Maurice Brinton

The Bolsheviks and
Workers' Control

The State and Counter-Revolution


Published: As pamphlet by Solidarity, London 1970
Transcribed: by Jonas Holmgren
Proofed: by Zdravko Saveski


1921

January

"Official" campaign, preparatory to Tenth Congress, launched by the strongly Leninist Petrograd Party Committee (in Zinoviev's hands). Even before the Congress, many administrative measures were taken to ensure the defeat of the Opposition. So irregular were some of these that the Moscow Party Committee at one stage voted a resolution publicly censuring the Petrograd organization "for not observing the rules of proper controversy".[1]

January 13

Moscow Party Committee denounced "tendency of the Petrograd organization to make itself a special centre for the preparation of Party Congresses".[2] The Leninists were using the Petrograd organization as a base from which to apply pressure to the rest of the Party. Moscow Committee urged Central Committee "to ensure the equitable distribution of materials and speakers...so that all points of view should be represented".[3] This recommendation was to be flagrantly violated. At the Congress, Kollontai stated that the circulation of her pamphlet had been deliberately impeded.[4]

January 14

Publication of the Platform of the Ten (Artem, Kalinin, Kamenev, Lenin, Lozovsky, Petrovsky, Rudzutak, Stalin, Tomsky and Zinoviev). This document gave a more finished form to Lenin's theses for the Congress.

January 16

Pravda publishes the Bukharin platform, described by Lenin as the "acme of ideological disintegration".[5]

January 21

In an article in Pravda on the Party crisis, Lenin writes:

"Now we add to our platform the following: we must combat the ideological confusion of those unsound elements of the opposition who go to the lengths of repudiating all 'militarization of economy', of repudiating not only the 'method of appointing' which has been the prevailing method up to now, but all appointments. In the last analysis this means repudiating the leading role of the Party in relation to the non-Party masses. We must combat the syndicalist deviation which will kill the Party if it is not completely cured of it".

A little later Lenin was to write that "the syndicalist deviation leads to the fall of the dictatorship of the proletariat".[6] In other words working class power ("the dictatorship of the proletariat") is impossible if there are militants in the Party who think the working class should exert more power in production ("the syndicalist deviation").[1*]

January 24

Meeting of the Communist Fraction during Second Congress of the Miners' Union. Kiselev, a miner, put the case for the Workers' Opposition which got 62 votes - as against 137 for the Leninist platform and 8 for Trotsky's.[7]

January 25

Pravda publishes the Workers' Opposition's 'Theses on the Trade Unions'. Alexandra Kollontai publishes The Workers' Opposition which develops the same ideas at a more theoretical level.[8]

For all the political storm unleashed by the Workers' Opposition there is little reliable documentation about this tendency. What information there is comes mainly from Leninist sources.[9] The virulence of the attacks against the Workers' Opposition suggests it enjoyed considerable support among rank-and-file factory workers and that this caused the Party leadership serious alarm. Shlyapnikov (the first Commissar of Labour), Lutovinov and Medvedev, the leaders of the metalworkers, were its most prominent spokesmen:

"Geographically it seems to have been concentrated in the South-Eastern parts of European Russia: the Donets Basin, the Don and Kuban regions and the Samara province on the Volga. In Samara the Workers' Opposition was actually in control of the Party organization in 1921. Before the Party shake-up in the Ukraine, in late 1920, the oppositionists had won a sympathetic majority in the republic as a whole. Other points of strength were in the Moscow province, where the Workers' Opposition polled about a quarter of the Party votes and in the Metalworkers' Union throughout the country".[10]

When Tomsky was to abandon the trade unionists and rejoin Lenin's camp later in 1921, he was to "explain" the appeal of the Workers' Opposition in terms of the metalworkers' ideology of industrialism and syndicalism.[11] It should be remembered that these same metalworkers had formed the backbone of the Factory Committees in 1917.

February

During the pre-Congress discussion the Leninist faction made full use of the newly established Control Commission. They ensured the resignation of both Preobrazhensky and Dzerzhinsky (judged unduly "soft" in relation to the Workers' Opposition and to the Trotskyists respectively) and their replacement by hardened apparatchiks such as Solts who proceeded to berate the divided Party leadership for its weakness in curtailing the "ultra left". The Leninists whipped up a noisy campaign and played relentlessly on the themes of unity and of the internal dangers confronting the Revolution. Again and again they took refuge in the cult of Lenin's personality. All other tendencies were labelled "objectively counter-revolutionary". They succeeded in getting control of the Party machine, even in areas with a long tradition of support for the Opposition.

So "successful" were some of these "victories" that there is serious doubt as to whether they were not achieved by fraud. On January 19 for instance a Party Conference of the Baltic Fleet is said to have given a 90 per cent vote to the Leninists.[12] Yet within two or three weeks a strong Fleet Opposition was to develop and widely distribute leaflets proclaiming:

"The Political Department of the Baltic Fleet has lost all contact not only with the masses but with the active political workers too. It has become a bureaucratic organ without authority...It has annihilated all local initiative and reduced all political work to the level of secretarial correspondence".[13]

Outside the Party, even harsher things were being said.

March 17

The Kronstadt Rebellion.

This key event which had a profound effect on the Congress which opened a few days later has been analyzed in detail elsewhere.[14]

March 8-16

Tenth Party Congress.

This was to prove one of the most dramatic assemblies in the whole history of Bolshevism. But in a sense the arguments used and the battles fought out there were only a distorted reflection of the much deeper crisis in the country as a whole. Strikes had broken out in the Petrograd area towards the end of February and Kronstadt was up in arms. Both were but the visible portions of a much larger iceberg of submerged discontent and disaffection.

From beginning to end the apparatus was in full control of the Congress. An atmosphere of near hysteria, such as had not been seen before at Bolshevik gatherings, pervaded the proceedings. It was now essential for the Party leadership to suppress the Opposition which whether it knew it or not - and whether it wanted to do so or not - was making itself the mouthpiece of all these frustrated aspirations. It was above all necessary to expunge the image of Kronstadt as a movement which defended the principles of the October Revolution against the Communists - the idea of the "third revolution" - which was exactly what the Kronstadters were proclaiming. "We fight", the rebels proclaimed, "for the genuine power of the working people while the bloody Trotsky and the glutted Zinoviev and their band of adherents fight for the power of the Party..."[15]

"Kronstadt has raised for the first time the banner of the uprising of the Third Revolution of the toilers...The autocracy has fallen. The Constituent Assembly has been dispatched to the region of the damned. Now the commissariocracy is crumbling..."[16]

At the Congress Trotsky rounded on the Workers' Opposition:

"They have come out with dangerous slogans. They have made a fetish of democratic principles. They have placed the workers' right to elect representatives above the Party. As if the Party were not entitled to assert its dictatorship even if that dictatorship temporarily clashed with the passing moods of the workers' democracy!"

Trotsky spoke of the "revolutionary historical birthright of the Party":

"The Party is obliged to maintain its dictatorship...regardless of temporary vacillations even in the working class...The dictatorship does not base itself at every given moment on the formal principle of a workers' democracy..."

The physical attack on Kronstadt - in which over two hundred delegates to the Congress participated - was accompanied by a massive verbal onslaught against the Workers' Opposition and similar tendencies. Although leading members of the Opposition were to fight against the Kronstadters (because they still retained illusions about "the historical role of the Party" and because they were still trapped in old organizational loyalties), Lenin and the Party leaders were fully aware of the deep affinities between the two movements: "Both attacked his leadership for having violated the spirit of the revolution, for having sacrificed democratic and egalitarian ideals on the altar of expediency and for inclining to bureaucratic concern with power for its own sake".[17] In relation to real issues their demands also overlapped in a number of areas. The Kronstadters - among whom were many dissident Party members - had proclaimed that

"the Soviet Socialist Republic can only be strong when its administration belongs to the toiling classes, represented by renovated trade unions...Thanks to the policy of the ruling party the trade unions have had absolutely no opportunity to be purely class organizations".[18]

Down to the fetishism of the unions, the language was the same.

The Congress opened with a virulent speech by Lenin appealing for loyalty to the Party and denouncing the Workers' Opposition as a threat to the Revolution. The Opposition was a "petty-bourgeois", "syndicalist", "anarchist" strand "caused in part by the entry into the ranks of the Party of elements which had still not completely adopted the Communist world view".[19] (In fact the Opposition was the very opposite. It was the reaction of the proletarian base of the Party to the entry of hordes of such elements.) The basic arguments of the Opposition were not dealt with in any depth. What argument - as distinct from invective - there was, was often confused. For instance, apart from being (a) "genuinely counter-revolutionary" and (b) "objectively counter-revolutionary", the Workers' Opposition was also "too revolutionary". Their demands were "too advanced" and the Soviet Government still had to concentrate on overcoming the masses' cultural backwardness.[20] According to Smilga the extreme demands (of the Workers' Opposition) disrupted the Party's efforts and raised hopes among the workers which could only be disappointed.[21] But, most important, the demands of the Workers' Opposition were revolutionary in a wrong (anarcho-syndicalist) way. This was the ultimate anathema. "If we perish", Lenin said privately

"it is all the more important to preserve our ideological line and give a lesson to our continuators. This should never be forgotten, even in hopeless circumstances".[22]

Gone were the brief days of the 1917 honeymoon. Gone was the rhetoric of State and Revolution. Out came the skeletons of the split in the First International. The cardinal crime of the Opposition was that elements among it (and more particularly among its fringes, such as Myasnikov and Bogdanov) were beginning to raise really awkward questions. In a clumsy and still fumbling manner some were beginning to question the primacy of the Party - others the class nature of the Russian State. As long as criticisms dealt with the "bureaucratic deformations or distortions" of this or that institution - or even in the Party itself - the Party could cope (it had in fact become quite practised in the matter!). But to raise doubts about these other absolutely basic matters could not be tolerated.

The threat was serious, even if at the moment only implicit in the Opposition's thinking. Ignatov's theses had warned of the likely effects of "the mass entry into the ranks of our Party of people from bourgeois and petty-bourgeois strata" combined with "the heavy losses sustained by the proletariat during the Civil War".[23] But one thing led to another. Shortly after the Congress Bogdanov and the Workers' Truth Group were to claim that the revolution had ended in a "complete defeat for the working class". They were to charge that:

"the bureaucracy, along with the NEP men had become a new bourgeoisie, depending on the exploitation of the workers and taking advantage of their disorganization. With the trade unions in the hands of the bureaucracy the workers were more helpless than ever".

"The Communist Party...after becoming the ruling Party, the party of the organizers and leaders of the State apparatus and of the capitalist-based economic life...had irrevocably lost its tie and community with the proletariat".[24]

This kind of thinking threatened the very basis of the Bolshevik regime and had ruthlessly to be expunged from the minds of working people.

"Marxism teaches us", Lenin said,

"that only the political party of the working class, i.e. the Communist Party, is in a position to unite, educate, organize...and direct all sides of the proletarian movement and hence all the working masses. Without this the dictatorship of the proletariat is meaningless".[25]

"Marxism" of course taught other things too. It emphasized that "the emancipation of the working class was the task of the working class itself"[26] and that "the Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties".[27] What Lenin was now preaching was not in fact "Marxism" but the crude Leninism of What Is To Be Done? (written in 1902), the Leninism which had asserted that the working class left to its own devices could only develop a trade union consciousness and would have to have political consciousness injected into it from the outside, by those "vehicles of science" the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia.[2*] In the minds of the Bolsheviks the Party embodied the historical interests of the class whether the class understood it or not - and whether the class wanted it or not. Given these premises, any challenge to the hegemony of the Party - whether in action or only in thought - was tantamount to "treason" to the Revolution, to a rape of History.

"Unity" was the all-pervasive theme of the Congress. Given the threat from without and the "threat" from within it didn't prove very hard for the leadership to get draconian measures accepted. These were still further to restrict the rights of Party members. Factional rights were abolished:

"The Congress prescribes the rapid dispersal of all groups without exception which have formed themselves on one platform or another...failure to execute this decision of the Congress will lead to immediate and unconditional expulsion from the Party".[28]

A secret provision gave the Central Committee unlimited disciplinary rights, including expulsion from the Party and even from the Central Committee itself (for which a majority of two-thirds would be required.)

These measures, an organizational turning-point in the history of Bolshevism, were overwhelmingly endorsed. But not without certain misgivings. Karl Radek stated:

"I had a feeling that a rule was being established which left us uncertain as to whom it might be applied against. When the Central Committee was chosen, the comrades from the majority composed a list which gave them control. Every comrade knew that this was done at the beginning of the dissension in the Party. We do not know...what complications may arise. The comrades who propose this rule think it is a sword aimed against differently thinking comrades. Although I am voting for this resolution I feel that it may even be turned against us."

Stressing the dangerous situation confronting both Party and State, Radek concluded, "let the Central Committee at the moment of danger take the sternest measures against the best comrades, if it finds this necessary".[29] This attitude, or rather this mentality - the Party can't be wrong in relation to the class, the Central Committee can't be wrong in relation to the Party - was to explain many subsequent events. It was literally to prove a noose around the necks of thousands of honest revolutionaries. It helps one understand both Trotsky's public denials of 1927 that Lenin had ever left a political testament, and the "confessions" of the Bolshevik Old Guard during the Moscow Trials of 1936-38. The Party, as an institution, had become reified. It now epitomized man's alienation in relation to revolutionary politics.

In relation to these political shifts - or rather to this emergence of what had always been some of the underlying strands of Bolshevism - the actual "discussions" of the Conference were of less significance. They have therefore deliberately been left to the end. Still operating within the ideological framework of "the Party" Perepechko, a member of the Workers' Opposition, identified bureaucratism (in the Party) as the source of the cleavage between the authority of the Soviets and the soviet apparatus as a whole and the broad working masses.[30] Medvedev charged the Central Committee with "deviations in the direction of distrust of the creative powers of the working class and concessions to the petty-bourgeoisie and to the bourgeois official castes".[31] To offset this tendency and preserve the proletarian spirit in the Party, the Workers' Opposition proposed that "every Party member be required to live and work for three months out of every year as an ordinary proletarian or peasant, engaged in physical labour".[32] Ignatov's theses called for a minimum of two-thirds of each body to be composed of workers. Criticism of the leadership was more bitter than it had been for years. A delegate raised a storm by calling Lenin "the greatest chinovnik" (hierarch of the Tsarist bureaucracy).[33] The leadership played its usual game. A long resolution on the trade unions, drawn up by Zinoviev was passed by 336 to 50 (for Trotsky's position) and 18 (for the Workers' Opposition):[34]

"Zinoviev took pains in this document to claim absolute continuity with the trade-union doctrine...stated by the First Trade Union Congress and in the Party programme of 1919. This was the familiar device of generating a smokescreen of orthodoxy to cover a change of course".[35]

The document which spoke a lot about "workers' democracy" went on to stress in unequivocal terms that the Party would guide all trade union work.

On the penultimate day of the Congress, at the end of a session, without any previous discussion in the Party and after a number of delegates had already left, Lenin made his famous proposals concerning the New Economic Policy. He proposed the substitution of a "tax in kind" for the forced requisitioning of grain from the peasants, one of the most hated features of "War Communism". There would be an end to Government control of the grain supply and, by implication, a free trade in grain. This momentous proposal was followed by four ten-minute contributions from the floor. The official report of the Tenth Congress runs to 330 pages, of which a bare twenty are devoted to the NEP![36] The main preoccupations of the Congress had clearly been elsewhere!

Internal tightening up now proceeded with a vengeance. A resolution was voted to the effect that "the most immediate task of the Central Committee was the stringent effectuation of uniformity in the structure of Party committees". The membership of the Central Committee was raised from 19 to 25 - of whom five were to devote themselves exclusively to Party work (especially visiting provincial committees and attending provincial Party Conferences).[37] The new Central Committee immediately imposed a radical change in the composition of the Secretariat. The Trotskyists (Krestinsky, Preobrazhensky and Serebriakov), judged lukewarm in their support of the Leninist line, were dropped from the Central Committee altogether. Radical changes were also brought about in the Orgbureau and in the composition of a number of regional Party organizations.[38] "Disciplined", "safe" mediocrities were being installed at all levels. "The organizational shifts of 1921 were a decisive victory for Lenin, the Leninists and the Leninist philosophy of Party life".[39] The Party having willed the end was now willing the means.

 

Epilogue

May 1921

All-Russian Congress of Metalworkers' Union.

This union had proved the backbone of the 1905 events. It had been won over by the Bolsheviks as early as 1913. It had animated the Factory Committees and provided many detachments of Red Guards. It was now deeply influenced by the idea of the Workers' Opposition. Its leader, Medvedev, was an active member of the Opposition. His grip on the union had to be broken.

At the Metalworkers' Congress the Central Committee of the Party handed down to the Party fraction in the union a list of recommended candidates for union [sic!] leadership. The metalworkers' delegates voted down this list, as did the Party fraction in the union (by 120 votes to 40). Every conceivable pressure was then brought to bear against them. The Opposition had to be smashed. The Central Committee of the Party disregarded every one of the votes and appointed a Metalworkers' Committee of its own.[40] So much for "elected and revocable delegates". Elected by the union rank and file and revocable by the Party leadership!

May 17-25

Fourth All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions.

This was to discuss the role of trade unions in the new, privately owned, sector sanctioned by the NEP. Tomsky, as president of the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions, was entrusted by the Central Committee of the Party with the preparation of the appropriate "theses" and with getting them accepted first by the Party fraction and later by the Congress as a whole. All went smoothly until by 1,500 votes to 30 the Congress also accepted an inoffensive-looking motion proposed by Ryazanov on behalf of the Party fraction, which was to precipitate a major scandal. The key section of the resolution stated: "the leading personnel of the trade union movement must be chosen under the general guidance of the Party, but the Party must make a special effort to allow normal methods of proletarian democracy, particularly in the trade unions, where the choice of leaders should be left to the trade unionists themselves".[41]

The Central Committee was furious. It came down on the Congress like a ton of bricks. Tomsky, who had not even supported the maverick resolution, had his credentials as representative of the Central Committee to the Congress immediately withdrawn. He was replaced in this position by such noted trade unionists as Lenin, Stalin and Bukharin - whose task it was to curb the fractious fraction. Ryazanov was barred from ever engaging in trade-union work again.

A special commission, headed by Stalin, was set up to "investigate Tomsky's behaviour". Its investigation completed, it decided to reprimand him severely for his "criminal negligence" (in allowing the Congress to express its own wishes). Tomsky was relieved of all his functions on the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions. As for the Party fraction, it was "talked into" reversing its decision of the day before. There is no record of how the hundreds of others fared who had supported the resolution. But who cared? In 1917 it had been proclaimed that "every cook should learn to govern the State". By 1921 the State was clearly powerful enough to govern every cook!

 


Conclusion

The events described in this pamphlet show that in relation to industrial policy there is a clear-cut and incontrovertible link between what happened under Lenin and Trotsky and the later practices of Stalinism. We know that many on the revolutionary left will find this statement hard to swallow. We are convinced however that any honest reading of the facts cannot but lead to this conclusion. The more one unearths about this period the more difficult it becomes to define - or even to see - the "gulf" allegedly separating what happened in Lenin's time from what happened later. Real knowledge of the facts also makes it impossible to accept - as Deutscher does - that the whole course of events was "historically inevitable" and "objectively determined". Bolshevik ideology and practice were themselves important and sometimes decisive factors in the equation, at every critical stage of this critical period. Now that more facts are available self-mystification on these issues should no longer be possible. Should any who have read these pages remain "confused" it will be because they want to remain in that state - or because (as the future beneficiaries of a society similar to the Russian one) it is their interest to remain so.

The fact that so many who have spent a lifetime in the socialist movement know so little about this period is not really surprising. In the first flush of enthusiasm for the "victorious socialist revolution" of 1917 it was almost inevitable that the viewpoint of the victors should alone have achieved a hearing. For many years the only alternative appeared to be the hypocritical laments of social democracy or the snarls of open counter-revolution. The voice of the revolutionary-libertarian opposition to Bolshevism had been well and truly smothered.

"Vae victis", said Brennus the Gaul in 390 BC as he threw his heavy sword on to the scales that were weighing the ransom, to lift the siege of Rome. "Woe to the vanquished" has indeed been the immediate judgement of history throughout the ages. This is why so little was heard about those revolutionaries who didn't wait till 1923 but who as early as 1918 saw the direction in which Russian society was moving and proclaimed their opposition, often at the cost of their lives. They, and their very memory, were to be obliterated in the great bureaucratic upsurge of the ensuing decades, euphemistically described as the "building of socialism".

It is only in recent years, when the fruits of the "victorious" revolution began to be reaped (in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and elsewhere) that widespread doubts have emerged and real questions at last been asked. It is only now that serious work is being devoted to the real nature of the rot (the Bolshevik attitude to the relations of production) and attention redirected to the prophetic warnings of the "vanquished". An enormous amount of valuable material relating to those formative years still remains to be restored to the revolutionary movement, to whom it rightly belongs.

Fifty years after the Russian Revolution we can see in sharper focus some of the problems that were being so heatedly discussed between 1917 and 1921. The libertarian revolutionaries of 1917 went as far as they could. But today we can speak from real experience. Hungary 1956 and France 1968 have highlighted the problems of modern bureaucratic capitalist societies and shown the nature of the revolutionary oppositions they engender, in both Eastern and Western contexts. The irrelevant and the contingent have been swept aside. The key questions of our epoch are now increasingly seen as man's domination over his environment and over the institutions he creates to solve the tasks that face him. Will man remain in control of his creations or will they dominate him? In these questions are embedded the even more fundamental ones of man's own "false-consciousness", of his demystification in relation to the "complexities" of management, of restoring to him his own self-confidence, of his ability to ensure control over delegated authority, and of his re-appropriation of everything that capitalism has taken from him. Also implicit in this question is how to release the tremendous creative potential within every one of us and harness it to ends which we ourselves have chosen.

In the struggle for these objectives Bolshevism will eventually be seen to have been a monstrous aberration, the last garb donned by a bourgeois ideology as it was being subverted at the roots. Bolshevism's emphasis on the incapacity of the masses to achieve a socialist consciousness through their own experience of life under capitalism, its prescription of a hierarchically structured "vanguard party" and of "centralization to fight the centralized state power of the bourgeoisie", its proclamation of the "historical birthright" of those who have accepted a particular vision of society (and of its future) and the decreed right to dictate this vision to others - if necessary at the point of a gun - all these will be recognized for what they are: the last attempt of bourgeois society to reassert its ordained division into leaders and led, and to maintain authoritarian social relations in all aspects of human life.

To be meaningful the revolution to come will have to be profoundly libertarian. It will be based on a real assimilation of the whole Russian experience. It will refuse to exchange one set of rulers for another, one bunch of exploiters for another, one lot of priests for another, one authoritarianism for another, or one constricting orthodoxy for another. It will have to root out all such false solutions which are but so many residual manifestations of man's continued alienation. A real understanding of Bolshevism will have to be an essential ingredient in any revolution which aims at transcending all forms of alienation and of self-mystification. As the old society crumbles both the bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy will have to be buried under its ruins. The real roots from which they grew will have to be understood. In this gigantic task the revolution to come will find its strength and its inspiration in the real experience of millions, both East and West. If it is even marginally assisted by this little book our efforts will have been well worthwhile.

 

Previous: 1920
Table of Contents

 


Remarks:

[1*] Lenin here poses quite clearly the question "power of the Party" or "power of the class". He unambiguously opts for the former - no doubt rationalizing his choice by equating the two. But he goes even further. He not only equates "workers' power" with the rule of the Party. He equates it with acceptance of the ideas of the Party leaders!

[2*] But even they were material of dubious value. The first Russian edition of What Is To Be Done? had carried on its frontispiece Lasalle's famous aphorism, "The Party strengthens itself by purging itself".

 


Footnotes:

[1] L. Trotsky, "Otvet petrogradskim tovarishcham" (Answer to the Petrograd Comrades), Tenth Party Congress, pp. 826-7, n. 1.

[2] Tenth Party Congress, p. 779, Appendix 6.

[3] Ibid.

[4] A. Kollontai, Tenth Party Congress, p. 103.

[5] Lenin, Selected Works, IX, p. 35.

[6] Ibid., p. 57.

[7] Lenin, Selected Works, IX, p. 79.

[8] The full text was published as Solidarity Pamphlet 7.

[9] See for instance K. Shelavin, Rabochaya oppozitsiya (The Workers' Opposition) (Moscow, 1930).

[10] Daniels, op. cit., p. 127.

[11] Tomsky, Tenth Party Congress, pp. 371-2.

[12] Pravda, January 27, 1921.

[13] Quoted in A. S. Pukhov, Kronshtadtski myatezh v 1921 g. (The Kronstadt Revolt of 1921) (Leningrad, 1931), p. 52. Ida Mett's pamphlet, The Kronstadt Commune, gives a good idea of the "disaffection" rampant in Petrograd at the time.

[14] For useful documentation, see Ida Mett, The Kronstadt Commune (Solidarity Pamphlet 27) and Victor Serge, Kronstadt, 1921 (Solidarity Pamphlet (reprinted from Solidarity, I, 7 [1961])).

[15] lsvestiya vremennogo revolyutsionnogo komiteta (News of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee), March 10, 1921.

[16] Ibid., March 12, 1921.

[17] Daniels, op. cit., pp. 145-6.

[18] Isvestiya vremennogo revolyutsionnogo komiteta, March 9, 1921.

[19] "O sindikalistskom i anarkhistskom uklone v nashei partii" (On the Syndicalist and Anarchist Deviation in Our Party), Tenth Party Congress, Resolutions, I, p. 530.

[20] Tenth Party Congress, pp. 382-3.

[21] Ibid., p. 258.

[22] Trotsky, Letter to friends in the USSR, 1930 (Trotsky Archive T 3279).

[23] Ignatov Theses, Tenth Party Congress.

[24] N. Karev, "O gruppe 'Rabochya Pravda' " (On the "Workers' Truth" Group), Bolshevik, July 15, 1924, pp. 31 ff.

[25] Tenth Party Congress, Resolutions, I, p. 531.

[26] K. Marx and F. Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in Selected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1958), I, p. 28.

[27] Ibid., p. 46.

[28] "On the Unity of the Party", Tenth Party Congress, Resolutions, I, pp. 527-30.

[29] Radek, Tenth Party Congress, p. 540.

[30] Tenth Party Congress, p. 93.

[31] Ibid., p. 140.

[32] "Resolution on Party Organization Proposed by the Workers' Opposition", Tenth Party Congress, p. 663.

[33] Yaroslavsky, Tenth Party Congress, reporting statements by Y. K. Milonov.

[34] Tenth Party Congress, p. 828, n. 1.

[35] Daniels, op. cit., p. 156.

[36] Schapiro, op. cit., p. 308.

[37] Tenth Party Congress, Resolutions, pp. 522-6.

[38] Daniels, op. cit., pp. 151-2.

[39] Ibid., p. 152.

[40] Isvestiya Ts. K., no. 32 (1921), pp. 3-4. See also Schapiro, op. cit., pp. 323-4.

[41] Ryazanov, Eleventh Party Congress, pp. 277-8. Also Schapiro, op. cit., pp. 324-5.

 


Last updated on: 6.14.2009