8

The Workers’ Opposition

IN SEPTEMBER 1920 Kollontai had made her first public criticism of the party leadership since her fight over the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. She was responding to the death of John Reed, the American socialist who had written a classic, though naive, history of the October Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World, and had become a leader of the nascent Communist Party of the United States. By 1920 Reed was beginning to criticize the bureaucratization of the Soviet government. His erstwhile comrades among the Russians paid little attention to the complaints of a man whom they probably dismissed as an amateur revolutionary and professional romantic. In the late summer of 1920 Zinoviev and Radek did take him to Baku to a conference of Asian Communists, but this gesture only exposed Reed’s weakened health to the difficulties of travel. He returned to Moscow ill with typhus and in September he died.

Although Louise Bryant wanted her husband’s body returned to the United States for burial, the Bolshevik leaders prevailed upon her to allow a Moscow funeral. Bukharin, Radek, and Kollontai attended as representatives of the party; foreign Communists who had been Reed’s friends were there, as were Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, the exiled American anarchists. When it was Kollontai’s turn to eulogize Reed, she surprised Goldman by converting her address into a veiled attack on what she regarded as dangerous tendencies within the party: “We call ourselves Communists,” she said, “but are we really that? Do we not rather draw the life essence from those who come to us, and when they are no longer of use, we let them fall by the wayside, neglected and forgotten? Our Communism and our comradeship are dead letters if we do not give out of ourselves to those who need us. Let us beware of such Communism. It slays the best in our ranks. Jack Reed was among the best.”¹

Kollontai did not usually criticize her own party in front of foreigners; indeed, she had irritated Goldman earlier by refusing to admit that the Soviet system had any important shortcomings.² To Reed, however, she felt an apology was owed, for ignoring him when he had asked embarrassing questions about the Russian party’s high-handed treatment of foreign Communists and its growing bureaucracy. Reed had begun to wonder aloud whether the revolutionary government was degenerating into rule by a small elite; Kollontai was beginning to wonder, too.

Shortly after the funeral, the Ninth Conference of the party met in Moscow to discuss this very issue. The civil war was now all but won, though at enormous cost to the country. The economy lay devastated, the transportation and communications systems were disrupted, thousands were dead or dying from battle and the famine and disease that followed it. The industrial workers had been drawn away from the factories to government and party jobs, had fled back to the villages where food was still to be found, or were living on in misery in the cities. The country faced a long winter without adequate food, shelter, or heat.

Somehow the Bolsheviks were going to have to effect a transition from war to peace and begin the enormous tasks of reconstruction, while retaining the support of the population. This overwhelming challenge worried the party, as did the growing chorus of popular demands for improvements. Some of the Bolsheviks’ most ardent supporters among the proletariat had begun to declare openly that the time had come for a real workers’ democracy, with decent food, decent housing, and full representation in decision making. Mensheviks, anarchists, and various other political groups long since driven from positions of influence lent their voices to the chorus, thereby raising Bolshevik fears that the allegiance of the working class could be won away from them.

All of the calls for reform found advocates within the party itself. The regime was becoming highly centralized and bureaucratic, so much so that local officials now acted primarily as executors of decisions made in Moscow. Almost all the members of other parties had been ousted from the government. Bolsheviks who held government or trade union jobs were reminded repeatedly that they were Communists first, and that their loyalty lay with the party. Gradually, behind the myriad of governmental structures, power came to rest in the party, and within it, the leadership.

How had revolutionaries who hated autocratic bureaucracy come to build a comparable structure of their own? The answer lies in the principles and structure of their party, in the crisis they faced, and in their Russian heritage. The Bolsheviks had always professed a commitment to strong leadership and unity, as well as to the free exchange of opinion among party members, but in the days before 1917 they engaged in open discussion far more often than they practiced democratic centralism. Bolshevik and Menshevik leaders argued among themselves constantly over doctrine and strategy, and the lines between the factions were fluid enough to allow people who disagreed to switch sides, as Kollontai did in 1915, or to remain aloof from both groups, as Trotsky did throughout most of the prerevolutionary period. Among the party rank and file at work in the underground in Russia, factional loyalties were often less important than eluding the police, and that required Bolsheviks and Mensheviks to work together. Nor were local Social Democrats well informed about the ideological disputes of their leaders or overly concerned with Marxist exegesis. Their goals were the practical ones of avoiding arrest, holding their party organization together, and teaching the workers something about socialism. Rigid centralization and strict demarcation of factions not only contradicted the communal traditions of the revolutionary underground, they were almost impossible, given conditions in Russia. Thus before 1917 the Bolsheviks honored their democratic beliefs more consistently than their doctrines favoring unity. Only after they had a firm hold on the reins of power and had resolved as a group to retain it in the face of a challenge from their enemies did party leaders and the rank and file put the principles of democratic centralism into practice.

The Bolsheviks were motivated by a will to survive, but that alone does not explain the tenacity with which they clung to power. They believed that they were midwifing the birth of the proletarian revolution, because they had amended Marxism to make that revolution a realistic possibility. Despite Marx’s determinism and their own professions of orthodoxy, the Bolsheviks accepted Lenin’s and Trotsky’s pronouncements that historical development could be advanced by a unified party. Unlike the Mensheviks in 1917, the Bolsheviks were not willing to wait; they wanted to shove Russia ahead to socialism by revising classical Marxism and forcing the revolution. This belief in their own ability to accelerate “normal” development through determined intervention was a key to their success, but it required honoring in practice the principles of unity and centralization. The same voluntarism led naturally to the conviction that the party must suppress alien social forces, fight the capitalists, and survive for the sake of world socialism. The Bolsheviks’ promethean resolve intensified the emphasis on unified command which, although always part of their political culture, had been weakened before the revolution by the different imperatives of émigré and underground life.

With these ideological predilections, the Bolsheviks, inexperienced in the art of government, began to improvise strategies for the winning of Russia’s civil war. They built on the bureaucratic tangle they had inherited from the tsar and the Provisional Government because they had had no time to restructure it. Nor did they have any plan for administering the dictatorship of the proletariat. Marx offered little help beyond suggesting the confiscation of private property by a temporary government of workers. Lenin, on the eve of the October Revolution, had written in his famous pamphlet The State and Revolution that any cook could be an administrator during the dictatorship of the proletariat. But cooks could not organize a new army or supply troops or keep industry going, so the Bolsheviks were obliged to bring back trained people, whom they denigrated as bourgeois but whose skills they desperately needed. As a stop-gap measure, they put party members at the top of inherited governmental structures, but kept the structures and many of the same personnel. These noncommunists influenced the formulation of policy, and their presence in the government provided still another impetus toward the consolidation of authority in the party Politburo. Thus the tendency toward centralization born of ideology and emergency was intensified by the dead weight of Russia’s past.

The Bolsheviks continued to claim they were constructing a “proletarian democracy,” but this declaration paled to hypocrisy in the light of their actions. When other political groups such as the Mensheviks and the SRs pointed out the Bolsheviks’ failures, the party drove them out of the soviets, then imprisoned them, rather than listen. The leaders resolutely refused to allow anyone from the outside to question them. The greater their insecurity—and they were fighting for survival—the more they used force to crush opposition. Here again the Bolsheviks’ ideology predisposed them to divide the world into enemies and friends, thus enabling them to explain criticism as the fabrication of hostile minds.

By the fall of 1920, some Bolsheviks had begun to worry about the increasing unwillingness of their comrades to listen to suggestions for reform, even from within their own ranks. Two groups had been demanding change for more than a year. The Democratic Centralists, led by former Left Oppositionists N. Osinskii, T. V. Sapronov, and V. M. Smirnov, called for reform in the party and government bureaucracy. Their demands struck a responsive chord, and the Bolshevik leadership established a commission to propose organizational changes; Sapronov was appointed a member. E. N. Ignatov was chosen to represent still another group of critics, the Workers’ Opposition.³

Although also concerned over the erosion of party democracy, the Workers’ Oppositionists differed from the Democratic Centralists in that their principal grievances arose out of a debate over trade union autonomy. The exact role of the trade unions in the Soviet system had never been clear. In the prerevolutionary period Mensheviks and Bolsheviks endorsed the unions as a means of propagandizing the working class, although they tended to feud over the extent of independence permissible for the unions.⁴ After the February Revolution the Bolsheviks talked about granting power to the factory committees which the workers had organized. They promised worker control of industry, to be exercised through those organizations, without really agreeing among themselves on the meaning of the phrase “worker control.”

When the Bolsheviks took power, the question of the trade unions’ role in fomenting revolution became irrelevant, and the issue shifted to their part in building a new society. The Bolsheviks quickly merged the fragmented, chaotic factory committees into the more structured, more controllable unions, but they never formally disavowed the commitment to worker control nor did they systematically define the limits of trade union power. Instead the Bolshevik-dominated All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions worked to mobilize, organize, and discipline labor, in the process creating friction between itself and the leaders of the individual unions. The council also vied for influence with the governmental departments that supervised the economy, the Commissariat of Labor and the Supreme Council of the National Economy.⁵

In the new party program approved by the Eighth Party Congress in 1919, the Bolsheviks attempted to define the relationship of the various institutions more clearly, but produced instead a document that clarified nothing and pleased no one. The final draft stated that “the trade unions should come to concentrate under their control the administration of the entire national economy,”⁶ which sounded like a ringing endorsement of worker control. But the next sentence took away what the first had given: “Guaranteeing in that way an indissoluble tie between the central government administration, the national economy, and the broad masses of the toilers, the trade unions should involve the latter on a broad scale in the direct work of running the economy.”⁷ Here the unions were a link that brought people into contact with governmental departments. But what role were they to have in the formulation of these departments’ policies? The program did not say, and other clauses in the document reaffirmed the need for “bourgeois specialists” in industry. Thus the problems had not been resolved. Rather than sort out the welter of ideological confusion and vested interests, the party increased its control over Bolshevik unionists, centralized union leadership, and purged non-Bolsheviks.⁸

Supporters of the Workers’ Opposition came together to protest against the unions’ diminishing autonomy and against the granting of a substantial decision-making role in industry to nonproletarians. In 1919 Shliapnikov, who had held a number of positions in the war effort since 1917 but who continued his leadership of the Metalworkers’ Union, circulated a set of theses which called for trade unions to assume control over industry.⁹ In September 1920 the Workers’ Oppositionists joined the Democratic Centralists at the Ninth Party Conference to call for reform of the party bureaucracy. The Workers’ Opposition wanted a greater number of workers in decision-making positions in the party and the government, an attack on bureaucratic abuses, and full freedom to criticize those abuses.

Kollontai supported the demand that Bolsheviks be allowed to speak their minds on party policies. “Comrades,” she told the conference, “there should be a guarantee that if in fact we are going to criticize, and criticize thoroughly, what is wrong with us, then the one who criticizes should not be sent off to a nice sunny place to eat peaches. Now, comrades, this isn’t a rare phenomenon.”¹⁰ She observed that currently “the Central Committee decrees [its will] and then it is put into practice through the provincial committees.” Local officials, fearing to express their opinions, would simply change orders to suit local conditions without informing the center. Kollontai concluded, “Long live criticism, but without the necessity of eating peaches after it.”¹¹

Kollontai was not a Workers’ Oppositionist in September 1920, nor, obviously, was she a trade unionist. She did share the unionists’ concern about bureaucracy, which she had always abhorred, and she opposed the employment of bourgeois specialists, against whom she had protested in 1918 and 1919. She also disliked the stifling of inner-party criticism. Things were going wrong when men like John Reed could be snubbed for raising valid questions. Even more fundamentally, Kollontai shared the belief of the Workers’ Opposition in proletarian democracy; she had, after all, always conceived of the revolution as democratic, spontaneous, and anti-authoritarian. Although she sympathized with both the Workers’ Opposition and the Democratic Centralists, Kollontai avoided joining either of the groups, possibly because she feared being banished to “a nice, sunny place to eat peaches,” but also because she wanted to concentrate on her work in the Zhenotdel. Throughout the fall Kollontai worked at the bureau, while the calls for reform in party and government were growing into a tumult of dissent.

The Ninth Conference passed a resolution vowing to fight the problem of bureaucracy by establishing new agencies, the control commissions, and promoting free discussion, but no fundamental improvements were immediately forthcoming. The control commissions themselves rapidly developed into nests of bureaucratic meddlers and spies. In November 1920 Trotsky shifted the focus of discussion from party reform to the role of the trade unions by proposing that all unions be restructured along military lines, so that they could become reliable executors of economic policy. He wanted to merge them fully into the government and replace their elected officials with appointed administrators. Trotsky had first tried out “militarization of the trade unions” in the Tsektran, or Central Transport Commission. There he had found that the military techniques of command which he had employed as head of the Red Army did bring some temporary improvement in Russia’s communications network. It was logical, therefore, that he should advocate their application to the whole economy, but he made the tactical mistake of unveiling his plan at a national trade union conference. Predictably, the delegates responded angrily to this attack on union autonomy. The argument over the role of the trade unions in the Soviet system, provoked by Trotsky’s proposal, continued through November and into December, despite Lenin’s efforts to conciliate union leaders. On December 24, the Central Committee gave permission for a full debate among Bolsheviks on the issues involved. On January 3, 1921, the Petrograd party committee, led by Zinoviev, called for candidates to the Tenth Party Congress in March to be elected according to their stand on the trade union question. The party leaders accepted that proposal; factions were organized, drew up statements of belief, and began to choose delegates. For the first and last time, groups within the Russian Communist Party campaigned for election on platforms that acknowledged abuses and promised reforms.

In a speech before the Bolshevik delegates to the Eighth Congress of Soviets on December 30 Lenin laid out his position, a centrist one, which had the greatest appeal in the party. He said that the trade unions were important, for they represented the ruling class—by which he meant the proletariat—but that they were not governing institutions like the state. Instead they fulfilled an educational function; they were “schools of communism” for the masses and a “link” between the vanguard (the party) and the more backward workers. Within them the workers learned discipline and through them they could make reform proposals to correct bureaucratic abuses of the Soviet system. The unions should not be merged into the government, as Trotsky proposed, but neither were they capable of running industry. Lenin’s position was summed up in the “Platform of the Ten,” issued on January 14 and signed by him and nine other Central Committee members.¹²

Trotsky now decided to compromise with his earlier militancy. He still called for a gradual merger of the trade unions into the government, but he added that he favored “workers’ democracy,” a phrase from Bukharin which meant that the unions should be democratically organized. Trotsky’s platform was also signed by a number of Central Committee members, most notably Bukharin. He had some support in Moscow and scattered throughout the Ukraine and the larger cities. So too did the Democratic Centralists, who published a platform criticizing party bureaucracy, but this faction campaigned very little.¹³ Increasingly as January wore into February, Lenin turned his attention to the Workers’ Opposition, which was emerging as the major challenge to his position.

Shliapnikov, the leader of the Workers’ Opposition, had made the group’s first public statement of the current debate in an article on December 13 and in a speech at the Soviet Congress on December 30. He recast this package of reform proposals into a platform, “The Tasks of the Trade Unions,” which the other members of the faction signed on January 18. Here all the Workers’ Opposition complaints of the past year were brought together. The faction accused the party of catering to the bourgeoisie at the proletariat’s expense. They charged the party with not having faith in the proletariat and therefore deliberately stifling mass participation in the revolution. They said that the party could only correct these injustices by democratizing the unions and then allowing the unions a much greater role in running industry. To achieve the latter goal, the Workers’ Opposition proposed the creation of an “All-Russian Congress of Producers,” a national assembly elected by the trade unions. The assembly would set economic policy and choose administrators to handle the daily operation of industry. A similar group of congresses and executives on the local level would perform the same functions there. The government should also accelerate the communalization of proletarian life—of food supply, transportation, and housing. Shliapnikov even proposed organizing communal gardens at the factories. Not only would these measures immediately improve the workers’ standard of living, but through them workers would learn to cooperate with one another in the re-education process that would eventually enable humankind to live together in harmony.¹⁴

The platform of the Workers’ Opposition was signed by thirty-eight unionists, chiefly from among the munitions makers, the miners, and the metalworkers, whom Shliapnikov represented. All the signers were officers in their organizations, but none belonged to the main leadership group of the All-Russian Trade Union Council, and many were provincials. Thus while the Workers’ Opposition did not spring from the rank and file directly, neither did its existence reflect a fight among the elite of the Central Committee. Furthermore it did have a following in the Ukraine, the Don Basin, Samara, and the industrial cities of central Russia.¹⁵ Shliapnikov proposed specific reforms in the name of the ideal of worker control and he demanded democratization as a solution to the problem of bureaucracy. He suggested centralized planning within a federated structure that would promote initiative and provide incentives. He called for immediate improvements in the life of the proletariat.

Lenin knew this combination of Marxist idealism and practical reforms could win the Workers’ Opposition substantial support in the party, and in late January he began to rebut their argument in detail. Primarily, Lenin charged that Shliapnikov’s position was “syndicalism,” “a complete break with communism” which ignored the role of the party in revolution. That was the crucial issue—the role of the party. In talking exclusively about the unions’ role in building socialism, the Workers’ Opposition was guilty of seeing the unions, rather than the party, as the major vehicle of revolutionary change.¹⁶

There was some justice in Lenin’s accusation. The Workers’ Opposition’s plans for the role of labor organizations in the period of socialist construction had a strongly syndicalist cast. The unions were to lay the economic foundations of socialism, and since orthodox Marxism asserted that economic foundations determined the entire structure of society, giving unions such power meant giving them the most important role in constructing a new society. In rebutting Lenin’s charge, however, Shliap- nikov could point to the series of Bolshevik proclamations espousing worker control of industry, particularly to the party program with its phrase “the trade unions should concentrate under their control the administration of the entire national economy as a single economic unit.”¹⁷ If the Workers’ Opposition was syndicalist, Shliapnikov asserted, it was a syndicalism the party itself had endorsed. In fact, rather than work out the relationship between the unions, the government, and itself, the party had issued a series of contradictory declarations, from which both Lenin and Shliapnikov could draw support.

What Lenin did not admit, if he was aware of it himself, was that his vanguard theory of the party was changing. He, and not Shliapnikov, was the revisionist. His party had been developed to lead the overthrow of the enemy class, to spur the proletariat into action. He had never written clearly about its role after that victory, although he had acted consistently to increase its power. Even in 1921 he continued to refer vaguely to the party’s mission of preparing the workers to run the economy and to the trade unions as “the source from which all our power flows,” “a reservoir of state power.”¹⁸ He would not openly disavow the promises of worker control made in 1917, but he was transforming the vanguard theory from a means to revolutionary upheaval into a justification of one-party rule over the entire life of the postrevolutionary society. As usual, Lenin changed doctrine to meet his perceptions of current needs, while continuing to honor the old commitments verbally and cloaking himself in the mantle of orthodoxy.

The majority of Communists accepted this alteration of purpose without fully understanding that it had happened. The spokesmen of the Workers’ Opposition barely mentioned the party in their initial statements, and the greatest shortcoming of their position throughout was that they did not systematically define the relationship between party, government, and unions, but instead chose to ask for an increase in the power of the unions. The Workers’ Opposition realized that their plan would diminish the role of government institutions in economic management. Indeed they desired to do that, but they did not seem aware that the government was at the time losing power to the party.¹⁹

In election after election, the candidates of the Workers’ Opposition lost to the Leninists, primarily because Lenin had seized the middle ground.²⁰ He promised reforms of the worst abuses without any major changes that might further unsettle an already difficult situation. He did not favor bureaucracy, as he claimed Trotsky did, or a weak party, as he said the Workers’ Opposition did. Instead he was for careful, cautious improvements. The Bolsheviks felt embattled in the winter of 1920-21; their cohesion as a group was strengthened by the rising hostility of the vast Russian population and the enormity of the tasks before them. Lenin, more than anyone else, was the symbol of the success their common commitment had already brought them. They followed him instinctively in the best of times; their allegiance intensified when, as in this instance, he spoke to their own desire for stability, calm, and, within the boundaries of their radical socialism, moderation.

Lenin used more than personal prestige to persuade Communists. Party leaders such as Anatoli Lunacharskii, the commissar of education, and Mikhail Frunze, the Red Army commander, traveled around the country organizing a campaign in which Lenin’s supporters vowed to make life better and threatened that a vote against the “Platform of the Ten” was a vote against Lenin.²¹ They may also have used less savory tactics, such as the intimidation of subordinates by superior officials,²² but coercion was not the primary reason for their success. The Leninists won because they represented the party majority from the outset, because Lenin led them, and because they could use the party machinery to their advantage.

In January 1921, precisely when the scope of Lenin’s victory was becoming apparent, Kollontai joined the Workers’ Opposition. She could no longer ignore the debates, nor was there a danger now of banishment to that “nice sunny place to eat peaches.” The party leadership had proclaimed the right of Communists to speak out on the trade union question. Kollontai chose to align herself with the Workers’ Opposition because in both general concerns and specific demands this group reflected her beliefs. She cherished the same concept of proletarian democracy as they, she was sympathetic to all their reform proposals, from trade union autonomy to communalization, and she shared their fear that the party was turning away from the workers toward the bourgeois specialists. When she informed Shliapnikov of her decision to join the faction is unknown, but her first public declaration of support for it came in a Pravda article on January 28. There Kollontai accused the party leadership of betraying the proletariat by relying on capitalist-trained managers and talking about a slow transition to worker control of industry. “If we had argued with similar wise caution and gradualness in 1917,” she proclaimed, “our party would not have led us on that straight though rocky path that shortened the road to communism, but would have carried us along the more tested road to the swamps and forest wildernesses of history.”²³

Her oratorical skill made Kollontai a welcome addition to the Workers’ Opposition. Exact information about where and when she spoke remains sequestered in closed Soviet files, but there is no doubt that her speeches increased the appeal of the faction. Shliapnikov formulated the ideas of the Workers’ Opposition and acted as its leading advocate, but he was not as compelling a speaker as Kollontai.²⁴ Kollontai contributed more than speeches, however. Knowing that they would be a small minority at the Tenth Congress, the leaders of the Workers’ Opposition decided to concentrate on winning over other delegates at the meeting itself. For this purpose they prepared two documents. The first was a set of theses on party reform. The second was a pamphlet by Kollontai, The Workers’ Opposition. She wrote it sometime in February and then took it to a government press. The press refused to print it at government expense, and Kollontai had to pay the costs herself.

The Workers’ Opposition, Kollontai argued in the pamphlet, had arisen as an expression of the discontent of the masses, from whom the revolution drew its life and on whom the government depended. The faction was composed of “workers, that part of the progressive vanguard of the Russian proletariat who carried all the difficulty of the revolutionary struggle on their shoulders and who have not been dispersed among Soviet institutions, losing their ties with the working masses.”²⁵ All too many workers, drawn away from the factories into other jobs, had been corrupted by power, Kollontai wrote, and had become estranged from the proletariat. Only the unions retained their connections with the masses. The unions had given birth to the Workers’ Opposition and therefore it followed that the Workers’ Opposition reflected the aspirations of the proletariat. This argument was not quite accurate. The Workers’ Oppositionists were leaders, if regional ones. Nor is there any evidence that the faction had a mass constituency, for the trade union membership from which they came and within which they were a minority, comprised a maximum of ten percent of the total nonagricultural labor force.²⁶ Nonetheless, Kollontai’s assertion that the Workers’ Opposition sprang from the people did point to the elite quality of the other factions and to the trade union origins of the Workers’ Opposition. Using traditional Bolshevik notions about the proletariat and the unions’ relationship to it, Kollontai began her pamphlet by staking out a special identity for her faction—democratic, uncorrupted, proletarian.

Why had the Workers’ Opposition developed as an expression of popular discontent, she asked. Because the party leadership had failed the workers. The virtue of the Bolsheviks had always been in their ability to sense the needs of the proletariat and guide the satisfaction of those needs in such a way that historical development was advanced at the same time. During 1917 the party had performed that task brilliantly, but now Kollontai charged that “our party has not only slowed its headlong rush to the future, but more and more often ‘prudently’ looks backward.”²⁷ The Bolsheviks had been corrupted by power and by the awesome task of governing an underdeveloped, war-ravaged country. They had compromised with nonproletarian elements, chiefly with the peasantry and the bourgeoisie. They had given bourgeois specialists power in industry, and since “production, its organization, is the essence of communism,”²⁸ to bring the bourgeoisie into decision-making positions in the economy was to reintroduce capitalist influences. All the present authoritarianism and bureaucracy sprang from this fundamental error. Furthermore, reliance on such people made the workers feel that their leaders no longer trusted them.

Kollontai went on to explain how the Workers’ Opposition’s proposals would correct present injustices. Most important was their package of economic reforms, for bureaucracy and autocracy in all other institutions sprang from the bureaucratization of industrial management by bourgeois elements. “The question is who will build a communist economy and how to build it,” Kollontai wrote. “This is the essence of our program. This is its heart.”²⁹ Obviously the workers should build the economy, for they were the only creative class in a socialist society. They alone could develop the new forms of production which socialism demanded. “The unions are not only schools of communism,” Kollontai wrote in refutation of Lenin, “but creators of communism."³⁰ A federated structure such as that proposed by the Workers’ Opposition would give full scope to the proletariat’s collective efforts.

Here lay the crux of the confrontation between Lenin’s majority and the Workers’ Opposition. Both Kollontai and Lenin thought that the working class would build communism, so the issue at bottom was which institution, party or union, would best serve as a vehicle to channel proletarian energies into economic construction. For Kollontai the party should supervise the government and guard ideology, but it could not manage the development of an entirely new industrial system. She wrote that only the working class, through the unions, could accomplish the mammoth task of laying the economic base for communism. Clearly, Kollontai did not understand the transformation that was then molding the party into a manager of all Soviet life.

Kollontai claimed, with considerable justification, that her position followed the canons of Marxism more closely than did those of the other factions. The party might well represent the vanguard, but it could not substitute itself for the entire working class. The unions had to deal with production every day, so through them the workers would have the final control over the economy. Given that power in a decentralized system, they could promote samodeiatel’nost', the spontaneity on which Kollontai believed socialist construction depended.

Just as the unions had to be democratized, so too did government and party. True to her notion that the party had gone astray in part because its proletarian essence had been corrupted by a flood of new members from the peasantry and the bourgeoisie, Kollontai proposed expelling everyone of nonproletarian origin who had joined since 1919. These people could appeal their expulsion within three months and could be readmitted, provided they did manual labor that would teach them about working-class life first hand, and provided they proved to the satisfaction of party officials that they were true Communists.

At the same time the party should honor its democratic principles. Workers should participate in all important party committees. Bolsheviks should be discouraged from holding both party and government jobs, and party officials should be elected rather than appointed. Free discussion should be honored at all levels of the hierarchy. Workers in power in a democratized party would ensure that the party acted as a guardian of revolutionary purity, of the “class line” of a government forced to rule a class-mixed country. The party committees would become “centers of ideological control over Soviet institutions.” The Central Committee would be “the highest ideological center of our class politics, the organ of thought and control over the practical politics of the soviets, the spiritual embodiment of the fundamentals of our program.”³²

The pamphlet ended with an affirmation of the need for the Workers’ Opposition. The group would continue to exist, within the party, because someone had to shock the Bolsheviks out of the numbing daily routine by demanding that they examine their failures. “Where there is criticism, analysis, there thought works, moves, and goes on, there is creativity, life, and that means movement forward, to the future.” The Workers’ Opposition had asked the party to honor its program, and it would continue to point out the correct course in the future. Eventually the leaders would acknowledge that the Workers’ Opposition was right. “Il’ich will be with us yet,” Kollontai predicted.³³

The ideas expressed in The Workers’ Opposition did not originate with Kollontai. Shliapnikov had formulated the economic proposals and was the first to charge that the party had lost faith in the proletariat. At the Ninth Party Conference, S. P. Medvedev had called for half of all party committees to be proletarian. The rest of the political reform notions and the arguments about the source of bureaucratization came out of the collaborative effort that had produced the “Resolutions on Party Construction” submitted to the Tenth Congress by the Workers’ Opposition.³⁴ Kollontai may have drafted that document, since it follows The Workers’ Opposition closely, but even there the ideas represent not an original formulation, but a fusion of many Democratic Centralist proposals with those of the Workers’ Opposition.

What Kollontai did was to unite the demands of the faction into a coherent argument that was passionate, eloquent, and persuasive. She called for democracy and spontaneity rather than bureaucracy and coercion. If she did not demand democratic rights for Mensheviks or SRs (and she did not), at least she did ask such rights for Bolsheviks. Furthermore, Kollontai advocated true power for the working class. She demanded complete, genuine worker control of industry in the belief that the masses would build a truly free society. Communism must develop out of the operation of social forces; it would not be coerced into being by party command. Perhaps that notion was naive in 1921, but Kollontai had always believed in the workers. Now that she saw her party heading toward autocracy, she demanded a return to a democracy that may have never existed within its ranks and a granting of full economic control to a class that had never proved itself capable of running industry. In a time of crisis she clung to the central beliefs of her Marxism—that collectivism as embodied in the proletariat was good, that communism came about through mass action, that authoritarianism was bad. She had joined the Workers’ Opposition because they shared her wholehearted faith in the working class. Having joined, she produced for them a pamphlet that remains an eloquent statement of anarchistic Marxism and her finest political manifesto.

Kollontai managed to have 1,500 copies of The Workers' Opposition printed and distributed in time for the Tenth Congress. The prospects of any success for her group at the meeting were not bright, for of the 694 delegates with full voting rights accredited to the congress, only 45 to 50 came from the Workers’ Opposition.³⁵ The faction’s hopes of changing minds must have also been dimmed by an outbreak of unrest in Petro- grad in February 1921. Strikes against the Bolsheviks culminated in an uprising of the naval garrison at Kronstadt, the island in the Gulf of Finland from which had come some of the most revolutionary sailors of 1917. Now Kronstadt exploded into riots over the sacrifices of the last three years, forcing Bolsheviks who had once gone to the troops with calls for militant action to return across the ice in violent repression. In all this unrest, Mensheviks, anarchists, SRs, and even defecting Bolsheviks were active, and the specter of the masses turning toward other socialists heightened the party’s already considerable anxiety. When the delegates to the Tenth Party Congress assembled in Moscow in early March, therefore, they came more prepared than usual to follow Lenin and to overrule opposition. Even Trotsky and Bukharin had begun to swing over to support the “Platform of the Ten.” The Democratic Centralists were not prepared for a concerted effort, so the Workers’ Opposition stood virtually alone.

Kollontai’s pamphlet achieved its objective of bringing the faction’s demands to the attention of the congress, but it also turned the anger of Lenin, Trotsky, and Bukharin against her. On March 8, the first day of the meeting, Angelica Balabanoff, a Bolshevik who had been a founder of the Zimmerwald Left, saw Kollontai talking to a French Communist in the foyer outside the auditorium.

At that moment Lenin entered at a brisk pace. He looked very tense and did not stop to return greetings. Walking up to Alexandra Kollontai’s interlocutor he said to him angrily, “What? You still speak to this individual?” He entered the assembly hall and became immediately engrossed in the reading of the pamphlet, entirely oblivious to his surroundings, even to greetings and words addressed to him directly. As he read on, his face darkened more and more.³⁶

The confrontation with the Workers’ Opposition began the next day, in the debate on the Central Committee report Lenin had presented to the congress. Shliapnikov rose to deplore the split between the leadership and the rank and file, which he said had been caused by the leadership’s stifling of mass initiative. He concluded:

Vladimir Il’ich, if we direct all our strength to the struggle here with these phenomena, and with elements not only abroad but here within our country, then the Workers’ Opposition will be very solidly and unanimously with you. But don’t go too far in fighting us. Perhaps you can suppress and divide us here, but you will only lose from it.³⁷

Kollontai followed Shliapnikov’s display of bravado with an equally challenging speech several hours later. She too said Lenin’s report from the Central Committee had not dealt with the problem of “the managers and the governors” in the party. “It is most important, comrades, that the party recognize this crisis, recognize that whole ranks of alien elements are hanging onto us, that the resolutions on purging the party have been taken only on paper and not put into practice.”³⁸

The Central Committee, as the “ideological-political leading organ,” must make positive efforts to prevent the split that was opening between the leadership and the proletariat. “The greatest misfortune, comrades, is that we feel a secret distrust of the broad masses, we feel the masses shrink from us,” Kollontai warned. They could only conquer that feeling by improving the possibilities of samodeiatel’nost', purging themselves of noncommunists, and turning their policies in the proper direction ideologically.³⁹

In a final word that evening and again in a speech the next day, Lenin said that the time had come to end factionalism. In this dangerous period the party needed unity above all else. The factions themselves were a sign of the influence the Bolsheviks’ enemies were exerting on the party, Lenin charged. The Workers’ Opposition held anarcho-syndicalist ideas, the Kronstadt rebels held anarchist ideas, therefore there must be a “connection” between the Workers’ Opposition and the Kronstadt uprising. Lenin stopped short of asserting that the Workers’ Oppositionists had played any role in the rebellion; he knew they had not. He merely linked the faction’s activities with the sailors’ chronologically, charged that syndicalism and the anarchism of Kronstadt were the same, declared that the Workers’ Opposition’s ideas were syndicalist, and left the frightened delegates to draw their own conclusions. There were good Communists in the Workers’ Opposition, and once they left the faction they should be welcomed back to full participation in the party, but for the leaders of the group Lenin had only scorn. Shliapnikov bragged about being a worker himself and Kollontai claimed that the faction was “class united and class conscious.” “Well, thank God,” Lenin said, “so we know that Comrade Kollontai and Comrade Shliapnikov are ‘class united and class conscious.’ ” Those delegates who knew about the other unity that had existed between Kollontai and Shliapnikov snickered.⁴⁰

Such were Lenin’s tactics—sarcasm and slander, not serious debate. He had made up his mind, and he chose to denigrate his old friends rather than discuss the issues. He had the majority with him already, and the time had come to end this unnecessary squabbling and get on with the real problems that confronted the party. He knew Kollontai and Shliapnikov were not agents of the petty-bourgeoisie, leading honest communists astray, but he also knew the right course, so if he had to shout Bolshevik curses to defeat them, he would. He had to get his people together before he could rely on them to carry out the new programs he had formulated. Perhaps he even believed that the opposition had unwittingly aided the uprising at Kronstadt by revealing party disunity. He knew they had never intended that consequence, but he had warned the Bolsheviks in December about what would happen if the party made a public display of factionalism. Now two months had been wasted in a useless debate that may have encouraged rebellion as well. If Lenin was not quite fair in accusing the Workers’ Opposition of falling under Menshevik or anarchist influence, he could believe that his condemnation was still a just punishment for the faction’s obstinate utopianism. Besides, to characterize the Workers’ Opposition as petty-bourgeois had the effect of frightening delegates too unsophisticated in Marxism to judge the validity of the charge.

Publicly, Lenin called for unity, and the delegates to the Tenth Congress followed him by approving all the reports and resolutions he submitted to them. Privately, Lenin held meetings with his supporters and with oppositionists in an effort to put together a Central Committee composed overwhelmingly of his people. He even succeeded in convincing four Workers’ Oppositionists, including Shliapnikov, to serve, thereby co-opting them. In the future, as members of the Central Committee, they would be bound by the majority’s decisions, and of course Lenin would hold the majority. When Kollontai rose to address the issue of party reform on the evening of March 13, therefore, Lenin had already secured the party endorsement and the Central Committee he wanted.⁴¹

She couched her speech as a response to Bukharin, who was supporting Lenin’s proposals to democratize the party by means of the same resolutions and control commissions that had yielded no meaningful results before. Her real target was Lenin’s theme that in this time of crisis the Bolsheviks must seek unity above all else. They did not need unity, Kollontai declared, as much as they needed a democratic party based on the proletariat.

Our Workers’ Opposition strongly insists that it is necessary not only to reorganize the whole apparatus. . . , but to say firmly and clearly that for all time and not only in a moment of respite a system of broadly developed democracy, of faith in the masses, and of guaranteed freedom of thought for comrades is necessary not only on paper but in fact.⁴²

Kollontai referred to Lenin briefly, when she said that his angry response to her pamphlet showed that she must be right. By comparison with Lenin’s speech, Kollontai’s was a model of restraint; she did not even take on Lenin as her main antagonist, although the level of his attack on her must have angered her. Perhaps she believed the congress would react more favorably to a reasoned presentation than to sarcasm, and Angelica Balabanoff did remark much later on Kollontai’s admirable “calm and self-control.”⁴³ Whatever her goals, the delegates did not receive her warmly. When she concluded with the usual Workers’ Opposition claim that the group was “connected with” the proletariat, someone yelled from the floor, “And with Kronstadt!” Kollontai responded angrily:

Comrades, you know that there was never a time when the Workers’ Opposition refused work and did not go to work wherever it was sent. Who first responded to Kronstadt, who went there first, if not representatives of the Workers’ Opposition? This time it wasn’t the Red General Staff who went there; representatives of the Workers’ Opposition went there. That’s who went first. (Laughter in the hall.) And I repeat further, when we are needed we can support the party and do our duty in the name of communism, in the name of the international workers’ revolution. We therefore demand the right, as a clearly working class party, to defend the interests of the proletarian revolution.⁴⁴

The delegates muttered, some few probably applauded, but the speech won no friends in a congress already strongly organized behind Lenin. He had played on the danger they faced to argue for moderation and unity, because he believed moderation and unity were the only realistic ways to deal with that very real danger. Kollontai sensed the crisis, too, but she called for reliance on revolutionary principles, on the broadest kind of reform, because she felt Bolshevik survival depended on mass support. Mass support would come only through mass participation and mass participation would build communism. Kollontai had welcomed Lenin’s determination to accelerate the revolution in 1917, but she would not accept his demand to govern the masses in 1921, even though both positions sprang from the same fundamentally Bolshevik, fundamentally Leninist, determination to control reality rather than let the natural forces they all professed to believe in develop naturally.

Lenin had never shared Kollontai’s faith in the proletariat. She had realized that in 1903 when she sided with the Mensheviks, but she had forgotten it in 1915, or else had concluded then that Lenin had changed his attitudes. He had not. As deeply as she believed in unfettered mass action, he believed in disciplined, controlled mass action; while she reveled in the exuberance of 1917, he prodded his party to ride the unrest to power. Mass action was a force to be channeled, not trusted or allowed to run free. That was what Leninism was about—seizing control of history while professing determinism. And yet the difference between Kollontai and Lenin was not simply one of democracy versus dictatorship. Each drew on personal ideology to interpret reality; each ignored certain dangers while being obsessed with others. Lenin, who feared anarchy and the loss of control, who valued discipline and unified effort, who knew the Russian proletariat to be unskilled and unorganized, who had always accepted the necessity for coercion, thought the shortest route to a socialist economy lay through rapid industrial reconstruction. Only the party could lead this process; to grant a major initiative to the backward proletariat would sink Russia into a chaos like that of 1917. Surrounded by enemies at home and abroad, the Bolsheviks could not risk the disintegration of “the ‘public meeting’ democracy” with which he had felt uncomfortable as early as March 1918.⁴⁵ The party must build socialism now through a disciplined, unified effort, through granting concessions to the peasantry, through marshaling all their propaganda and power to make the Russian into a productive worker. Thereafter, when the economic base for communism had been laid, a true democracy would follow.

In 1918 Rosa Luxemburg had written, “Socialist democracy is not something which begins only in the promised land after the foundations of socialist economy are created; it does not come as some sort of Christmas present for the worthy people who, in the interim, have loyally supported a handful of socialist dictators.”⁴⁶ For Luxemburg and for Kollontai, democracy was a process. It was the only medium in which to experiment with new types of organization. Democracy might sanction coercion to eradicate the forces of the past, but not to shape the future. These revolutionary women held to their populist principles because they both distrusted power and authority far more than did Lenin.

Rebellion against all forms of authority, not just tsarist autocracy, had initially brought Kollontai to Marxism. There is considerable merit in the charge of a Soviet historian that she held the anarchist view that governments were innately evil.⁴⁷ She distrusted the hierarchies of the German Social Democrats, the Soviet government, and her own party. She overlooked the proletariat’s ignorance and fragmentation but she would not overlook the government’s abuses, because she trusted the proletariat and distrusted governments. Kollontai cannot justly be called an anarchist, if only because she accepted, while anarchists denied, the necessity of government and party during the transition to communism; but there was a distinctly anarchist tinge in her fundamental distrust of power.

On the evening of March 14 the congress elected the Central Committee, approving Lenin’s candidates with only minor revisions. Earlier that day Shliapnikov, Medvedev, and Kutuzov had spoken for the Workers’ Opposition in the debate on the trade unions, but the position of the “Platform of the Ten” was adopted.⁴⁸ According to Anastas Mikoian, the delegates were tired of listening anyway, since all the issues had already been decided. “For more than two months,” he wrote, “we had heard, read and talked so much about this subject that we were awfully bored.”⁴⁹

The next day Lenin introduced the first steps of the New Economic Policy (NEP), his plan for economic reconstruction, which would allow a partial return to private enterprise. Requisitioning of the peasants’ grain was to be replaced by a tax low enough to encourage them to raise more food, then sell it for profit. Lenin had struck hard against the opposition, in part to insure unified party support for this concession to the peasantry. He expected many Bolsheviks to object to any return to a free market economy, but even the Workers’ Oppositionists kept silent. Mikoian wrote that they did not seem to feel the proposal touched the issues under discussion.⁵⁰ Perhaps too they were weary with their losing battle.

Lenin had promised throughout the meeting that he would put an end to factionalism. On March 16, the last day of the congress, when some of the delegates had already left, he introduced two new documents, the “Resolution on Syndicalism and the Anarchist Deviation in our Party,” and the “Resolution on Party Unity.” The first condemned the Workers’ Opposition as a petty-bourgeois group which had arisen because of the presence of Mensheviks and peasants in the party. The faction’s ideas were un-Marxist and dangerous, and if the Workers’ Opposition persisted in spreading them, they would be thrown out of the party. The “Resolution on Party Unity” gave the party the legal right, for the first time, to expel members for “factionalism.” From now on, the Central Committee had the power to punish Communists for any “breach of discipline” or organized group dissent.⁵¹

Medvedev and Shliapnikov responded angrily to this attempt to throttle them. The Workers’ Opposition, Medvedev said, knew that both resolutions were aimed at them, and that despite the pledges of freedom for inner-party criticism the resolutions would end all discussions in the future.⁵² After Medvedev a furious Shliapnikov came to the podium and began, “I have not seen or heard anything more demagogic or slanderous than this resolution in my life, in a twenty-year tenure in the party.” How dare Lenin accuse him and the other Bolsheviks in the Workers’ Opposition of being petty-bourgeois? Almost all of them had been party members since well before the revolution. They were not calling for syndicalism; they advocated economic planning, the leadership of the party, and soviet government. If the congress passed Lenin’s resolutions, the Workers’ Oppositionists would resign from the Central Committee and their other posts and “take the discussion of the unworthy methods of struggle with the Workers’ Opposition to the court of the international Communist proletariat.” Still angry, Shliapnikov concluded sarcastically, “Of course, comrades, once you have stuck your label of anarchist-syndicalist on me here, although with that very big reservation about its being a deviation, I cannot be a competent member of the [Central Committee] and I tender my resignation.”⁵³

More debate followed, but the resolutions were passed. Lenin said a final comforting word to the effect that these were only temporary measures made necessary by the current crisis. He accepted none of the resignations. The delegates voted another resolution urging the Workers’ Oppositionists to submit to party discipline by serving on the Central Committee. Lenin ended the meeting with a speech hailing all that the congress had accomplished.

Frightened by the tasks facing them and the world of enemies in which they lived, the Bolsheviks had now chosen to shut their ears to valid criticism, to cling to reforms that had not worked in the past, and to answer opposition with repression. No doubt many saw the resolutions as temporary measures, but as Trotsky later admitted, they had first outlawed all criticism by other political parties as a temporary measure, and now they moved against their own comrades.⁵⁴ They chose the easy route of intolerance, in the process rebuilding the autocracy that was the worst feature of their Russian heritage. Rather than reverse the wartime improvisations that had sustained the very bureaucratic authoritarianism they had once fought to destroy, the Bolsheviks refused to risk major reform.

Kollontai did not join the other Oppositionists in the protest of the last day’s session, nor could she vote against the resolutions since she was accredited to the congress with “advisory” voting rights only. She may not have been in the hall; if she was, she kept silent. Almost all of her fears about the price of opposition had been confirmed. The attacks on her were to be expected, of course, and in her speeches she gave no evidence that Lenin had particularly wounded her. He probably had, however, as had Bukharin, for both men used personal insults that not only were unnecessary but also attacked her identity as a woman. Lenin made the remark about her relationship with Shliapnikov, and he knew she was still Dybenko’s wife. If she and Shliapnikov had become lovers again (and there is no evidence that they had), Lenin did not need to bring it up in a debate at a party congress.

Bukharin struck harder in a speech on March 13 when he attacked an article, “The Cross of Motherhood,” which Kollontai had published in January 1921. Kollontai had described the difficulties of being a mother in discussing a play entitled “The Miracle,” which she had seen in Germany in 1914. The protagonists were three women—the Virgin Mary, the Mother Superior of a convent, and a young nun—and the message was that motherhood required a woman to sacrifice her child to the world.⁵⁵ The article was sentimental and muddled, and as Bukharin quoted it out of context, it sounded even stranger to the congress delegates. Obviously, he said, anyone who wrote such “disgusting, sentimental, Catholic banalities” about motherhood should not be taken seriously. He went on to criticize other oppositionists with equal fervor, but he did not attack their masculinity as he had subtly joked about Kollontai’s femininity. Perhaps she would claim he did not understand her article because he was a man, Bukharin said, but if he could be turned into a woman he would still think it drivel, just like the “clear class line” she claimed in The Workers’ Opposition.⁵⁶

Lenin’s reference to her sex life and Bukharin’s attack on her article may have insulted Kollontai more than the other criticism because they seized on her womanhood in order to discredit her. The personal attack may have caused her to feel even more strongly the stinging rebuke that had been delivered to her faction. She had never liked party infighting, she had avoided it during emigration, and she feared its consequences in the fall of 1920. After the Tenth Congress she returned to the Zhenot- del to take up work that seemed less controversial. She did not renounce her principles; she simply retreated, as she had done after Brest-Litovsk.