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.

Comintern Left critics of Bolshevism 1885–1939 ✕ Killed in prison

The polemicist who survived trial only to die in prison

"Do you know the difference between Stalin and Moses? Moses led the Jews out of Egypt, but Comrade Stalin led them out of the Politburo." — Radek to Boris Bazhanov, after Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the Politburo.

A Polish-born Jewish journalist and diplomat who moved between the international social-democratic and communist movements. A close associate of Lenin, he participated in the Brest-Litovsk negotiations and the founding of the Comintern, serving on the Bolshevik Central Committee and as Comintern secretary. Renowned for his sharp polemics and biting wit, he led the Left Opposition before recanting publicly in 1930 and rejoining the Party. During the Great Purge he became the central defendant at the Second Moscow Trial, delivering theatrical confessions that earned him a 10-year sentence; in 1939 he was killed in prison on Stalin's orders.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Left critics of Bolshevism 1891–1938 ✕ Executed

The Kosior brother who died in Vorkuta as an oppositionist while his brother ruled Ukraine for Stalin

After signing the Declaration of 46 in 1923 he spent fifteen years as an oppositionist, through expulsion, exile, a political isolator, and a camp, until he was shot.

Born in Węgrów in Poland, he joined the RSDLP in 1906. He was the brother of Stanislav Kosior, and while his brother rose to the Politburo and the leadership of the Ukrainian party, he took the road of the oppositions. He was an instructor for the Moscow metalworkers union in 1919, a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the 12th Army and deputy head of the political department of the 14th Army in 1920, chairman of the All-Ukrainian Council of Trade Unions from 1920 to 1922, and chief editor of the trade-union paper Trud from 1922 to 1924. He belonged to the Democratic Centralist group in 1921, signed the Declaration of 46 in 1923, and worked with the Left Opposition thereafter. Expelled in May 1928, he was exiled to Pokrovsk in the Volga German ASSR, and because he kept up the work in exile he was given three years in a political isolator and then five years of exile in Minusinsk. In July 1936 he was sentenced to five years in the camps and held at Ukhta-Pechlag, was arrested again in December 1937, and was shot at Vorkuta on 30 March 1938.

Left critics of Bolshevism 1917–2000 ○ Natural causes

The Trotskyist theorist who defined the USSR as bureaucratic state capitalism and built Britain's Socialist Workers Party

The slogan the Cliff group raised in 1950, when a handful of supporters brought out Socialist Review: “Neither Washington nor Moscow but international socialism.” It was a refusal of both camps of the Cold War, and the sentence that defined this current for the next half century.

Born Yigael Glückstein. Raised in Palestine in a family of Polish-Jewish immigrants, he left the Zionist left in his teens for Trotskyism, served twelve months in a British Mandate prison for anti-war agitation, and moved to Britain in 1947. In The Nature of Stalinist Russia (1948) he defined the USSR not as a degenerated workers'' state but as bureaucratic state capitalism, breaking with Fourth International orthodoxy, and on that base he built the theory of the permanent arms economy, which explained the postwar boom by East-West military spending, and of deflected permanent revolution, in which neither bourgeoisie nor working class but intellectuals and officers carry the revolution out. The organization he started as the Socialist Review Group in 1950 became the International Socialists and, in 1977, the Socialist Workers Party. He left a study of Rosa Luxemburg and four-volume biographies of Lenin and of Trotsky, and, never granted British citizenship, remained stateless all his life.