John Medhurst - No Less Than Mystic - A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left

The crushing of the Workers’ Opposition led to a fatal decision, one that ended whatever internal democracy still existed within the party. On the final day of the Congress, as the scars of the battles with the Opposition and the Kronstadt sailors were still live and raw, Lenin introduced two new resolutions–one on “Party Unity” and one on “Anarchist and Syndicalist Deviations in the Party”. The first resolution declared that as part of a struggle against factionalism, “every organisation of the party must take strict action to prevent factional actions”. It ordered “immediate dissolution of all groups without exception formed on the basis of one platform or another (such as the Workers’ Opposition Group, the Democratic Centralists group, etc.)”. Failure to comply or enforce this resolution would result in instant expulsion from the party.

The second resolution hammered the final nail in the coffin of the Workers’ Opposition by targeting it specifically as an “anarchist and syndicalist deviation” and declaring that “the propaganda of its ideas” was “incompatible with membership of the Russian Communist Party”. Out of over 600 delegates at the Congress, only 25 voted against the first resolution and 30 against the second. 27

The ban on factions landed on the party like a fist. Trotsky told the congress that the ban and the proscriptions were temporary, but they were never to be repealed. Having passed his resolutions and gifted the bureaucracy the power to destroy any organised opposition, Lenin sought to ameliorate the policy with a few concessions. He acknowledged the validity of the Workers’ Opposition’s case against “bureaucratic perversions” and suggested that if an issue such as the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk arose in the future, “it is possible that it will then be necessary to elect by platform”. He may even have meant this. But in the context of one-party rule enforced by the Secretariat, the Orgburo and the Cheka, Lenin’s concessions vanished in the wind.

Some sensed the shadow that now hung over them. Karl Radek told the congress he had “a feeling that a rule is being established here which has left us still uncertain as to whom it will be applied […] Although I am voting for this resolution I feel that it may even be turned against us.” He finished by admitting:

Regardless of who this sword may be turned against–at such a moment it is necessary to adopt this resolution and say: Let the Central Committee at the moment of danger take the sternest measures against the best comrades, if it finds this necessary. A definite line by the Central Committee is essential. The best Central Committee may make a mistake, but this is less dangerous than the wavering we see now. 28

Radek and the party had now conceded the principle that, no matter the actual facts of the case, the Central Committee was always right.

In 1936-38 Radek, along with Rykov, Tomsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and Shliapnikov–and thousands of other Old Bolsheviks–would all be purged from the party, arrested and executed. One of the reasons used to justify their infamous Moscow Trials was the “factionalism” (mixed with sabotage, espionage and other alleged crimes) of the accused, and how any such activity was, objectively, counter-revolutionary. The other charges were false, supported by manufactured evidence and confessions extracted by torture, but the claim that any opposition to Stalin, and to a Central Committee dominated by Stalin, was inherently counter-revolutionary had a twisted logic derived from the ban on factions. Those who had supported the ban, like Radek and Bukharin, stood helpless before these accusations. Their dilemma was captured perfectly in Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940), a novel which expresses more about the grim logic of Leninism than the entire army of Lenin apologists then and since.

Stalin began the purge with the arrest and execution of Zinoviev and Kamenev and others classed as a “Trotskyite-Kamenevite-Zinovievite-Leftist-Counter-Revolutionary Bloc”, and expanded it to take in tens of thousands of people accused of political crimes. NKVD Order 00447 authorised mass arrests of all whom the NKVD considered anti-Soviet elements, such as most of the intelligentsia, “ex-Kulaks” and non-Russian nationalists. These were divided into those to be immediately shot and those sent to the Gulag. The order also authorised execution of those already held in work camps on the grounds of “continuing counter-revolutionary activity”. Unlike previous purges, this one annihilated the party itself. Of 1,966 delegates to the Seventeenth Communist Party Congress in 1934, 1,108 were arrested and most of these were executed. Of 139 members of the Central Committee of 1934, only 29 were still alive by 1939, the rest having been shot or driven to suicide. By its end point the Great Terror saw between 600,000 and 1.2 million people executed. 29

Trotsky himself offered the ultimate capitulation at the Thirteenth Party Congress in 1924, the first after Lenin’s death, which Stalin’s Secretariat organised so well that not a single Oppositionist attended as a delegate. Faced with a storm of condemnation of his The Lessons of October (1924), which had made criticisms of the “Triumvirate” of Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev, Trotsky had to bend the knee. “The party in the last analysis is always right, because the party is the sole historical instrument given to the proletariat for the solution of its basic problems”, he told the Congress. “I know that one cannot be right against the party. It is only possible to be right with the party and through the party, for history has not created other ways for the realisation of what is right”. 30

The National Bolsheviks had won. Of all the “oppositions” within the Bolshevik Party, only Shliapnikov and Kollontai could honestly claim that they had opposed the termination of internal party democracy and the subsequent fast-track to Stalinism. And even they were as complicit as all other Bolshevik leaders in establishing the one-party state and the denial of civil and democratic rights to non-party oppositionists in 1917-18. With hardly any exceptions, they all forged the weapons which killed them.

In comparison to the Workers’ Opposition, the Left Opposition of 1923-24 and the “United Opposition” of 1927, though later lauded as the authentic Bolshevik opposition to Stalinist bureaucracy, were internal splinter groups easily suppressed. By the time Trotsky stirred to overt opposition the battle was already over, and Trotsky himself had played a leading role in disarming all who might have defeated Stalin–the trade unions, the Workers’ Opposition and, most especially, the Kronstadt sailors. The Kronstadt rebellion of 1921 did not spring from nowhere, nor was it an anarchist-monarchist conspiracy (as some on the Marxist left, even today, maintain). It was a genuine, mass-based and popular working-class revolt against an oppressive state in favour of a system of radical socialist democracy.

The Fortress and the city of Kronstadt were situated on Kotlin Island, 20 miles west of Petrograd in the Gulf of Finland. A series of sea forts ran across the gulf to further protect Petrograd. In winter the sea between the mainland and Kotlin Island froze. Onto this unique and enclosed location–close to revolutionary Petrograd yet isolated enough to create a great sense of camaraderie and professional pride–were thrown some of the most independent-minded and instinctively rebellious workers and peasants in the Russian Empire.

Once inducted into the massive Baltic Fleet they were given a level of technical training and professional responsibility denied most production-line factory workers. The sailors of the Fleet were temperamentally anarchist and politically syndicalist, instinctively resistant to the hierarchy and discipline imposed by their aristocratic officers. Between the formation of the SR Party in 1901 and the 1905 Revolution, they soaked up the political propaganda of the SRs that reached them across the ice from Petrograd, and formed mini-Soviets of their own to discuss politics and organise around their own grievances.