Group of Democratic Centralism

Origins and formation

The Group of Democratic Centralism (Russian: Группа демократического централизма, the 'decists') emerged directly out of the 1918 Left Communist faction in both personnel and ideas. It was formed in early 1919 and was at first based among personnel of local Soviet and party organs. Its leaders were Old Bolshevik intellectuals: Valerian Obolensky-Ossinsky, Vladimir Smirnov, Timofei Sapronov, V. N. Maximovsky, M. S. Boguslavsky, A. Z. Kamensky, Isaak Dashkovsky and Raphail Farbman. Sources differ on when it formed: alongside the early 1919 date there is March 1919 at the 8th Party Congress, while Michel Olivier traces the group to December 1919 out of the 1918 Left Communist faction.

Platform and activity

The group counterposed 'democratic centralism' to 'bureaucratic centralism'. It peaked at the 9th Party Congress (March–April 1920), where it was partially supported by senior Communists including Tomsky and Yurenev but its proposals were voted down; there Osinsky defined democratic centralism as carrying out Central Committee directives through local organisations while recognising the autonomy of those organisations and their responsibility for individual spheres of work, against Lenin's definition. The decists opposed the bureaucratisation of party and Soviet bodies and one-man management in industry, held that the Party had usurped the dictatorship of the proletariat, and, while not stating openly that Thermidorian forces had won, issued a 'Group of 15' platform dated 27 June 1927 that was more radical than the Trotskyist-Zinovievist 'Platform of 13'. The new organisation was built as a clandestine network of cells of at most five members rather than an inner-party faction, and it distributed the typewritten pamphlet 'The Workers' Question' and mass leaflets aimed at industrial workers in 1928–29. Sapronov's 'The Agony of the Petty-Bourgeois Dictatorship' (1931), written in exile, characterised the Soviet economic system as a 'malformed state capitalism' and Stalin's regime as a petty-bourgeois dictatorship; it was later used as evidence by Stalin's judges.

Distinctions from other currents

The Democratic Centralists called for more democratic participation in decision-making within the party and the state but did not align fully with either Trotsky or the Workers' Opposition. The Workers' Opposition was composed for the most part of workers and oriented to the trade unions, demanding production management by trade unions independent of the Soviet state, whereas the decists were largely members of the Central Committee and the leading institutions of the party and focused on party and Soviet democracy. They entered the 1923 opposition independently of Trotsky, and in 1923 the Soviet press called oppositionists 'supporters of Sapronov and Preobrazhensky' rather than Trotskyists. In autumn 1926 the Sapronovites left the 'Bolshevik-Leninist' bloc, protesting the line of Trotsky and Zinoviev and especially their public declaration of 16 October 1926 recanting factional activity. The point of dissolution is also disputed: Michel Olivier states that the group was dissolved with the other factions by the 10th Congress in 1921, whereas other accounts describe the leaders as continuing to act inside the party until expulsion at the 15th Congress in December 1927.

Repression and fate

In 1923 the decists took part in the opposition that produced the Declaration of the 46, whose 'initiators' and 'core' Sapronov and other Decist leaders were regarded as; its Moscow headquarters met in Maximovsky's apartment in the National hotel, and Maximovsky won the Hamovnichesky district party conference in January 1924 before being forced out within two months. The 'Group of 15' formed by Sapronov and Smirnov in 1926 joined the United Opposition headed by Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev, and its members were expelled at the 15th Party Congress in December 1927 along with the rest of the United Opposition. The GPU chief Agranov admitted that in 1927 the Chekists believed 'one room would have been enough' for all active decists, while they had about five hundred members in Moscow and Leningrad alone and the decists themselves estimated their membership at about two thousand; in March 1928 the party Central Control Commission held a special meeting on the struggle against the Sapronovites.

After the 1927 expulsion the leaders were moved from exile to political isolators and camps, and by the early 1930s the GPU had generally destroyed the Sapronovite underground. Members' fates were not uniform. Sapronov was arrested again in prison on 10 August 1937, sentenced by the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court to the highest penalty on 28 September 1937 and shot the same day (rehabilitated 28 March 1990). Vladimir Smirnov was sentenced to death by the Military Collegium on 26 May 1937, where he pleaded not guilty, and shot that day (partially rehabilitated 1960, fully in 1990). Osinsky was arrested on 14 October 1937 and shot on 1 September 1938 (rehabilitated 1957). By contrast V. N. Maximovsky, a founding leader, was arrested on 27 July 1937 but according to the official record died in exile of a cerebral haemorrhage in November 1941, posthumously rehabilitated in 1955. During the Great Terror former decists who had left the opposition in the mid-1920s were shot as well, and former members took part in the 1936–37 hunger strikes and protests in the Vorkuta and Kolyma camps.