Ian Hebbes Communist Left in Russia after 1920

8/19/2019 Ian Hebbes Communist Left in Russia after 1920

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Ian Hebbes

THE COMMUNIST LEFT IN RUSSIA AFTER 1920

INTRODUCTION

This text focuses on the activity of the communist left in Russia after 1920. The

groups covered constituted the left wing of the Russian Communist Party

(Bolshevik), RCP(B), and had their origins in the Left Communist fraction of 1918.

Those few historians who have dealt with this early Left Communist fraction have

failed to show how this current, that only narrowly failed to win a majority in both

the Party central organs and the workers’ Soviets for its views, could disappear

without trace. The near totality of commentators see the later left communist groups

as either extensions of quite different political tendencies (i.e. the Workers

Opposition) and/or as groups which ceased to exist in the early 1920s due to

repression. The choice of the period after 1920 is based on the fact that most

accounts cease to deal with the communist left as an organised force after this

period, or see it as merely existing in the period of 1920-1921, and then as a

phenomenon isolated from the early left communist fraction of 1918-1919. In order

to establish the continuity of the later work of the communist left with its

predecessors and counterpose this to the prevailing myth maintained by almost

everyone that the Bolshevik Communist/Left Opposition were the sole opposition in

the late 1920s and 1930s.

The attempt to eliminate the communist left from the historical record as an

organised force inside Russia is a reflection of social reality. The communist left were

a minoritarian force, numerically weak and dispersed by the growing terror of the

counter-revolution. Existing in conditions of total clandestinity few of their

documents reached the west, and the main primary sources exist only in tiny left

communist journals of the 1920s which even the largest archives overlook. The rarity


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of these documents and the scarcity of information make it impossible to gain more

than an impression of the evolution of these groups and the relations between them.

But enough materials exist to affirm the continued existence of the communist leftand their influence on the better known currents such as the Left Opposition and

the Democratic Centralists.

THE COMMUNIST LEFT AFTER 1920 IN RUSSIA

It is no accident that one of the most obscure groups of the communist left that

fought inside and outside the RCP(B) should emerge in Moscow. This was one of thecentres of the militant proletariat and had from 1917 onwards been a bastion of the

Left Communist Fraction in 1918 and of the Democratic Centralists who still

retained an influence amongst the workers and within the Party despite repeated

purges, transfers and other acts of bureaucratic repression. Neither R.V. Daniels, L.

Schapiro nor E.H. Carr refers to this group whose documents are more accessible

than other smaller breakaways from the RCP(B). The main source for this group’s

writings in English is theWorkers Dreadnought of 1922. The first document from the

Group of Revolutionary Left Communists (CWP) of Russia appears in vol. IX no.12

June 3rd. It announces that the group has ‘left the social democratic Russian

Communist Party’ and supports the setting up of the 4th International with the KAPD

(Communist Workers Party of Germany), KAPN (Communist Workers Party of the

Netherlands) and the CWP (Workers Dreadnought) as well as the Bulgarian

Communist Left. This statement suggests that the group in Moscow had already

been in contact with the KAPD for some time and were influenced by their positions

and were in regular clandestine contact. This is further confirmed in the text ‘An

Appeal from the Russian Workers’ Opposition’ which shows that the clandestine

group were able to collect money amongst workers in Russia to pay for literature to

be printed in Germany as it was impossible to do so in Russia. But as the

Dreadnought points out the inflation in Russia was so high that the ‘millions of


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roubles’, ‘ painfully collected’ were so devalued that when exchanged would hardly

cover the postage: thus the comrades appealed for money to aid their work in Russia.

This Appeal stressed the central tasks of the group as the vanguard to ‘oppose the

Russian Soviet government’s New Economic Policy and United Front’ stating ‘we have

entered the struggle against the betrayal of the first triumphs of the revolution. Our

mission is to continue the revolution’. By their designation of the term ‘Russian’ to

both the party and the Soviet government they indicate they regard them as national

(i.e. non-proletarian) organisms, which had departed from internationalism. As with

the rest of the KAI (Communist Workers International) they tended to under-estimate

the counter-revolution and over-estimate the possibilities for a global renewal of the

class struggle, based on the upturn of the class struggle in Germany and the revival

of workers’ struggles in Russia in 1922 and 1923. Thus they took the side of the

KAPD/Essen against the KAPD/Berlin who opposed as premature the setting up of a

4th International, and sent one delegate to the KAPD 5th Congress in Hanover, who

reported on the ‘illegal work’ in Russia. In the same issue ofWorkers Dreadnought,

July 29th 1922 is a longer text on the failure of the united front. (p. 6). This speaks

of ‘the genuine communists in Russia who are making a stand against the united front

and state capitalism, and who are upholding the standpoint of the KAPD’. The CWP of

Russia’s text shows that the 3rd International has gone the way of the 2nd and Two

and a Half Internationals, and it and its trade union apparatus has ‘sunk up to its

eyes in the slough of opportunism and reformism’ and proceeds to attack the policy of

the united front and ‘elections and parliamentary action’ declaring that ‘ proletarian

revolution can alone lead you out of the blind alley into which capitalism and the

traitors to socialism have brought us’. Thus the CWP denounce ‘Lenin’s peaceable

united front’ as ‘co-operation with the bourgeoisie’. In another earlier text inWorkers

Dreadnought June 17 1922, the united front is again denounced and connected to

the internal policy of ‘capitalism which is newly introduced into Russia’. It is

described as an ‘out and out right wing platform for which the international has


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abandoned its principals’, Despite this stand the CWP was not the caricatural ultra

left sectarian group who denounce everything and everyone tout court. While

remaining rightly sceptical of the centrist ‘so-called Workers Opposition’ and theirrightward moving leadership, who are called ‘unprincipled and backboneless’ the

CWP of Russia remain willing to pledge ‘support to all that is left of revolutionary

tendencies in the RCP’. At this time the Democratic Centralists and left wing

members of the Workers Opposition as well as members of the Workers Group still

carried on opposition work inside the RCP so this was neither a sectarian or utopian

standpoint. However the CWP of Russia did call on these forces to build a new party.

If the CWP was initially ambiguous in its attitude to the Workers Opposition it was

due to the heterogeneous nature of this group: while recognising that the RCP(B) was

incapable of reform from within and that ‘in any case the Workers Opposition is not

capable of doing it’ they are still prepared to ‘support all demands and propositions of

the Workers Opposition which point in a sound revolutionary direction’. But

immediately the CWP of Russia were to criticise the leadership of the Workers

Opposition for pledging themselves ‘to the improvement of the cause of the Menshevik

bourgeois united front in our country’ (as they themselves called it). Thus the CWP of

Russia clearly distinguished between the Workers Opposition leadership which was

moving in a rightward direction and the rank and file influenced by the workers’

struggle and the work of left communists and the Democratic Centralists. At this

point the left communist groups and parties publicised the positions and activities of

the Workers Opposition internationally. Soon, however, the CWP of Russia were to

abandon their limited and highly critical support for the Workers Opposition which is

then referred to as the ‘so-called’ Workers Opposition in the press of the communist

left. Thus the CWP of Russia acted as a clandestine fraction working outside the

RCP(B) with relations abroad maintained by an exile group in Berlin and a small

presence in the Moscow Party and the proletariat in general. Little more can be said

about this group inside Russia although its supporters in Berlin maintained


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themselves as a section of the KAI and gave support to other left communist

individuals and groups inside Russia.

This group, however, is not to be confused with the more widely known Workers

Group of the RCP(B) that was formed in February/March 1922. While sharing many

of the same positions as the Workers Group, the CWP of Russia did not organise

inside the RCP(B) in the same way as Miasnikov’s group, nor initially share

Miasnikov’s analysis of the trade unions as arenas for communist work in Russia.

However the main area of disagreement was on the question of the nature of

revolution and counter-revolution in Russia. The CWP of Russia, under the influence

of the KAPD, was to accept that the revolution of October 1917 was a bourgeois or

double revolution, whereas the Workers Group maintained that the revolution was a

proletarian revolution and the opening of a world-wide proletarian struggle. In this

they upheld the traditional left communist analysis defended since 1918, a shared

recognition with the CWP of the internal involution, and counter-revolution, which

was marked by the defeats of 1918-20. For the Workers Group this was to remain

the reflection of the failure of the world revolution to spread from its bastion in

Russia - rather than any original error in the seizure of power by the proletariat in

1917. The two groups, however, agreed on the need for a new party and a new

International as well as the need to oppose the NEP at home, and the united front

abroad. Both were prepared to support class struggle against the Party/state

apparatus and to engage in illegal work. It is improbable that the two groups of the

left communists in Moscow had no contact with each other, but no documentary

record exists of any contact between them or of them engaging in polemics with each

other. However the Berlin group of the CWP did publish the manifest of the Workers

Group and translate and distribute it internationally. However the KAPD were critical

of the manifesto and despite claiming ‘the Workers Group as the Russian section of

the 4th International’ in 1924 the documentary material remains ambiguous on the

precise evolution of the two groups in Russia. Certainly the repression growing


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inside the Party and the ‘workers’ state’ apparatus drove Miasnikov and the Workers

Group to abandon work inside these organisms - it was practically impossible. They

were also to adopt the anti-parliamentary and anti-union viewpoint of the KAPD andthe KAI and adopt the name of CWP which suggests an evolution in their positions

on behalf of the Workers Group. But alongside this is the fact that the Workers

Group did not accept the KAPD’s criticisms, nor did it join the KAI which it regarded

as premature. This was connected to its rejection of the immediatist view that saw an

imminent revival of the proletariat in Russia and world wide. Just as it was unwilling

to totally reject the 3rd International and the RCP(B) or the proletarian nature of the

revolution in Russia, it was immune to the idea of rejecting the immediate and

defensive struggles of the workers, a question which was to totally divide and weaken

the left communists in Germany. thus it remains unclear whether the Workers

Group of the RCP(B) fused with the CWP in Russia, despite its differences. What is

known is that the Workers Group was to grow in numbers and influence and

maintain itself as an organisation until the mid 1930s in Russia alongside the

Democratic Centralists. The original CWP was to disappear as a group in Russia,

being maintained for a short while by Russian exiles in Berlin.

The Workers Group was to crystallise around the person of Gabriel Miasnikov who

was a Bolshevik militant since before 1905. Some authors have the origin of this

group as being in the Workers Opposition or its left wing or that it was ‘inspired’ by

the work of Ignatov. While it is true that elements from both groups were to join the

Workers Groups this is due to the close work between these groups in the 1920-21

struggles inside the Party. The banning of fractions had provoked both increased

solidarity and co- operation within the left fractions and provoked a radicalisation of

the left. The Workers Opposition was always a relatively eclectic tendency which

demonstrated its centrism by its attempts to act as a loyal opposition even after its

ban as a fraction. It was equally seen as the least dangerous of the left opposition by

the right. This provoked a growing alienation on the part of its left wing who were


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attracted to the arguments and analysis of the Democratic Centralists and other

members of the left communist wing of the Party who maintained a continuity with

the work of the 1918 Left Communists. Far from being inspired by Ignatov’s group, which itself split up in a number of contradictory directions and symbolised the

increasing impossibility of bridging the gap between the communist left and the

RCP(B) as a whole, the Workers group was in direct political continuity with the

communist left and won elements from both opposition groups on the basis of its

political programme. The personal embodiment of this reality was Miasnikov himself,

a member of the Left Communist Fraction who came from one of the earliest

bastions of left communism in the Ukraine and specifically its core in Samara and

Saratov.

‘On 12-13 May[1918] a joint conference of the Perm’ and Motovilikha organisations

assembled, with Gabriel Miasnikov in the van of the Left’s campaign. After fiery

speeches by Borchaninov and Miasnikov himself condemning the Brest peace - for its

failure to provide any real breathing- space and for the retreats from socialist policies

that flowed from it - a resolution in support of the Regional Conference’s decisions was

adopted by a vote of thirty to twenty.’

He was widely respected throughout the Party, even by his opponents and was able

to win elements of the Samara organisation of the Workers Opposition to his

positions in the discussion clubs set up and (temporarily) tolerated, as a safety valve

in late 1921-22. In Samara the Workers Opposition was still in control of the Party

apparatus and was on the left wing of its fraction. When Lenin met with the 37

Workers’ Opposition delegates this was a manoeuvre. This manoeuvre was aimed at

the leaders of the Workers’ Opposition prior to the Party Congress in an attempt to

separate them form both the Democratic Centralists and their own left wing. The

appeal to restrain their militants and cease factional activity had little effect and the

discussion clubs which had become centres of opposition in Moscow and the Urals


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were closed down.

The Workers Group of the Russian Communist Party was the name appended to a

manifesto issued in 1923. For R.V. Daniels this programme ‘was largely that of the

Workers Opposition’ (p.160) and the group describes as ‘a direct offshoot of the

Workers Opposition’ (p.159). However E.H. Carr makes no reference to the origins of

the Workers Group in the Workers Opposition and L. Schapiro (p.306) points out

that while G.I. Miasnikov was ‘at times prepared to support this group’, ‘though not a

signatory of the Workers Opposition Platform’. Given the fact that the evolution of the

Workers Group and its political positions were within the framework of the

communist left and that its main elements had been members of the Left

Communist Fraction of 1918 undermines R.V. Daniels portrayal of this group as a

left wing offshoot of the Workers Opposition. It is true that the workers Opposition

were strong in the Perm area of the Urals, and to the left of this tendency. It is

equally true that this region and Samara were also strongholds of left communist

militants who were still influential in the Party apparatus. Under these conditions

the Workers Group was able to attract elements who were reacting to the rightward

moving Workers Opposition, as well as from the Democratic Centralist group. The

close work and discussions as well as the solidarity in reaction to growing repression

inside the Party in 1921-22 had produced two opposite reactions within the

Opposition. Those who sought to conciliate with the Party and state apparatus and

those who were to draw more radical conclusions from the course of events. The

former included the majority of the workers Opposition and the Ignatov group who

had joined them. The left, a minority, of the Ignatov group joined with the

Democratic Centralists. In such conditions of polarisation it was inevitable that the

Workers Opposition which attempted to act as a loyal opposition even after its

banning as a fraction, and was the most eclectic of the left tendencies would produce

a variety of splits.


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THE WORKERS’ TRUTH

The Workers’ Truth was the first group of the communist left to emerge ‘outside’ the

RCP(B). this group took its name from its paperRabochaia Pravda (no. l, Sep 1922)

in which it launched an appeal that outlined it programmatic views. The paper was

produced illegally in Moscow and it was here that the group had its base throughout

its existence, during which it was clandestine in operation even before it was made

illegal. R.V Daniels and E. H. Carr, the main secondary sources in English, agree

that the group was mainly composed of intellectuals and some workers, and that it

was probably a splinter group that emerged from the Proletkult movement rather

than directly from the RCP(B). Like this movement which was influenced by A.

Bogdanov, the Workers’ Truth shared certain of Bogdanov’s views and this may have

been a factor in their apparent isolation from other left communist groupings both

inside and outside the RCP, and the indifference or hostility expressed towards them

despite the convergence of their political positions on many key questions.

While Bogdanov had inspired the left fraction of the RSDLP(B), unlike most of the

Vperiod group (1908-1917) he had not rejoined the RCP(B), con- fining his activity to

work in the building of the Proletkult movement. A pamphlet produced by the

RCP(B),O Gruppe Rabocheia Pravda:Bol’shevik 7-8 (1924) details how the group

reflected his concepts and terminology and affirmed its allegiance to his views.

However Bogdanov himself denied approval or support for their platform, or being

their leader. With the growth of strikes in 1923 and the fears of the growing influence

of left communists inside and outside the party the merest suspicion of collaboration

or association with the Workers’ Truth was sufficient for the GPU to have him

imprisoned.

Little is known of the individuals who made up this group, or even how many issues

of its paper came out. It is probable that the group did not exceed 20 core members,


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organised as a collective with a milieu of sympathisers perhaps 200-400 in number.

The group was known to have intervened in the strikes in 1922 and 1923 and it was

this activity which brought down the repression which seems to have crushed thegroup. An account in Pravda in 1923 refers to the expulsion of 13 supporters of the

Workers’ Truth from the RCP(B), 7 of whom were members of the collective. And later

that year the MenshevikSocialist Herald, an émigré paper produced in Berlin speaks

of 400 members (?!) of Workers’ Truth purged in a mass nation-wide expulsion of left

communist elements. Even if E.H. Carr is right in asserting that this is ‘probably’ an

overestimation of the influence of this group, R.V. Daniels is wrong to assert that the

leadership of the RCP did not take such groups seriously, at least in terms of their

potential.

It was not just the paranoia of the GPU and the growing bureaucracy that motivated

the growing repression, but also the ability of these tiny, but growing numbers of

communist nuclei to articulate a coherent critique of the involution and degeneration

of the revolution in Russia and connect this to the defence of the workers’ immediate

struggles to defend themselves against the demands of the party/state apparatus.

It was this that distinguished the emerging left communists from the later Left

Opposition: Trotsky could only concede that the ‘Workers’ Untruth’, as he called

them, were the symptom of a problem in the party and its relations with the working

class, but this in no way prevented him form supporting their expulsion and

repression, or opposing the workers’ struggles of 1922-23. This sectarianism of

Trotsky towards the left communists which was to remain a feature of the Left

Opposition, who refused to seriously confront groups like the Workers’ Truth,

dismissing them as ultra-leftist or idealist. This did not prevent members of the

Workers’ Truth corresponding with Trotsky privately, but these and other

connections with the ‘ultra-left’ remain unpublished .

When it launched its 1922 Appeal, it had called for ‘ propaganda circles ... created in


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solidarity with the Workers’ Truth’; ‘Everywhere in the mills and factories, in the trade

union organisations, the workers’ faculties, the soviet and party schools, the

Communist Union of Youth and the party organisations.’ At the same time they called

for a new ‘workers’ party’ they were still prepared to work within the old

organisations and this reflected both the difficulty of giving a practical orientation

and the political confusions that were to lead to practical and theoretical inability to

adjust to and resist the growing counter-revolution. It was these positions which

contributed to their inability to politically and practically understand and resist the

growing counter-revolution unlike the Democratic Centralist Fraction or the

Communist Workers Group with whom they had discussions and contact. The other

left communist groups were hostile to the politics of this group which put into

question the making of a proletarian revolution in 1917 and the role of the party in a

manner which both echoed the Menshevik arguments of the past and pre-figured the

arguments of the Council Communist groups. Thus Miasnikov and the Communist

Workers’ Group were critical of this ‘so-called workers opposition’ and its platform,

while simultaneously recognising it as containing proletarian elements who it called

on to regroup behind its own analysis.

The shared opposition to the NEP and the united front, and to the growth of state

capitalism as well as a willingness to use the few remaining opportunities to work in

the union and party bodies, as well as working illegally outside and against these

bodies could not conceal the growing divergences between the 2 groups. The Workers’

Truth tended to work towards a politicisation of the immediate struggles, seeing ‘the

material conditions’ ... ‘of the organisers of state capitalism’ were ‘sharply

differentiated from the conditions of the working class’ and this was based on the

repression and exploitation of the working class: but this view led them to see the

union emphasis on wage demands and conditions of work, as a weakness which

reflected a revival of the old economism. Here they differed sharply from theCommunist Workers’ Party who saw the unions as Party/State organisms which were


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instruments of state capitalist discipline and exploitation. If there was agreement by

the Workers’ Truth that the unions were organs that defended the ‘interests of

production, i.e. state capital’ it led to diametrically opposed conclusions to the CWG. The CWG denied that the unions were simply reformist or that they defended the

immediate interests of the workers, they were not simply non-revolutionary, but

counter-revolutionary . The CWG did not therefore look to the unions to reform

themselves, nor equate the workers struggles for immediate and limited gains with

defensive trade unionism. Far from being a movement which expressed economism

and a retreat, the strikes and immediate struggles were the only basis for a revival of

the proletariat and its communist minorities. For the CWG this meant a revival of

the workers’ soviets and factory committees in conscious opposition to the unions.

The Workers’ Truth differences were more profound when it came to the question of

what state capitalism meant in the context of the Russian economy. Ironically, they

shared with Lenin a belief in its historically progressive features in opposition to the

analysis of the various left communist fractions and groups speaking of the October

Revolution eliminating ‘all barriers in the path of economic development’ not by

inaugurating a world wide proletarian revolution against capitalism as the left

communists defended but in a purely Russian and national framework which saw

‘the successful revolution and the civil war’ opening ‘broad perspectives ... of vapid

transformation into a country of progressive capitalism.’ No wonder Miasnikov saw the

Workers’ Truth as abandoning Bolshevik internationalism for a Menshevik/

nationalist framework, and the proletarian struggle against all reactionary, stagist

conceptions by blessing the newly emerging state capitalist economy with a

progressive role. While recognising the fusion of the party/state apparatus was

transforming it into an agent of capitalism and calling for workers to resist

exploitation the Workers’ Truth were to remain fundamentally undermined by a

fatalism, produced by the defeat of the working class which it saw as ‘incapable of

playing any influential role’ and having ‘now been thrown back almost a decade.’ Thus


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it logically saw its work as the long term work of creating propaganda circles and

awaiting a future resurgence of the working class: unfortunately their recognition

that the workers were defeated did not prevent them from falling into a contradictoryimmediatism which supposed they could ‘politicise’ the strikes of 1922-23.

The Workers’ Truth, unlike the Democratic Centralist and Communist Workers’

Groups were unable to maintain the work of a communist faction and were

completely crushed by the first waves of the counter-revolutionary terror in 1923

although isolated ex-Workers’ Truth members are mentioned in the Bulletins of the

Left Opposition they had no organisation after 1923 and Miasnikov writing for the

CWG in 1924 stated that by then the Workers’ Truth had nothing in common with

them, and that they were ‘attempting to wipe out everything that was communist in

the revolution of October 1917’ and were therefore completely Menshevist. Unable to

break with Bogdanov’s contradictory views which led them to see the bourgeois

counter-revolution as leading to a progressive development of capitalism in Russia,

the Workers’ Truth remained isolated both nationally and internationally. This view

shares with Menshevism the vision that the revolution was premature. In their

instinctive defence of the workers they were too radical for the Bolshevik right and

centre, or for the conservative Mensheviks; in their analysis of October 1917 and its

subsequent evolution they alienated the communist left. Thus this largely

anonymous collectivity was on the basis of its opposition to the NEP, and its

positions of state capitalism and the party, as well as its defence of the workers’

immediate struggles as a left communist group. But it shared with the KAPD of

Berlin a tendency to immediatism and a rejection of the defensive struggles as

inadequate, and a theory of the offensive. In their economic views they also

prefigured the Council Communists in favouring working collectively rather than a

centralised work as a fraction. In fact it remained a marginal and ephemeral

grouping compared to the Democratic Centralists and the Communist Workers’

Group who expressed the organisational and political continuity of the left


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communist fraction of the RCP as it developed inside and later outside and against

the Party/State apparatus.

THE COMMUNIST WORKERS’ GROUP

The main focus of this study of the history of the Communist Workers Group is

based primarily on translations of its documents that appeared in various papers of

the international left communist groups which emerged in the 1920s and 1930s. Its

thesis is that the CWG was in political and organisational continuity with the left

communist fraction of the of the RSDLP(B) and an integral part of the internationalcommunist left. In order to demystify the history of this group it is necessary to

criticise the approaches of other historians who have, consciously or unconsciously,

mystified and falsified this history where it has not been ignored or overlooked. Even

the most accessible and sympathetic accounts by the leading expert on Russian

anarchism, the libertarian historian Paul Avrich (‘Bolshevik Opposition to Lenin: G.T.

Miasnikov and the Workers Group’,The Russian Review vo1.43 1984, pp. l-29)1 and

the libertarian Marxist Roberto Sinigaglia (Mjasnikov et Rivoluzione Russa - Edizioni

Jaca Books, Milano 1973), have focused primarily on the personality of Miasnikov

and make little reference to the organised activity of the group which is assumed to

have disappeared as an organised force in the mid 1920s.

The more commonly accessible accounts of the origins of the CWG begin with its

relations with the Workers’ Opposition, R.V. Daniels, the influential author ofThe

Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia, pp160-161,

writes ‘backed by a small groups of other former Workers’ Oppositionists, Miasnikov

issued early in 1923 a lengthy manifesto in the name of ‘The Workers’ Groups of the

Russian Communist Party’. The Programme was largely that of the Workers’

Opposition.’ Isaac Deutscher appears to confirm this ‘The Workers; Opposition had

lain low and was breaking up. Its splinter groups, however, had to some extent been


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involved in the strike agitation, which was spontaneous in the main. The most

important of these was the Workers’ Group…’. Similarly Robert Sakwa reiterates that

the CWG was ‘inspired by the Workers’ Opposition’ and a splinter group. However,

both Schapiro (p.306, footnote 33), and Avrich (ibid. p.6) confirm that Miasnikov had

never been a member of the Workers’ Opposition and this view was shared by one of

its leaders, A.G. Shliapnikov. While it is true that several of the leading members of

the CWG had been members of the Workers’ Opposition, a complete list of known

members of the CWG shows many who were left communist in 1918 or members of

the Democratic Centralist Fraction. This continuity is down played in order to

emphasise the apparent organic links with the Workers’ Opposition. If the left

communist groups won over elements of the more militant left wing of the Workers’

Opposition it was a result of their opposition to the centrist and vacillating

leadership of the Workers’ Opposition which was entrenched in the union apparatus

and particularly its growing bureaucracy. Just as the Ignatov group was polarised,

with the left wing joining the Democratic Centralists and the right wing majority

joining the Workers’ Opposition, so the latter group was polarised under the

influence of the left communists of the CWP and the CWG as well as the independent

left communist nuclei that emerged in the period 1921-23. While the leadership of

the Workers’ Opposition moved to accommodate itself to the increasingly monolithic

party/state apparatus many of its rank and file militants sided with those workers

and peasants who fought to defend their immediate interests against the growing

demands of state-capitalism and counter-revolution. It was this response to the

growing political and economic crisis that led elements to break from its political

framework of loyal opposition and increasingly muted criticism to join groups like the

CWG and other left communist groupings especially in Moscow and the industrial

centres of the Urals and the Ukraine which had been bastions of the communist left

in 1918. The one genuine splinter group from the Worker’ Opposition, Panushkin’s

Workers’ and Peasants’ Party, was another short-lived reaction to the NEP, which


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organised in Moscow and called one demonstration before being crushed by the GPU:

even here it showed the influence of Miasnikov’s views on Kronstadt and the need for

peasant unions. Given this context and the political position of both the Workers’Opposition and the CWG, it shows R.V. Daniels view of their relationship is totally

false and at odds with the explicit positions of the CWG defended over the 15 years of

their existence. Far from being ‘inspired’ by this Workers’ Opposition, from the outset

they called on the rank and file to break with it organisationally and politically,

rejecting any possibility of the Workers’ Opposition as a whole making a positive

evolution.

The CWG had initially a dual orientation which indicates the uniquely difficult

circumstances in which it operated. It was both acting as a clandestine fraction

within the RCP(B) and the organs of the workers state and from the outset acting as

the nucleus of a new workers’ party. Its Bolshevik origins made it immune to any

relations with the Mensheviks or Social Revolutionaries, nor did it heed the

temptation to adopt positions which put into question the proletarian nature of the

October revolution in Russia. It was for this reason the CWG was to reject the

Workers’ Truth as ‘basically Menshevik’ despite its apparent leftism, and later break

with the KAI which rejected any united front with the Third International in the mid

1920s. Contrary to the mythology of the Left Opposition in Russia, including Trotsky

himself, the left communists of the CWG were not sectarian. In fact they continued

to work inside the Party until expulsion, deportation, mass arrests and

imprisonment and torture made this virtually impossible. Before the banning of

factions the left communists had worked on common issues with the Workers’

Opposition and the Democratic Centralists and it was to the left-wing of these

groups that they appealed as well as to sincere elements in the Workers’ Truth to

form a new party, based on a new programme. In this they went beyond the strategy

of loyal opposition which was eventually to split the Democratic Centralists, and was

to remain the strategy of the Bolshevik-Leninist/ Left Opposition. Thus their strategy


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was fundamentally based on the impossibility of reforming or recapturing the RCP(B)

as a whole, while recognising that the Party and the workers’ organs under its

central were areas in which the CWG should intervene. This strategy was outlined inan article inSocialisticsky Vestnik, July 6th 1924, which states that ‘members of the

workers’ group can be:

1) members of the RCP(B), 2) expelled from the RCP(B) for political reasons, 3) those not

belonging to any party who are advised to join the RCP(B).’

It was this attitude, forged by years of clandestine work for the Bolshevik fraction

inside Czarist Russia, that enabled the CWG to evolve inside Russia and survive

despite the waves of repression that smashed groups like the Workers’ Truth,

Workers’ and Peasants’ Party and the Workers Opposition. Most secondary accounts

simply assume, or act as though, this was the fate of the CWG and that it also

disappeared as an organised force in 1924. Even the lengthy accounts of Sinigaglia

and Avrich simply become an account of Miasnikov’s personal exile as though the

group ceased to exist. Yet in some respects the most startling achievements of this

group were in its final years and for this history the primary sources are translations

of their documents which appeared in small left communist journals, untouched by

any of the authors previously referred to. This work was based on the fundamental

documents written in the mid 1920s and it is a testimony to the political clarity and

organisational strength of this group that it was to maintain itself as an organisation

until 1938 when its militants were all finally executed in the purges. The group was

able, almost until the end, to maintain links with its militants abroad firstly in

Berlin, and later in Paris, where Miasnikov worked.

Initially the CWG was one of the strongest of the left communist nuclei - ‘the most

audacious’, E.H. Carr; ‘the most important’, I. Deutscher; ‘The most interesting’, A.

Kollontai. It was not their numbers which threatened the party, however, but their


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willingness to intervene in the workers’ strikes and their potential to give a political

lead to elements inside and outside the Party and organise them. The nucleus of the

CWG, consisted of experienced and influential worker-Bolsheviks, implanted in areas where the ideas of the left communists were well known since 1918. These were also

the areas where the proletariat was most concentrated and combative, even in the

harsh conditions of 1923-24. Certainly these elements did not directly provoke the

strikes which emerged as a spontaneous reaction to the growing economic and

political crisis, but they were prepared to defend the strikers and give a political

perspective for those prepared to fight the NEP whether inside or outside the Party.

The CWG produced clandestine leaflets, manifestos and a regular press, as well as

circulating literature inside the Party. A network existed for this purpose which was

able to smuggle literature in and out of Russia and into the camps. As late as 1930

the CWG was producing a regular paper,The Road to Power, in Moscow (Source,

L’Ouvrier Communiste, no. 6, Jan 1930).

In March 1923 the first nucleus of the CWG was formed in Moscow consisting of 3

workers, C. Miasnikov, N.V. Kuznetsov and P.B. Moiseev. They constituted the

Provisional Central Organisational Bureau of the CWG. In February these three had

collectively begun to produce and distribute the hectographed manifesto of the

Workers’ Group of the RCP(B) which was circulated in Russia and abroad and aimed

to be an intervention into the 12th Party Congress planned in April. The Manifesto

was based on two earlier works of Miasnikov but also went beyond them and again

demonstrates the continuity of this document with the left communist fraction of

1918. This centre was to become the official central organ of the CWG in Russia, and

of the CWP later. The impact of this document, which was circulated at the 12th

Party Congress can be judged from the negative and positive responses within the

working class and the Party. It is difficult to assess objectively the various claims

made about the membership of the CWG. Numerically Avrich (ibid. p.20) states that

Kuznetsov’s estimate of 3,000 members in Moscow, and 19,000 throughout the


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country, is a ‘wild exaggeration’ (citing Sorin, ibid. 115-117) but not why this should

be so. He says that ‘by summer the group had some 300 members in Moscow, where it

was centred, as well as a sprinkling of adherents in other cities - many were old

Bolsheviks, and all, or nearly all were workers’. (Sinigaglia, ibid. p.59, gives 200 in

Moscow). Even if these figures are correct, given the high level of political

commitment required by the CWG and the existence of other left groups and

tendencies, this would still reflect a strong political presence in Moscow. There were

only 1655 Bolsheviks at the beginning of 1917. But other evidence suggests a higher

figure of perhaps 1,000 throughout Russia and a much wider influence than has

normally been given to this group. In Moscow the group’s most active members,

apart from those on the Bureau, were I. Makh - who replaced A. Moiseev on the

central organ, S.I.N. Tuinov, V.P. Demidov, Renzina, I.M. Korov, G.V. Shokhanov, A.I.

Medvednev (not to be confused with S. R. Medvedev, leader of the Workers’

Opposition), Porestnatov, Trofinov, Luchin, C.R. Duchkin. On the 5th June the group

convened a Conference in Moscow which elected a Moscow Bureau of 8 members

with Makh as the delegate an the Central Bureau. Miasnikov had already been

arrested in May and Kuznetsow had taken over as spokesman for the group. The

group continued its work towards the Party and particularly the leaders of those

centrist formations which were on the brink of liquidation, giving the rank and file

the chance to judge the worth of opposition leaders like Lutinov, Kollontai and

Ignatov who, while ‘sympathising’ with the ultra left, did nothing in practice to

endanger their own positions. They wished to restrict criticism to internal Party

debate, a condition which would lead to silence eventually. Others contacted, like

Riazanov, similarly refused to break Party discipline and defend left communists

from GPU repression. Having worked with the Workers Opposition over the Appeal of

the 22, this was to prove a watershed for that tendency who retreated and eventually

formally recanted its positions. The CWG had won over its left wing and soon

abandoned any further attempts at working with this current.]


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The Conference also elected a secretariat of 4 which may account for Avrich’s

conflicting sources. And Kuznatsov reports that a 4 person bureau was elected for

youth work. At this time the group was only planning a journal. However, it did havea printing press in Moscow.

Initially the official RCP had responded cautiously. Having nullified the left factions

inside the Party, it hoped to be able to similarly intimidate others by the expulsion

and repression of individuals. Miasnikov was arrested on May 25th, a month after

the 12th Party Congress, and it was this Congress that had branded the CWC as

counter-revolutionary and hence illegal. The Party was not yet reduced to a purely

capitalist instrument and so Kossior of the Democratic Centralists and Trotsky were

able to speak sympathetically of the mistakes of the Party and the difficulties which

drove the comrades into ultra-left errors. The Party was still prepared to engage (in

private) in a political debate with its opponents whether through the form of Sorin’s

relatively objective pamphlet on the left communists, which the Party circulated

internally. Trotsky went along with labelling, the CWG as objectively counter-

revolutionary and anti-Party, while engaging in private correspondence with

Democratic Centralists and Miasnikovites. Even Bukharin tried, in person, to

persuade Miasnikov to recant to no avail. With the growth of strikes in August and

September the RCP(B) moved against the group as a whole. They made their move

when they became aware of the CWG’s growing agitation, and its preparations to call

a one day general strike and a mass demonstration, in commemoration of the Bloody

Sunday march of 190,5, with Lenin’s portrait heading the march. The Central

Committee produced a resolution branding the CWG as anti-Communist and anti-

Soviet and ordered the GPU to suppress it.

Thus in September 28 members of the CWG were arrested. Five, including Kuznetsov

had already been expelled and 9 more were expelled including Moiseev, Tuinov,

Berzina, Demidov, Kotov and Shokhanov. The remaining 14 were reprimanded. With


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this and the re-arrest of Miasnikov, who had been promised immunity by Zinoviev

and Kretinsky, the Soviet ambassador in Berlin, in the fall of 1923 Avrich (ibid. F. 24)

concludes that in Jan 1924 when Lenin died ‘the Workers’ Group had been silenced.

It was the last dissident movement in the Party to be liquidated while Lenin was still

alive… smashed with the blessing of all the top Soviet leaders.’ Sinigaglia and others

appear to concur, but this was not the case. Most commentators agree that the

RCP(B) had good reason to fear the influences of the group like the CWG in

conditions of growing inflation, unemployment and a strike wave, which they were

attempting to politicise. What is significant is that they overlook the evidence that

the CWG carried out work in the Red Army and found an echo for their positions, a

factor which was a tangible threat evoking uneasy memories of 1917.

The CWG, which was opposed to the united front tactic of the Third International,

was to propose a united front with the RCP(B) rank and file and its left wing, but

with the growing impossibility of any fractional work inside the RCP it became an

open party, the CWG, probably regrouping with the original CWP nucleus who were

influenced by the KAPD. This led the group to deepen its critique of the unions and

eventually abandon any work inside these state capitalist organs. From the outset

the CWG had been highly critical of these organs, favouring the factory committees

and workers’ soviets as organs to defend workers’ interests and express a revival of

workers’ democracy.

‘This is the Workers’ Group’s assessment of the unions (taken from correspondence

intercepted by the police): ‘The silent army of the dominant group in the RCP’; ‘A blind

army in the hands of the bureaucrats’; ‘A bureaucratic appendage of the Politburo’.

(Translated from Sinigaglia, pp.64-65).

Similarly the communist workers’ Party adopted an anti-parliamentary position close

to that of the KAPD and the Italian Left. thus they were open to the discussions of


22/31

the communist left with whom they maintained links via a bureau in exile, under the

direction of a Rumanian militant, Kate Rumanova, and others. This bureau helped

with printing, sending material into Russia and publicising the work of the CWP ofRussia abroad. This work was moved to Paris when Miasnikov arrived there in

October 1930. The group in Russia was able to publish a regular bulletin form which

most of the following was translated. It gives some picture, however partial, of the

group’s continued activity:

‘In Moscow Oct 1924 the GPU arrested a group of Red Army soldiers who had the

support of some officers, at the Spashi Barracks. They were accused of discussing

with the CWG about the resolution of the Party banning the group and its activities in

repressing the CWG publication and banning its militants from Moscow… ‘On Nov 7th

1924 the left communists did organise a demonstration in Moscow protesting against

the suppression of their views. Not only the CWG members but also the non-party

members were arrested by the GPU for the crime of sympathising with the communist

left… ‘On December 8th 1924 the Moscow CWG issued a leaflet publicising the arrest of

11 of its group in the Urals (Perm) who had gone on hunger strike . They demanded to

be told the reasons for their arrest and a public trial… ‘On December 27th 1924

banished members of the CWG were escorted under armed guard of the GPU on a train

into internal exile in the Northern woods of Russia. (At Tschardynsk)… ‘ Also that

month the GPU confiscated a second printing press organised clandestinely by the

CWG… ‘In December further unrest was reported in the army. The GPU are reported to

have broken a counter-revolutionary conspiracy, arrested a clandestine organisation of

communists in the Red Army who called the NEP the New Exploitation of the Proletariat

and called for a struggle for that it was supposedly the Third International to work to

undermine capitalist armies in just this manner. The next day in response to the GPU’s

actions a part of the battalion stationed in the Kremlin declared their dissatisfaction

with the leaders politics and declared their solidarity with the CWG. For this they were


23/31

sent to Smolensk.

The bulletin also talks of a wave of repression in the Ukraine where the entire

membership of the central bureau of the CWP in the Ukraine was arrested.

While precise details are not available, it is clear that the group managed to exist in

an organised form, issuing appeals, leaflets and manifestos until 1929, when it still

had a clandestine press which was being produced in Moscow. Its militants were

scattered throughout Russia with many in exile, deported to the isolators and labour

camps, or on the run from the GPU. In exile, whether in Berlin or France, in 1930this network was sustained by correspondence and occasional bulletins. Their work

was published in England by the Workers’ Dreadnought and the Commune and in

Germany by the press of the KAI/KAPD and others; but the best source of

information on their activity in the early 1930s is the journalL’Ouvrier Communiste,

produced by ex-Bordigists and KAPD elements with whom Miasnikov collaborated in

exile in France. These documents also find a partial corroboration in the Bulletins of

the Left Opposition and the writings of Trotsky where the CWG are ridiculed as

marginal, sectarian ultra-leftists and called Miasnikovists. But events were to give

the scattered nuclei of the CWG a chance to have an influence on the discussion in

the communist left wing of the RCP. The growing political and economic crisis, as

well as Hitler’s rise to power, and the impotence of both the left and united

opposition to counter the growing Stalinist counter-revolution, was compounded by

the number of capitulations in the opposition, both from the Bolshevik Leninists and

the Democratic Centralists. In the case of the latter this produced a radicalisation of

a large left wing minority known as the ‘irreconcilables’. The Democratic Centralists,

for 10 years, ‘had dithered’ (Ciliga), ‘now capitulation to Lenin’s ultimatum, now

supporting the Trotskyists in their struggle with Stalin. Its orientation ... proved to he

sterile. The Five Year Plan shook the group to ifs foundations. The majority, like the

majority of the Trotskyists, capitulated’ and justified this by saying that from the


24/31

moment when the NEP and the bourgeoisie were liquidated, socialism was being

built. Again we can see a counter-reaction from a section of the Democratic

Centralists around Timotei Sapronov who continued to reflect that section of thegroup that had its origins in the original Left Communist fraction of 1918. Ciliga

shows how this group, which was essentially reconstituted on a new basis (The

Manifesto of the 15) was constantly winning over militants from the irreconcilable

wing of the Bolshevik Leninists, and eventually it was to win a majority in Vorkuta.

At the same time Miasnikov shows that the CWG had opened a discussion with this

group, recognising that its new platform, which spoke of Stalinist counter-revolution

and Thermidor, represented a qualitative evolution and a break with the Democratic

Centralist orientation of the past which was relatively uncritical of Lenin. This again

confirms that the CWG were correct not to jump to the sectarian conclusion that the

RCP(B) as a whole was counter-revolutionary, even when it rejected any possibility of

its reform. The Workers’ Group’s orientation enabled it to win over both the Sapronov

groups and the majority of the left ‘irreconcilables’, as well as some remnants of both

the Workers’ Opposition and the Workers’ Truth into a Federation of left communist

groups. The aim of this organisation was to co-ordinate the activities of its militants

and to promote a discussion on the perspectives both internationally and nationally

for the proletariat. The CWG saw this as a step towards the refounding of a CWP of

Russia on a broader basis. However, the Democratic Centralists and ex-Trotskyists

were by no means homogenous. Older Democratic Centralists were less critical of

Bolshevism, though some were more than willing to form a new party Others (a

minority) wanted to call for a 4th International. The CWG militants Zankov and

Tuinov were hesitant on this point because they had already experienced the

problems caused by the premature formation of the Communist Workers’

International (KAI 4th International). However, the CWG did work for the formation of

Communist Parties in the ‘Soviet’ Union, and were therefore not totally homogenous

on this point. However they were clear on the counter-revolutionary nature of the


25/31

Russian state, and the state capitalist nature of the economy. Ante Ciliga’s account

tends to focus on the positions of individuals, and he fails to realise the CWG; was

the main force behind a regroupment which went beyond the confines of Vorkuta: where 20-25 comrades were united. And that the Group of 15 were no longer

Democratic Centralists but a new group, but this is understandable given the

conditions in which the group operated. In August 1928 a similar regroupment had

taken place as a result of a conference in Moscow in which a representative of the

Group of 15, the Bureau of the CWG and some escaped ex-Workers’ Oppositionists

had created a bureau which issued a joint appeal for the formation of a Communist

Workers’ Party in Russia. The discussions at Vorkuta may have reflected a parallel

development or a direct response to this initiative: the evidence is not clear. Ciliga

dates this as occurring in 1933, so it is possible there is no direct connection given

the time lag.

Initially, as its name implies, the Communist Workers’ Group considered that it was

a fraction of the RCP(B) and it worked to regroup revolutionaries on the basis of its

programme whether through work inside the Party, and the trade unions, co-

operatives, as well as the Soviets or outside these organs, which were by this time

tied to the state. They supported workers’ strikes and demonstrations. In this latter

respect they broke with Soviet legality and the loyal opposition strategy of the

Democratic Centralists who worked solely within the Party, and the more right wing

so called left Opposition which was beginning to emerge. However the CWG, from the

start, were not sectarian, they called on elements from the Workers’ oppositely and

the Workers’ Truth to break with these organisations to form an authentic

Communist Party in Russia and in this policy they were successful. From the outset

they had won over elements from the left wing of the Workers’ Opposition and the

Democratic Centralists as well as elements from the older left communist fraction of

1918. It is also probable that they absorbed those elements in the Communist

Workers’ Party of Russia to become a unified group that supported the KAI in


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Russia. The CWG was prepared to work with the Third International in a united front

against the bourgeoisie, which for them included its left wing, Social Democracy.

Unlike the Democratic Centralists and the Bolshevik Leninist Left Opposition theydid not believe in reforming the RCP or the Third International; even if they were still

workers’ organisations they were increasingly becoming obstacles to any world

revolution. Thus they were to regard the Left Opposition, and the Unified Opposition

as centrist, or centre right block with no possibility of reversing the growing counter-

revolution internally and globally. Despite being banned and declared an anti-Party,

counter-revolutionary grouping, despite deportation, imprisonment, beatings and

torture the CWG was to survive as a clandestine group in many areas of the USSR

with an influence beyond its small size. It was this capacity to survive due to the

political and organisational abilities of its members who comprised many veteran

Bolsheviks who had learned to engage in clandestinity before the War.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jean Barrot and Denis Authier,La Gauche Communiste en Allemagne, 1918-1921,

Payot, Paris 1976. Especially chapters 16 and 17

E. H. Carr,The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923, vols. 1-3 : The Interregnum 1923-

1924;Socialism in One Country 1924-1926, vols. 1-3Foundations of a Planned

Economy, 1926-1929 vols. 1-2

W.J. Chase,Workers, Society, and the Soviet State Labor and Life in Moscow, 1918-

1929, University of Illinois Press 1990

Ante Ciliga,The Russian Enigma, Ink Links PB 1979

Barbara Evans Clements:Bolshevik Feminist Life of A. Kollontai, Indiana University

Press 1979


27/31

R.V. Daniels:The Conscience of the Revolution -Communist Opposition in Soviet

Russia, Clarion Books 1969

Isaac Deutscher,The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1919-1921: The Prophet Unarmed:

Trotsky 1921-1924, Oxford University Press 1976

Eduard A. Dune,Notes of a Red Guard, University of Illinois Press 1993

R.C. Elwood,Inessa Armand, Cambridge University Press 1992

Israel GetzlerKronstadt 1917-1921. The Fate of a Soviet Democracy, Cambridge

University Press 1983

Ronald Kowalski,The Bolshevik Party in Conflict: The Left Communist Opposition of

1918, Macmillan 1991

Lenin,Collected Works Progress Publishers, Moscow, (translated from the 4th and 5th

Russian editions).

G.M. Maximoff The Guillotine at Work: vol. l The Leninist Counter-revolution,

Cienfuegos Press 1979

Mary McAuley,Bread and Justice: State and Society in Petrograd 1917-1922,

Clarendon Press 1991

Christian Rakovsky,Selected Writings on Opposition in the USSR 1923-30, Alison and

Busby 1981

T.H. Rigby,Lenin’s Government -Sovnarkom 1917-1922, Cambridge University Press

1979

Guy Sabatier,Traité de Brest Litovsk 1918. Coup d’Arret à la Révolution, Spartacus


28/31


29/31

‘The Left Opposition in 1923’, David S. Law inCritique no.2, Glasgow, no date.

Economics of the Left Opposition - special issue ofCritique no 13, Glasgow 1981

Workers Group

Roberto Sinigaglia,Mjasnikov e la Rivoluzione Russa Jaca Book

On the Current Situation: Theses of the Left Communists (1918),Critique pamphlet

1977, Glasgow.

‘Two Documents of the Communist Left in Russia’, inWorkers Voice no.14, 1974, a

left communist bi-monthly from Liverpool.

Documents of the 1923 Opposition, New Park 1975

The Platform of the Joint Opposition 1927; New Park 1973

David Ross,Revolution and Counter Revolution in Russia, a mid 1970s pamphlet of

the Revolutionary Workers Group of Chicago.

The Workers Opposition - Alexandra Kollontai,Solidarity pamphlet no.7, no date.

From Workers Dreadnought, London 1922, July 29th, p.6: ‘From Russian Workers,

the Group of Revolutionary Left-wing Communists (Communist Workers Party) of

Russia on the Failure of the United Front’, and an account of the Delegate from

Russia to the 5th Special Congress of the KAPD.

‘Left-Wing Imprisonment in Russia: with an Appeal to the Communist International

and its Sympathising Proletariat from Various International groups of the Left

Communist and an Additional Appeal by the CWG of Russia’ (ibid. vol. XI no 11, May

31st 1924).


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31/31

KAI with Aldred’s comment on a manifesto issued in support of Miasnikov;

‘Anti-Parliamentarianism Abroad’, Sept/Oct 1927, with details on groups in

Germany, Holland and Russia derived from correspondence, papers etc.;

‘Shall Labor Liquidate Socialism or Capitalism’, November 1927, an article on the

Russian Communist Workers’ Groups with further excerpts from Miasnikov’s

manifesto;

‘The Struggle in Russia’, December 1927, a letter from Käte Rumanova with excerpts

from the Appeal of Russian Workers’ Opposition.

* * *