Workers' Group

Background

The Workers' Group grew out of criticisms Myasnikov had been voicing since 1920. As head of the Perm party committee he attacked the replacement of workers' control by one-man management in nationalised industry, the growing share of non-workers in the party and its leading bodies, and the narrowing of internal party democracy. His May 1921 memorandum demanded the abolition of the death penalty, the end of bureaucratic rule, the transfer of production management to producers' soviets, and freedom of speech for everyone "from monarchists to anarchists." After an exchange of letters with Lenin he was expelled in February 1922; with N. V. Kuznetsov and B. P. Moiseev, both also expelled, he formed a Provisional Central Organisational Bureau in March 1923.

Programme

The February 1923 manifesto, written to influence the 11th Party Congress that April, was smuggled around the Soviet Union. Its programme demanded the election of workers' councils in all nationalised factories with participation in management; the election of factory directors, union leaders and central authorities by congresses of workers' councils; freedom of expression for all manual workers; the abolition of the Council of People's Commissars with its functions transferred to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee; autonomy and internal democracy for the communist parties of the Soviet nationalities; and, internationally, rejection of the Comintern strategy of alliances with parties of the Second International and the "2½ International." The group held the NEP to be unavoidable given Russia's economic backwardness, but warned that without proletarian democracy it risked becoming a "New Exploitation of the Proletariat" that bred a privileged group. It criticised two other oppositions of the day: the Democratic Centralists for concerning themselves only with intra-party democracy, and the Workers' Truth group for tolerating capitalist restoration.

Organisation and repression

The group had about 300 adherents in Moscow alone and hundreds more elsewhere, mostly workers and many from the disbanded Workers' Opposition. Its leadership followed a double line, acting both as a faction of the party and as a clandestine alternative. When strikes broke out in Moscow and other cities in summer 1923 it planned a general strike and a workers' demonstration, but in September the OGPU arrested its leaders, confiscated its literature and closed its workplaces, effectively dismantling it. The 12th Party Congress declared the Workers' Group "counter-revolutionary," and the suppression of the Workers' Group and the Workers' Truth group was the first use of the OGPU in the party's internal factional struggle. The sources differ on its later fate, offering 1924 for its development into a separate Workers' Communist Party, 1929 for its disappearance, and 1933 for a final wave of repression. They agree that remnants persisted in prison and underground into the early 1930s and that a "Federation of Left Communists" was formed in the Vorkuta camp in the 1930s.

Significance

As left communists, Myasnikov and the group rejected the Comintern's united-front strategy toward the Second International while linking up with the German Communist Workers' Party (KAPD) and the Communist Workers' International, yet they insisted on working inside the Soviet party. Defeated politically, Myasnikov fled abroad in 1928 and in 1931 published The Latest Deception, defining the USSR as state capitalist; he returned in 1944, was arrested on arrival and executed on 16 November 1945.