The
Group of Democratic Centralism, sometimes called the
Group of 15, the
Decists, or the
Decemists, was a dissenting faction within the Soviet Communist Party in the early 1920s.
The Group was formed in March 1919 at the
8th Party CongressThe 8th Congress of the Russian Communist Party was held in Moscow 18 - 23 March, 1919.The Congress was attended by 301 voting delegates who represented 313,766 Party members...
. It was composed mostly of
BolshevikThe Bolsheviks, originally also Bolshevists , derived from bol'shinstvo, "majority") 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 was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and communist politician who led the October Revolution of 1917. As leader of the Bolsheviks, he headed the Soviet state during its initial years , as it fought to establish control of Russia in the Russian Civil War and worked to create a...
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 Marxist socio-political thought, the dictatorship of the proletariat refers to a socialist state in which the proletariat, or the working class, have control of political power. The term, coined by Joseph Weydemeyer, was adopted by the founders of Marxism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in the...
.
The group's original leaders were
Old BolshevikOld Bolshevik , also Old Bolshevik Guard or Old Party Guard, was an unofficial designation for those who were members of the Bolshevik party before the Russian Revolution of 1917, many of whom were either tried and executed by the NKVD during Stalin era purges or died under suspicious...
s Valerian Obolensky, Vladimir Smirnov,
Timofei SapronovTimofei Vladimirovich Sapronov was a Russian revolutionary, Old Bolshevik and socialist militant.Whilst working as a house painter Sapronov joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1912. He was active during the Russian Revolution and Russian Civil War in the...
, 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...
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 Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army....
's
Left OppositionThe Left Opposition was a faction within the Bolshevik Party 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 his death in January...
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 , born Ovsei-Gershon Aronovich Radomyslsky Apfelbaum , was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a Soviet Communist politician...
and
Lev KamenevLev Borisovich Kamenev , born Rozenfeld , was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a prominent Soviet politician. He was briefly head of state of the new republic in 1917, and from 1923-24 the acting Premier in the last year of Lenin's life....
. 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 PurgeThe Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938...
in the late 1930s.