Declaration of 46

The document

On 15 October 1923 forty-six party officials submitted a secret document to the Politburo. The signatories included Preobrazhensky, Serebryakov, Antonov-Ovseenko, and Sapronov, leading figures of the revolution and civil war who belonged to several groups with different political histories.

The document raised two problems. One was the absence of economic policy: improvised responses without planning were producing the scissors crisis, a credit squeeze, and unemployment. The other was the internal regime of the party: the secretariat had taken hold of the organization through its power of appointment, and expression of opinion by members was effectively blocked.

Relation to Trotsky's letter

The declaration shared its framing with Trotsky's letter of a week earlier, on 8 October. Whether the two were coordinated or written separately was disputed at the time, and the Politburo used the question as ground for defining them as factional organization. Most of the signatories denied coordination.

The Politburo and the Central Control Commission dealt with the matter over that December and the following January. In January 1924 the Thirteenth Party Conference adopted a resolution defining Trotsky's letter and the Declaration of the Forty-Six as factionalism, and that resolution became the precedent for later measures against oppositions.

Aftermath

The Declaration of the Forty-Six is treated as the organizational starting point of the Left Opposition. Its signatories took different paths afterwards: some recanted and kept their posts, some were expelled in 1927, and some continued in opposition activity.

During the Great Purge the list became in effect a roll of the condemned. The overwhelming majority of signatories were arrested and shot between 1936 and 1938, and having signed the declaration was itself cited in investigation files as evidence of participation in an anti-Soviet organization. That an expression of opinion submitted as an internal party document served as the ground of a criminal charge a decade later shows how the standing of inner-party opposition changed after the ban on factions.