The
Group of Democratic Centralism, sometimes called the
Group of 15 or the
Decists was a dissenting faction within the Soviet Communist Party in the early 1920s.
The Group was formed in March 1919 at the 8th Party Congress. It was composed mostly of
BolshevikThe Bolsheviks, originally also Bolshevists were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903...
intellectuals, who criticised the leadership of the Communist Party and
Vladimir LeninVladimir Ilyich Lenin , born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov , was the Bolshevik Leader of the 1917 October Revolution, and the first Head of State of the Soviet Union; in the course of his political career, he used the pseudonyms Lenin, V. I. Lenin, Nikolai Lenin, and N. Lenin...
for excessive centralisation of political power in the party, removal of local party initiative, and rigid control from above within the industry, Party and local administration.
The
Group of Democratic Centralism, sometimes called the
Group of 15 or the
Decists was a dissenting faction within the Soviet Communist Party in the early 1920s.
The Group was formed in March 1919 at the 8th Party Congress. It was composed mostly of
BolshevikThe Bolsheviks, originally also Bolshevists were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903...
intellectuals, who criticised the leadership of the Communist Party and
Vladimir LeninVladimir Ilyich Lenin , born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov , was the Bolshevik Leader of the 1917 October Revolution, and the first Head of State of the Soviet Union; in the course of his political career, he used the pseudonyms Lenin, V. I. Lenin, Nikolai Lenin, and N. Lenin...
for excessive centralisation of political power in the party, removal of local party initiative, and rigid control from above within the industry, Party and local administration. Rather than the dictatorship of the Party which existed, the Group advocated a return to
dictatorship of the proletariatIn Marxism, the dictatorship of the proletariat denotes the transitional socialist State between the capitalist class society and the classless communist society...
.
The group's original leaders were
Old BolshevikOld Bolshevik, old Bolshevik Guard of old Party guard is an unofficial designation for members of the Bolshevik party before the Russian Revolution of 1917, many of whom were either tried and executed by the NKVD during Stalin's purges or died under suspicious circumstances.In 1922 there were...
s Valerian Obolensky, Vladimir Smirnov, Timofei Sapronov, V.N. Maximovsky, M.S. Boguslavsky, A. Z. Kamensky, and Raphail. Their influence within the Party, always limited, peaked at the 9th Party Congress in March-April 1920 when they were given partial support on some issues by senior Communists like
Mikhail TomskyMikhail Pavlovich Tomsky was a factory worker, trade unionist and Bolshevik leader. He was the Soviet leader of the All Russian Central Council of Trade Unions.Tomsky attempted to form a trade union at his factory in St. Petersburg resulting in his dismissal...
and
Konstantin YurenevKonstantin Konstantinovich Yurenev , also known as Konstantin Konstantinovich Krotovsky , was a Soviet politician and diplomat....
. Nonetheless, their proposals were voted down. They were active during the intra-Party "trade union discussion" in late 1920-early 1921 when the Party split into numerous factions, but didn't gather much support and the faction became moribund after the 10th Party Congress in March 1921.
The Group's leaders continued to protest what they saw as a gradual abolition of intra-Party democracy throughout the early 1920s and joined
Leon TrotskyLeon Trotsky , born Leyba Davidov Bronstein , was a Bolshevik revolutionary and Marxist theorist. He was one of the leaders of the Russian October Revolution, second only to Lenin...
's
Left OppositionThe Left Opposition was a faction within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1923 to 1927 headed de facto by Leon Trotsky. The Left Opposition formed as part of the power struggle within the party leadership that began with the Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin's illness and intensified with...
in 1923. In 1926 Sapronov and Smirnov formed the
Group of 15 which joined the
United OppositionThe United Opposition was a group formed in the All-Union Communist Party in 1926 by Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev, and Grigory Zinoviev in opposition to Joseph Stalin...
headed by Trotsky,
Grigory ZinovievGrigory Yevseevich Zinoviev was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a Soviet Communist politician.-Before the 1917 Revolution :Gregory Zinoviev was born in Yelizavetgrad , Ukraine,...
and
Lev KamenevLev Borisovich Kamenev was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a prominent Soviet politician. He was briefly the nominal head of the Soviet state in 1917 and a founding member and later chairman of the ruling Politburo.-Background:Kamenev was born in Moscow, the son of a Jewish railway worker...
. They were expelled from the Communist Party at the 15th Party Congress in December 1927 along with the rest of the United Opposition. Although some of them repented and were re-admitted to the Party in the early 1930s, they were purged and executed on trumped up charges during the
Great PurgeGreat Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin in 1937–1938. It involved a large-scale purge of the Communist Party and Government officials, repression of peasants, Red Army leadership, and the persecution of...
in the late 1930s.