Workers' Opposition

The Workers' Opposition (Russian: Рабочая оппозиция, romanized: Rabochaya oppozitsiya) was a faction of the Russian Communist Party that emerged in 1920 as a response to the perceived over-bureaucratisation that was occurring in Soviet Russia. They advocated for the transfer of national economic management to trade unions. The group was led by Alexander Shlyapnikov, Sergei Medvedev, Alexandra Kollontai and Yuri Lutovinov. It officially existed until March 1921 when it was forced to dissolve by the 10th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), and semi-clandestinely until the subsequent 11th Congress in 1922, where its main exponents teetered dangerously on the verge of being purged for fractionist activity. In some aspects, it was close with the German council communist movement, although there is no information about direct contacts between these groups.

The emergence of the Workers' Opposition's “ideological sources” was linked with a statement by Alexander Shlyapnikov, which appeared on November 4, 1917: in his statement, Shlyapnikov proposed expanding the Council of People's Commissars by including representatives “from all Soviet parties”. Their first public appearance as an organized group was at the 9th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), in September 1920, when the faction not only declared its existence, but also summed up the “work to be done”.

One of the first speeches of representatives of the "workers' opposition" - the name was coined by Lenin - took place in February 1920, during the 2nd Tula Conference of the RCP (B.), after which the group managed to get a majority of seats in the provincial committee of the party, and its leader - I. V. Kopylov - became the chairman of the new composition of the provincial committee. In response to this, the former members of the provincial committee formed the opposition, directing their activities to prove the inability the "workers' opposition" to manage the affairs of the province; in addition, they began to plan the failure of their political opponents at the next provincial party conference. This confrontation led to an intensification of the struggle within the organization itself: the party's Novosilsky District committee opposed the election of Kopylov and called for an extraordinary conference. The demand of the old guard was supported in Moscow by members of the party's central committee, who recalled Kopylov at their disposal. The conflict did not end there, because in response, the Zarechensky district committee issued a resolution requesting "to leave Kopylov to work in Tula." The Central Committee nevertheless decided to convene an extraordinary party conference in the province: a resolution evaluating the work as unsatisfactory was adopted by a majority of 185 votes against 49. In response, representatives of the “workers' opposition” Severny and Nikitin left the district committee because of their disagreement with the party line. Having been defeated in Tula, Kopylov's supporters nevertheless retained their positions in the Zarechensky district organization and the power struggle continued. At that time, support for the workers' opposition in the lower ranks of the party was quite strong: in particular, the number of Tula party organizations was halved between May and November 1920, mainly due to the exit of the local workers.

From the end of 1919 to the beginning of 1920, the workers' opposition matured along the periphery of Moscow Oblast and, by March 1920, took shape in the capital with many trade union leaders joining the group. In the same month, at a meeting of the communist faction of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions, Shlyapnikov proposed a formula for the separation of powers in the USSR: his simple scheme consisted in the separation of functions of trade unions, Soviets, and the Bolshevik party. According to the leader of the opposition, the party could be the responsible political state leader of the revolutionary struggle and construction, the Soviets - the form of political power, and the trade unions - the only responsible organizations of the national economy and, at the same time, the school of industrial management for workers.

Shlyapnikov's theses caused great concern within the Central Committee of the RCP (b), which saw in them the manifestation of tendencies toward syndicalism in the Soviet trade unions - that is, an attempt on the leading role of the party in the economic sphere. On March 8 and 10, 1920, at meetings of the VTsSPS and MGPSS factions, representatives of the Central Committee Nikolai Bukharin and Nikolay Krestinsky sharply criticized Shlyapnikov's ideas, accusing him of “syndicalism, guild narrowness, distrust of the Soviets and the party.” In response to such accusations, Lozovsky, who attended the meetings, noted that syndicalists denied the state itself, and Shlyapnikov had a different point of view: the opposition leader did not deny the state and did not encroach on state property; he talked only about the responsibility of trade unions for the economy and the main role of unions in Soviet industry.

In September 1920, at the 9th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), there was a new flash of activity of supporters of the workers' opposition, which was associated with a discussion about the upper and lower classes of the party. Yuri Lutovinov formulated a number of provisions that later became part of the group's opposition program: in his speech he “fervently insisted on the immediate implementation of the broadest possible labor democracy, on the complete abolition of appointment, and on the strictest cleansing of the party.” The Bolshevik conference did not support this proposal: moreover, at the meeting it was decided to create a control commission, whose task was to prevent the factional struggle in the party. Despite such measures, the speeches of the supporters of the workers' opposition became more frequent throughout the country, and its contradictions with the course of the Central Committee intensified both in the regions and in the center. In particular, in November 1920, the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP (B.) was forced to pay special attention to the conflict in the Tula Provincial Committee of the RCP (B.), which flared up with renewed vigor: to clarify the circumstances, the central committee sent a special commission to the province. At the same time, in Moscow itself, the internal party struggle took on a fierce character. In the fall of 1920, playing on the problem of the upper and lower classes, the workers' opposition were able to attract the sympathy of many Bolsheviks to their program and form tangible support for their ideas among the party workers. As a result, at the end of November, at the gubernatorial conference, the opposition bloc was able to collect almost half of the delegates' votes: 124 against 154 people. As indicated in the Central Committee's report, "the opposition itself was extremely hostile to the common party line": subsequently, Lenin noted that it came to the point that "the conference ended in two rooms".

The "trade-union debate" marked the rise of the "workers' opposition." Relying on the provisions contained in the party program adopted at the 8th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1919 - primarily on the part that “trade unions should come to the total concentration of control over the entire national economy" - Shlyapnikov criticized the central committee with his like-minded comrades for “militaristic methods” of working with trade unions, specifically because during the Russian Civil War, unions were massively deprived of independence and absorbed by the government of the RSFSR.

According to Aleksei Semyonovich Kiselyov, serious disagreements with the party leadership among the trade union leaders emerged at the beginning of 1920: he saw them as the main reason for the transition to a policy of militarization of labor. At that time, the majority of trade unions believed that the prospect of the end of active hostilities required, if not a change in policy guidelines, then at least a shift in emphasis in the organization of labor - a transition to economic incentives. In particular, they advocated the improvement of the food situation of the proletariat and the development of "amateur activity" of workers within the framework of trade union organizations. Moreover, the party leadership proceeded from the assumption that in the prevailing conditions at the time of the end of the long war, reliance on conventional methods of industrial management would not be able to prevent the final collapse of the Soviet economy: they believed that emergency measures, including military ones, were necessary.