Left Opposition

Formation

The Left Opposition took shape in the autumn of 1923. On 8 October that year Trotsky sent a letter to the Central Committee criticizing the bureaucratization of the party apparatus and the concentration of appointment powers in the secretariat, and on 15 October forty-six party officials submitted a declaration to the Politburo to the same effect. These two documents were the starting point of an organized grouping.

The moment of 1923 coincided with economic crisis. With the scissors crisis widening the gap between industrial and agricultural prices and unemployment rising, the opposition demanded planned industrialization and the restoration of inner-party democracy together. That combination became the basic structure of its platform.

Platform

The economic axis had three elements: rapid industrialization through planning, agricultural cooperation on a voluntary basis, and restraint on income differentials and bureaucratic privilege. Preobrazhensky's theory of primitive socialist accumulation supplied the theoretical grounding for the question of industrial funding.

The political axis was the restoration of inner-party democracy. The opposition pointed out that the ban on factions of 1921 had been an emergency measure and demanded the right to state programmatic views and the restoration of procedures for debate. On international questions it clashed with the Comintern leadership over relations with the Guomindang in the Chinese revolution and over the response to the British general strike.

Merger and expulsion

The political alignment changed after 1925. Stalin combined with Bukharin, while Zinoviev and Kamenev, who had previously opposed Trotsky, formed a New Opposition and then joined the Left Opposition in the United Opposition of 1926. The United Opposition raised its own slogans at the demonstrations for the tenth anniversary of the revolution in 1927, and that action became the ground for organizational measures.

In December 1927 the Fifteenth Party Congress expelled members of the opposition from the party. Many afterwards recanted and were readmitted, Zinoviev and Kamenev among them, while Trotsky was exiled to Alma-Ata in 1928 and deported abroad in 1929. Remaining groups were arrested again in 1932 and 1933, and most of those who had belonged to the opposition were shot in the Moscow trials and the Great Purge of the 1930s.

Legacy

The literature of the Left Opposition remains the first internal left critique to analyse the nature of the Soviet system. Its method of locating the causes of bureaucratization in the structure of power in an isolated backward country rather than in individual character became a reference for later Soviet studies and left argument, and internationally it was the theoretical starting point of the Trotskyist current.