an organisation of the ruling, dominant, governing class, which has now set up a dictatorship and is exercising coercion through the state. But it is not a state organisation; nor is it one designed for coercion, but for education. It is an organisation designed to draw in and to train; it is, in fact, a schooclass="underline" a school of administration, a school of economic management, a school of communication.20
This reserved for the unions a particular role and gave them some latitude to implement it, but it was a far cry from the economic democracy for which the Workers’ Opposition was arguing.
The Workers’ Opposition never stood a chance. The Control Commission which organised party congresses was overseen by the Orgburo, run by Stalin. His apparatchiks instructed local party officials to send only Lenin-loyalists to the Congress, despite the sympathy for the Opposition amongst the rank and file. At a conference of the large Moscow branch of the party held in November 1920, 124 delegates out of 278 openly declared support for the Opposition (more would have done so if not for immense pressure from the leadership), which probably reflected the level of support across the whole party. Yet at the Tenth Party Congress there were only about 50 pro-Opposition delegates out of a total of 694.21
The Congress was conducted in “an atmosphere of near-hysteria”22 in which Opposition speakers were shouted down. Trotsky, sensing he had lost on the main proposals, turned his fire on the Opposition’s calls for more internal democracy and a loosening of party control. It was here that he slated the Opposition for making a “fetish of democratic principle” and said it had “placed the workers’ right to elect representatives above the party”, something that was deplorable given the workers’ “transitory mood”.
The Workers’ Opposition platform did not explicitly criticise one-party rule, but that criticism was implicit in its strictures on unaccountable, undemocratic power. As Robert Daniels’s classic work on “Communist Opposition” within the Bolshevik/Communist Party put it, “Their programme of unfettered democracy and control of the economy by an ‘association of producers’ would mean an attempt at immediate introduction of the forms of social organisation which in 1917 the revolutionaries had generally agreed upon as the ultimate institutions of the communist society”.23 But this was not 1917. Mass strikes, the heckling of Bolshevik leaders at trade union meetings, and the uprising at Kronstadt–all this, Lenin knew, was a submerged iceberg of discontent within the party.
Lenin and many other speakers therefore launched a savage attack on the Opposition, especially Shliapnikov and Kollontai. It was only on the first morning of the Congress that Lenin obtained a copy of Kollontai’s pamphlet, and he read it as he came in and sat down. “I hurriedly distribute my pamphlet”, Kollontai wrote later in her diary:
The atmosphere is tense and strained. The Kronstadt uprising was only a few days before […] Now my pamphlet is in Lenin’s hands. He leafs through it irritably, shaking his head in disapproval. Then the storm burst. For three quarters of an hour Lenin fulminated against the Workers’ Opposition and my pamphlet.24
Lenin did not baulk at crude sexist insults which were lapped up by a congress composed mainly of men chosen by Stalin’s Secretariat. Slyly referencing what many delegates would have known from internal party gossip (that the aristocratic Kollontai and the working-class Shliapnikov had once had a personal relationship), Lenin from the rostrum joked, “Well, thank God, Kollontai and Shliapnikov are a ‘class united’”. The delegates laughed and Kollontai was suitably humiliated.
Lenin then turned to the Workers’ Opposition platform itself. He condemned its call for workers’ self-management as petty bourgeois, syndicalist and deriving from elements in the party who had not “fully adopted the Communist world-view”. With the Kronstadt sailors declaring an independent Soviet just across the Gulf of Finland, he was in no mood to tolerate internal dissent. “I contend there is a connection between the ideas and slogans of the petty bourgeois counter-revolution and the slogans of this opposition, which although it doubtless has its honest and misguided supporters, is nevertheless inspired by disrupters who choose to add to the chaos of the Kronstadt rebellion”, he told the congress. “People writing pamphlets like these should be exposed and eliminated”.
Kollontai’s biographer Cathy Porter conveys the hysteria of a Congress in which the debate was “ostensibly about the unions but more fundamentally about the function and unity of the party”.25 After vicious personal attacks on her from Lenin and Bukharin (whose over-emotional nature often betrayed him), Kollontai responded calmly that the anger and vituperation of her colleagues stood in stark contrast to the limited programme for democratic reform the Workers’ Opposition had actually proposed. “The workers know there’s something wrong”, she told the congress, “but instead of running to Vladimir Ilyich’s office for a chat, as so many of our more timid comrades did, we proposed a series of practical measures for cleansing our ranks and reviving our mutual relations with the people”.26 But for Lenin and Trotsky the working class has ceased to be a proper proletariat, and therefore any programme to devolve decision-making to them was politically dangerous. The Theses on the Trade Union Question was overwhelmingly rejected.
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