeted by applause.

A Georgian Bolshevik who left a deep mark on the Chinese revolution as a Comintern operative. In 1927 he chaired the August 7 Emergency Conference, engineered the removal of Chen Duxiu, elevated Mao Zedong to the Politburo, and approved the Canton uprising. He also advanced the theory that China's 'Asiatic mode of production' made it possible to bypass the capitalist stage. In 1930 he and Syrtsov formed the first party-apparatus opposition to Stalin's forced collectivization; demoted and marginalized, he shot himself in 1935 under threat of arrest.