Left Communists
좌파 공산주의자
A faction within the Bolshevik Party that in early 1918 opposed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and instead called for 'revolutionary war' against Imperial Germany. Led by Bukharin, the group also advanced a radical economic programme: immediate nationalization of industry, full workers' control, and the abolition of money. It abstained on the ratification vote at the Seventh Party Congress (March 1918), and faded as an organized faction by the end of 1918, as War Communism partly absorbed its radical demands. Most of its members later affiliated with Trotsky's Left Opposition in the mid-1920s.
In depth
Brest-Litovsk and the Revolutionary War Thesis
From December 1917 to March 1918, the Bolshevik Party was torn by internal struggle over a separate peace with Germany. Lenin insisted that, without an army or a functioning front, peace must be signed on any terms. Trotsky proposed a middle course, 'neither war nor peace', a unilateral declaration of demobilization.
The Left Communists rejected both. Their argument was stark: peace with an imperialist power was a betrayal of world revolution, and the Russian Revolution could not survive without an uprising of the European proletariat, above all in Germany. A revolutionary war, they argued, must be waged to ignite the German working class.
Controlling the Moscow regional party bureau and influential in the Petrograd committee, they published the journal Kommunist and mobilized opposition to the treaty. A survey of local soviets at the time showed majority opposition to peace: in the Urals, for example, 46 of 70 soviets whose position was known rejected the German terms.
Composition and Aftermath
The faction's leading figures included Bukharin, Bubnov, Osinsky (Obolensky), Pyatakov, Preobrazhensky, Radek, Kollontai, Smirnov, and Yakovleva. At the Seventh Party Congress (6–8 March 1918), which Lenin and Sverdlov packed with pro-peace delegates, the Left Communists abstained on the ratification vote.
As civil war intensified in the summer of 1918 and War Communism was introduced, the faction's radical economic demands (nationalization of industry, abolition of banks, exclusion of bourgeois specialists) lost their distinct factional rationale. By late 1918 the Left Communist faction had effectively dissolved. Some members shifted to the Military Opposition or the Democratic Centralists, and by the mid-1920s most had gravitated toward Trotsky's Left Opposition.
The Left Communists are a wholly distinct group from the later Left Opposition (the Trotsky-led faction from 1923 onward). Both share the label 'left,' but the former was a temporary 1918 faction coalescing around opposition to the Brest peace, while the latter was a sustained opposition movement against bureaucratization and the doctrine of socialism in one country.
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Sources
- Wikipedia (EN) Primary source: faction composition, leadership under Bukharin, Brest-Litovsk opposition, VII Congress abstention, dissolution by late 1918, later affiliation with Trotsky's Left Opposition.
- Wikipedia (RU) Russian article: full list of faction members, details of the revolutionary war programme, survey data on local soviet opposition to the treaty (70 Urals soviets: 46 against, 24 for), confirmation of Kommunist journal and Moscow regional bureau control.