Right Opposition

The name and the group

The Right Opposition was not a name of its own choosing. Stalin applied it in 1928 to the group around Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky, who at the time stood at the top of the party and state apparatus. Bukharin chaired the Executive Committee of the Comintern, Rykov chaired Sovnarkom, and Tomsky led the central trade union body.

What they opposed were the emergency measures adopted in the grain crisis of 1928 and the policy turn that followed: the revival of forced procurement, the raising of Five-Year Plan targets, and full collectivization.

Their case

The case extended the logic of NEP. Growth had to be balanced, giving the peasant an incentive to sell while maintaining light industry and the supply of consumer goods, because forced extraction would destroy the market and cost industry both its outlet and its grain. Bukharin's Notes of an Economist, published in 1929, was the public statement of this position.

The dispute was a difference of judgement about the pace of accumulation. The Left Opposition had also demanded industrialization, but combined it with inner-party democracy and voluntary cooperation, while the Right sought to lower the pace itself to keep a balance with the peasant economy. The course Stalin carried out joined the Left's demand for industrialization to the coercive means the Left had excluded.

Defeat and international spread

The Right Opposition was defeated at the Central Committee plenum of April 1929. Bukharin was removed from the Comintern chairmanship and Tomsky from the trade union leadership, and Rykov lost the chairmanship of Sovnarkom in 1930. All three recanted, but they were targeted again in the 1930s, and Bukharin and Rykov were shot after the Trial of the Twenty-One in 1938.

Internationally the current organized as the Communist Party Opposition of Brandler and Thalheimer in Germany and the Lovestone group in the United States, with similar formations in some fifteen countries. Expelled from the Comintern, they joined the International Revolutionary Marxist Centre in 1939 and developed independent positions in debates over the analysis of fascism and the popular front strategy.