Part 1: Origins of the Left Opposition
In coming weeks, PRMI will be publishing a series of articles on the history of the revolutionary movement following the victory of the Russian Revolution, covering the formation of the Fourth International and its post WW2 degeneration, leading up to our recent history.
By Walter Chambers, 6 February 2025
From the point of view of the international working class, the Russian revolution which began with the overthrow of Tsarism in February 1917, leading in October 1917 to the socialist revolution when the working class led by the Bolsheviks came to power, was one of the greatest events in history.
In the new Soviet state, the Bolsheviks had introduced a whole range of radical socialist measures. After withdrawing from World War 1, Russia refused to recognise secret agreements previously agreed between the imperialist powers, granted land to the peasantry, introduced workers’ control, the right to vote for all citizens men, women and youth, equal rights for women, decriminalised same sex relations, granted the right of self-determination to those nations that wanted it as well as radically transforming the education and health systems in favour of working people and the poor. They established the Communist International, with the aim of building a world revolutionary party capable of spreading the socialist revolution.
International capital however was determined to strangle the revolution. Tsarist and other reactionary forces set up armies to oppose the revolution, they were soon joined by the armies of twenty other countries including large contingents of British, Japanese, Czech, German, Turkish, French and US troops, whilst elsewhere other revolutionary movements were brutally suppressed – with, for example the assassination of the heroic anti-war German revolutionaries Luxemburg and Liebknecht. The imperialist intervention which led to a brutal civil war almost destroyed the new Soviet republic.
Isolation of the revolution
Lenin who, with Trotsky, led the Russian Revolution, died in January 1924. In his last year he suffered one stroke after another, most likely caused by the failed assassination attempt by the social-revolutionary Fanny Kaplan in 1918. It is, though, no coincidence that his last major speech in November 1922 was to the 4th Congress of the Communist International discussing the prospects for world revolution. This was followed by a series of letters expressing his concern at the growing influence of Stalin. He formed a block with Trotsky to defend the monopoly of foreign trade, and requested the Soviet Congress to find a way of removing Stalin from the post of General Secretary.
Lenin understood very well, and indeed the principle was enshrined in the DNA of the Bolshevik party, that if the new Soviet State in Russia was to survive and develop in a genuinely socialist direction, the extension of the revolution across Europe and the world was necessary. Lenin’s insistence that the new USSR should be a union of independent socialist states was with the aim of accepting a future socialist Germany as an equal partner.
The four year long civil war waged by reactionary and imperialist armies which sought to overturn the revolution took the lives of many of the best class fighters, left much of the country in ruins, and the Russian economy in tatters. The new Soviet state desperately needed the spread of the revolution to the more developed countries. This was not a false hope – the German revolution saw the Kaiser overthrown before it was betrayed by the Social-democrats, in Hungary a revolutionary government came to power but quickly collapsed, whilst major revolutionary waves spread across Turkey, Italy, Mexico, India, Egypt, Ireland and elsewhere.
What was lacking in these countries were revolutionary parties such as the Bolsheviks, and as a consequence, Soviet Russia was left isolated, laying the basis for the future degeneration of the revolution, a process that did not take place in one leap, but over time in line with a series of international and national developments, resisted all the way by the supporters of what became the International Left Opposition, and then Fourth International, led by Trotsky.
Destruction caused by the civil war
The Civil War was not just hugely destructive, it had demanded political measures that would not normally be expected in a democratic socialist society. The economy was over-centralised, rather than the peasantry being allowed to develop their newly gained land, they found their grain requisitioned by the state, and the very nature of war demanded strict military discipline.
Even in this situation though, debates over policies raged within the Bolshevik party. Only in 1921, was it thought necessary to introduce a temporary ban on factions – a ban, which Lenin stressed in his resolution was intended at a time of severe crisis to maintain party unity when it was under attack on many fronts. In no way, he stressed, was any genuine criticism or argument to be restricted, but rather than used for factional purposes, should be discussed by the whole party.
Lenin was also recognising another process undermining the new Soviet state. It had, in many ways, inherited the state apparatus from the old Tsarist system. Only the most widespread democratic control, primarily by the working class, could break this down, but this was increasingly impossible because the most conscious class fighters had been taken into the army, or their time was devoured by multitudinous administrative tasks needed to run society. For this reason, in one of his last contributions Lenin proposed to strengthen the political role of the Central Committee and sharpen the effectiveness of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate intended to combat bureaucracy.
By 1920 a debate had opened within the new state on how best to develop the economy. Trotsky, who was not only leader of the Red Army, but had also been involved in directing economic work and the railways in the Urals had seen the problems caused by over-centralisation. He proposed in February 1920 to replace grain requisitioning by a progressive tax on the peasantry. Lenin initially rejected this idea. But with the delay of the European revolution, in 1921 Lenin proposed the New Economic Policy (NEP) as a temporary measure. This relaxed the harsh conditions that had been necessary for the economy during the civil war, reducing some of the economic strain, but at the expense of giving more power to market forces, wealthier peasants, and experts from before the revolution.
The introduction of the NEP did lead to economic development, but it also strengthened the bureaucratic and pro-capitalist trends both within the state apparatus and even increasingly in the party.
Lenin’s last struggle
The developing bureaucratic trends were increasingly seen in dealing with the non-Russian nationalities. Only 45% of Russia’s population in 1917 were ethnic Russians, there were over 200 other ethnic groups represented in the new Soviet state. Lenin had grown increasingly worried by the heavy-handed way in which Stalin’s supporters had trampled on national sensitivities in Georgia. He fought Stalin’s proposal to unify the, at the time, three other Soviet republics into the Russian Socialist Federation, instead insisting that each should have equal status with Russia in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Having seen how Stalin and his supporters were basing themselves on backward great-Russian nationalism, he “declared war to the death on dominant national chauvinism”. To do so he opened an ideological battle over the national question, asking Trotsky to defend, on his behalf, the Georgian Bolsheviks who had suffered the bullying by Stalin’s henchmen.
By the time of the 12th Party Congress in 1923, full time party workers occupied over half of the delegates’ position. But Lenin, already debilitated by strokes, died in early 1924, unable to continue his struggle against the developing bureaucracy.
A new phase of the world revolution could have restored the confidence of the Russian working class. In 1923 the French occupied the Ruhr and there was a new upsurge of revolution in Germany. Having made serious ultra-left mistakes in 1921, the German communists, advised by Zinoviev and Bukharin, failed to recognise the importance of decisive action when a revolutionary situation developed in 1923. They first called an all-out general strike but then, at the last minute, called it off. The news reached Hamburg too late. The insurrection there lasted three days before collapsing. This left the German Communists discredited and the working class demoralised, which eventually opened the way for Hitler’s victory.
This was the background to the 13th Party Congress in early 1924, just after Lenin’s death. Stalin and his supporters managed to suppress Lenin’s Last Testament, which called for Stalin’s removal as General Secretary.
New crises
It is not true, as Isaac Deutscher and Pierre Broue have said, that Trotsky failed to take up the struggle against Stalin in 1923. True that Trotsky wanted to avoid appearing to exploit Lenin’s death to wage a power struggle. But he tenaciously raised the Georgian issue, firstly in Pravda, before Stalin publicly retreated on this question. Trotsky then concentrated on the economy, in which he raised the need to strengthen the tempo of industrialization, and on inner-party democracy, explaining that only a healthy party regime would allow for an ideological regrouping to oppose the counter offensive by the apparatus and most conservative elements.
By now, other crises were unfolding. The NEP led to economic growth, but its negative effects increased. In what was, in effect, the restoration of small-scale capitalism, a new caste of rich peasants, traders and speculators, the so-called NEPmen, developed. They in turn increasingly influenced the growing layer of ‘chinovniks’ — state bureaucrats, many of whom had been mensheviks in 1917 or even worked for the tsarist regime. Trotsky spoke of the “Scissors crisis” – falling agricultural prices while industrial prices rose. This meant peasants could not buy the equipment they needed, and supplies to the cities fell. While a layer of rich peasants – kulaks – was growing, the rural masses lived in poverty, and urban unemployment escalated.
Growing opposition
Trotsky was far from alone in criticising the growing bureaucracy. Tens of thousands of Bolsheviks stood in the way of the Stalinist counter-revolution. In October 1923 many ‘old Bolsheviks’, active revolutionaries with decades of experience, such as Preobrazhensky, Smirnov, Pyatakov, and Sapronov signed the “Platform of the 46” in October 1923. They were joined by Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, the former soldier who led the storming of the Winter Palace, Evgeniya Bosh. a founding member of the Ukrainian Bolsheviks she led the armed uprising in Kiev, as well as Christian Rakovsky, the Bulgarian born revolutionary and one of Trotsky’s closest allies. Apart from Bosh, who died of ill health in 1925, they were all executed by Stalin between 1936–8.
The “Platform of the 46” criticised the chaotic management of industry, proposing instead the more effective use of state planning to speed up the country’s industrialization to improve living standards and strengthen the role played by the working class. Pointing to the growth of the bureaucracy, it opposed their increasing privileges and the “oppressive party regime” dominated by the “selection of the party hierarchy by the Secretariat”.
Stalin did not, at that stage, have the authority to rule the party single-handedly. A ‘troika’ was formed, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and Joseph Stalin presented themselves as Lenin’s natural successors. Although the Secretariat banned the distribution of Trotsky’s position, there was still life in the party. The Party press, including Pravda and Isvestia carried many reports of how the Opposition was winning the debate, including in several key Moscow districts.
Opposing bureaucracy and privilege
In 1923, the Bolsheviks still believed that any party member occupying a post should get no more than a skilled worker. Lenin, in 1922, was paid 4700 rubles a month, just 37% above the average factory worker. Almost all state and party positions in 1924 were occupied by those who had joined the party before 1917. This, though, included many former workers who had fought in the war. But after Lenin’s death, the “Lenin Levy” was initiated. Hundreds of thousands of politically inactive workers, often under pressure of losing their jobs, were recruited into the party. This was an open door to those who saw the party as a road to privilege and success. By 1927 party membership had tripled to 1,2 million. Party members grew to expect promotion, food parcels, even better housing when others suffered hunger and food shortages. The party maximum was abolished by a secret decree in 1932.
The Troika accused the Left Opposition of sowing factional divisions that threatened party unity, and removed Trotsky and others from their positions. Several were sent abroad as ambassadors – Rakovsky to France, Joffe to China, Krestinsky to Germany, and Kotziubinski to Austria.
The purge spread to the Communist International during the Fifth Congress in 1924. Zinoviev introduced a misnamed policy of “Bolshevisation” demanding sections denounce “Trotskyism”. French communists who had published Trotsky’s “New Course” were expelled. The whole leadership of the Polish party, which supported Trotsky, was erased. In Germany, Brandler, an opponent of Trotsky who was on the right wing of the party, was also expelled, blamed for the 1923 debacle, thus relieving the bureaucracy of blame for its role. Only two more Congresses of the Comintern were held until 1943, when Stalin disbanded it to please his imperialist allies.
No sooner had Lenin died, than work began on rejecting the need for World Revolution. The Bolsheviks understood that a socialist revolution in a semi-feudal country like Russia could only be sustained by expanding the revolution to the advanced capitalist countries. By the end of 1924 however, Nikolai Bukharin, who was later to become Stalin’s firm ally, introduced the idea of building ‘socialism in a separate country”, usually translated as ‘socialism in one country’.
By 1926 this had become official Comintern policy. The cause of world revolution was subordinated to making good relations with bourgeois nationalists and trade union bureaucrats. These forces would be relied upon to oppose military intervention against the Soviet Union, but would also move against rising working-class militancy abroad. Domestically, the bureaucracy leaned on the growing inequality that had developed under the New Economic Policy, with Bukharin appealing to the wealthier peasants to “enrich yourself”.
The Joint Opposition
These bureaucratic policies provoked a new crisis that led to a second wave of opposition and a break within the bureaucracy. Leningrad, formerly called Petrograd, was where Zinoviev and Kamenev had a strong base. It was an industrial city most directly impacted by the policies of Stalin and Bukharin. Under pressure from below, the two former Troika members moved into opposition, calling for a strengthening of inner party democracy and warning of the ‘national limitations’ of ‘socialism in one country’. This left Stalin leaning on the right-wing – Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky, who promoted the strengthening of rich peasants in the country and the entrepreneurial class in the cities.
A new, Joint Opposition was established between the Left Opposition, the “Leningrad Opposition”, and others. Their defining document was the 1927 “Platform of the Joint Opposition”. It called for the revitalization of the soviets, the development of industry on a democratic basis, the mobilization of the poor and middle peasants against the kulak, and other demands.
The second wave of struggle was much more intense than in 1923. The Opposition’s print shop was attacked, and those who ran it, arrested. The state press published conspiracy theories about the Opposition working with White Guards. With this higher level of oppression, the Opposition brought the fight to the public. They occupied public buildings to organize illegal public meetings by candlelight, as the electricity had been turned off.
International issues
There were also important disputes over international issues.
In 1926, millions of British workers walked out in a general strike in support of the miners who had been striking against wage cuts. During the nine days of action the strike quickly moved in an insurrectionary direction with, in some cities, trade unions taking control of food supplies and distribution. But after Churchill, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, challenged trade union leaders to either call the strike off or take power the strike was betrayed while it was still gaining momentum. In advance of this, the Stalinist bureaucracy had established the Anglo-Russian Committee, an alliance of Soviet and British trade union leaders. This was based not on comradely criticism but banquets and mutual praise and left the British communists disarmed, unable to prepare the working class for their betrayal by the union leaders. The betrayal left the working class shocked and defeated.
An even more bitter struggle was unfolding in China, where a revolutionary movement saw the bourgeois nationalist Kuomintang come to power. The Comintern had followed a disastrous policy. In 1922–23 it advised the Chinese Communists to join the bourgeois Kuomintang. Only Trotsky opposed this on the Comintern executive. As a consequence, the Chinese Party held back from independent actions, while Stalin and Bukharin acted as cheerleaders for the Kuomintang, inviting it to join the Comintern.
This proved fatal when the interests of the Chinese bourgeoisie came into conflict with the proletariat, and in 1927 the Kuomintang launched a coup murdering thousands of workers, especially members of the Chinese Communist Party. This brought the struggle of the Left Opposition more thoroughly into the international arena.
The betrayal of the Chinese revolution proved a stunning confirmation of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. Support for the Left Opposition grew by hundreds and even thousands. Nonetheless, this confirmation of Trotsky’s ideas dealt a crushing blow to his movement. It’s not enough to be right. Concrete victories and defeats can shape consciousness much more powerfully than logical argument. The Russian Revolution confirmed Trotsky’s theory in a positive manner, while the Chinese Revolution confirmed Trotsky’s theory in a negative way. The defeat in China, like the earlier defeat in Germany, demobilized the international working-class struggle, increasing the demoralization and the social base on which the bureaucracy rested.
Stalin’s zig-zag.
By this time the Soviet economy had experienced a serious strengthening of capitalist tendencies particularly on the land at the expense of state run industry. By 1926, 60% of grain sales were in the hands of just 6% of peasant holdings. Party economists actively discussed removing restrictions on the sale of wheat and the state monopoly of foreign trade.
The gap between grain prices and industrial goods that Trotsky had earlier identified had continued. By 1927 a grain strike developed — delivery of grain to the cities was cut by 2/3rds. This followed a wave of terror organised by the kulaks, the rich peasants, in the country in which more than 1150 communists were killed. By the end of the year even in Moscow there was no tea, soap, cooking oil or white bread on sale. The whole of the city’s textile industry closed for 4 months.
By the end of 1927, Zinoviev and Kamenev had capitulated to Stalin. Stalin initially ignored the escalating crises, during the 1928 Party Congress he spoke only of galloping success. Yet weeks later he panicked. In a massive zig-zag, he announced a 5-year economic plan and the ‘forced’ collectivisation of the land. In 1925 Trotsky had been denounced for demanding “super-industrialisation” because he had argued that industry should grow by 10–14%, but now Stalin demanded growth rates of 21–25% a year.
Trotsky described how the high growth rates that Stalin proposed could only be achieved by extreme effort, typified by the ‘Stakhanov movement’. Aleksei Stakhanov was a Ukrainian miner who achieved incredible production levels by, according to Trotsky, “an intensification of labor, and even to a lengthening of the working day.” Recently it has been revealed that while ordinary miners would dig the coal face and then turn to prop up the ceiling behind them, Stakhanov would alone dig the coal with two other miners following to store up the roof. All the coal dug was then credited to Stakhanov. This approach led to a dramatic differentiation between the wages of the shock workers who earned thousands of rubles, while the rest just hundreds.
Far more dramatic and disastrous was Stalin’s policy of forced collectivisation. The kulaks would now be “liquidated as a class” and within two years, collective ownership of cultivated land grew from 2% to 77%. This led to a human catastrophe — hundreds of thousands, probably millions starved to death as the peasantry across the USSR from Ukraine in the West to Kazakhstan in the East were left without means of subsistence.
Mass repression
Oppositionists like Trotsky and Rakovsky saw this as the bureaucratic manoeuvre, while others such as Preobrazhensky, Radek, and Smilga mistakenly saw this zig-zag as a de-facto embrace of the Left Opposition’s program, leading them to capitulate to Stalin. This period saw the full consolidation of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Oppositionists, on the left and the right, were arrested, and often exiled to Siberia. The death penalty against oppositionists was instituted. Trotsky was exiled, first to Kazakhstan, and later expelled from the country altogether, forcing him to flee to Turkey.
Despite decades of propaganda about the alleged brutality of the Bolshevik regime in its early years, its policies were significantly more humanitarian than those of the leading capitalist nations. In 1923, when the country was just emerging from civil war, there were just under 80,000 prisoners in the USSR — of whom about 4,000 were ‘political’, on charges related to war crimes, pogroms and so on. The number of political prisoners began to significantly grow only in 1926 — no longer from reactionary circles, but from supporters of the revolution. For comparison, in 1923 there were one and a half times more prisoners per head of population in the US, and in today’s Russia there are ten times as many prisoners. But as the Stalinist regime stepped up political repression, the number of prisoners in 1930 reached 175,000 and by 1940 1,660,000 people.
In 1937 Trotsky explained that Bolshevism and Stalinism were separated by a “whole river of blood”. The Stalinist regime with its police state and bureaucratic methods was not able, even though at certain times it tried, to completely overturn the gains of the October revolution. The economic gains achieved through nationalisation and state planning particularly when contrasted with the great depression raging in western capitalism allowed industrialisation and dramatic improvements in living standards for the working class. But they were gained at a huge human cost. It meant, as Trotsky wrote in his masterpiece “Revolution Betrayed” a new revolution.
“The revolution which the bureaucracy is preparing against itself will not be social, like the October revolution of 1917. It is not a question this time of changing the economic foundations of society, of replacing certain forms of property with other forms. History has known elsewhere not only social revolutions which substituted the bourgeois for the feudal regime, but also political revolutions which, without destroying the economic foundations of society, swept out an old ruling upper crust (1830 and 1848 in France, February 1917 in Russia, etc.). The overthrow of the Bonapartist caste will, of course, have deep social consequences, but in itself it will be confined within the limits of political revolution.”
In the next part, the history of the formation of the Fourth International will be covered.