The Workers' Opposition () 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.

Ideology

The Workers' Opposition advocated the role of unionized workers in directing the economy at a time when Soviet government organs were running industry by diktat and trying to exclude trade unions from a participatory role. Specifically, the Workers' Opposition demanded that unionized workers (blue and white collar) should elect representatives to a vertical hierarchy of councils that would oversee the economy. At all levels, elected leaders would be responsible to those who had elected them and could be removed from below. The Workers' Opposition demanded that Russian Communist Party secretaries at all levels cease petty interference in the operations of trade unions and that trade unions should be reinforced with staff and supplies to allow them to carry out their work effectively. Leaders of the Workers' Opposition were not opposed to the employment of "bourgeois specialists" in the economy, but did oppose giving such individuals strong administrative powers, unchecked from below. The "Workers' Opposition" based their ideas on the experience of the first months of Soviet power - a short period when the organization of production was really carried out on the basis of the self-government of the proletarians. 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”.

First appearances

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. The resolution put an end to the aspirations of the Workers' Opposition and the Democratic Centralists.

Another secret resolution specially aimed at the Workers' Opposition was also passed condemning 'the syndicalist and anarchist deviation in our party', which "made further advocacy of the basic tenets of the Workers' Opposition's programme impossible". Yet the Congress shared some of its peripheral proposals, including conducting a purge of the Party and organizing better supply of workers, to improve workers' living conditions, and three of its leaders were elected to the Party Central Committee: Shlyapnikov as a full voting member, Medvedev and Kiselyov as candidate members. Nevertheless, Party leaders subsequently undertook a campaign to subordinate trade unions to the Party and to harass and intimidate those who opposed this campaign.

End of the movement

thumb|right|[[Alexandra Kollontai one of the most prominent spokespersons for the Workers' Opposition.]]

Members of the former Workers' Opposition continued to advocate their views during the period of the New Economic Policy but increasingly became politically marginalized. Nonetheless, on 5 July 1921 Kollontai took the floor before the Third Congress of the Comintern, bitterly attacking the policies of the Soviet government and warning that NEP 'threatened to disillusion workers, to strengthen the peasantry and petty bourgeoisie, and to facilitate the rebirth of capitalism'.

Shlyapnikov and his supporters also conducted discussions with Gavril Myasnikov's Workers Group, but unlike Myasnikov, were determined not to leave the ranks of the Communist Party. At the beginning of 1922, former exponents of the Workers' Opposition, such as Shlyapnikov and Medvedev, and other members of the party of working class origins signed the so-called Letter of the Twenty Two, appealing to the Comintern Executive against suppression of dissent within the Russian party and bourgeois infiltrations into the Soviet state and the party itself. Kollontai co-signed the letter, with her best friend Zoya Shadurskaia, as intellectuals of non-working-class extraction, but in February 1922 she was restrained by Trotsky and Zinoviev from speaking before the Comintern Executive on behalf of the views expressed in the appeal. Shlyapnikov, Kollontai, and Sergei Medvedev narrowly escaped expulsion from the Russian Communist Party at the party's subsequent Eleventh Congress in 1922, while two other signatories of the appeal, Flor Anisimovich Mitin (1882–1937) and Nikolái Vladimirovich Kuznetsov (1898–1937), were expelled. Kollontai later became an important diplomat and Shlyapnikov wrote memoirs.

In the latter half of the 1930s, Shlyapnikov and his closest comrades (Kollontai was not among them) were charged with involvement in a counterrevolutionary group called "Workers' Opposition" and with having linked up with the "counterrevolutionary Trotskyist–Zinovievist terrorist bloc". Despite their proclaiming themselves innocent, both Shlyapnikov and Medvedev, along with many others, were condemned to death and executed in September 1937. In her biography of Shlyapnikov Barbara Allen concludes the last chapter before epilogue, with these words:

After the end of Stalinism, Shlyapnikov was rehabilitated in 1963, Medvedev in 1977. The decision annulling the latter's case for lack of evidence emphasized that "None of those judged on the Workers' Opposition case confessed guilt".

Membership

thumb|[[Aleksei Kiselyov (politician)|Aleksei Kiselyov, chair of the Miners’ Union and a signatory of the theses of the Workers’ Opposition (but not of the Letter of the 22)]]

The Workers' Opposition was led by Alexander Shlyapnikov, who was also chairman of the Russian Metalworkers' Union, and it consisted of trade union leaders and industrial administrators who had formerly been industrial workers. Alexandra Kollontai, the famous socialist feminist, was the group's mentor and advocate. Other prominent members included Sergei Medvedev and Mikhail Vladimirov (leaders of the Metalworkers' Union), and Genrikh Bruno (artilleries industry leaders), Mikhail Chelyshev (a member of the Party Control Commission), (chairman of the Textileworkers' Union), Kirill Orlov (member of the Council of Military Industry and a participant in the 1905 mutiny on the Russian battleship Potemkin), and Aleksei Kiselyov (chairman of the Miners' Union). Yuri Lutovinov, a leader of the Metalworkers' Union and of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions, sometimes spoke for the group, but sometimes held his own opinion.

References

Bibliography

  • Paperback: Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016.
  • Allen, Barbara C., A Proletarian From a Novel': Politics, Identity, and Emotion in the Relationship between Alexander Shliapnikov and Alexandra Kollontai, 1911-1935 . "The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review", 35 (2008), No. 2, 21–54
  • Allen, Barbara C., Early dissent within the party: Alexander Shliapnikov and the letter of the twenty-two . "The NEP Era: Soviet Russia 1921-1928", 1 (2007), 21–54
  • Daniels, Robert. The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia. Cambridge, Mass., 1960; revised edition, Boulder, Col., 1988.
  • Holmes, Larry E. For the Revolution Redeemed: The Workers Opposition in the Bolshevik Party, 1919-1921. The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, no. 802 (1990).
  • Kollontai, Alexandra. Rabochaya oppozitsiya. Moscow, 1921. Translated into English by Workers' Dreadnought in London (22 April - 19 August 1921) and the IWW in the United States (The Workers' Opposition in Russia, 1921).
  • Sorenson, Jay. The Life and Death of Soviet Trade Unionism: 1917-1928. New York, 1969.
  • The Workers' Opposition in the Russian Communist Party: Documents, 1919-30. Edited and translated by Barbara C. Allen. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2021. Paperback: Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022.
  • Alexandra Kollontai, The Workers' Opposition
  • Theses of the Workers' Opposition