Goldman initially refused to believe this. After travelling around Soviet Russia and encountering crushed Soviets and persecuted Mensheviks and anarchists, she returned to Petrograd in late 1920 to find disillusion had spread to her friends in the Communist Party itself. “Whenever they called on me they repeated their determination to get out of the party”, she recorded. “They were suffocating in an atmosphere of intrigue, blind hatred and persecution”. When she visited the headquarters of Sovnarcom, she recalled her “surprise on finding there were two separate restaurants in Smolny, one where wholesome and sufficient food was served to important members of the Petrograd Soviet and the Third International, while the other was for the ordinary employees of the party”.13 This was no freak occurrence. In 1919, when workers at the nationalised print shop of Ostrogozhsk in Voronezh complained about loss of back pay and lay-offs at the plant without explanation or reason, the Chair of the town’s Revolutionary Committee responded, “Shoot every tenth man, and the rest will be silent”.14
This was the social reality that created the Workers’ Opposition. The chasm between ordinary workers on one side and Sovnarcom officials on the other grew wider and wider. Jonathan Aves records that “in the first six months of 1920 strikes had occurred in 77% of middle-sized and large works”, and finds that these strikes were a direct protest against “intensification of War Communist labour policies, the militarisation of labour, the implementation of one-man management, as well as food supply difficulties”.15 In her study of militant Russian printers, Koenker concluded that the division between “productivists” and “workerists” ran right through the working class, “shattering the class-based sense of purpose that had contributed to the Communists’ victory in October 1917”.16
All these undercurrents exploded at the Tenth Party Congress, 8th-16th March 1921. The touchpaper was lit by the publication on 25th January of the Workers’ Opposition “Theses on the Trade Union Question”, followed in March, on the very eve of the Congress, by the “Platform of the Workers’ Opposition”. The platform was written by Alexandra Kollontai, the only member of Sovnarcom to take an explicit stand with the Opposition. Even before the publication of its programme, Lenin called the Workers’ Opposition “the greatest danger to our continued existence”. On 21st January he wrote in Pravda:
We must combat the ideological confusion of those unsound elements of the opposition who go the lengths of repudiating all militarisation of the economy, of repudiating not only the method of appointing, which has been the prevailing method up to now, but all appointments. In the last analysis this means repudiating the leading role of the party in relation to the non-party masses.
What most worried Lenin was that the Opposition was not a faction of left intellectuals based around a low-circulation newspaper. It was led by senior Bolshevik trade unionists and it had strong working-class support in the Metal Workers Union, the Printers Union, the miners of the Kuban and Donetz Basin regions, and swathes of the engineering and railway industries. In Samara the Workers’ Opposition actually controlled the local party. In Moscow most members supported it, although they were kept out of official positions. The challenge came from those supposed to be the bedrock of the regime.
The Theses on the Trade Union Question was submitted to the Tenth Party Congress as the basis for general debate, although it ranged beyond just the issue of the role of the unions. Kollontai, whose libertarian political philosophy had deeply influenced the work of the Zhendotel, was already regarded with suspicion by hardline Leninists. Nonetheless her status within the party was high. She had forged a new path in a vital area of social revolution, had written groundbreaking works of Marxist feminist theory, and was married to ex-Commissar for the Navy and legendary Red Army commander Pavel Dybenko.17 An organised grouping led by her and Shliapnikov was a serious threat.
Kollontai’s pamphlet disposed of the idea that the only matter at issue was the role of the trade unions: “The break goes deeper”. Having explained that it intended to focus on “cardinal political and economic questions”, it criticised the role and privileges of the “specialists” within industry, and the departure from collective management for one-man management. In a section titled “Who has gained from the revolution?”, Kollontai answered that the peasants gained directly from land redistribution and the bourgeoisie managed to adjust itself to the new government by claiming specialist knowledge that needed to be protected, but the workers had not seen any benefit. She dismissed the view of Lenin and Bukharin that the trade unions should be “schools of communism” and a “transmission belt” for instructions from the state to the workers, even though this was a step back from Trotsky’s proposals for the militarisation of labour.
Kollontai explained that the Workers’ Opposition wished to form a body made from the workers themselves to administer what she called “the peoples’ economy”. This should be overseen by trade unions working in conjunction with elected Factory Committees. In itself this was not a departure from the initial programme for industry advanced by Sovnarcom immediately after October 1917. It was not an anarcho-syndicalist programme or one that advocated the independence of autonomous workers’ committees at plant level, even if these were linked together in a federated structure to ensure coordinated national production. But in the context of 1921 it was a loud call for more socialist democracy.
Even more so was the demand that the “elective principle”–the principle scorned by Trotsky in the Red Army and Tsektran but supported by Lunacharsky in education–be re-established “at every level” and that it replace the system of appointment by which the Orgburo had established its grip on the party. Kollontai finished with a call for political initiative and activity to once again reside with he working class:
Finally, the Workers’ Opposition has raised its voice against bureaucracy. It has dared to say that bureaucracy binds the wings of self-activity and creativeness of the working class; that it deadens thought, hinders initiative and experimenting in the sphere of finding new approaches to production–in a word that it hinders the development of new forms of production and life.18
Lenin, who in a crisis could be more tactically adroit than Trotsky, had already sensed that the proposals advanced by Trotsky, Dzerzhinsky and Bukharin to militarise labour and impose new leaders on trade unions were providing the Workers’ Opposition with ammunition to attack the government. Trotsky argued that his proposals flowed from the nature of the Soviet state and had been endorsed by Lenin and the Politburo. He described any objections as a “manifestation of Kautskyian-Menshevik-SR prejudices”.19 But Lenin now backed off. He looked for a middle course between Trotsky and the Workers’ Opposition, one which would restrain the former and undermine the latter. He therefore proposed the “Platform of the Ten” (the ten being Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Tomsky, Stalin, Kalinin, Lozovsky, Radzutak, Petrovsky and Artem). Whilst the Platform re-iterated the need for one-man management and privileges for specialists, it stressed that the unions still needed to fulfill their function of protecting and representing workers.
In a speech on 30th December, 1920, published as “The Trade Unions, the Present Situation and Trotsky’s Mistakes”, Lenin said that the trade unions were