A people's tragedy

Lenin, as always in such situations, was in a rage. He would stop at nothing to ensure the defeat of the Workers’ Opposition. Kollontai was targeted for personal abuse. Lenin would not speak to her and threatened those who did. During the debates he used the fact that Shliapnikov and Kollontai were known to have been lovers to ridicule their arguments for proletarian solidarity. ‘Well, thank God,’ he said to general laughter, ‘we know that Comrade Kollontai and Comrade Shliapnikov are a “class united”.’ To sly sarcasm Lenin added slander, condemning the Workers’ Opposition as a ‘syndicalist deviation’ and accusing it of sharing the same ideals as the Kronstadt mutiny and the workers’ strikes. This was of course false: whereas both groups of protesters were demanding the overthrow of the Bolshevik dictatorship, the Workers’ Opposition merely wanted to reform it. But such distinctions were harder to make than they were to blur. In the atmosphere of hysterical panic — which Lenin helped to create at the Congress with his constant warnings that Soviet power could be overthrown at any moment — the Bolshevik delegates were much too frightened to question Lenin’s charge. They accepted his demagogic line that strict party unity was called for at this moment and that to tolerate such opposition factions could only benefit the enemy. No doubt, if it had come to a vote, Lenin’s position on the trade union question would have received a substantial majority in any case. The ‘Platform of Ten’, as it was known, offered a welcome compromise between Trotsky’s supercentralism and the ‘syndicalism’ of the Workers’ Opposition, effectively restoring the position of the Ninth Party Congress whereby the state would continue to run industry through the system of One-Man Management and consult the unions on managerial appointments. But Lenin’s tactics made victory sure. His two resolutions condemning the Workers’ Opposition received massive majorities, with no more than thirty of the 694 Congress delegates voting against them.54

Lenin now consolidated his victory with one of the most fateful decisions in the history of the Communist Party — the ban on factions. This secret resolution, passed by the Congress on 16 March, outlawed the formation of all party groupings independent of the Central Committee. By a two-thirds vote of the Central Committee and the Control Commission such factions could be excluded from the party. The ban had been proposed by Lenin in a moment of vindictive anger against the Workers’ Opposition. It was passed by a Congress which had clearly become bored and impatient with the factional squabbles of the past few months, and which in the present crisis was only too eager to rally round its leader against his opponents in the party. Neither Lenin nor the rank and file fully realized the ban’s potential significance. Henceforth, the Central Committee was to rule the party on the same dictatorial lines as the party ruled the country; no one could challenge its decisions without exposing themselves to the charge of factionalism. Stalin’s rise to power was a product of the ban. He used the same tactics against Trotsky and Bukharin as Lenin had used against the Workers’ Opposition. Indeed it was mainly to enforce the ban and carry out the purge of the Workers’ Opposition that Lenin created the office of a General Secretary of the Party, with Stalin as the first ‘Gensek’, in April 1922. By the Twelfth Party Congress of 1923 that purge was accomplished — as was Stalin’s ascendancy in the Central Committee. Shliapnikov and Kollontai, though spared the ignominy of expulsion from the party, were both sent into diplomatic exile — the former to Paris, the latter to Stockholm. Supporters of the Workers’ Opposition were removed from their party and trade union posts. Most of them were harassed, some imprisoned, nearly all of them were later shot in Stalin’s terror. Shliapnikov was murdered in 1937.