Left opposition to the Bolsheviks
좌파 반대파
The left opposition to the Bolsheviks is an umbrella name for the currents that criticised or opposed Lenin's party and the Soviet leadership from the left after the October Revolution of 1917. It covers the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, who left the coalition government over the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk; the intra-party factions of the Left Communists (1918), the Democratic Centralists, the Workers' Opposition and the Left Opposition of 1923–1927; the Kronstadt rising of 1921, which demanded new elections to the soviets and freedom for the socialist parties; the oppositional groups inside the party in the early 1930s; and later cases such as Valery Sablin's 1975 shipboard mutiny against the leadership's departure from Leninist principles. It is not one organisation but a set of distinct oppositions invoking world revolution, workers' self-management and inner-party democracy.
In depth
Definition and scope
The left opposition to the Bolsheviks is a collective name for the currents that criticised or opposed Lenin's party and the Soviet leadership from the left after the October Revolution. It is not one organisation or programme. It brings together the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, who governed in coalition with the Bolsheviks and then broke with them; the factions that arose inside the party, the Left Communists, the Democratic Centralists, the Workers' Opposition and the Left Opposition; the Kronstadt rising of 1921; oppositional groups inside the party in the early 1930s; and later individuals who called for a return to Leninist principles. Their demands included the immediate spread of the revolution abroad, self-management by workers and peasants, inner-party democracy and freedom of factions, and free elections to the soviets.
The narrower faction around Trotsky in 1923–1927 is treated in the entry Left Opposition, and the alliance of 1926–1927 in United Opposition. This entry covers the wider field: opposition from the left from 1917 to the late Soviet period.
The Left Socialist Revolutionaries: from coalition to rupture
The Left SRs arose as the left wing of the Socialist Revolutionary Party during the First World War. At the party's Third Congress in May–June 1917 they formed a so-called "left opposition", demanding that the war be condemned as imperialist and left at once, that cooperation with the Provisional Government end, and that the land be handed to the peasants immediately. In October they joined the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet and took part in the armed rising; they supported the Bolsheviks at the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets and constituted themselves as a separate party in December. At the end of 1917 they entered the Council of People's Commissars, heading the commissariats of agriculture (Andrei Kolegayev), justice (Isaac Steinberg) and posts and telegraphs (Prosh Proshian), among others.
The rupture began with Brest-Litovsk. On 23 February 1918 the Left SRs voted in the Central Executive Committee against signing the peace, then against its ratification at the Fourth Extraordinary Congress of Soviets in March, after which they left the Council of People's Commissars. Seeing the decrees on committees of poor peasants as an attack on their base among the working peasantry, the party resolved in June to use every available means to "straighten the line of Soviet policy". On 6 July Left SRs Yakov Blumkin and Nikolai Andreyev assassinated the German ambassador Mirbach in Moscow; after the events that followed, the Fifth Congress of Soviets excluded from the soviets the Left SRs who supported their Central Committee's line. On the basis of a letter by Maria Spiridonova, another reading holds that the assassination was the personal initiative of a few leaders and that there was no uprising. The party split in September 1918, and some members continued an armed underground struggle. After its Fourth Congress (September–October 1918) the party's programme moved towards positions close to anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism, proposing that enterprises be handed to the self-management of their work collectives. In the Great Terror Boris Kamkov, Kolegayev and others were shot, and Spiridonova was shot near Oryol in September 1941.
Factions inside the party: from the Left Communists to the Workers' Opposition
Inside the party the Left Communists formed an opposition in January 1918. Arguing that the socialist revolution in Russia would perish unless the revolution was spread abroad at once, they fought the Brest peace; at home they proposed abolishing the banks entirely and speeding up the abolition of money, decentralising state and economic administration, and not employing "bourgeois" specialists. They controlled the party's Moscow regional bureau and published Kommunist. The Russian encyclopedia notes that their programme of "revolutionary war" was no further left than the one Lenin had advanced before early 1918.
In early 1919 former Left Communists including Timofei Sapronov and Vladimir Maksimovsky formed the Democratic Centralists ("Decists"). They set democratic centralism against "bureaucratic centralism", opposed one-man management of enterprises at the Ninth Party Congress, and after the Tenth Congress banned factions and groupings demanded freedom of factions inside the party. In late 1919 and early 1920 the Workers' Opposition, led by Alexander Shlyapnikov, Sergei Medvedev, Alexandra Kollontai and Yuri Lutovinov, appeared and called for management of the national economy to be transferred to the trade unions; it was defeated at the Eleventh Congress in 1922. Gavriil Myasnikov, a member of the Workers' Opposition, later led the "Workers' Group" and argued that the Soviet Union was state-capitalist in nature; he was expelled from the party in February 1922.
The Kronstadt rising (1921)
In March 1921 the garrison of the Kronstadt fortress, the crews of the Baltic Fleet and the town's residents rose against the dictatorship of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and the policy of War Communism. A resolution adopted in February by meetings of the crews of the battleships Sevastopol and Petropavlovsk contained political demands such as "Power to the soviets, not to the parties!", and the meeting of 28 February demanded new elections to the soviets, the abolition of commissars, freedom of activity for all socialist parties and freedom of trade. The historian Paul Avrich read the resolution as a demand that the government observe the constitution and grant the rights and freedoms Lenin had spoken of in 1917 — a return to the slogan "All power to the soviets!". The meeting was opened by Stepan Petrichenko. The assault involved the Seventh Army under Mikhail Tukhachevsky and around 300 delegates of the Tenth Party Congress, among them leaders of the Workers' Opposition and the Democratic Centralists who volunteered. The same year the government ended War Communism and moved to the New Economic Policy.
The Left Opposition and inner-party opposition in the early 1930s
The Left Opposition began to take shape around the "Declaration of the 46" in October 1923, while Lenin was ill; its best-known figures include Leon Trotsky, Yevgeni Preobrazhensky, Karl Radek, Christian Rakovsky, Ivan Smirnov, Lev Sosnovsky and Alexander Voronsky. The Russian encyclopedia cites the view that in 1923–1924 the opposition was neither a "Trotskyist" nor a "factional" organisation but a tendency held together by criticism of party policy and support for a more decisive "democratisation" of the inner-party regime. Former Democratic Centralists joined it, but Sapronov and Vladimir Smirnov, considering Trotsky insufficiently radical, formed their own group in 1926. The opposition marched in the tenth-anniversary demonstrations of 7 November 1927 with slogans such as "Let us fulfil Lenin's testament!", and in December the Fifteenth Congress declared its views incompatible with party membership. Seventy-five activists of the United Opposition and the Sapronov–Smirnov group were expelled, and about 8,000 oppositionists were expelled before, during and after the congress. In 1930 Trotsky's supporters abroad founded the International Left Opposition.
Opposition continued into the early 1930s. In 1930 Vissarion Lominadze formed an oppositional group with Lazar Shatskin that made contact with Sergei Syrtsov, chairman of the RSFSR Council of People's Commissars; Stalin called it a "right-leftist bloc". In 1932 a group of pre-revolutionary Bolsheviks led by Vasily Kayurov asked Martemyan Ryutin to write its programme and formed the Union of Marxist-Leninists. Made up mainly of supporters of the "Right", it sought to unite all communists, right and left, who rejected Stalin's course, and its document "Stalin and the Crisis of the Proletarian Dictatorship" acknowledged that the Left Opposition had been right in its struggle against the inner-party regime.
Calls to return to Leninism: the Sablin affair (1975)
A later case is that of Valery Sablin, a naval captain third rank who led a mutiny on the large anti-submarine ship Storozhevoy on 9 November 1975. The official version was that he tried to take the ship to Sweden; by Sablin's own account he was taking it to Kronstadt in protest against the departure of the party and government from Leninist principles in building socialism, intending to address Brezhnev on Central Television. Sentenced to death for treason, he was shot in Moscow on 3 August 1976.
Relations to neighbouring currents
These currents came from different traditions. The Left SRs were a separate socialist party based on the working peasantry, while the inner-party factions demanded inner-party democracy and workers' control as members of the Bolshevik party. The Russian encyclopedia notes that the Workers' Opposition resembled the German council-communist movement in some respects, though there is no record of direct contact between them. The Trotskyist movement abroad is treated under Trotskyism, and German-Dutch council communism and the Italian left under Left communism and Council communism.