Lenin against Left Communism

As early as 1892 Karl Kautsky noted that Marxism as a revolutionary movement had to control its less orthodox and more adventurist elements, especially romantic revolutionary intellectuals and radical workers. Kautsky characterized such elements as primitive, utopian, and yet a necessary “childhood disease which threatens every young socialist movement.” During the years before 1914, German social democrats generally felt that they were the wise parents of recalcitrant Russian socialist children. August Bebel noted the “childishness” of the RSDRP at the Stuttgart congress in 1907, and even told Maxim Litvinov to his face that “you are children.” At the same congress Lunacharsky compared syndicalism to a “childhood disease” (detskaia bolezti’) that any workers’ movement must experience and then outgrow.²

The characterization of syndicalism as a childhood disease persisted in Russia after 1917. In May 1918 Lenin referred to Nikolai Bukharin and the “left” communists who opposed signing the Brest Litovsk treaty as people experiencing “left adolescence” (levoe rebiachestvo) and playing into imperialist hands because of their “childish helplessness” (detskaia bespomoshchnost’). The idea of an “infantile disorder” (the common English translation used in Lenin’s 1920 pamphlet) suggests a Freudian psychological malfunction that will be a permanent and lifelong part of the patient’s psyche, an irrational behavior pattern that one might call childish. But the idea of a “childhood disease” suggests measles more than neuroses, an inevitable but passing and relatively harmless contagion through which all children must go but which then does not recur in adult life. In 1920 Lenin characterized “left communism” as a “very young trend” and promised that “the disease can be easily cured, and we need to work to cure it with maximum energy; this disease will pass without any danger, and afterwards the organism will become even stronger.” Whatever “left communism” meant after 1917, it was related to a childhood disease before 1914 which Bolshevism had experienced and successfully outgrown.³

In 1909 Lenin had countered the syndicalist threat within Bolshevism by breaking with his own fraction and writing Materialism and Empiriocriticism, an Aesopian indictment of Bogdanov and the other Bolsheviks who sought to maintain Bolshevism without Lenin. In 1920 Lenin again sought to deal with syndicalism in his well-known pamphlet Left-wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder. In both cases Lenin was concerned that some Bolsheviks sought to transform Marxism into useful myth, rather than party orthodoxy, in order to mobilize workers to action. In 1920 Lenin feared that his Communist rivals inside and outside Soviet Russia wished to transform the new Communist International, or Comintern, into a radical revolutionary organization that would be self-destructive for communist parties and harmful to more pragmatic trade and diplomatic ties of Russia with the capitalist world. But what Lenin called “left Bolshevism” after 1905 and “left-wing communism” after 1917 were not minority factions, but major groupings that threatened Lenin’s control of his own organization: the Bolshevik Center in 1909 and the Comintern in 1920.

The Syndicalist Wave

European and American syndicalists greeted the Russian Revolution as if it were their own. In 1919 Sorel praised Lenin as “the greatest theoretician that socialism has had since Marx.” The IWW greeted its fraternal comrades in Russia as if one big union had come to power. Yet syndicalist spontaneity soon ran into difficulties in association with the new Comintern, an organization international and revolutionary in form, but Russian and authoritarian in content.⁴

The founding congress of the Comintern, held in Moscow in April 1919, was sparsely attended. Few European or American comrades could get through the blockade maintained by the Allied Powers against a Soviet Russia involved in a bloody civil war. The congress resolutions were vaguely syndicalist in tone, however, praising revolutionary activities such as “mass action” and relegating “bourgeois parliamentarism” to a subordinate value as a strategy. “A coalition is necessary,” wrote Bukharin, “with those elements of the revolutionary workers’ movement who, though they did not previously belong to the Socialist Party, now, on the whole, take up the standpoint of the proletarian dictatorship in the form of the Soviet system, e.g., some of the sections among the Syndicalists.”⁵

This promise of a coalition with former syndicalists helped bring many left-wing European socialists into the Comintern, especially in Holland. Pannekoek, Gorter, and Roland-Holst all became key figures in the early Comintern. For a time some thought a true international socialist organization might be centered in Amsterdam, not Moscow. In his report to the first Comintern congress, the Dutch socialist S. J. Rutgers admitted that “spiritually we stood close to the syndicalist elements of the Dutch Labor movement, and when the world war broke out our party with one anarchist group and in conjunction with the syndicalists formed a revolutionary committee.” The Dutch left, like the IWW, had a syndicalist heritage that would make affiliation with a Comintern increasingly difficult.⁶

Lenin was well aware that anarchism and syndicalism were still powerful mass movements inside Soviet Russia. In a meeting with the grand old man of Russian anarchism, Prince Peter Kropotkin, in May 1919, Lenin told him that syndicalism was a movement harmful to the revolution. Yet he realized the need for foreign support from former syndicalists. Lenin wrote the English socialist Sylvia Pankhurst that the Comintern should not alienate “those among the workers who, while advocating Sovietism, refuse to participate in the parliamentary struggle.” Antiparliamentarism was a mistake due to a lack of revolutionary experience. In October 1919, he wrote German, French, and Italian communists a letter repeating this sentiment, noting that not to participate in parliamentary elections would be “an undoubted mistake” and “an even greater offense against the ideas of Marxism and its practical policy (a strong, centralized, political party) and a leap towards the ideas and practice of syndicalism.” Again, Lenin presented his own views as Marxist orthodoxy, and his rivals’ views as mistakes or worse. But many still disagreed with him.⁷

By early 1920 Lenin was deeply concerned with anarchism and syndicalism in Russia and abroad. Anarchist groups had been especially active that winter in Moscow, and had even bombed party headquarters. The guerrilla forces of Nestor Makhno were flying the black flag of anarchism in the Ukraine, fighting off White and Red armies alike. In January 1920 two American anarchist leaders, Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, were deported to Russia. In March Lenin plied them with questions about the labor movement, the socialist parties, and the IWW in America. Sorel dedicated the fourth edition of his Reflections on Violence to Lenin. Kropotkin told Lenin that “the syndicalist movement will emerge as the great force in the course of the next fifty years, leading to the creation of the communist stateless society.” At the ninth RKP(b) party congress in late March, Lenin noted that party membership stood only at six hundred thousand, while the trade unions claimed three million members. Pravda denounced trade union autonomy as “syndicalist contraband.” In May 1920 the Moscow printers went on strike. Enthusiasm for trade unions, rather than the party, also emerged in Bukharin’s The Economics of the Transition Period and a new edition of Bogdanov’s Short Course in Economic Science, both of which Lenin read and annotated with concern. Thus, in Soviet Russia in 1920 labor unrest was epidemic and trade unions were as widespread as any other infectious disease.⁸

In this setting Lenin began to write his second Aesopian indictment of syndicalism, Left-Wing Communism: A Childhood Disease. This time the censor was not the imperial police, but his own party, over which he still could not claim control.

Left-Wing Communism: A Childhood Disease

Oh! How I understand Lenin.

—GEORGES SOREL

A schism is better than a muddle.

—LENIN

Lenin’s famous 1920 pamphlet is generally interpreted as a piece of tactical political advice directed at emerging foreign communist parties that makes two points: first, that the Russian Bolshevik experience in creating a successful revolution should serve as the model for foreign communist parties, whose countries must inevitably go through a similar experience; second, that all communist parties must give up uncompromising opposition to bourgeois society, especially its trade unions and its parliaments, and engage in legal political activity, joining labor unions and running candidates for elected public office.⁹

Prepared for distribution at the second Comintern congress in the summer of 1920, the pamphlet has been viewed as an outline of tactics and strategy for the Comintern and foreign communist parties in the years to come. But in 1920 the Comintern was a frail reed, bent by the winds of revolution in the aftermath of World War I, its future unknown. Lenin was still recalling the seductive appeal of syndicalism that had enticed his own movement since 1905. Left-Wing Communism was directed as much against the known historical experience of Russian Bolshevism as against the future unknown deviations of Western Communism. It reminded Russian leaders of past mistakes, and promised good Russian behavior to Western politicians, both in the oblique Aesopian language customary in Lenin’s writings.

Lenin at the time of the Second Congress of the Comintern and the writing of Left-Wing Communism: A Infantile Disorder, Moscow, July 1920. From Vospominaniia V. I. Lenina (Moscow, 1979), supplement.

Why did Lenin choose to describe left Bolshevism in terms of childhood diseases? As we have seen, syndicalism was traditionally criticized as childish or infantile by European Marxists. But in addition, Lenin celebrated his fiftieth birthday on April 22, 1920, and his secretary, E. D. Stasova, gave him a birthday cartoon. Drawn by the artist Karrik in 1900 on the occasion of a jubilee for the Populist thinker N. K. Mikhailovsky, the cartoon showed various Russian Marxists of the day as small children lined up to greet the great man. Stasova editorialized in her note to Lenin that in 1900 the Russian social democrats were still in their infancy, but in 1920 had come to maturity largely through Lenin’s efforts.¹⁰

Left-Wing Communism is dated April 27, 1920. This date probably marked the beginning, rather than the end, of Lenin’s writing of the book. No preliminary drafts or notes of the book have been found, only a ninety-three-page handwritten manuscript and a typed version with editorial corrections. In addition, there is no evidence in Soviet chronologies of Lenin’s extremely busy life that he was actually working on the book before April 27, and there is considerable evidence of work between then and July 19. The effects of the Allied blockade were still being felt, so that getting people or information into the country was time consuming and often dangerous. Yet Lenin’s pamphlet is full of references to West European communist publications from January through mid-April 1920. Written in great haste, his pamphlet was directed not only at the representatives of foreign communist parties about to gather in Moscow for the second Comintern congress, but at the left wing of his own party and the leaders of Western governments— audiences that Lenin appreciated only in April.¹¹

In late March or early April 1920, Lenin received the first eight volumes of the Comintern journal, Communist International. These were bound and distributed to delegates to the ninth RKP(b) party congress in Moscow. They made it very clear that the Comintern, especially its Dutch, German, and American members, were drifting toward syndicalism. The first issue of April 1919 featured the resolution of Bukharin calling for mass action and criticizing participation in parliamentary elections. Other issues contained articles by Dutch socialists making clear their cooperation with syndicalists and anarchists. By April 1920 Lenin was aware that the syndicalist wave might inundate the Comintern.¹²

Syndicalism was, in fact, on the rise again. In October 1919, S. J. Rutgers was sent to Europe to establish Comintern branches in Berlin, Vienna, and Amsterdam. But the West European Bureau in Amsterdam held its own conference in early February 1920, with representatives from America and Great Britain, and began to issue its own bulletin as “the provisional Bureau in Amsterdam of the Communist International.” The bureau resolved to turn industrial unions to more radical paths, and “came close to adopting the line of the West European syndicalists, who renounced political activity in its entirety.” For the next three months, Amsterdam, as much as Moscow, could lay claim to being the active center of the Comintern. In addition, a disparate but substantial number of German syndicalist organizations came together in February 1920 in Hannover as the Allgemeine Arbeiter-Union Deutschlands (AAUD), modeling itself after the IWW.¹³

Syndicalism threatened Lenin at home as well as abroad. In January 1920 Zinoviev, as head of the Comintern, wrote an appeal to the IWW arguing that “the Communists and the IWW are in accord. The capitalist State must be attacked by DIRECT ACTION,” and urging that the IWW cooperate with the CPUSA in a relationship of “brotherhood.” On March 25, in the wake of the abortive right-wing Kapp Putsch in Berlin, Zinoviev urged the KPD (Communist Party of Germany) to “arm yourselves! Form workers’ councils! Assemble your Red Army!” In fact, the failure of the KPD to offer significant resistance to the Kapp Putsch led on April 4, 1920, to the formation of a schismatic Communist Workers’ Party of Germany (KAPD), an antiparliamentary and quasisyndicalist organization of whose existence Lenin was unaware until after April 23, when he was able to get a copy of the new party’s journal, Kommunistische Arbeiter Zeitung.¹⁴

In the meantime Lenin had been reading the American socialist leader Daniel De Leon’s Industrial Unionism, a pamphlet that argued the primacy of the party over the trade unions. Lenin was undoubtedly aware that this “Red Pope of Revolution” had been purged from the IWW in 1908, precisely the time when Lenin had nearly lost control of Bolshevism because of syndicalist enthusiasms in his own movement. In 1920 Lenin again faced losing control of the Comintern to the same kind of enthusiasms.¹⁵

In early May 1920 Lenin began a furious effort to get his hurriedly written pamphlet published and translated before the second Comintern congress met in July. Meanwhile, a two-man KAPD delegation arrived in Moscow after a perilous voyage in a fishing boat to Murmansk, and found Lenin immediately hostile to their antiparliamentary ideas. They were shown portions of the still unfinished manuscript. On May 5 the completed manuscript arrived at the Petrograd Section of the State Publishing House, and the next day was sent to the printer. Lenin immediately wanted to know how long the printing would take and requested two preprints. He also asked Zinoviev to “hold off printing until the text is corrected.”¹⁶

Even as his book was in press, Lenin continued his research. These included articles from Italian communist newspapers and journals and the latest issue of Communist International. On May 12 Lenin dashed off a supplement to his book, using the new materials acquired through the Comintern’s Petrograd headquarters. He may even have been under pressure to do so. In the main text Lenin wrote that “in 1908 the ‘left’ Bolsheviks were expelled from our Party for stubbornly refusing to understand the necessity of participating in a most reactionary ‘parliament’ “ and that boycotting the Duma had been a “serious mistake.” But in the supplement Lenin wrote that “in 1907–1908 the ‘left’ Bolsheviks at certain times and places agitated among the masses more successfully than we did,” the “we” of Leninism presumably being distinguished from the “they” of left Bolshevism.¹⁷

Lenin had difficulty publishing Materialism and Empiriocriticism in 1909 with either Menshevik or Bolshevik houses. In 1920 he found that Zinoviev was not especially happy with printing Left-Wing Communism for the Comintern. In May 1920 Zinoviev dutifully criticized German syndicalism for encouraging the growth of “bourgeois labor unions.” He agreed with Lenin that the new KAPD was “dragging the movement backwards from revolutionary Marxism to confused, obscure syndicalism.” But Zinoviev did admit that “revolutionary syndicalism and the tactics of the IWW are a step forward” from other trade unions. He promised that the second Comintern congress would “put an end to all syndicalist prejudices on the role of the Communist Party” and would “separate the Communist wheat from the syndicalist weeds.”¹⁸

This sounded like Lenin in 1907: Bolshevism must learn from syndicalism in order to destroy it. Zinoviev was slow in getting Lenin’s book out, and Lenin complained about the delay. By June 12 the Russian edition had been printed, and by June 18 Lenin was able to send out autographed copies. Lenin did not have complete control over the publication of his own book, which was carried out not in Moscow, but in Petrograd, by the leaders (Zinoviev, L. Karakhan, M. Borodin) of the very organization Lenin was attacking for its syndicalism, the Comintern.¹⁹

Lenin made further changes in his book after the Russian edition and before the appearance of French, German, and English translations that summer. Again, he did not have a free hand. He depended on A. M. Heller, an American communist, for gathering from the Italian press “citations against Turati and other reformists” that would “prove their deviation from discipline and decisiveness.” He had to respond to the protest of the Dutch communist D. J. Wijnkoop that he, Lenin, was saddling the entire Dutch party with the sins of the Tribune group and their syndicalism. In response, Lenin replaced the words “Dutch Tribunists” with “certain members of the Dutch Communist Party” and printed Wijnkoop’s letter at the end of the English edition. As late as July 17, 1920, Lenin complained to Kamenev, Borodin, and Radek that the proposed English edition did not faithfully reflect the Russian original, and asked them to make changes in the galleys of all foreign editions. Finally, the English edition appeared on the eve of the congress on July 19 as The Infantile Sickness of the ‘Leftism’ in Communism.²⁰

The Second Comintern Congress

By the time the second Comintern congress convened in July 1920, Lenin’s antisyndicalist views were well known. In an interview with Jacob Friis, a Norwegian member of the Comintern executive, Lenin remarked that “antiparliamentarism is one of the childhood diseases of communism against which I have often had to fight.” Lenin cited his opposition to Bukharin and Radek in 1918. A few days later he attacked an antiparliamentary article by George Lukacs in the Vienna journal Kommunismus as “very leftist and very bad.” Lenin also persuaded the Comintern executive committee that it should denounce KAPD policies as a “capitulation before the views of syndicalism and industrialism which are reactionary.” The committee obligingly resolved that syndicalism was “a step forward only in comparison with the old, musty counter-revolutionary ideology of the Second International,” but a step backwards from Communism.²¹

Trotsky also argued that the party must maintain its control over the labor unions. He told the Comintern congress that the French Communist Party, for example, should “entirely absorb the revolutionary wing of the present Socialist Party, and the revolutionary section of French Syndicalism.” The PCF should dominate the trade unions, because “a bona fide revolutionary syndicalist, like a bona fide revolutionary socialist, must become united in a Communist Party.”²²

Zinoviev, in contrast, was still more favorably inclined toward syndicalism than either Lenin or Trotsky. “The Russian Bolsheviks defined their attitudes toward revolutionary syndicalism already fifteen years ago [1905],” he wrote, “when revolutionary syndicalism was finishing its honeymoon.” Bolshevism had tried to “separate the grain from the chaff and find the wholesome seed in the irresistible protest of the working masses against opportunism, expressing itself in sympathy with revolutionary syndicalism. We must follow the same line now.”

Despite its “vagueness and muddle,” concluded Zinoviev, syndicalism was “healthy.” While the Comintern should struggle against “all syndicalist misconceptions, confusions and prejudices,” it should also ally with the syndicalists because they were “as much enemies of the bourgeois order as we are.” As late as August 1920 it would appear that Zinoviev did not share Lenin’s violent antipathy to syndicalism or “left-wing communism,” a fact which may have helped delay the publication of Lenin’s pamphlet.²³

Foreign syndicalists were still enthusiastic about Soviet Russia. Charles Ashley, an IWW spokesman, urged affiliation with the Comintern because it would lead the “class conscious efforts of the workers to achieve power,” including the Shop Stewards in England and syndicalists in France. Other Wobblies also felt that the organization should join the Comintern. By the end of 1920 the romance was wearing off. Some IWW members returned from Russia to report that Russian nationalism and party authority were more dominant than internationalism and workers’ control. The real childhood disease, wrote one, was now “Radekalism,” the emergence of a new ruling class in Soviet Russia.²⁴

Both the text and context of Lenin’s Leji-Wing Communism suggest that his underlying concern in 1920 was the syndicalist experience of Russian Bolshevism, as much as the control of European communism. Since 1905, Lenin had viewed syndicalism as a spontaneous and violent mood of labor unrest from which Marxists could learn much, but to which they should not lose control. The mood of syndicalism—one big union, the general strike, direct action, economic confrontation, workers’ control— was essential in making a revolution. But in 1920 it was a liability for a besieged party clinging to power against enemies at home and abroad in the midst of a bloody civil war. What Lenin called “left-wing communism” in 1920 was an inheritance of the syndicalism of 1905. Once again, Lenin could not speak openly about a movement from which Bolshevism and the Comintern both continued to draw sustenance.²⁵

Proletkult and the End of Collectivism

The Bolshevik Revolution brought many of Lenin’s errant flock back to the fold. Many were veterans of the underground experience of 1905 and former supporters of Bogdanov. But in the early days of the revolution Lenin’s power was tenuous and he badly needed support wherever he could find it. Thus Krasin quickly assumed a major role in the Commissariat of Foreign Trade, Lunacharsky became the first commissar for public enlightenment, and Bogdanov created his own Proletkult movement. These men were independent personalities who continued to play a role less submissive than Lenin might have desired.

In October 1920 a reunion of sorts occurred at M. S. Olminsky’s apartment in Moscow. In attendance were Lenin, Gorky, Bogdanov, Andreeva, Kamo, and A. M. Ignatiev. The topic was ostensibly literary publication, but the makeup of the group suggests that matters of money may have also been discussed. For these were veterans of the Tiflis Ex and other underground adventures. Kamo, the urbane bandit, was about to get married, with Gorky as his best man. (In July 1922 Kamo died as violently as he had lived, run over on his bicycle by an automobile.) Ignatiev was inventing machine guns for aircraft. In March 1918 Martov openly attacked Bolshevik expropriations before the revolution; his Menshevik newspaper was promptly closed down, and Stalin denounced him for slandering the party. But for thousands of new party members, these embarrasing matters seemed increasingly out of date, and there were more pressing problems to be solved in a world of famine, social collapse, and civil war.²⁶

Bogdanov continued to pursue the collectivist dream outside of the party. In 1917 he was an active member of the Petrograd Soviet, urging it to prepare workers for the coming revolution. He was a proponent of mass mobilization through slogans (“short and simple, so the masses can assimilate them”), but urged support for the provisional government in July, arguing that the soviets did not want to take power. In August 1917 he formed his own national organization, Proletkult, which sponsored art, literature, theater, and cinema across the country by and for workers.²⁷

The Proletarian Culture movement was a mass movement that was not under party control. As such, its days were numbered. But from 1917 to 1920 it played a major role in creating a collectivist revolutionary culture and in rallying support for the new regime. Proletkult theaters were everywhere, even with the Red Army at the front, and spawned a generation of innovative directors, including Vsevolod Meyerhold and Sergei Eisenstein. Bogdanov still envisaged a universal science—the “organized experience of humanity”—that would produce a collectivist world view. He called for a Workers’ University and a Workers’ Encyclopedia. The individualism and authoritarianism of Christianity must give way to the collectivism of proletarian culture. “Christ, if he existed, was undoubtedly a proletarian,” proclaimed Bogdanov.²⁸

Bogdanov continued to work for a collectivist culture, but his relativism was to prove his undoing. Leninism in power was authoritarian and orthodox in its party interpretation of Marxism. Bogdanov argued that truth was still relative, a “tool for living,” neither absolute nor eternal. Together with Bazarov, Bogdanov edited a book on Einstein’s theory of relativity. The sense of building a future grounded on myth pervaded Bogdanov’s writings, undermining by definition any ideology he might have created. Lenin created myth in the name of orthodox truth; Bogdanov created culture in the name of scepticism. In the end he died a victim of his own lifelong search for immortality, experimenting on himself with a new technique for blood transfusion.²⁹

Proletkult had its origins in the years after 1905, and represented an echo of the collectivist and syndicalist tradition we have examined. It was a vision based on the proletariat, not the party, and was therefore intolerable to Lenin. Like syndicalism, it ended as an ephemeral movement and mood, leaving no permanent institutional legacy except its ideas and its culture, unacceptable in a world of socialist realism and party lines.

Kronstadt and the End of Syndicalism

In the years after 1917, syndicalism persisted in a variety of circles and factions that espoused the general idea of workers’ control of factories in the new society. The Workers’ Opposition movement of 1920 was roundly criticized for its syndicalist ideas, and helped precipitate a great debate in the winter of 1920–1921. This debate was made even more significant with the outbreak of armed violence by workers and peasants, soldiers and sailors, against the Bolshevik regime in the name of workers’ control and soviet power—the Kronstadt naval base uprising of March 1921.³⁰

Lenin was particularly disturbed at the popularity of the Workers’ Opposition, led by Alexander Shliapnikov, for minimizing the role of the state. In January 1921 Lenin accused Bukharin of “a clean break with communism and a transition to syndicalism” for his apparent support of Shliapnikov’s views. “Syndicalism,” observed Lenin, “hands over to the mass of non-party workers who are compartmentalized in the industries, the management of their industries, thereby making the party superfluous.” Syndicalism and party control were clearly inconsistent.³¹

“Marxists have been combatting syndicalism all over the world,” Lenin told a congress of miners in Moscow. True revolutionary syndicalists were siding with Soviet Russia. But it would be quite improper for Russian workers to “rush into the arms of syndicalism” and learn “syndicalist nonsense” from groups like the Workers’ Opposition. Bukharin and Shliapnikov represented a “syndicalist deviation” from party orthodoxy. The “syndicalist malaise,” warned Lenin, “must and will be cured.”³²

To Lenin’s outrage and embarrassment, the Kronstadt uprising coincided with the meeting of the tenth party congress in Moscow in March 1921. Clearly syndicalism had gone too far. Lenin fired off a draft resolution on “The Syndicalist and Anarchist Deviation in Our Party” which was adopted by the congress. He argued that it was necessary to “purge the party” of such deviations and to ban all factions. The Workers’ Opposition wanted to set up an All-Russian Congress of Producers; this would mean that the trade unions would elect a national government of a sort. This was “bourgeois counter-revolution,” fumed Lenin. Syndicalism and anarchism could no longer be tolerated. They were “incompatible with membership in the RKP(b).”³³

The tenth party congress marked the end of syndicalism as a significant component of Bolshevism. After 1921 syndicalist ideas were heresies. A deviation, said Lenin, could still be rectified by an “exchange of opinion”; what could not be tolerated was the “propaganda of ideas” by a faction outside the party. Like Proletkult, syndicalism came to an end in 1921 as a collectivist contribution to the Russian Revolution and Bolshevik power. In 1905 collectivism had been essential; now it was superfluous and even dangerous. The party, not workers and intellectuals, was the dominant collective, and in its name all individualism— including that of the collectivists—was suspect.³⁴