History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Encyclopedia
The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
, which evolved out of the Bolshevik
faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party
in 1912, can roughly be divided into the following periods; the early years of the Bolshevik Party in clandestinity and exile, the period of the October Revolution, consolidation of the party as the governing force of the Soviet Union
, the Great Purge
of the 1930s, Khrushchev and Brezhnev periods, the Gorbachev era of reform which eventually led to the break-up of the party in 1991. The history of the regional/republican branches of the party does however differ from the all-Russian/all-Union party on several points.
adversaries. Over twenty Party organizations were represented. In the eyes of the Bolsheviks the conference had, therefore, the significance of a regular Party congress.
In the statement of the conference which announced that the shattered central apparatus of the Party had been restored and a new Central Committee
set up. "Not only have the banner of the Russian Social-Democratic Party, its program and its revolutionary traditions survived, but so has its organization, which persecution may have undermined and weakened, but could never utterly destroy"—the statement of the conference declared. Moreover, the conference declared the Mensheviks expelled from the party. Thus the RSDLP was effectively split, with the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks constituting separate political parties (Both groups would continue to use the name RSDLP. The Bolshevik party added '(bolshevik)' to their name to differentiate themselves from the Mensheviks.)
In its resolution on the reports presented by the local organizations, the conference noted that "energetic work is being conducted everywhere among the Social-Democratic workers with the object of strengthening the local illegal Social-Democratic organizations and groups." The conference noted that the most important rule of Bolshevik tactics in periods of retreat, namely, to combine illegal work with legal work within the various legally existing workers’ societies and unions, was being observed in all the localities.
The Prague Conference elected a Bolshevik Central Committee of the Party, consisting of Vladimir Lenin
, Joseph Stalin
, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Yakov Sverdlov
, Spandaryan
, Goloshchekin and others. Stalin and Sverdlov were elected to the Central Committee in their absence, as they were in exile at the time. Among the elected alternate members of the Central Committee was Mikhail Kalinin
.
For the direction of revolutionary work in Russia a practical centre (the Russian Bureau of the C.C.) was set up with Stalin at its head and including Y. Sverdlov, Spandaryan, S. Ordjonikidze, M. Kalinin and Goloshchekin.
Writing to Maxim Gorky
at the beginning of 1912, on the results of the Prague Conference, Lenin said:
Speaking of the significance of the Prague Conference, Stalin said:
In the summer of 1912, Lenin moved from Paris to Galicia in order to be nearer to Russia. Here he presided over two conferences of members of the Central Committee and leading Party workers, one of which took place in Krakow
at the end of 1912, and the other in Poronino, a small town near Krakow, in the autumn of 1913. These conferences adopted decisions on questions relating to the working-class movement: the rise in the revolutionary movement, the tasks of the Party in connection with the strikes, the strengthening of the illegal organizations, the Social-Democratic group in the Duma
, the Party press, the labour insurance campaign, etc.
(Truth), published in St. Petersburg. It was founded, according to Lenin's instructions, on the initiative of Stalin, Olminsky and Poletayev. Pravda was intended as a legal, mass working-class paper founded simultaneously with the new rise of the revolutionary movement. Its first issue appeared on .
Previous to the appearance of Pravda, the Bolsheviks already had a weekly newspaper called Zvezda, intended for advanced workers. Zvezda had played an important part at the time of the Lena events. It printed a number of political articles by Lenin and Stalin. But the Party felt that with the revolutionary upsurge, a weekly newspaper no longer met the requirements of the Bolshevik Party. According to the analysis of the Party leadership, a daily mass political newspaper designed for the broadest sections of the workers was needed. Thus Pravda was founded.
The tsarist government suppressed Pravda eight times in the space of two and a half years; but each time, with the support of the workers, it reappeared under a new but similar name, e.g., Za Pravdu (For Truth), Put Pravdy (Path of Truth), Trudovaya Pravda (Labour Truth), etc..
Whilst the average circulation of Pravda was 40,000 copies per day, the circulation of Luch
(Ray), the Menshevik daily, did not exceed 15,000 or 16,000.
In Moscow, the party launched Nash Put
as a workers newspaper in September 1913. It was banned after just a few editions were published.
The elections to the Fourth Duma were held in the autumn of 1912. At the beginning of October, the government, dissatisfied with the course of the elections in St. Petersburg, tried to encroach on the electoral rights of the workers in a number of the large factories. In reply, the St. Petersburg Committee of the RSDLP(b), on Stalin's proposal, called upon the workers of the large factories to declare a one-day strike.
Placed in a difficult position, the government was forced to yield, and the workers were able at their meetings to elect whom they wanted. The vast majority of the workers voted for the 'Mandate (Nakaz) of the Workingmen of St. Petersburg to Their Labour Deputy' to their delegates and the deputy, which had been drawn up by Stalin. The Mandate declared that the future actions of the people should take the form of a struggle on two fronts—against the tsarist government and against the liberal bourgeoisie. In the end, RSDLP(b) candidate Badayev was elected to the Duma by the workers of St. Petersburg.
The workers voted in the elections to the Duma separately from other sections of the population (this was known as the worker curia). Of the nine deputies elected from the worker curia, six were members of the RSDLP(b): Badayev, Petrovsky, Muranov, Samoilov, Shagov and Malinovsky (the latter subsequently turned out to be an agentprovocateur). The Bolshevik deputies were elected from the big industrial centres, in which not less than four-fifths of the working class were concentrated. After the election, the RSDLP(b) formed a joint Social-Democratic Duma group together with the Mensheviks (whom had seven seats). In October 1913, after a series of controversies with the Mensheviks, the RSDLP(b) Duma members, on the instructions of the Central Committee of the Party, withdrew from the joint Social-Democratic group and formed an independent Bolshevik Duma group.
In the Duma, the Bolsheviks introduced a bill providing for an 8-hour working day. It was voted down, but had a significant agitational value for the Bolsheviks.
The RSDLP(b) denounced the war as imperialist. Moreover, the party denounced the European Social Democratic parties, who supported the war efforts of their respective countries, as 'social-chauvinists'. From the very outbreak of the war Lenin began to muster forces for the creation of a new International, the Third International. In the manifesto against the war it issued in November 1914, the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party already called for the formation of the Third International in place of the Second International
.
In February 1915, a conference of Socialists of the Entente
countries was held in London. The RSDLP(b) delegate Litvinov, on Lenin’s instructions, spoke at this conference demanding that the Socialists should resign from the national governments of Belgium and France, completely break with the imperialists and refuse to collaborate with them. He demanded that all Socialists should wage a determined struggle against their imperialist governments and condemn the voting of war credits. But no voice in support of Litvinov was raised at this conference.
At the beginning of September 1915 the first conference of internationalists
was held in Zimmerwald
. Lenin called this conference the 'first step' in the development of an international movement against the war. At this conference Lenin formed the Zimmerwald Left
group. But the Lenin felt that within the Zimmerwald Left group only the RSDLP(b) had taken a correct and thoroughly consistent stand against the war.
The Zimmerwald Left group published a magazine in German called the Vorbote (Herald), to which Lenin contributed articles. In 1916 the internationalists succeeded in convening a second conference in the Swiss village of Kienthal. It is known as the Second Zimmerwald Conference. By this time groups of internationalists had been formed in nearly every European country and the cleavage between the internationalist elements and the 'social-chauvinists' had become more sharply defined.
The manifesto drawn up by the Kienthal Conference was the result of an agreement between various conflicting groups; it was an advance on the Zimmerwald Manifesto. But like the Zimmerwald Conference, the Kienthal Conference did not accept the basic principles of the Bolshevik policy, namely, the conversion of the imperialist war into a civil war, the defeat of one's own imperialist government in the war, and the formation of the Third International. Nevertheless, the Kienthal Conference helped to crystallize the internationalist elements of whom the Communist Third International was subsequently formed.
At the beginning of the war, in spite of persecution by the police, the Bolshevik members of the Duma– Badayev, Petrovsky, Muranov, Samoilov and Shagov– visited a number of organizations and addressed them on the policy of the Bolsheviks towards the war and revolution. In November 1914 a conference of the Bolshevik group in the State Duma was convened to discuss policy towards the war. On the third day of the conference all present were arrested. The court sentenced the Bolshevik members of the State Duma to forfeiture of civil rights and banishment to Eastern Siberia. The tsarist government charged them with high treason
.
At this point Lev Kamenev
deviated from the party line. He declared in the court that he did not agree with the party on the question of the war, and to prove this he requested that the Menshevik Jordansky be summoned as witness.
The Bolsheviks campaigned against the War Industry Committees set up to serve the needs of war, and advocated boycott of the elections of 'Workers Groups' of the Committee.
The Bolsheviks also developed extensive activities in the army and navy. The party formed nuclei in the army and navy, at the front and in the rear, and distributed leaflets calling for a fight against the war. In Kronstadt, the Bolsheviks formed a 'Central Collective of the Kronstadt Military Organization' which had close connections with the Petrograd Committee of the Party. A military organization of the Petrograd Party Committee was set up for work among the garrison.
In August 1916, the chief of the Petrograd Okhrana reported that 'in the Kronstadt Collective, things are very well organized, conspiratorially, and its members are all taciturn and cautious people. This Collective also has representatives on shore.'
At the front, the party agitated for fraternization between the soldiers of the warring armies, claiming that the world bourgeoisie was the enemy, and that the war could be ended only by converting the imperialist war into a civil war and turning one's weapons against one's own bourgeoisie and its government. Cases of refusal of army units to take the offensive became more and more frequent. There were already such instances in 1915, and even more in 1916.
Particularly extensive were the activities of the Bolsheviks in the armies on the Northern Front, in the Baltic provinces. At the beginning of 1917 General Nikolai Ruzsky
, Commander of the Army on the Northern Front, informed Headquarters that the Bolsheviks had developed intense revolutionary activities on that front.
and Nizhni Novgorod. In Moscow about one-third of the workers took part in the strike of January 22. A demonstration of two thousand persons on Tverskoi Boulevard was dispersed by mounted police. A demonstration on the Vyborg Chaussée in Petrograd was joined by soldiers. "The idea of a general strike
," the Petrograd police reported, "is daily gaining new followers and is becoming as popular as it was in 1905."
On , a strike broke out at the Putilov Works in Petrograd. On the workers of most of the big factories were on strike. On International Women's Day
, , at the call of the Petrograd Bolshevik Committee, working women came out in the streets to demonstrate against starvation, war and tsardom. The Petrograd workers supported the demonstration of the working women by a city-wide strike movement. The political strike began to grow into a general political demonstration against the tsarist system.
On the demonstration was resumed with even greater vigour. About 200,000 workers were already on strike. On large sections of working-class Petrograd had joined the revolutionary movement. The political strikes in the districts merged into a general political strike of the whole city. Demonstrations and clashes with the police took place everywhere. Slogans were raised like "Down with the tsar!", "Down with the war!", "We want bread!"
On the morning of the political strike and demonstration began to assume the character of an uprising. The workers disarmed police and gendarmes and armed themselves. Nevertheless, the clashes with the police ended with the shooting down of a demonstration on Znamenskaya Square. General Khabalov, Commander of the Petrograd Military Area, announced that the workers must return to work by , otherwise they would be sent to the front. On the tsar gave orders to General Khabalov: "I command
you to put a stop to the disorders in the capital not later than tomorrow." But “to put a stop” to the revolution was no longer possible.
On the 4th Company of the Reserve Battalion of the Pavlovsky Regiment opened fire, not on the workers, however, but on squads of mounted police who were engaged in a skirmish with the workers. A most energetic and persistent drive was made to win over the troops, especially by the working women, who addressed themselves directly to the soldiers, fraternized with them and called upon them to help the people to overthrow the tsarist autocracy
. The practical work of the Bolshevik Party at that time was directed by the Bureau of the Central Committee of the Party which had its quarters in Petrograd and was headed by Vyacheslav Molotov
. On February 26 (March 11) the Bureau of the Central Committee issued a manifesto calling for the continuation of the armed struggle against tsardom and the formation of a Provisional Revolutionary Government.
On the troops in Petrograd refused to fire on the workers and began to line up with the people in revolt. The number of soldiers who had joined the revolt by the morning of March 12 was still no more than 10,000, but by the evening it already exceeded 60,000.
The workers and soldiers who had risen in revolt began to arrest tsarist ministers and generals and to free revolutionaries from jail. The released political prisoner
s joined the revolutionary struggle. In the streets, shots were still being exchanged with police and gendarmes posted with machine guns in the attics of houses. But the troops rapidly went over to the side of the workers, and this decided the fate of the tsarist autocracy. When the news of the victory of the revolution in Petrograd spread to other towns and to the front, the workers and soldiers everywhere began to depose the tsarist officials.
On , the liberal members of the Fourth State Duma, as the result of a backstairs agreement with the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik leaders, set up a Provisional Committee of the State Duma, headed by Rodzyanko, the President of the Duma, a landlord and a monarchist. And a few days later, the Provisional Committee of the State Duma and the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik leaders of the Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, acting secretly from the Bolsheviks, came to an agreement to form a new provisional government of Russia, headed by Prince Lvov. The Provisional Government included Milyukov, the head of the Constitutional-Democrats, Guchkov, the head of the Octobrists and the Socialist-Revolutionary Kerensky amongst others. The Bolsheviks condemned the new provisional government as 'imperialist'.
In the new political atmosphere after the Revolution, the party resumed publishing of legal journals. It resumed the publication of its legal periodicals. Pravda appeared in Petrograd five days after the February Revolution, and Sotsial-Demokrat in Moscow a few days later.
to Socialism. Furthermore Lenin suggested discarding the term 'Social Democrat' and replacing it with 'Communist'. He also repeated the call for a new, Third International. The Theses were presented at a party meeting in Petrograd, and subsequently at a meeting of both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in the same city.
On April 14 a Petrograd City Conference of Bolsheviks was held. The conference approved Lenin's theses and made them the basis of its work. Within a short while the local organizations of the Party had also approved Lenin's theses. Opponents of Lenin's these included Kamenev, Rykov and Pyatakov.
The more outspoken counter-revolutionaries, like General Kornilov, demanded that fire be opened on the demonstrators, and even gave orders to that effect. But the troops refused to carry out the orders.
During the demonstration, a small group of members of the Petrograd Party Committee (Bagdatyev and others) issued a slogan demanding the immediate overthrow of the Provisional Government. The Central Committee of the party sharply condemned the conduct this grouping as adventurists, considering this slogan untimely and incorrect, a slogan that hampered the Party in its efforts to win over a majority in the Soviets and ran counter to the party line of a peaceful development of the revolution.
The All-Russian April Conference showed that the Party was growing by leaps and bounds. The conference was attended by 133 delegates with vote and by 18 with voice but no vote. They represented 80,000 organized members of the Party. The conference discussed and laid down the Party line on all basic questions of the war and revolution: the current situation, the war, the Provisional Government, the Soviets, the agrarian question, the national question, etc.
In his report, Lenin elaborated the principles he had already set forth in the April Theses. The task of the Party was to effect the transition from the first stage of the revolution, "which placed the power in the hands of the bourgeoisie . . . to the second stage, which must place the power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest strata of the peasantry" (Lenin). The course the Party should take was to prepare for the Socialist revolution. The immediate task of the Party was set forth by Lenin in the slogan: "All power to the Soviets!"
The slogan, "All power to the Soviets!" meant that it was necessary to put an end to the dual power, that is, the division of power between the Provisional Government and the Soviets, to transfer the whole power to the Soviets, and to drive the representatives of the landlords and capitalists out of the organs of government.
The conference resolved that the party should agitate towards the people that the Provisional Government represented the landlords and the bourgeoisie, as well as denouncing the policy of cooperation of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks.
The April Conference also discussed the agrarian and national questions. In connection with Lenin's report on the agrarian question, the
conference adopted a resolution calling for the confiscation of the landed estates, which were to be placed at the disposal of the peasant committees, and for the nationalization of all the land.
Regarding the national question, Lenin and Stalin declared that the party must support the national liberation movements of oppressed peoples against imperialism. Consequently, the party advocated the right of nations to self-determination even to the point of secession and formation of independent states.
Kamenev and Rykov opposed Lenin at the Conference. Echoing the Mensheviks, they asserted that Russia was not ripe for a Socialist revolution, and that only a bourgeois republic was possible in Russia. They recommended the Party and the working class to confine themselves to 'controlling' the Provisional Government.
Zinoviev, too, opposed Lenin at the conference; it was on the question whether the Bolshevik Party should remain within the Zimmerwald alliance, or break with it and form a new International. Lenin insisted that as the years of war had shown, while this alliance carried on propaganda for peace, it did not actually break with the bourgeois partisans of the war. Lenin therefore called for immediate withdrawal from this alliance and on the formation of a new, Communist International. Zinoviev proposed that the Party should have remained within the Zimmerwald alliance. Lenin condemned Zinoviev’s proposal and called his tactics 'archopportunist and pernicious.'
In addition to the work in the Soviets, the Bolsheviks carried on extensive activities in the trade unions and in the factory committees. Particularly extensive was the work of the Bolsheviks in the army. Military organizations began to arise everywhere. The Bolsheviks worked at the front and in the rear to organize the soldiers and sailors. A particularly important part in making the soldiers active revolutionaries was played at the front by the Bolshevik newspaper, Okopnaya Pravda (Trench Truth).
A Petrograd Conference of Factory Committees was held from May 30 to June 3, 1917. At this conference three-quarters of the delegates already supported the Bolsheviks. Almost the entire Petrograd proletariat supported the Bolshevik slogan—"All power to the Soviets!"
On June 3 (16), 1917, the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets met. The Bolsheviks were still in the minority in the Soviets; they had a little over 100 delegates at this congress, compared with 700 or 800 Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries and others. At the First Congress of Soviets, the Bolsheviks insistently stressed the consequences of compromise with the bourgeoisie and exposed the imperialist character of the war. Lenin made a speech at the congress in which he declared that 'only a government of Soviets could give bread to the working people, land to the peasants, secure peace and lead the country out of chaos'.
A mass campaign was being conducted at that time in the working-class districts of Petrograd for the organization of a demonstration and for the presentation of demands to the Congress of Soviets. However, the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet decided to call a demonstration for June 18 (July 1). The Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries expected that the demonstration would take place under anti-Bolshevik slogans. The Bolshevik Party began energetic preparations for this demonstration. Stalin wrote in Pravda that "...it is our task to make sure that the demonstration in Petrograd on June 18 takes place under our revolutionary slogans." In the rally the Bolshevik slogans prevailed over Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary ones.
District of Petrograd. They continued all day. The separate demonstrations grew into a huge general armed demonstration demanding the transfer of power to the Soviets. The party was opposed to armed action at that time, for it considered that the revolutionary crisis had not yet matured, that the army and the provinces were not yet prepared to support an uprising in the capital, and that an isolated and premature rising might only make it easier for the counter-revolutionaries to crush the vanguard of the revolution. But when it became obviously impossible to keep the masses from demonstrating, the party resolved to participate in the demonstration. Hundreds of thousands of men and women marched to the headquarters of the Petrograd Soviet and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets, where they demanded that the Soviets take
the power into their own hands, break with the bourgeoisie, and pursue an active peace policy. Notwithstanding the pacific character of the demonstration, units—detachments of officers and cadets were brought out against it. Many were killed in the skirmishes.
The ensuing crackdown resulted in the Kerensky government ordering the arrest of the Bolshevik leadership on July 19. Lenin escaped capture, went into hiding, and wrote State and Revolution
, which outlined his ideas for a socialist government.
The items on the congress agenda were:
(1) Report by the Organising Bureau;
(2) Report by the C.C. R.S.D.L.P.(B.);
(3) Reports from Local Organisations;
(4) Current Situation: (a) The War and the International Situation; (b) The Political and Economic Situation;
(5) Revision of the Programme;
(6) The Organisational Question;
(7) Elections to the Constituent Assembly;
(8) The International;
(9) Unification of the Party;
(10) The Trade Union Movement;
(11) Elections;
(12) Miscellaneous.
The congress also discussed the question whether Lenin should appear in court.
The congress heard the political report of the Central Committee and the report on the political situation, both of which were presented by Stalin on behalf of the Central Committee. The resolution on the political situation was based on Lenin's guiding recommendations. It appraised the political situation in the country following the July events, and set out the Party's political line at the new stage of the revolution. The congress declared that the peaceful development of the revolution was over and that power in the country had virtually passed into the hands of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie. In keeping with Lenin's recommendations, it temporarily withdrew the slogan "All Power to the Soviets", because just then the Soviets, led by the Mensheviks and S.R.s, were an appendage to the counter-revolutionary Provisional Government. This withdrawal did not imply renunciation of the Soviets as the political form of proletarian dictatorship. The congress advanced the slogan of fighting for the complete abolition of the dictatorship of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie and for the proletariat winning power in alliance with the peasant poor, through an armed uprising.
The congress rejected the proposals put forward by Preohrazhensky, who contended that the socialist revolution could not win in Russia and that Russia could not take the socialist road unless a proletarian revolution was accomplished in the West. The congress also rebuffed Bukharin, who opposed the Party's course for the socialist revolution, saying that the peasants formed a bloc with the bourgeoisie and would refuse to follow the working class.
The congress decisions laid special emphasis on Lenin's thesis of the alliance of the proletariat and the peasant poor as the paramount condition for the victory of the socialist revolution. "It is only the revolutionary proletariat," said the resolution "The Political Situation", "that can accomplish this task—a task set by the new upswing-provided it is supported by the peasant poor"
The question whether Lenin should appear in court was one of the first items discussed by the congress. Stalin, who touched on it in replying to the debate on the Central Committee's political activity, declared in favour of Lenin appearing in court, on the understanding that Lenin's personal safety would be guaranteed and the trial conducted on democratic lines. Stalin moved a resolution to that effect.
V. Volodarsky, I. Bezrabotny (D. Z. Manuilsky) and M. Lashevich spoke in favour of Lenin appearing in court (provided his safety was guaranteed, the trial was public and representatives of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets attended it), and moved a resolution in that sense.
G. K. Orjonikidze countered Stalin's position that a bourgeious court could give fair trial to a revolutionary leader of the working class. He stressed that Lenin must under no circumstances be delivered into the hands of the investigators. F. E. Dzerzhinsky, N. A. Skrypnik and others spoke against Lenin appearing in court. "We must say clearly and explicitly," said Dzerzhinsky, "that those comrades who advised Lenin not to allow himself to be arrested did well. We must make clear to all comrades that we do not trust the Provisional Government and the bourgeoisie and will not deliver Lenin until justice triumphs, that is, until that disgraceful trial is called off."
After much debate, the Sixth Party Congress unanimously passed a resolution against Lenin appearing in court, expressed its "emphatic protest against the outrageous persecution of revolutionary proletarian leaders by the public prosecutor, spies and police", and sent Lenin a message of greeting.
Y. M. Sverdlov reported on the Central Committee's organising activity. He pointed out that in the three months that had passed since the Seventh (April) All-Russia Conference the Party membership had trebled, increasing from 80,000 to 240,000, and the number of Party organisations had grown from 78 to 162. The congress heard nineteen reports from local organisations. The speakers stressed the vast amount of work being carried on by local organisations and the steadily growing influence of the Bolsheviks among the working people.
The congress discussed and approved the Party's economic platform, which envisaged nationalisation and centralisation of the banks, nationalisation of large-scale industry, confiscation of the landed estates and nationalisation of all the lands in the country, establishment of workers' control over production and distribution, organisation of proper exchange between town and country, and other revolutionary measures.
The congress adopted the new Party Rules. The first clause of the Rules, dealing with membership, was supplemented with the stipulation that Party members should submit to all Party decisions. The new provision was introduced that persons seeking admission should present recommendations from two Party members and that their admission should be subject to approval by the general meeting of the organisation concerned. The Rules stressed that all Party organisations should be based on the principles of democratic centralism. Party congresses were to be convened once a year and plenary meetings of the Central Committee, not less than once in two months.
The congress reaffirmed the decision of the Seventh Conference of the RSDLP(b) on the need to revise the Party Programme in the sense indicated by the conference. It found it necessary to call a congress before long for the express purpose of adopting a new Programme, and instructed the Central Committee and all Party organisations to begin discussing a revision of the Party Programme, preparatory to the congress.
The congress resolution "Youth Leagues" said it was a pressing task to contribute to the formation of socialist class organisations of young workers, and obliged Party organisations to devote the greatest attention to this task. In discussing the item "The Trade Union Movement", the congress criticised the theory of trade union neutrality and pointed out that the trade unions had a vital interest in carrying the revolution through to a victorious end and that they could accomplish the tasks facing Russia's working class provided they remained militant class organisations recognising the political leadership of the Bolshevik Party.
The congress made all its decisions subordinate to the chief objective, which was to train the working class and the peasant poor for an armed uprising to bring about the victory of the socialist revolution. In a manifesto addressed to all working people, all workers, soldiers and peasants of Russia, it called on them to gather strength and prepare, under the banners of the Bolshevik Party, for the decisive battle with the bourgeoisie.
Among those the congress elected to the Central Committee were V. I. Lenin, Y. A. Berzin, A. S. Bubnov, F. E. Dzerzhinsky, A. M. Kollontai, V. P. Milyutin, M. K. Muranov, V. P. Nogin, F. A. Sergeyev (Artyom), S. G. Shahumyan, J. V. Stalin, Y. M. Sverdlov and M. S. Uritsky.
At the congress the Inter-District Organisation of United Social-Democrats, a Menshevik dissident group to which Leon Trotsky
belonged, joined the party. At the time of the merger the Inter-District Organisation of United Social-Democrats had 4000 members across Russia.
led by General Kornilov, and offered arms to those who would defend St. Petersburg against Kornilov. The Bolsheviks enlisted a 25,000 strong militia
to defend St. Petersburg from attack, and reached out to Kornilov's troops, urging them not to attack. The troops stood down and the rebellion fizzled. Kornilov was taken into custody. However, the Bolsheviks did not return their arms, and Kerensky succeeded only in strengthening the Bolshevik position.
During this period, the situation of dual power
endured. While the legislature and provisional government were controlled by Kerensky in coalition with the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionary Party, the workers' and soldiers' soviets were increasingly under the control of the Bolsheviks, who now had what amounted to their own private army. Factories, mills and military units held new elections and sent to the Soviets representatives of the RSDLP(b) in place of Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. On August 31, the day following the victory over Kornilov, the Petrograd Soviet endorsed the Bolshevik policy. The old Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary Presidium of the Petrograd Soviet, headed by Chkheidze, resigned, thus clearing the way for the Bolsheviks. On September 5, the Moscow Soviet of Workers’ Deputies went over to the Bolsheviks. The Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik Presidium of the Moscow Soviet also resigned and left the way clear for the Bolsheviks. Encouraged by the expansion of the influence within the Soviets the party, through its representatives with the Soviets, was able to call for a Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets in the second half of October 1917.
The RSDLP(b) Central Committee spent September and October 1917 debating whether they should use parliamentary methods or whether they should seize power by force. With Lenin in hiding in Finland
, the parliamentary line– advocated by Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev
and Rykov against Joseph Stalin
and Leon Trotsky
– at first prevailed. The Bolsheviks participated in the quasiparliamentary bodies convened by the Provisional Government, the All-Russian Democratic Conference and the smaller, more permanent Pre-Parliament.
Lenin sent numerous letters to the Central Committee and to St. Petersburg party activists urging them to abandon the parliamentary path and overthrow the Provisional Government by means of an insurrection. In his articles and letters Lenin outlined a detailed plan for the uprising showing how the army units, the navy and the Red Guards would be used, what key positions in Petrograd would be seized in order to ensure the success of the uprising, and so forth.
On October 7, Lenin secretly arrived in Petrograd from Finland. On the same day the balance of power within the Central Committee shifted in favor of the insurrection in early October, resulting in the party delegation withdrawing from the Pre-Parliament.
On October 10 the meeting of the Central Committee of the Party took place at which it was decided to launch the armed uprising within the next few days. The resolution of the Central Committee of the Party, drafted by Lenin, stated:
(Lenin, Selected Works, Vol. VI, p. 303.)
Two members of the Central Committee, Zinoviev and Kamenev, spoke and voted against this decision. Although at this meeting Trotsky did not vote against the resolution directly, he moved an amendment proposing that the uprising should not be started before the Second Congress of Soviets met.
readiness to support the uprising in Petrograd.
On the instructions of the Central Committee of the Party, a Revolutionary Military Committee of the Petrograd Soviet was set up. This body became the legally functioning headquarters of the uprising.
On October 16 an enlarged meeting of the Central Committee of the Party was held. This meeting elected a Party Centre, headed by Stalin, to direct the uprising. This Party Centre was the leading core of the Revolutionary Military Committee of the Petrograd Soviet and had practical direction of the whole uprising.
At the meeting of the Central Committee Zinoviev and Kamenev again opposed the uprising. Meeting with a rebuff, they came out openly in the press against the uprising, against the Party. On October 18 the Menshevik newspaper, Novaya Zhizn
, printed a statement by Kamenev and Zinoviev declaring that the Bolsheviks were making preparations for an uprising, and that they (Kamenev and Zinoviev) considered it an adventurous gamble. Lenin wrote in this connection: "Kamenev and Zinoviev have betrayed the decision of the Central Committee of their Party on the armed uprising to Rodzyanko and Kerensky." Lenin put before the Central Committee the question of Zinoviev's and Kamenev's expulsion from the party for breaching party discipline
, having disclosed the secret plans for an armed insurrection.
On October 21 the party sent commissars of the Revolutionary Military Committee to all revolutionary army units. Throughout the remaining days before the uprising energetic preparations for action were made in the army units and in the mills and factories. Precise instructions were also issued to the warships Aurora and Zarya Svobody. Wary of a preempitive counterattack of the Kerensky government, the Central Committee of the party decided to initiate the uprsing before the appointed time, and set its date for the day before the opening of the Second Congress of Soviets.
and revolutionary soldiers pressed back the armoured cars and placed a reinforced guard over the printing plant and the Rabochy Put editorial offices. Towards 11 am Rabochy Put came out with a call for the overthrow of the Provisional Government. Simultaneously, on the instructions of the Party Centre of the uprising, detachments of revolutionary soldiers and Red Guards were rushed to the Bolshevik headquarters in the Smolny Institute. Thus the uprising had begun.
On the night of October 24 Lenin arrived at the Smolny Institute and assumed personal direction of the uprising. During that night revolutionary units of the army and detachments of the Red Guard kept arriving at the Smolny. The Bolsheviks directed them to the centre of the capital, to surround the Winter Palace, where the Provisional Government had entrenched itself.
On October 25 (November 7), Red Guards and revolutionary troops occupied the railway stations, post office, telegraph office, the Ministries and the State Bank. The Pre-parliament was declared dissolved. The Smolny, the headquarters of the Petrograd Soviet and of the Bolshevik Central Committee, became the headquarters of the revolution, from which fighting orders emanated. The uprising also included the navy forces. The cruise ship Aurora turned its guns on the Winter Palace.
On October 25 (November 7) the Bolsheviks issued a manifesto 'To the Citizens of Russia' announcing that the Provisional Government had been deposed and that state power had passed into the hands of the Soviets. The Provisional Government had taken refuge in the Winter Palace under the protection of cadets and shock battalions. On the night of October 25 the Bolsheviks took the Winter Palace by storm and arrested the Provisional Government. At this point Petrograd was under the authority of the Bolshevik Party.
On the night of October 26 (November 8) the Second Congress of Soviets adopted the Decree on Peace. The congress called upon the belligerent countries to conclude an immediate armistice for a period of not less than three months to permit negotiations for peace to put an end to the ongoing World War.
While addressing itself to the governments and peoples of all the belligerent countries, the congress at the same time appealed to 'the class-conscious workers of the three most advanced nations of mankind and the largest states participating in the present war, namely, Great Britain, France and Germany.' It called upon these workers to help 'to bring to a successful conclusion the cause of peace, and at the same time the cause of the emancipation of the toiling and exploited masses of the population from all forms of slavery and all forms of exploitation.'
That same night the Second Congress of Soviets adopted the Decree on Land, which proclaimed that 'landlord ownership of land is abolished forthwith without compensation.' The basis adopted for this agrarian law was a Mandate (Nakaz) of the peasantry, compiled from 242 mandates of peasants of various localities. In accordance with this Mandate private ownership of land was to be abolished forever and replaced by public, or state ownership of the land. The lands of the landlords, of the tsar's family and of the monasteries were to be turned over to all the toilers. By this decree the peasantry received over 400,000,000 acres (1,600,000 km²) of land that had formerly belonged to the landlords, the bourgeoisie, the tsar's family, the monasteries and the churches. Moreover, the peasants were released from paying rent to the landlords, which had amounted to about 500,000,000 gold rubles annually.
All mineral resources (oil, coal, ores, etc.), forests and waters were declared to be the property of the people.
Lastly, Congress established a new government called the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom). Lenin became the Chairman
of the new government, literally Premier, Trotsky became the first People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and other Bolshevik leaders took over other government ministries, which were known as "commissariats" until 1946.
. Lenin personally directed the suppression of the anti-Soviet mutiny.
In Moghilev, at the General Headquarters of the Army, General Dukhonin, the Commander-in-Chief, also attempted a mutiny. When the Soviet Government instructed him to start immediate negotiations for an armistice with the German Command, he refused to obey. Thereupon Dukhonin was dismissed by order of the Soviet Government. The General Headquarters was broken up and Dukhonin himself was killed by the soldiers, who had risen against him.
That same day, November 17, Nogin, in his own name and in the names of Rykov, V. Milyutin, Teodorovich, A. Shlyapnikov, D. Ryazanov, Yurenev and Larin, members of the Council of People's Commissars, announced their disagreement with the policy of the Central Committee of the Party and their resignation from the Council of People’s Commissars. The Central Committee of the party branded them as 'deserters' from the revolution and 'accomplices of the bourgeoisie'.
, who had a significant influence in the countryside, initially sided with the Bolsheviks. The Congress of Peasant
Soviets which took place in November 1917 endorsed the Soviet Government. An agreement was reached between the RSDLP(b) and the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries and several of the Left SR leaders were given posts in the Council of People’s Commissars (Kolegayev, Spiridonova, Proshyan and Steinberg). However, this agreement lasted only until the signing of the Peace of Brest-Litovsk and the formation of the Poor Peasants Committees, when a deep cleavage took place among the peasantry. At this point the Left SRs sided with the more affluent peasants and initiated a revolt against Soviet power. The revolt was suppressed by the Soviet Government.
Large sectors of the Russian political spectrum, from the Mensheviks and Socialist-
Revolutionaries to the Whiteguards, opposed the negotiation policy of the Soviet Government. Moreover, a sector within the party had their doubts about the line of negotiations. Trotsky on one hand and the 'Left Communists' (led by Bukharin, a grouping also including Radek and Pyatakov) argued that the war should have been continued.
On February 10, 1918, the peace negotiations in Brest-Litovsk were broken off. Although Lenin and Stalin, in the name of the Central Committee of the party, had insisted that peace be signed, Trotsky, who was chairman of the Soviet delegation at Brest-Litovsk, announced that the Soviet Republic refused to conclude peace on the terms proposed by Germany. Fighting reassumed, and the German forces made rapid advances into Russian territory.
At this juncture the RSDLP(b) and the Soviet Government issued the call– 'The Socialist fatherland is in danger!', urging the working class to join the Red Army.
On February 18, 1918, the Central Committee of the Party had approved Lenin's proposal to send a telegram to the German government offering to conclude an immediate peace. However, the German offensive was maintained for a few days. The German government expressed its willingness to sign peace on February 22.
Within the party, the debates continued. Bukharin and Trotsky, Lenin declared, 'actually helped the German imperialists and hindered the growth and development of the revolution in Germany.' On February 23, the Central Committee decided to accept the terms of the German Command and to sign the peace treaty. Large territories, including Estonia, Latvia and Poland were passed over to German control, and Ukraine was converted into a separate state under German dominance. Moreover, the Soviet Government undertook to pay an indemnity to the Germans.
The Moscow Regional Bureau of the Party, of which the 'Left Communists' (Bukharin, Ossinsky, Yakovleva, Stukov and Mantsev had temporarily seized control, passed a resolution of no-confidence in the Central Committee. The Bureau declared that it considered 'a split in the Party in the very near future scarcely avoidable.' Moreover the resolution declared that 'In the interests of the international revolution, we consider it expedient to consent to the possible loss of the Soviet power, which has now become purely formal.' Lenin branded this decision as 'strange and monstrous.'
Later official Soviet history stated that this move on behalf of Trotsky, Bukharin and their followers had been part of a conspiracy to break the Brest-Litovsk agreement and to overthrow Lenin.
Reporting at this congress on the Brest-Litovsk Peace, Lenin said that '...the severe crisis which our Party is now experiencing, owing to the formation of a Left opposition within it, is one of the gravest crises the Russian revolution has experienced.'
The resolution submitted by Lenin on the subject of the Brest-Litovsk Peace was adopted by 30 votes against 12, with 4 abstentions. On the day following the adoption of this resolution, Lenin wrote an article entitled 'A Distressful Peace', in which he said:
Lenin, Collected Works, Russ. ed., Vol. XXII, p. 288.
In its resolution, the congress declared that further military attacks on the Soviet Republic were inevitable, and that therefore the congress considered it the fundamental task of the Party to adopt the most resolute measures to organize the Red Army and to introduce universal military training.
Moreover, the congress decided to change the name of the party to Russian Communist Party (bolsheviks), in order to differentiate it from the Mensheviks and other remaining factions originating from the RSDLP.
At the congress a special commission, which included Lenin and Stalin, was elected to draw up a new Party program, Lenin's draft program having been accepted as a basis.
went to the front. In the propaganda of the party it was a war for the fatherland, a war against the foreign invaders and against the revolts of the exploiting classes whom the revolution had overthrown. The Council of Workers' and Peasants' Defence, organized by Lenin, directed the work of supplying the front with reinforcements, food, clothing and arms.
At this juncture the Socialist-Revolutionaries, began assassinating leading party members. They killed Uritsky and Volodarsky, and had made an attempt on the life of Lenin. Following this, the 'Red terror
' was unleashed upon them and throughout Russia the Socialist-Revolutionaries were crushed.
The party took active part in the military affairs, through the Political Commissars within the Red Army. The Political Commissats were responsible for political and ideological training with the army units.
Faced with a situation of extreme material hardships, the Soviet Government introduced the policies of War Communism
. It took under its control the middle-sized and small industries, in addition to large-scale industry, so as to accumulate goods for the supply of the army and the agricultural population. It introduced a state monopoly of the grain trade, prohibited private trading in grain and established the surplus-appropriation system, under which all surplus produce in the hands of the peasants was to be registered and acquired by the state at fixed prices, so as to accumulate stores of grain for the provisioning of the army and the workers. Lastly, it introduced universal labour service for all classes. In the viewpoint of the party, the principle of 'He who does not work, neither shall he eat' was put into practice.
The congress adopted a new Party Program. This program included a description of capitalism and imperialism, and compared two systems of state– the bourgeois-democratic system and the Soviet system. It specified the specific tasks of the Party in the struggle for socialism: completion of the expropriation of the bourgeoisie; administration of the economic life of the country in accordance with a single socialist plan; participation of the trade unions in the organization of the national economy; socialist labour discipline; utilization of bourgeois experts in the economic field under the control of Soviet bodies; gradual and systematic enlistment of the middle peasantry in the work of socialist construction.
The congress adopted Lenin's proposal to include in the program in addition to a definition of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism, the description of industrial capitalism and simple commodity production contained in the old program adopted at the Second Party Congress (of the RSDLP). Lenin considered it essential that the program should take account of the complexity of the economic system and note the existence of diverse economic formations in the country, including small commodity production, as represented by the middle peasants.
Bukharin, however, proposed that the clauses dealing with capitalism, small commodity production, the economy of the middle peasantry, should have been left out of the program.
Bukharin and Pyatakov differed with Lenin on the national question. Bukharin and Pyatakov argued against the inclusion in the program of a clause on the right of nations to self-determination; claiming that the slogan that would hinder the victory of the proletarian revolution and the union of the proletarians of different nationalities. Lenin refuted the standpoints of Bukharin and Pyatakov.
An important place in the deliberations of the Eighth Congress was devoted to policy towards the middle peasants. The Decree on the Land had resulted in a steady growth in the number of middle peasants, who now comprised the majority of the peasant population. In the analysis of the party, the attitude and conduct of the middle peasantry was of momentous importance for the fate of the Civil War and Socialist construction. The analysis stipulated that the outcome of the Civil War would largely depended on which way the middle peasantry would swing, which group would win its allegiance.
The new policy towards the middle peasant proclaimed by Lenin at the Eighth Congress required that the proletariat should rely on the poor peasant, maintain a stable alliance with the middle peasant and fight against the 'kulak
' (rich peasant). The policy of the party before the Eighth Congress was in general one of neutralizing the middle peasant. This meant that the Party strove to prevent the middle peasant from siding with the kulak and with the bourgeoisie in general. But now this was not enough. The Eighth Congress passed from a policy of neutralization of the middle peasantry to a policy of stable alliance with them for the purpose of the struggle against the Whites and foreign intervention.
The problems connected with the building up of the Red Army held a special place in the deliberations of the congress, where the so called 'Military Opposition' appeared in the field. This 'Military Opposition' comprised a number of former members of the now shattered group of 'Left Communists'; but it also included some party cadres who had never participated in any oppositional activity, but were dissatisfied with the way Trotsky was conducting the affairs of the army. The 'Military Opposition' was hostile to Trotsky on the grounds that he relied on military experts of the old tsarist army, enemies in the eyes of the 'Military Opposition'.
Lenin and Stalin condemned the 'Military Opposition', because it defended the survival of the guerrilla mode of operations and resisted the creation of a regular Red Army, the utilization of the military experts of the old army and the establishment of strict military discipline. In his response to the 'Military Opposition', Stalin said:
A Military Commission was set up at the congress. The motivation behind this decision was to strengthen the Red Army and to bring it still closer to the party.
The congress further discussed party and Soviet affairs and the guiding role of the party in the Soviets. During the debate on the latter question the congress repudiated the view of the Sapronov-Ossinsky group which held that the Party should not guide the work of the Soviets.
Lastly, in view of the huge influx of new members into the Party, the congress outlined measures to improve the social composition of the party and decided to conduct a re-registration of its members. This initiated the first purge of the Party ranks.
On March 25, 1919, the Central Committee elected by the 8th congress appointed a Politburo consisting of Kamenev, N. Krestinsky, Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky, and with Bukharin, Zinovyev and Kalinin as candidate members.
Special attention was devoted by the congress to a single economic plan for the restoration, in the first place, of the railways, the fuel industry and the iron and steel industry. The major item in this plan was a project for the electrification of the country, which Lenin advanced as 'a great program for the next ten or twenty years'. This formed the basis of the plan of the State Commission for the Electrification of Russia (GOELRO).
The congress rejected the views of agroup which called itself the Group of Democratic Centralism
and was opposed to one-man management and the undivided responsibility of industrial directors. It advocated unrestricted 'group management' under which nobody would be personally responsible for the administration of industry. The chief figures in this group were Sapronov, Ossinsky and Y. Smirnov. They were supported at the congress by Rykov and Tomsky.
merged with the Hummat Party
, the Adalat Party and the Ahrar Party of Iran, forming the Communist Party of Azerbaijan.
had decided that there should be only one communist party in every country, the Party of Revolutionary Communism
dissolved itself, and its members joined the RCP(b).
, and in 1922 the Communist Party became the only legal political party.
In 1922 the Jewish Communist Party (Poalei Zion) (EKP) merged into the Yevsektsiya
, the Jewish section of the party. This was one of two Poalei Zion (left zionists
) groupings active in Russia at the time. The other, the Jewish Communist Labour Party (Poalei Zion)
, was prohibited in 1928.
in April 1922.
The next month Lenin suffered his first stroke and the question of who would be his successor became paramount as his health deteriorated. Lenin's role in government declined. He suffered a second stroke in December 1922 and the Politburo
ordered that he be kept in isolation. His third stroke in March 1923 left him bedridden and unable to speak though he was still able to communicate through writing. Lenin finally died as the result of a fourth stroke in January 1924.
As a result of Lenin's illness, the position of general secretary became more important than had originally been envisioned and Stalin's power grew. Following Lenin's third stroke a troika
made up of Stalin, Zinoviev
and Kamenev emerged to take day to day leadership of the party and the country and try to block Trotsky from taking power. Lenin, however, had become increasingly uneasy about Stalin and, following his December 1922 stroke dictated a letter to the party criticising him and urging his removal as general secretary. Stalin was aware of Lenin's Testament
and acted to keep Lenin in isolation for health reasons and increase his control over the party apparatus.
Zinoviev and Bukharin became concerned about Stalin's increasing power and proposed that the Orgburo
which Stalin, but no other members of the Politburo
, be abolished and that Zinoviev and Trotsky be added to the party secretariat thus diminishing Stalin's role as general secretary. Stalin reacted furiously and the Orgburo was retained but Bukharin, Trotsky and Zinoviev
were added to the body.
Due to growing political differences with Trotsky and his Left Opposition
in the fall of 1923, the troika of Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev reunited. At the Twelfth Party Congress in 1923, Trotsky failed to use Lenin's Testament
as a tool against Stalin for fear of endangering the stability of the party.
Lenin died in January 1924 and in May his Testament was read aloud at the Central Committee
but Zinoviev and Kamenev argued that Lenin's objections had proven groundless and that Stalin should remain General Secretary. The Central Committee decided not to publish the testament.
Meanwhile the campaign against Trotsky intensified and he was removed from the position of People's Commissar of War before the end of the year. In 1925, Trotsky was denounced for his essay Lessons of October which criticised Zinoviev and Kamenev for initially opposing Lenin's plans for an insurrection in 1917. Trotsky was also denounced for his theory of permanent revolution
which contradicted Stalin's position that socialism could be built in one country
, Russia, without a worldwide revolution. As the prospects for a revolution in Europe, particularly Germany, became increasingly dim through the 1920s, Trotsky's theoretical position began to look increasingly pessimistic as far as the success of Russian socialism was concerned.
With the resignation of Trotsky as War Commissar the unity of the troika began to unravel. Zinoviev and Kamenev again began to fear Stalin's power and felt that their positions were threatened. Stalin moved to form an alliance with Bukharin and his allies on the right of the party who supported the New Economic Policy
and encouraged a slowdown in industrialisation efforts and a move towards encouraging the peasants to increase production via market incentives. Zinoviev and Kamenev denounced this policy as a return to capitalism. The conflict erupted at the Fourteenth Party Congress held in December 1925 with Zinoviev and Kamenev now protesting against the dictatorial policies of Stalin and trying to revive the issue of Lenin's Testament
which they had previously buried. Stalin now used Trotsky's previous criticisms of Zinoviev and Kamenev to defeat and demote them and bring in allies like Molotov
, Voroshilov
and Mikhail Kalinin
. Trotsky was dropped from the politburo entirely in 1926. The Fourteenth Congress also saw the first developments of the Stalin personality cult with Stalin being referred to as "leader" for the first time and becoming the subject of effusive praise from delegates.
Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev formed a United Opposition
against the policies of Stalin and Bukharin but they had lost influence as a result of the party struggles and no longer posed a serious threat to Stalin. In October 1927 Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the Central Committee and at the Fifteenth Party Congress held in December 1927 the remaining members of the left opposition were subjected to insults and humiliations and in 1928 Trotsky and the Left Opposition were expelled from the Communist Party itself.
Stalin now moved against Bukharin by appropriating Trotsky's criticisms of his right wing policies. Stalin now promoted a new general line favouring collectivization of the peasantry and rapid industrialization of industry forcing Bukharin and his supporters into a Right Opposition
.
At the Central Committee meeting held in July 1928, Bukharin and his supporters argued that Stalin's new policies would cause a breach with the peasantry. Bukharin also alluded to Lenin's Testament. While Bukharin had support from the party organization in Moscow and the leadership of several commisariats Stalin's control of the secretariat was decisive in that it allowed Stalin to manipulate elections to party posts throughout the country giving him control over a large section of the Central Committee. The right opposition was defeated, Bukharin attempted to form an alliance with Kamenev and Zinoviev but it was too late.
, Grigory Zinoviev
and Nikolai Bukharin
. Joseph Stalin instigated a series of purges against senior members of the party, culminating in the Great Purge
of 1935 to 1938, with the key processes known as Moscow Trials
.
There are theories that purges were initiated as a tool in Stalin's struggle for power. At the 17th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (b)
(February 1934) Sergei Kirov only received three negative votes in the election to the Politburo
showing himself to be the most popular Soviet leader while Stalin received 267 negative votes ranking him the least popular. According to Molotov's memoirs as well as other reports, a number of party members at the Congress had approached Kirov with the proposal that he run for the position of General Secretary against Stalin.
Whether or not Stalin initiated the Purge as a response to opposition to him within the party and whether or not Stalin was personally behind the assassination of Kirov in December 1934 in order to remove a rival, that was used as a pretext for the Purge, the fact remains that of the 1,966 delegates who attended the 1934 "Congress of Victors", 1,108 were ultimately arrested by the secret police. Of 139 members of the Central Committee
, 98 were arrested.
Ostensibly, the purge began as an investigation into Kirov's murder. Zinoviev
and his former supporters were charged with the murder and subjected to show trial
s before being executed. The "investigation" continued and soon found thousands of alleged conspirators who were similarly rounded up and shot or put into labor camp
s. Stalin claimed that Kirov's assassin, Leonid Nikolaev
, was part of a larger conspiracy led by Zinoviev
, Kamenev and ultimately Leon Trotsky
against the Soviet government.
Additional triggers for the purge may have been the refusal by the Politburo
in 1932 to approve the execution of M. N. Riutin, an Old Bolshevik who had distributed a 200-pg pamphlet calling for the removal of Stalin and their refusal in 1933 to approve the execution of A.P. Smirnov, who had been a party member since 1896 and had also been found to be agitating for Stalin’s removal.
The failure of the Politburo to act ruthlessly against anti-Stalinists in the Party may have combined in Stalin’s mind with Kirov’s growing popularity to convince him of the need to move decisively against his opponents, real or perceived, and destroy them and their reputations as a means of consolidating Stalin and the bureaucracy’s power over the party and the state.
The Moscow Trials
lasted until 1938 and were used to blame various former oppositionists (as well as numerous supporters of Stalin who were considered suspect for some reason or another) with the failure of Stalin's Five Year Plan
to meet its goals as well as other problems in the Soviet Union. Numerous Bolshevik luminaries such as Bukharin, Radek
, Rykov
and Rakovsky
were accused of plotting to overthrow Stalin or even conspiring with Hitler against the USSR and were tried and executed.
The Great Purge saw the removal of 850,000 members from the Party, or 36% of its membership, between 1936 and 1938. Many of these individuals were executed or perished in prison camps. “Old Bolsheviks” who had been members of the Party in 1917 were especially targeted.
At the 18th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (b)
held in 1939, only 2% of the delegates had also been delegates to the last congress held in 1934.
system under Stalin
in his war against so-called "class enemies". Stalin also undertook massive resettlements of Kulak
s, similarly to the Tsarist penal system of ssylka (resettlement in remote areas) which had been established to deal with political dissidents and common criminals without executing them.
As Stalin consolidated his rule the party itself ceased to be a serious deliberative body under Stalin with Party Congresses, particularly after the Great Purge, being little more than show pieces in which delegates would sing the praises of Stalin in what became a cult of personality
. No party congresses were held at all between 1939 and 1952. The role of the secret police became paramount in Soviet society and within the party with party members closely monitored to ensure their adherence to Stalin. Similarly the Central Committee and even the Politburo became rubber stamps for Stalin's dictatorship and without any ability to challenge his power or question his decision.
At the 1952 party congress, Stalin had Molotov
and Mikoyan
removed from the Politburo
and diluted the power of executive members by replacing the body with a twenty-five member Presidium (plus eleven candidates) that was twice the old Politburo's size. However, an informal Bureau of the Presidium, comparable to the old Politburo, was established in order to make decision-making more manageable. This bureau consisted of Stalin, Lavrentiy Beria
, Georgy Malenkov
, Nikita Khrushchev
, Nikolai Bulganin
, Kliment Voroshilov
, Lazar Kaganovich
, Maksim Saburov
, and Mikhail Pervukhin
, with future decision-making limited in practice to the first four or five of these.
(the feared leader of the NKVD
), Malenkov
and Khrushcev
.
At the meeting of the Presidium's inner bureau held immediately after Stalin's death, Beria proposed Malenkov as Chairman
of the Council of Ministers (or Premier). The size of the Presidium was also cut in half in order to remove the influence of the new members that had been appointed in 1952 – the new Presidium had exactly the same membership as the old bureau of the Presidium except that Molotov and Mikoyan were reinstated. Malenkov also became First Secretary of the Party (as the position of General Secretary was now known) but had to relinquish that position and leave the party Secretariat
on March 14, 1953 in the name of collective leadership
due to the dissatisfaction of others in the leadership with Malenkov's assumption of both leadership roles.
Despite Beria's history as Stalin's most ruthless subordinates, he was at the forefront of destalinization and liberalisation after Stalin's death, possibly as a means of winning support for his campaign to become leader. Beria not only publicly denounced the Doctors' plot
as a "fraud" but he instigated the release of hundreds of thousands of political prisoners from the gulag
s (prisoners he had had a hand in arresting in the first place), brought in a liberal policy towards non-Russian nationalities in the Soviet Union thus reversing decades of Russification
and persuaded the Presidium and the Council of Ministers to urge the Ulbricht
regime in Germany to slow down the "construction of socialism" and institute liberal economic and political reforms.
The surviving party leadership feared Beria and Khrushchev in particular saw him as his most serious rival. Khrushchev was unable to win conservatives in the Presidium such as Molotov to his side until one of Beria's initiatives, his German policy, resulted in calamity for Soviet power. At Beria's urging the East German government sent the public signals about an easing up in the regime thus raising expectations but when they equivocated on implementing changes such as cancelling a plan to increase labour production (and thus workload on individual workers) a mass protest movement resulted that threatened the existence of the government and resulted in a hard crackdown using Soviet troops (see Uprising of 1953 in East Germany
).
The events in Germany convinced conservatives and supporters of Beria such as Molotov, Malenkov and Bulganin that his policies were dangerous and destabilising to Soviet power (his policy towards the nationalities was seen as a threat to the unity of the USSR itself). Days after the events in Germany, Khrushchev persuaded them to support an effective putsch against Beria. In June 1953, three months after Stalin's death, the members of the Presidium (the renamed Politburo) under the instigation of Khrushchev agreed to ambush Beria at a Presidium meeting surprising him by bringing in army officers to put him under arrest. He was tried and shot in December 1953 though Khrushchev was later to claim that he shot Beria himself at the June meeting of the Presidium.
With Beria, Malenkov's ally, out of the way, Khrushchev was in a position to outmanoeuver Malenkov for power. Khrushchev became First Secretary in September, 1953 ushering in a period in which Malenkov and Khrushchev shared power. Khrushchev won the support of Bulganin
to move against Malenkov and at the Central Committee meeting in January 1955, Malenkov was criticized for his close relationship with Beria as well as his failure to implement promises to increase the production of consumer goods. The next month he was dismissed as head of the government.
The 20th Congress of the CPSU
held in 1956 marked the party's formal break with Stalin (three years after his death) when First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev
gave his famous Secret Speech denouncing the crimes and excesses of Stalin. This ushered in a period of destalinisation which saw an end to the personality cult which had grown around Stalin, the release of tens of thousands of political prisoners and a thaw in political and cultural discourse. This was too much for conservatives in the Presidium (the renamed Politburo). Malenkov, Kaganovich, Molotov and Bulganin attempted to oust Khrushchev in the summer of 1957 and won a vote in the Presidium to oust Khrushchev but Georgy Zhukov
the defence minister and war hero, supported Khrushchev's demands that the matter be sent to the Central Committee which overturned the Presidium vote. Khrushchev ousted the so-called Anti-Party Group
from the Presidium and ultimately from the party and, in 1958 became Premier while retaining the position of First Secretary.
The execution of Beria also brought the NKVD
and its successor, the KGB
under party control where, under Stalin, the state security apparatus had become more powerful than the party and the military. The reversal caused by Beria's arrest and execution brought an end to much of the arbitrary arrest and the system of forced labour in Gulag
s that had marked the Stalin era.
Khrushchev attempted to reorganize the party structure in 1962 along economic rather than geographical lines. This led to confusion and the alienation of many party officials.
Khrushchev's prestige was severely damaged as a result of the Cuban Missile Crisis
which ended in what many in the party saw as a humiliating climbdown by Khrushchev. He was removed from power in October 1964 by the Central Committee due to the Cuban Missile Crisis as well as the failure of his agricultural and industrial policies. Destalinisation came to a halt under the new General Secretary, Leonid Brezhnev
who emerged as the new party leader after first plotting with Nikolai Podgorny
to oust Khrushchev and then outmanoeuvering Podgorny to take the party leadership (Podgrony became the ceremonial head of state as a consolation until Brezhnev took that position for himself in 1977). However, there was no return to the policies of terror against party members. While internal party struggles would result in expulsions there were no executions of party members after the execution of Lavrentiy Beria
in 1953. When Georgy Malenkov
, Molotov, Kaganovich and other members of the so-called Anti-Party Group
were expelled from the Presidium and ultimately from the party for allegedly plotting against Khrushchev they were not put on trial or imprisoned but simply demoted to minor posts (such as ambassador to Mongolia
in the case of Molotov) or pensioned off as when Khrushchev himself was deposed in 1964.
Though initially, the USSR was again under a collective leadership, this time with Brezhnev as General Secretary, Podgorny as Chairman of the Presidium and Alexei Kosygin as Premier of the Soviet Union
. Brezhnev was able to consolidate power to become the leading figure, but he was never able to gather as much powers as Stalin and Khrushchev had done previously. At the 23rd Congress of the CPSU held in 1966, Brezhnev was able to have himself declared General Secretary of the party, reviving a title that had not existed since Stalin. The Presidium also reverted to its previous name of Politburo. While Kosygin attempted to pursue a policy of favouring light industry and consumer good production over heavy industry (see Kosygin reform
), Brezhnev favoured military expansion which necessitated a continued emphasis on heavy industry. While Kosygin remained Premier, it was Brezhnev's policies that won out and by 1968 he was the undisputed leader of both the party and the country. The Brezhnev period ushered in an unparalleled period of stability in the party, a stability that ultimately led to stagnation. Almost half of the members of the 1981 Central Committee had been on the body in 1966 while the average age of Politburo members rose from 55 in 1966 to 68 in 1982. The aging Soviet leadership led to its being described as a gerontocracy
. Brezhnev suffered a stroke in 1975 but continued in power despite deteriorating health until his death in November 1982 at the age of 76. His final years were marked by an attempt to create a personality cult around himself as well as growing corruption within the party as members increasingly paid lip service to socialist ideas and instead saw their positions as a route to self enrichment.
became the party's general secretary in 1985 following an interregnum after Brezhnev's death
in 1982 when the party was led first by Yuri Andropov
and then by Konstantin Chernenko
. When Brezhnev died Andropov was proclaimed General Secretary within days and by the official coverage in the Soviet media it was clear that he was the leader. Andropov died on February 9, 1984 and Chernenko was elected his replacement on February 13 but Chernenko was a compromise stopgap candidate as Gorbachev – Andropov's protege – lacked sufficient support in the Politburo. However, Chernenko was already an ill man and his duties were increasingly carried out by others, particularly Gorbachev who was nominated by Andrei Gromyko
to become General Secretary when Chernenko died. There are indications Gorbachev may have been in control prior to Chernenko's death as he was announced as the new General Secretary the day after Chernenko died on March 10, 1985.
Gorbachev instituted policies of glasnost
, perestroika
, and acceleration. Glasnost allowed freedom of speech in the Soviet Union and a flourishing of political debate within the Communist Party to a degree not seen since the Russian Revolution
, perestroika was an attempt to restructure the political and particularly the economic organisation of the country, while acceleration meant faster development of the economy. This period of liberalisation ultimately ended in the dissolution of the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe.
At the 27th Congress of the CPSU in 1986, Boris Yeltsin
became a candidate member of the Politburo and offended party members in a speech that attacked the hidden privileges of the party elite.
At the 1988 Party Conference Gorbachev launched reforms to reduce the party's control over the government including proposals for multicandidate elections to regional and local legislatures and the positions of local and regional party first secretaryships. While Gorbachev was able to receive approval for his reforms from the party, the membership of the CPSU was becoming increasingly resistant to Gorbachev's policies and rather than being a locus for change became a bulwark of conservatism. Increasingly, Gorbachev bypassed the party in order to implement his reforms relying instead on governmental bodies.
status. The Communist Party's power over the state formally ended that same year with the newly-created Soviet Presidency, whose first and only President was Party General Secretary Gorbachev.
The growing likelihood of the dissolution of the USSR itself led hardline elements in the CPSU to launch the August Coup
in 1991 which temporarily removed Gorbachev from power. On August 19, 1991, a day before the New Union Treaty
was to be signed devolving power to the republics, a group calling itself the "State Emergency Committee" seized power in Moscow declaring that Gorbachev was ill and therefore relieved of his position as president. Soviet vice-president Gennadiy Yanayev was named acting president. The committee's eight members included KGB
chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov
, Internal Affairs Minister Boris Pugo, Defense Minister Dmitriy Yazov, and Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov
. The coup dissolved because of large public demonstrations and the efforts of Boris Yeltsin
who became the real power in Russia as a result. Gorbachev returned to Moscow as president but resigned as General Secretary and vowed to purge the party of hardliners. Yeltsin had the CPSU formally banned within Russia on August 26. The KGB was disbanded as were other CPSU-related agencies and organisations. Yeltsin's action was later declared unconstitutional but by this time the USSR had ceased to exist.
The Communist Party in between Gorbachev's resignation and its suspension was politically impotent. By the time of the 28th Congress of the CPSU
in July 1990, the party was largely regarded as being unable to lead the country and had, in fifteen republics, split into opposing factions favouring either independent republics or the continuation of the Soviet Union. Stripped of its leading role in society the party lost its authority to lead the nation or the cohesion that kept the party united. Its last General Secretary was Vladimir Ivashko
, chosen on August 24. Actual political power lay in the positions of President of the Soviet Union
(held by Gorbachev) and President of the Russian SFSR (held by Yeltsin). Ivashko remained for five days as acting General Secretary until August 29 when the party's activity was suspended by the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union.
CPSU activity in territory of Russia has been stopped by the Decree of the president of Russian SFSR Boris Yeltsin №169 from November, 6th 1991, its structures are dismissed, and the property is nationalised. This event is the actual end of the CPSU. Later the Constitutional court of the Russian Federation has specified that CPSU dissolution is lawful also its restoration is inadmissible. (The decision of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation №9-П from November, 30th 1992).
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union
, Russian adherents to the CPSU tradition, particularly as it existed before Gorbachev, reorganised themselves as the Communist Party of the Russian Federation
. Today there is a widespread flora of parties in Russia, claiming to be the successors of CPSU. Several of them used the name CPSU. However, CPRF is generally seen (due to its massive size) as the inheritor of the CPSU in Russia. Besides CPRF was founded during the Gorbachev era, several years before CPSU was abolished and was seen as a "Russian-nationalist" counterpart to CPSU.
In other republics, communists established the Armenian Communist Party
, Communist Party of Azerbaijan, Party of Communists of Kyrgyzstan
, Communist Party of Ukraine
, Party of Communists of Belarus
, Party of Communists of the Republic of Moldova, Communist Party of Kazakhstan
and the Communist Party of Tajikistan
. Along with the CPRF, these parties formed the Union of Communist Parties – Communist Party of the Soviet Union (SKP-KPSS).
In Turkmenistan
, the local party apparatus led by Saparmurat Niyazov
was converted into the Democratic Party of Turkmenistan
.
In Uzbekistan
, Islam Karimov converted the CPSU branch into the Democratic People's Party.
In Georgia
, the Socialist Labour Party was founded in 1992. This party would later evolve into the Communist Party of Georgia
(SKP). Another communist faction in Georgia, which is larger than SKP, is the United Communist Party of Georgia
(SEKP).
In Estonia
, the CPSU branch was in the hands of reformers, who converted it into the Estonian Democratic Labour Party (EDTP). A minority regrouped into the Communist Party of Estonia
.
In Lithuania
, the CPSU was officially banned in 1991. Branch of "progressive" communists led by Algirdas Brazauskas
converted into the Democratic Labour Party of Lithuania
, established in 1992. In Latvia
, communist organizations were officially banned and a major part of the party there had broken away in 1990 and formed the Latvian Social Democratic Party
. The remnants of CPSU became the Union of Communists of Latvia, which went underground. Later communists regrouped into the Socialist Party of Latvia
.
Communist Party of the Soviet Union
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the only legal, ruling political party in the Soviet Union and one of the largest communist organizations in the world...
, which evolved out of the Bolshevik
Bolshevik
The 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....
faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party
Russian Social Democratic Labour Party
The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party , also known as Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party or Russian Social Democratic Party, was a revolutionary socialist Russian political party formed in 1898 in Minsk to unite the various revolutionary organizations into one party...
in 1912, can roughly be divided into the following periods; the early years of the Bolshevik Party in clandestinity and exile, the period of the October Revolution, consolidation of the party as the governing force of the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
, the Great Purge
Great Purge
The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938...
of the 1930s, Khrushchev and Brezhnev periods, the Gorbachev era of reform which eventually led to the break-up of the party in 1991. The history of the regional/republican branches of the party does however differ from the all-Russian/all-Union party on several points.
Formation of RSDLP(b)
In January 1912, the Bolshevik fraction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party convened a 6th All-Russian Party Conference, in the absence of their MenshevikMenshevik
The Mensheviks were a faction of the Russian revolutionary movement that emerged in 1904 after a dispute between Vladimir Lenin and Julius Martov, both members of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. The dispute originated at the Second Congress of that party, ostensibly over minor issues...
adversaries. Over twenty Party organizations were represented. In the eyes of the Bolsheviks the conference had, therefore, the significance of a regular Party congress.
In the statement of the conference which announced that the shattered central apparatus of the Party had been restored and a new Central Committee
Central Committee
Central Committee was the common designation of a standing administrative body of communist parties, analogous to a board of directors, whether ruling or non-ruling in the twentieth century and of the surviving, mostly Trotskyist, states in the early twenty first. In such party organizations the...
set up. "Not only have the banner of the Russian Social-Democratic Party, its program and its revolutionary traditions survived, but so has its organization, which persecution may have undermined and weakened, but could never utterly destroy"—the statement of the conference declared. Moreover, the conference declared the Mensheviks expelled from the party. Thus the RSDLP was effectively split, with the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks constituting separate political parties (Both groups would continue to use the name RSDLP. The Bolshevik party added '(bolshevik)' to their name to differentiate themselves from the Mensheviks.)
In its resolution on the reports presented by the local organizations, the conference noted that "energetic work is being conducted everywhere among the Social-Democratic workers with the object of strengthening the local illegal Social-Democratic organizations and groups." The conference noted that the most important rule of Bolshevik tactics in periods of retreat, namely, to combine illegal work with legal work within the various legally existing workers’ societies and unions, was being observed in all the localities.
The Prague Conference elected a Bolshevik Central Committee of the Party, consisting of Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir 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...
, Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Yakov Sverdlov
Yakov Sverdlov
Yakov Mikhaylovich Sverdlov ; known under pseudonyms "Andrei", "Mikhalych", "Max", "Smirnov", "Permyakov" — 16 March 1919) was a Bolshevik party leader and an official of the Russian Soviet Republic.-Early life:...
, Spandaryan
Spandaryan
Spandaryan may refer to:*Spandaryan, Shirak, Armenia*Spandaryan, Syunik, Armenia*Spandarian Reservoir, Syunik, Armenia*Silikyan, Yerevan, Armenia...
, Goloshchekin and others. Stalin and Sverdlov were elected to the Central Committee in their absence, as they were in exile at the time. Among the elected alternate members of the Central Committee was Mikhail Kalinin
Mikhail Kalinin
Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin , known familiarly by Soviet citizens as "Kalinych," was a Bolshevik revolutionary and the nominal head of state of Russia and later of the Soviet Union, from 1919 to 1946...
.
For the direction of revolutionary work in Russia a practical centre (the Russian Bureau of the C.C.) was set up with Stalin at its head and including Y. Sverdlov, Spandaryan, S. Ordjonikidze, M. Kalinin and Goloshchekin.
Writing to Maxim Gorky
Maxim Gorky
Alexei Maximovich Peshkov , primarily known as Maxim Gorky , was a Russian and Soviet author, a founder of the Socialist Realism literary method and a political activist.-Early years:...
at the beginning of 1912, on the results of the Prague Conference, Lenin said:
At last we have succeeded, in spite of the Liquidator scum, in restoring the Party and its Central Committee. I hope you will rejoice with us over the fact.
Speaking of the significance of the Prague Conference, Stalin said:
This conference was of the utmost importance in the history of our Party, for it drew a boundary line between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks and amalgamated the Bolshevik organizations all over the country into a united Bolshevik Party.
In the summer of 1912, Lenin moved from Paris to Galicia in order to be nearer to Russia. Here he presided over two conferences of members of the Central Committee and leading Party workers, one of which took place in Krakow
Kraków
Kraków also Krakow, or Cracow , is the second largest and one of the oldest cities in Poland. Situated on the Vistula River in the Lesser Poland region, the city dates back to the 7th century. Kraków has traditionally been one of the leading centres of Polish academic, cultural, and artistic life...
at the end of 1912, and the other in Poronino, a small town near Krakow, in the autumn of 1913. These conferences adopted decisions on questions relating to the working-class movement: the rise in the revolutionary movement, the tasks of the Party in connection with the strikes, the strengthening of the illegal organizations, the Social-Democratic group in the Duma
Duma
A Duma is any of various representative assemblies in modern Russia and Russian history. The State Duma in the Russian Empire and Russian Federation corresponds to the lower house of the parliament. Simply it is a form of Russian governmental institution, that was formed during the reign of the...
, the Party press, the labour insurance campaign, etc.
Emergence of Pravda
An important instrument used by the Bolshevik Party to strengthen its organizations and to spread its influence among the masses was the Bolshevik daily newspaper PravdaPravda
Pravda was a leading newspaper of the Soviet Union and an official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party between 1912 and 1991....
(Truth), published in St. Petersburg. It was founded, according to Lenin's instructions, on the initiative of Stalin, Olminsky and Poletayev. Pravda was intended as a legal, mass working-class paper founded simultaneously with the new rise of the revolutionary movement. Its first issue appeared on .
Previous to the appearance of Pravda, the Bolsheviks already had a weekly newspaper called Zvezda, intended for advanced workers. Zvezda had played an important part at the time of the Lena events. It printed a number of political articles by Lenin and Stalin. But the Party felt that with the revolutionary upsurge, a weekly newspaper no longer met the requirements of the Bolshevik Party. According to the analysis of the Party leadership, a daily mass political newspaper designed for the broadest sections of the workers was needed. Thus Pravda was founded.
The tsarist government suppressed Pravda eight times in the space of two and a half years; but each time, with the support of the workers, it reappeared under a new but similar name, e.g., Za Pravdu (For Truth), Put Pravdy (Path of Truth), Trudovaya Pravda (Labour Truth), etc..
Whilst the average circulation of Pravda was 40,000 copies per day, the circulation of Luch
Luch (newspaper)
Luch was a Menshevik legal daily newspaper in Russia, published in St. Petersburg from 1912 to July 1913. In all 237 issues appeared. The newspaper survived mainly on the donations from liberals. Its policy was controlled by P. B. Axelrod, F. I. Dan, L. Martov and A. S. Martynov....
(Ray), the Menshevik daily, did not exceed 15,000 or 16,000.
In Moscow, the party launched Nash Put
Nash Put (1913)
Nash Put was a daily newspaper published in Moscow between September 7-25 1913. It functioned as a legal organ of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party....
as a workers newspaper in September 1913. It was banned after just a few editions were published.
Work in the Duma
Another legally functioning central organ of the Party was the Bolshevik group in the Fourth State Duma. In 1912 the government decreed elections to the Fourth Duma. The RSDLP(b) decided to participate in the elections. The RSDLP(b) acted independently, under its own slogans, in the Duma elections, simultaneously attacking both the government parties and the liberal bourgeoisie (Constitutional-Democrats). The slogans of the Bolsheviks in the election campaign were a democratic republic, an 8-hour day and the confiscation of the landed estates.The elections to the Fourth Duma were held in the autumn of 1912. At the beginning of October, the government, dissatisfied with the course of the elections in St. Petersburg, tried to encroach on the electoral rights of the workers in a number of the large factories. In reply, the St. Petersburg Committee of the RSDLP(b), on Stalin's proposal, called upon the workers of the large factories to declare a one-day strike.
Placed in a difficult position, the government was forced to yield, and the workers were able at their meetings to elect whom they wanted. The vast majority of the workers voted for the 'Mandate (Nakaz) of the Workingmen of St. Petersburg to Their Labour Deputy' to their delegates and the deputy, which had been drawn up by Stalin. The Mandate declared that the future actions of the people should take the form of a struggle on two fronts—against the tsarist government and against the liberal bourgeoisie. In the end, RSDLP(b) candidate Badayev was elected to the Duma by the workers of St. Petersburg.
The workers voted in the elections to the Duma separately from other sections of the population (this was known as the worker curia). Of the nine deputies elected from the worker curia, six were members of the RSDLP(b): Badayev, Petrovsky, Muranov, Samoilov, Shagov and Malinovsky (the latter subsequently turned out to be an agentprovocateur). The Bolshevik deputies were elected from the big industrial centres, in which not less than four-fifths of the working class were concentrated. After the election, the RSDLP(b) formed a joint Social-Democratic Duma group together with the Mensheviks (whom had seven seats). In October 1913, after a series of controversies with the Mensheviks, the RSDLP(b) Duma members, on the instructions of the Central Committee of the Party, withdrew from the joint Social-Democratic group and formed an independent Bolshevik Duma group.
In the Duma, the Bolsheviks introduced a bill providing for an 8-hour working day. It was voted down, but had a significant agitational value for the Bolsheviks.
Outbreak of World War I
In July 1914 the Tsarist government called for general mobilization. Russia entered into war with Germany. The First World War had begun.The RSDLP(b) denounced the war as imperialist. Moreover, the party denounced the European Social Democratic parties, who supported the war efforts of their respective countries, as 'social-chauvinists'. From the very outbreak of the war Lenin began to muster forces for the creation of a new International, the Third International. In the manifesto against the war it issued in November 1914, the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party already called for the formation of the Third International in place of the Second International
Second International
The Second International , the original Socialist International, was an organization of socialist and labour parties formed in Paris on July 14, 1889. At the Paris meeting delegations from 20 countries participated...
.
In February 1915, a conference of Socialists of the Entente
Allies of World War I
The Entente Powers were the countries at war with the Central Powers during World War I. The members of the Triple Entente were the United Kingdom, France, and the Russian Empire; Italy entered the war on their side in 1915...
countries was held in London. The RSDLP(b) delegate Litvinov, on Lenin’s instructions, spoke at this conference demanding that the Socialists should resign from the national governments of Belgium and France, completely break with the imperialists and refuse to collaborate with them. He demanded that all Socialists should wage a determined struggle against their imperialist governments and condemn the voting of war credits. But no voice in support of Litvinov was raised at this conference.
At the beginning of September 1915 the first conference of internationalists
Zimmerwald Conference
The Zimmerwald Conference was held in Zimmerwald, Switzerland, from September 5 through September 8, 1915. It was an international socialist conference, which saw the beginning of the end of the coalition between revolutionary socialists and reformist socialists in the Second International.-...
was held in Zimmerwald
Zimmerwald
Zimmerwald was until 31 December 2003 an independent municipality in the Canton of Bern, Switzerland. It is located on a hill in the proximity of the city of Bern in the Bernese Mittelland...
. Lenin called this conference the 'first step' in the development of an international movement against the war. At this conference Lenin formed the Zimmerwald Left
Zimmerwald Left
The Zimmerwald Left was a revolutionary minority fraction at the Zimmerwald Peace Conference of 1915, headed by Lenin. The Left of the Zimmerwald Congress was made up of eight out of 38 people: Lenin, Zinoviev , Jānis K. Bērziņš , Karl Radek , Julian Borchardt , Fritz Platten , Zeth Höglund and...
group. But the Lenin felt that within the Zimmerwald Left group only the RSDLP(b) had taken a correct and thoroughly consistent stand against the war.
The Zimmerwald Left group published a magazine in German called the Vorbote (Herald), to which Lenin contributed articles. In 1916 the internationalists succeeded in convening a second conference in the Swiss village of Kienthal. It is known as the Second Zimmerwald Conference. By this time groups of internationalists had been formed in nearly every European country and the cleavage between the internationalist elements and the 'social-chauvinists' had become more sharply defined.
The manifesto drawn up by the Kienthal Conference was the result of an agreement between various conflicting groups; it was an advance on the Zimmerwald Manifesto. But like the Zimmerwald Conference, the Kienthal Conference did not accept the basic principles of the Bolshevik policy, namely, the conversion of the imperialist war into a civil war, the defeat of one's own imperialist government in the war, and the formation of the Third International. Nevertheless, the Kienthal Conference helped to crystallize the internationalist elements of whom the Communist Third International was subsequently formed.
At the beginning of the war, in spite of persecution by the police, the Bolshevik members of the Duma– Badayev, Petrovsky, Muranov, Samoilov and Shagov– visited a number of organizations and addressed them on the policy of the Bolsheviks towards the war and revolution. In November 1914 a conference of the Bolshevik group in the State Duma was convened to discuss policy towards the war. On the third day of the conference all present were arrested. The court sentenced the Bolshevik members of the State Duma to forfeiture of civil rights and banishment to Eastern Siberia. The tsarist government charged them with high treason
High treason
High treason is criminal disloyalty to one's government. Participating in a war against one's native country, attempting to overthrow its government, spying on its military, its diplomats, or its secret services for a hostile and foreign power, or attempting to kill its head of state are perhaps...
.
At this point Lev Kamenev
Lev Kamenev
Lev 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....
deviated from the party line. He declared in the court that he did not agree with the party on the question of the war, and to prove this he requested that the Menshevik Jordansky be summoned as witness.
The Bolsheviks campaigned against the War Industry Committees set up to serve the needs of war, and advocated boycott of the elections of 'Workers Groups' of the Committee.
The Bolsheviks also developed extensive activities in the army and navy. The party formed nuclei in the army and navy, at the front and in the rear, and distributed leaflets calling for a fight against the war. In Kronstadt, the Bolsheviks formed a 'Central Collective of the Kronstadt Military Organization' which had close connections with the Petrograd Committee of the Party. A military organization of the Petrograd Party Committee was set up for work among the garrison.
In August 1916, the chief of the Petrograd Okhrana reported that 'in the Kronstadt Collective, things are very well organized, conspiratorially, and its members are all taciturn and cautious people. This Collective also has representatives on shore.'
At the front, the party agitated for fraternization between the soldiers of the warring armies, claiming that the world bourgeoisie was the enemy, and that the war could be ended only by converting the imperialist war into a civil war and turning one's weapons against one's own bourgeoisie and its government. Cases of refusal of army units to take the offensive became more and more frequent. There were already such instances in 1915, and even more in 1916.
Particularly extensive were the activities of the Bolsheviks in the armies on the Northern Front, in the Baltic provinces. At the beginning of 1917 General Nikolai Ruzsky
Nikolai Ruzsky
Nikolai Vladimirovich Ruzsky , was a Russian general of World War I.Career=His military career prior to the outbreak of World War I in August 1914 took him to both the Russo-Turkish War and the Russo-Japanese War, where he was Chief of Staff to the Second Manchurian Army. In between he served as...
, Commander of the Army on the Northern Front, informed Headquarters that the Bolsheviks had developed intense revolutionary activities on that front.
February Revolution
The year 1917 was inaugurated by the strike of . In the course of this strike demonstrations were held in Petrograd, Moscow, BakuBaku
Baku , sometimes spelled as Baki or Bakou, is the capital and largest city of Azerbaijan, as well as the largest city on the Caspian Sea and of the Caucasus region. It is located on the southern shore of the Absheron Peninsula, which projects into the Caspian Sea. The city consists of two principal...
and Nizhni Novgorod. In Moscow about one-third of the workers took part in the strike of January 22. A demonstration of two thousand persons on Tverskoi Boulevard was dispersed by mounted police. A demonstration on the Vyborg Chaussée in Petrograd was joined by soldiers. "The idea of a general strike
General strike
A general strike is a strike action by a critical mass of the labour force in a city, region, or country. While a general strike can be for political goals, economic goals, or both, it tends to gain its momentum from the ideological or class sympathies of the participants...
," the Petrograd police reported, "is daily gaining new followers and is becoming as popular as it was in 1905."
On , a strike broke out at the Putilov Works in Petrograd. On the workers of most of the big factories were on strike. On International Women's Day
International Women's Day
International Women's Day , originally called International Working Women’s Day, is marked on March 8 every year. In different regions the focus of the celebrations ranges from general celebration of respect, appreciation and love towards women to a celebration for women's economic, political and...
, , at the call of the Petrograd Bolshevik Committee, working women came out in the streets to demonstrate against starvation, war and tsardom. The Petrograd workers supported the demonstration of the working women by a city-wide strike movement. The political strike began to grow into a general political demonstration against the tsarist system.
On the demonstration was resumed with even greater vigour. About 200,000 workers were already on strike. On large sections of working-class Petrograd had joined the revolutionary movement. The political strikes in the districts merged into a general political strike of the whole city. Demonstrations and clashes with the police took place everywhere. Slogans were raised like "Down with the tsar!", "Down with the war!", "We want bread!"
On the morning of the political strike and demonstration began to assume the character of an uprising. The workers disarmed police and gendarmes and armed themselves. Nevertheless, the clashes with the police ended with the shooting down of a demonstration on Znamenskaya Square. General Khabalov, Commander of the Petrograd Military Area, announced that the workers must return to work by , otherwise they would be sent to the front. On the tsar gave orders to General Khabalov: "I command
you to put a stop to the disorders in the capital not later than tomorrow." But “to put a stop” to the revolution was no longer possible.
On the 4th Company of the Reserve Battalion of the Pavlovsky Regiment opened fire, not on the workers, however, but on squads of mounted police who were engaged in a skirmish with the workers. A most energetic and persistent drive was made to win over the troops, especially by the working women, who addressed themselves directly to the soldiers, fraternized with them and called upon them to help the people to overthrow the tsarist autocracy
Tsarist autocracy
The Tsarist autocracy |transcr.]] tsarskoye samoderzhaviye) refers to a form of autocracy specific to the Grand Duchy of Muscovy . In a tsarist autocracy, all power and wealth is controlled by the tsar...
. The practical work of the Bolshevik Party at that time was directed by the Bureau of the Central Committee of the Party which had its quarters in Petrograd and was headed by Vyacheslav Molotov
Vyacheslav Molotov
Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov was a Soviet politician and diplomat, an Old Bolshevik and a leading figure in the Soviet government from the 1920s, when he rose to power as a protégé of Joseph Stalin, to 1957, when he was dismissed from the Presidium of the Central Committee by Nikita Khrushchev...
. On February 26 (March 11) the Bureau of the Central Committee issued a manifesto calling for the continuation of the armed struggle against tsardom and the formation of a Provisional Revolutionary Government.
On the troops in Petrograd refused to fire on the workers and began to line up with the people in revolt. The number of soldiers who had joined the revolt by the morning of March 12 was still no more than 10,000, but by the evening it already exceeded 60,000.
The workers and soldiers who had risen in revolt began to arrest tsarist ministers and generals and to free revolutionaries from jail. The released political prisoner
Political prisoner
According to the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, a political prisoner is ‘someone who is in prison because they have opposed or criticized the government of their own country’....
s joined the revolutionary struggle. In the streets, shots were still being exchanged with police and gendarmes posted with machine guns in the attics of houses. But the troops rapidly went over to the side of the workers, and this decided the fate of the tsarist autocracy. When the news of the victory of the revolution in Petrograd spread to other towns and to the front, the workers and soldiers everywhere began to depose the tsarist officials.
On , the liberal members of the Fourth State Duma, as the result of a backstairs agreement with the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik leaders, set up a Provisional Committee of the State Duma, headed by Rodzyanko, the President of the Duma, a landlord and a monarchist. And a few days later, the Provisional Committee of the State Duma and the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik leaders of the Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, acting secretly from the Bolsheviks, came to an agreement to form a new provisional government of Russia, headed by Prince Lvov. The Provisional Government included Milyukov, the head of the Constitutional-Democrats, Guchkov, the head of the Octobrists and the Socialist-Revolutionary Kerensky amongst others. The Bolsheviks condemned the new provisional government as 'imperialist'.
In the new political atmosphere after the Revolution, the party resumed publishing of legal journals. It resumed the publication of its legal periodicals. Pravda appeared in Petrograd five days after the February Revolution, and Sotsial-Demokrat in Moscow a few days later.
Return of Lenin
On April 3 (16), 1917, after a long period of exile, Lenin returned to Russia. On his arrival he presented his 'April Theses' to the party, formulating the political line for socialist revolution. Lenin proposed to replace the parliamentary republic by a Soviet republic as the most suitable form of political organization of society in the period of transition from capitalismto Socialism. Furthermore Lenin suggested discarding the term 'Social Democrat' and replacing it with 'Communist'. He also repeated the call for a new, Third International. The Theses were presented at a party meeting in Petrograd, and subsequently at a meeting of both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in the same city.
On April 14 a Petrograd City Conference of Bolsheviks was held. The conference approved Lenin's theses and made them the basis of its work. Within a short while the local organizations of the Party had also approved Lenin's theses. Opponents of Lenin's these included Kamenev, Rykov and Pyatakov.
April manifestation
On April 20 the Central Committee of the RSDLP(b) called upon the masses to protest against the 'imperialist policy' of the Provisional Government. On April 20–21 (May 3–4), 1917, not less than 100,000 workers and soldiers took part in a demonstration. Their banners bore the demands: "Publish the secret treaties!", "Down with the war!", "All power to the Soviets!". The workers and soldiers marched from the outskirts of the city to the centre, where the Provisional Government was sitting. On the Nevsky Prospect and other places clashes with groups of bourgeois took place.The more outspoken counter-revolutionaries, like General Kornilov, demanded that fire be opened on the demonstrators, and even gave orders to that effect. But the troops refused to carry out the orders.
During the demonstration, a small group of members of the Petrograd Party Committee (Bagdatyev and others) issued a slogan demanding the immediate overthrow of the Provisional Government. The Central Committee of the party sharply condemned the conduct this grouping as adventurists, considering this slogan untimely and incorrect, a slogan that hampered the Party in its efforts to win over a majority in the Soviets and ran counter to the party line of a peaceful development of the revolution.
7th party conference
On April 24, 1917, the Seventh (April) Conference of the RSDLP(b) assembled. For the first time in the existence of the Party a Bolshevik Conference met openly. In the history of the Party this conference holds a place of importance equal to that of a Party Congress.The All-Russian April Conference showed that the Party was growing by leaps and bounds. The conference was attended by 133 delegates with vote and by 18 with voice but no vote. They represented 80,000 organized members of the Party. The conference discussed and laid down the Party line on all basic questions of the war and revolution: the current situation, the war, the Provisional Government, the Soviets, the agrarian question, the national question, etc.
In his report, Lenin elaborated the principles he had already set forth in the April Theses. The task of the Party was to effect the transition from the first stage of the revolution, "which placed the power in the hands of the bourgeoisie . . . to the second stage, which must place the power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest strata of the peasantry" (Lenin). The course the Party should take was to prepare for the Socialist revolution. The immediate task of the Party was set forth by Lenin in the slogan: "All power to the Soviets!"
The slogan, "All power to the Soviets!" meant that it was necessary to put an end to the dual power, that is, the division of power between the Provisional Government and the Soviets, to transfer the whole power to the Soviets, and to drive the representatives of the landlords and capitalists out of the organs of government.
The conference resolved that the party should agitate towards the people that the Provisional Government represented the landlords and the bourgeoisie, as well as denouncing the policy of cooperation of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks.
The April Conference also discussed the agrarian and national questions. In connection with Lenin's report on the agrarian question, the
conference adopted a resolution calling for the confiscation of the landed estates, which were to be placed at the disposal of the peasant committees, and for the nationalization of all the land.
Regarding the national question, Lenin and Stalin declared that the party must support the national liberation movements of oppressed peoples against imperialism. Consequently, the party advocated the right of nations to self-determination even to the point of secession and formation of independent states.
Kamenev and Rykov opposed Lenin at the Conference. Echoing the Mensheviks, they asserted that Russia was not ripe for a Socialist revolution, and that only a bourgeois republic was possible in Russia. They recommended the Party and the working class to confine themselves to 'controlling' the Provisional Government.
Zinoviev, too, opposed Lenin at the conference; it was on the question whether the Bolshevik Party should remain within the Zimmerwald alliance, or break with it and form a new International. Lenin insisted that as the years of war had shown, while this alliance carried on propaganda for peace, it did not actually break with the bourgeois partisans of the war. Lenin therefore called for immediate withdrawal from this alliance and on the formation of a new, Communist International. Zinoviev proposed that the Party should have remained within the Zimmerwald alliance. Lenin condemned Zinoviev’s proposal and called his tactics 'archopportunist and pernicious.'
Work in the Soviets
On the basis of the decisions of the April Conference, the Party developed extensive activities in order to win over the masses, and to train and organize them for battle. The Party line in that period was to win a majority in the Soviets, by 'explaining the Bolshevik policy and exposing the compromising policy of the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, to isolate these parties from the masses'.In addition to the work in the Soviets, the Bolsheviks carried on extensive activities in the trade unions and in the factory committees. Particularly extensive was the work of the Bolsheviks in the army. Military organizations began to arise everywhere. The Bolsheviks worked at the front and in the rear to organize the soldiers and sailors. A particularly important part in making the soldiers active revolutionaries was played at the front by the Bolshevik newspaper, Okopnaya Pravda (Trench Truth).
A Petrograd Conference of Factory Committees was held from May 30 to June 3, 1917. At this conference three-quarters of the delegates already supported the Bolsheviks. Almost the entire Petrograd proletariat supported the Bolshevik slogan—"All power to the Soviets!"
On June 3 (16), 1917, the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets met. The Bolsheviks were still in the minority in the Soviets; they had a little over 100 delegates at this congress, compared with 700 or 800 Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries and others. At the First Congress of Soviets, the Bolsheviks insistently stressed the consequences of compromise with the bourgeoisie and exposed the imperialist character of the war. Lenin made a speech at the congress in which he declared that 'only a government of Soviets could give bread to the working people, land to the peasants, secure peace and lead the country out of chaos'.
A mass campaign was being conducted at that time in the working-class districts of Petrograd for the organization of a demonstration and for the presentation of demands to the Congress of Soviets. However, the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet decided to call a demonstration for June 18 (July 1). The Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries expected that the demonstration would take place under anti-Bolshevik slogans. The Bolshevik Party began energetic preparations for this demonstration. Stalin wrote in Pravda that "...it is our task to make sure that the demonstration in Petrograd on June 18 takes place under our revolutionary slogans." In the rally the Bolshevik slogans prevailed over Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary ones.
July Days
In early July, widespread discontent in St. Petersburg led to militant demonstrations calling for the overthrow of the Provisional Government. Following news of a failed offensive at the front, on July 3 (16) spontaneous demonstrations started in the VyborgVyborg
Vyborg is a town in Leningrad Oblast, Russia, situated on the Karelian Isthmus near the head of the Bay of Vyborg, to the northwest of St. Petersburg and south from Russia's border with Finland, where the Saimaa Canal enters the Gulf of Finland...
District of Petrograd. They continued all day. The separate demonstrations grew into a huge general armed demonstration demanding the transfer of power to the Soviets. The party was opposed to armed action at that time, for it considered that the revolutionary crisis had not yet matured, that the army and the provinces were not yet prepared to support an uprising in the capital, and that an isolated and premature rising might only make it easier for the counter-revolutionaries to crush the vanguard of the revolution. But when it became obviously impossible to keep the masses from demonstrating, the party resolved to participate in the demonstration. Hundreds of thousands of men and women marched to the headquarters of the Petrograd Soviet and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets, where they demanded that the Soviets take
the power into their own hands, break with the bourgeoisie, and pursue an active peace policy. Notwithstanding the pacific character of the demonstration, units—detachments of officers and cadets were brought out against it. Many were killed in the skirmishes.
The ensuing crackdown resulted in the Kerensky government ordering the arrest of the Bolshevik leadership on July 19. Lenin escaped capture, went into hiding, and wrote State and Revolution
State and Revolution
The State and Revolution , by Vladimir Lenin, describes the role of the State in society, the necessity of proletarian revolution, and the theoretic inadequacies of social democracy in achieving revolution to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat.Citing Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, Lenin...
, which outlined his ideas for a socialist government.
6th Party Congress
The Sixth Congress of the RSDLP(b) sat in Petrograd from July 26 to August 3 (August 8–16), 1917, in semi-legal conditions. It was attended by 157 delegates voting and 110 delegates with voice but no vote, from 240,000 Party members. Lenin guided the congress from underground. He kept in touch with Petrograd through Bolsheviks assigned by the Central Committee who visited him at Razliv. Lenin's theses "The Political Situation", the article "On Slogans" and other items formed the basis for congress resolutions. While at Razliv, Lenin took part in drafting the most important resolutions of the congress. The congress unanimously elected Lenin its honorary chairman.The items on the congress agenda were:
(1) Report by the Organising Bureau;
(2) Report by the C.C. R.S.D.L.P.(B.);
(3) Reports from Local Organisations;
(4) Current Situation: (a) The War and the International Situation; (b) The Political and Economic Situation;
(5) Revision of the Programme;
(6) The Organisational Question;
(7) Elections to the Constituent Assembly;
(8) The International;
(9) Unification of the Party;
(10) The Trade Union Movement;
(11) Elections;
(12) Miscellaneous.
The congress also discussed the question whether Lenin should appear in court.
The congress heard the political report of the Central Committee and the report on the political situation, both of which were presented by Stalin on behalf of the Central Committee. The resolution on the political situation was based on Lenin's guiding recommendations. It appraised the political situation in the country following the July events, and set out the Party's political line at the new stage of the revolution. The congress declared that the peaceful development of the revolution was over and that power in the country had virtually passed into the hands of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie. In keeping with Lenin's recommendations, it temporarily withdrew the slogan "All Power to the Soviets", because just then the Soviets, led by the Mensheviks and S.R.s, were an appendage to the counter-revolutionary Provisional Government. This withdrawal did not imply renunciation of the Soviets as the political form of proletarian dictatorship. The congress advanced the slogan of fighting for the complete abolition of the dictatorship of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie and for the proletariat winning power in alliance with the peasant poor, through an armed uprising.
The congress rejected the proposals put forward by Preohrazhensky, who contended that the socialist revolution could not win in Russia and that Russia could not take the socialist road unless a proletarian revolution was accomplished in the West. The congress also rebuffed Bukharin, who opposed the Party's course for the socialist revolution, saying that the peasants formed a bloc with the bourgeoisie and would refuse to follow the working class.
The congress decisions laid special emphasis on Lenin's thesis of the alliance of the proletariat and the peasant poor as the paramount condition for the victory of the socialist revolution. "It is only the revolutionary proletariat," said the resolution "The Political Situation", "that can accomplish this task—a task set by the new upswing-provided it is supported by the peasant poor"
The question whether Lenin should appear in court was one of the first items discussed by the congress. Stalin, who touched on it in replying to the debate on the Central Committee's political activity, declared in favour of Lenin appearing in court, on the understanding that Lenin's personal safety would be guaranteed and the trial conducted on democratic lines. Stalin moved a resolution to that effect.
"It is not clear at the moment," he said, "who is in power. There is no guarantee that if they [Lenin and Zinoviev] are arrested they will not be subjected to brute force. Things will be different if the trial is held on democratic lines and it is guaranteed that they will not be torn to pieces. When we asked the Central Executive Committee about this, they replied: 'We do not know what may happen.' So long as the situation is not clear and a covert struggle is going on between the nominal and the real authority, there is no point in the comrades appearing before the authorities. If, however, power is wielded by an authority which can safeguard our comrades against violence and is fair-dealing at least to some extent ... they shall appear."
V. Volodarsky, I. Bezrabotny (D. Z. Manuilsky) and M. Lashevich spoke in favour of Lenin appearing in court (provided his safety was guaranteed, the trial was public and representatives of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets attended it), and moved a resolution in that sense.
G. K. Orjonikidze countered Stalin's position that a bourgeious court could give fair trial to a revolutionary leader of the working class. He stressed that Lenin must under no circumstances be delivered into the hands of the investigators. F. E. Dzerzhinsky, N. A. Skrypnik and others spoke against Lenin appearing in court. "We must say clearly and explicitly," said Dzerzhinsky, "that those comrades who advised Lenin not to allow himself to be arrested did well. We must make clear to all comrades that we do not trust the Provisional Government and the bourgeoisie and will not deliver Lenin until justice triumphs, that is, until that disgraceful trial is called off."
After much debate, the Sixth Party Congress unanimously passed a resolution against Lenin appearing in court, expressed its "emphatic protest against the outrageous persecution of revolutionary proletarian leaders by the public prosecutor, spies and police", and sent Lenin a message of greeting.
Y. M. Sverdlov reported on the Central Committee's organising activity. He pointed out that in the three months that had passed since the Seventh (April) All-Russia Conference the Party membership had trebled, increasing from 80,000 to 240,000, and the number of Party organisations had grown from 78 to 162. The congress heard nineteen reports from local organisations. The speakers stressed the vast amount of work being carried on by local organisations and the steadily growing influence of the Bolsheviks among the working people.
The congress discussed and approved the Party's economic platform, which envisaged nationalisation and centralisation of the banks, nationalisation of large-scale industry, confiscation of the landed estates and nationalisation of all the lands in the country, establishment of workers' control over production and distribution, organisation of proper exchange between town and country, and other revolutionary measures.
The congress adopted the new Party Rules. The first clause of the Rules, dealing with membership, was supplemented with the stipulation that Party members should submit to all Party decisions. The new provision was introduced that persons seeking admission should present recommendations from two Party members and that their admission should be subject to approval by the general meeting of the organisation concerned. The Rules stressed that all Party organisations should be based on the principles of democratic centralism. Party congresses were to be convened once a year and plenary meetings of the Central Committee, not less than once in two months.
The congress reaffirmed the decision of the Seventh Conference of the RSDLP(b) on the need to revise the Party Programme in the sense indicated by the conference. It found it necessary to call a congress before long for the express purpose of adopting a new Programme, and instructed the Central Committee and all Party organisations to begin discussing a revision of the Party Programme, preparatory to the congress.
The congress resolution "Youth Leagues" said it was a pressing task to contribute to the formation of socialist class organisations of young workers, and obliged Party organisations to devote the greatest attention to this task. In discussing the item "The Trade Union Movement", the congress criticised the theory of trade union neutrality and pointed out that the trade unions had a vital interest in carrying the revolution through to a victorious end and that they could accomplish the tasks facing Russia's working class provided they remained militant class organisations recognising the political leadership of the Bolshevik Party.
The congress made all its decisions subordinate to the chief objective, which was to train the working class and the peasant poor for an armed uprising to bring about the victory of the socialist revolution. In a manifesto addressed to all working people, all workers, soldiers and peasants of Russia, it called on them to gather strength and prepare, under the banners of the Bolshevik Party, for the decisive battle with the bourgeoisie.
Among those the congress elected to the Central Committee were V. I. Lenin, Y. A. Berzin, A. S. Bubnov, F. E. Dzerzhinsky, A. M. Kollontai, V. P. Milyutin, M. K. Muranov, V. P. Nogin, F. A. Sergeyev (Artyom), S. G. Shahumyan, J. V. Stalin, Y. M. Sverdlov and M. S. Uritsky.
At the congress the Inter-District Organisation of United Social-Democrats, a Menshevik dissident group to which Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky , born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army....
belonged, joined the party. At the time of the merger the Inter-District Organisation of United Social-Democrats had 4000 members across Russia.
Dual power and debates of political action
The repression against the Bolsheviks ceased when the Kerensky government was threatened by a rebellionKornilov Affair
The Kornilov Affair, or the Kornilov Putsch as it is sometimes referred to, was an attempted coup d'état by the then Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Army, General Lavr Kornilov, in August 1917 against the Russian Provisional Government headed by Alexander Kerensky.-Background:Following the...
led by General Kornilov, and offered arms to those who would defend St. Petersburg against Kornilov. The Bolsheviks enlisted a 25,000 strong militia
Militia
The term militia is commonly used today to refer to a military force composed of ordinary citizens to provide defense, emergency law enforcement, or paramilitary service, in times of emergency without being paid a regular salary or committed to a fixed term of service. It is a polyseme with...
to defend St. Petersburg from attack, and reached out to Kornilov's troops, urging them not to attack. The troops stood down and the rebellion fizzled. Kornilov was taken into custody. However, the Bolsheviks did not return their arms, and Kerensky succeeded only in strengthening the Bolshevik position.
During this period, the situation of dual power
Dual power
Dual power is a concept that has taken on a broad meaning in the hands of anarchists and Libertarian socialists who use it to refer to the concept of gradual revolution through the creation of "alternative-institutions" and "counter-institutions" in place of and in opposition to state and corporate...
endured. While the legislature and provisional government were controlled by Kerensky in coalition with the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionary Party, the workers' and soldiers' soviets were increasingly under the control of the Bolsheviks, who now had what amounted to their own private army. Factories, mills and military units held new elections and sent to the Soviets representatives of the RSDLP(b) in place of Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. On August 31, the day following the victory over Kornilov, the Petrograd Soviet endorsed the Bolshevik policy. The old Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary Presidium of the Petrograd Soviet, headed by Chkheidze, resigned, thus clearing the way for the Bolsheviks. On September 5, the Moscow Soviet of Workers’ Deputies went over to the Bolsheviks. The Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik Presidium of the Moscow Soviet also resigned and left the way clear for the Bolsheviks. Encouraged by the expansion of the influence within the Soviets the party, through its representatives with the Soviets, was able to call for a Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets in the second half of October 1917.
Insurrection vs. Parliamentarism
Finland
Finland , officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country situated in the Fennoscandian region of Northern Europe. It is bordered by Sweden in the west, Norway in the north and Russia in the east, while Estonia lies to its south across the Gulf of Finland.Around 5.4 million people reside...
, the parliamentary line– advocated by Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev
Grigory Zinoviev
Grigory Yevseevich Zinoviev , born Ovsei-Gershon Aronovich Radomyslsky Apfelbaum , was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a Soviet Communist politician...
and Rykov against Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
and Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky , born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army....
– at first prevailed. The Bolsheviks participated in the quasiparliamentary bodies convened by the Provisional Government, the All-Russian Democratic Conference and the smaller, more permanent Pre-Parliament.
Lenin sent numerous letters to the Central Committee and to St. Petersburg party activists urging them to abandon the parliamentary path and overthrow the Provisional Government by means of an insurrection. In his articles and letters Lenin outlined a detailed plan for the uprising showing how the army units, the navy and the Red Guards would be used, what key positions in Petrograd would be seized in order to ensure the success of the uprising, and so forth.
On October 7, Lenin secretly arrived in Petrograd from Finland. On the same day the balance of power within the Central Committee shifted in favor of the insurrection in early October, resulting in the party delegation withdrawing from the Pre-Parliament.
On October 10 the meeting of the Central Committee of the Party took place at which it was decided to launch the armed uprising within the next few days. The resolution of the Central Committee of the Party, drafted by Lenin, stated:
The Central Committee recognizes that the international position of the Russian revolution (the revolt in the German navy which is an extreme manifestation of the growth throughout Europe of the world Socialist revolution; the threat of conclusion of peace by the imperialists with the object of strangling the revolution in Russia) as well as its military position (the indubitable decision of the Russian bourgeoisie and Kerensky and Co. to surrender Petrograd to the Germans), and the fact that the proletarian party has gained a majority in the Soviets– all this, taken in conjunction with the peasant revolt and the swing of popular confidence towards our Party (the elections in Moscow), and, finally, the obvious preparations being made for a second Kornilov affair (the withdrawal of troops from Petrograd, the dispatch of Cossacks to Petrograd, the surrounding of Minsk by Cossacks, etc.)– all this places the armed uprising
on the order of the day.
Considering therefore that an armed uprising is inevitable, and that the time for it is fully ripe, the Central Committee instructs all Party organizations to be guided accordingly, and to discuss and decide all practical questions (the Congress of Soviets of the Northern Region, the withdrawal of troops from Petrograd, the action of our people in Moscow and Minsk, etc.) from this point of view.
(Lenin, Selected Works, Vol. VI, p. 303.)
Two members of the Central Committee, Zinoviev and Kamenev, spoke and voted against this decision. Although at this meeting Trotsky did not vote against the resolution directly, he moved an amendment proposing that the uprising should not be started before the Second Congress of Soviets met.
Preparing for the insurrection
The Central Committee of the party sent its representatives to the Donetz Basin, the Urals, Helsingfors, Kronstadt, the South-Western Front and other places to organize the uprising. Voroshilov, Molotov, Dzerzhinsky, Ordjonikidze, Kirov, Kaganovich, Kuibyshev, Frunze, Yaroslavsky and others were specially assigned by the party to direct the uprising in the provinces. Zhdanov carried on the work among the armed forces in Shadrinsk, in the Urals. Yezhov made preparations for an uprising of the soldiers on the Western Front, in Byelorussia. The representatives of the Central Committee acquainted the leading members of the Bolshevik organizations in the provinces with the plan of the uprising and mobilized them inreadiness to support the uprising in Petrograd.
On the instructions of the Central Committee of the Party, a Revolutionary Military Committee of the Petrograd Soviet was set up. This body became the legally functioning headquarters of the uprising.
On October 16 an enlarged meeting of the Central Committee of the Party was held. This meeting elected a Party Centre, headed by Stalin, to direct the uprising. This Party Centre was the leading core of the Revolutionary Military Committee of the Petrograd Soviet and had practical direction of the whole uprising.
At the meeting of the Central Committee Zinoviev and Kamenev again opposed the uprising. Meeting with a rebuff, they came out openly in the press against the uprising, against the Party. On October 18 the Menshevik newspaper, Novaya Zhizn
Novaya Zhizn
Novaya Zhizn was the first legal newspaper of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Its first editor was Maxim Litvinov. It was edited by Bolsheviks during November-December 1905....
, printed a statement by Kamenev and Zinoviev declaring that the Bolsheviks were making preparations for an uprising, and that they (Kamenev and Zinoviev) considered it an adventurous gamble. Lenin wrote in this connection: "Kamenev and Zinoviev have betrayed the decision of the Central Committee of their Party on the armed uprising to Rodzyanko and Kerensky." Lenin put before the Central Committee the question of Zinoviev's and Kamenev's expulsion from the party for breaching party discipline
Party discipline
Party discipline is the ability of a parliamentary group of a political party to get its members to support the policies of their party leadership. In liberal democracies, it usually refers to the control that party leaders have over its legislature...
, having disclosed the secret plans for an armed insurrection.
On October 21 the party sent commissars of the Revolutionary Military Committee to all revolutionary army units. Throughout the remaining days before the uprising energetic preparations for action were made in the army units and in the mills and factories. Precise instructions were also issued to the warships Aurora and Zarya Svobody. Wary of a preempitive counterattack of the Kerensky government, the Central Committee of the party decided to initiate the uprsing before the appointed time, and set its date for the day before the opening of the Second Congress of Soviets.
Insurrection in Petrograd
Kerensky began his attack on the early morning of October 24 (November 6) by ordering the suppression of the central organ of the party, Rabochy Put (Workers' Path), and the dispatch of armoured cars to its editorial premises and to the printing plant of the Bolsheviks. By 10 am, however, on the instructions of Stalin, Red GuardsRed Guards (Russia)
In the context of the history of Russia and Soviet Union, Red Guards were paramilitary formations consisting of workers and partially of soldiers and sailors formed in the time frame of the Russian Revolution of 1917...
and revolutionary soldiers pressed back the armoured cars and placed a reinforced guard over the printing plant and the Rabochy Put editorial offices. Towards 11 am Rabochy Put came out with a call for the overthrow of the Provisional Government. Simultaneously, on the instructions of the Party Centre of the uprising, detachments of revolutionary soldiers and Red Guards were rushed to the Bolshevik headquarters in the Smolny Institute. Thus the uprising had begun.
On the night of October 24 Lenin arrived at the Smolny Institute and assumed personal direction of the uprising. During that night revolutionary units of the army and detachments of the Red Guard kept arriving at the Smolny. The Bolsheviks directed them to the centre of the capital, to surround the Winter Palace, where the Provisional Government had entrenched itself.
On October 25 (November 7), Red Guards and revolutionary troops occupied the railway stations, post office, telegraph office, the Ministries and the State Bank. The Pre-parliament was declared dissolved. The Smolny, the headquarters of the Petrograd Soviet and of the Bolshevik Central Committee, became the headquarters of the revolution, from which fighting orders emanated. The uprising also included the navy forces. The cruise ship Aurora turned its guns on the Winter Palace.
On October 25 (November 7) the Bolsheviks issued a manifesto 'To the Citizens of Russia' announcing that the Provisional Government had been deposed and that state power had passed into the hands of the Soviets. The Provisional Government had taken refuge in the Winter Palace under the protection of cadets and shock battalions. On the night of October 25 the Bolsheviks took the Winter Palace by storm and arrested the Provisional Government. At this point Petrograd was under the authority of the Bolshevik Party.
Second Congress of Soviets
The Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets opened in the Smolny at 10:45 pm on October 25 (November 7), 1917, when the uprising in Petrograd was already in motion and the power in the capital had de facto passed into the hands of the Petrograd Soviet. The Bolsheviks secured an overwhelming majority at the congress. The Mensheviks, Bundists and Right Socialist-Revolutionaries left the congress, announcing that they refused to take any part in its labours. In a statement which was read at the Congress of Soviets they referred to the ongoing uprising as a 'military plot'. The congress then condemned the position of the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. The congress proclaimed that all power had passed to the Soviets:On the night of October 26 (November 8) the Second Congress of Soviets adopted the Decree on Peace. The congress called upon the belligerent countries to conclude an immediate armistice for a period of not less than three months to permit negotiations for peace to put an end to the ongoing World War.
While addressing itself to the governments and peoples of all the belligerent countries, the congress at the same time appealed to 'the class-conscious workers of the three most advanced nations of mankind and the largest states participating in the present war, namely, Great Britain, France and Germany.' It called upon these workers to help 'to bring to a successful conclusion the cause of peace, and at the same time the cause of the emancipation of the toiling and exploited masses of the population from all forms of slavery and all forms of exploitation.'
That same night the Second Congress of Soviets adopted the Decree on Land, which proclaimed that 'landlord ownership of land is abolished forthwith without compensation.' The basis adopted for this agrarian law was a Mandate (Nakaz) of the peasantry, compiled from 242 mandates of peasants of various localities. In accordance with this Mandate private ownership of land was to be abolished forever and replaced by public, or state ownership of the land. The lands of the landlords, of the tsar's family and of the monasteries were to be turned over to all the toilers. By this decree the peasantry received over 400,000,000 acres (1,600,000 km²) of land that had formerly belonged to the landlords, the bourgeoisie, the tsar's family, the monasteries and the churches. Moreover, the peasants were released from paying rent to the landlords, which had amounted to about 500,000,000 gold rubles annually.
All mineral resources (oil, coal, ores, etc.), forests and waters were declared to be the property of the people.
Lastly, Congress established a new government called the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom). Lenin became the Chairman
Premier of the Soviet Union
The office of Premier of the Soviet Union was synonymous with head of government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics . Twelve individuals have been premier...
of the new government, literally Premier, Trotsky became the first People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and other Bolshevik leaders took over other government ministries, which were known as "commissariats" until 1946.
Spread of the revolution
Soon the news of the uprising in Petrograd reached the other parts of the empire. For several days in Moscow the street were the scenes of street battles between Bolsheviks and opponents of the revolution.Attempts of counter-revolution
The now deposed Kerensky attempted to retake Petrograd. On November 10, 1917, Kerensky, who during the uprising had fled from Petrograd to the Northern Front, mustered several Cossack units and dispatched them against Petrograd under the command of General Krasnov. On November 11, 1917, an organization calling itself the Committee for the Salvation of the Fatherland and the Revolution headed by Socialist-Revolutionaries, raised a mutiny of cadets in Petrograd. But the mutiny was suppressed by sailors and Red Guards without in evening of the same day, and on November 13 General Krasnov was routed near the Pulkovskiye HeightsPulkovskiye Heights
Pulkovo Heights is a chain of hills located to the south of Saint Petersburg. They run to the south-west in the direction of the Izhora Plateau and have an altitude of up to 73 meters. They were used as a natural defense line during the Russian Civil War and the Battle of Leningrad. It is the...
. Lenin personally directed the suppression of the anti-Soviet mutiny.
In Moghilev, at the General Headquarters of the Army, General Dukhonin, the Commander-in-Chief, also attempted a mutiny. When the Soviet Government instructed him to start immediate negotiations for an armistice with the German Command, he refused to obey. Thereupon Dukhonin was dismissed by order of the Soviet Government. The General Headquarters was broken up and Dukhonin himself was killed by the soldiers, who had risen against him.
Debates of the line of the party
One sector of the party leadership, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Rykov, Shlyapnikov and others, differed with Lenin over the political line of the party. They called for the formation of an 'all-Socialist government', which to include Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. On November 15, 1917, the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party adopted a resolution rejecting agreement with these parties, and proclaiming 'Kamenev and Zinoviev' strikebreakers of the revolution. On November 17, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Rykov and Milyutin, disagreeing with the policy of the Party, announced their resignation from the Central Committee.That same day, November 17, Nogin, in his own name and in the names of Rykov, V. Milyutin, Teodorovich, A. Shlyapnikov, D. Ryazanov, Yurenev and Larin, members of the Council of People's Commissars, announced their disagreement with the policy of the Central Committee of the Party and their resignation from the Council of People’s Commissars. The Central Committee of the party branded them as 'deserters' from the revolution and 'accomplices of the bourgeoisie'.
Relation to the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries
The Left Socialist-RevolutionariesLeft Socialist-Revolutionaries
In 1917, Russia the Socialist-Revolutionary Party split between those who supported the Provisional Government, established after the February Revolution, and those who supported the Bolsheviks who favoured a communist insurrection....
, who had a significant influence in the countryside, initially sided with the Bolsheviks. The Congress of Peasant
Soviets which took place in November 1917 endorsed the Soviet Government. An agreement was reached between the RSDLP(b) and the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries and several of the Left SR leaders were given posts in the Council of People’s Commissars (Kolegayev, Spiridonova, Proshyan and Steinberg). However, this agreement lasted only until the signing of the Peace of Brest-Litovsk and the formation of the Poor Peasants Committees, when a deep cleavage took place among the peasantry. At this point the Left SRs sided with the more affluent peasants and initiated a revolt against Soviet power. The revolt was suppressed by the Soviet Government.
Brest-Litovsk Peace
However, Russia was still at war with Germany and Austria-Hungary. In the view of the Bolsheviks, the war had to be ended in order to consolidate Soviet power. The Soviet Government called upon 'all the belligerent peoples and their governments to start immediate negotiations for a just, democratic peace'. But the former allies of Russia, Great Britain and France—refused to accept the proposal of the Soviet Government. In view of this refusal, the Soviet Government decided to start negotiations with Germany and Austria-Hungary. The negotiations began on December 3 in Brest-Litovsk. On December 5 an armistice was signed.Large sectors of the Russian political spectrum, from the Mensheviks and Socialist-
Revolutionaries to the Whiteguards, opposed the negotiation policy of the Soviet Government. Moreover, a sector within the party had their doubts about the line of negotiations. Trotsky on one hand and the 'Left Communists' (led by Bukharin, a grouping also including Radek and Pyatakov) argued that the war should have been continued.
On February 10, 1918, the peace negotiations in Brest-Litovsk were broken off. Although Lenin and Stalin, in the name of the Central Committee of the party, had insisted that peace be signed, Trotsky, who was chairman of the Soviet delegation at Brest-Litovsk, announced that the Soviet Republic refused to conclude peace on the terms proposed by Germany. Fighting reassumed, and the German forces made rapid advances into Russian territory.
At this juncture the RSDLP(b) and the Soviet Government issued the call– 'The Socialist fatherland is in danger!', urging the working class to join the Red Army.
On February 18, 1918, the Central Committee of the Party had approved Lenin's proposal to send a telegram to the German government offering to conclude an immediate peace. However, the German offensive was maintained for a few days. The German government expressed its willingness to sign peace on February 22.
Within the party, the debates continued. Bukharin and Trotsky, Lenin declared, 'actually helped the German imperialists and hindered the growth and development of the revolution in Germany.' On February 23, the Central Committee decided to accept the terms of the German Command and to sign the peace treaty. Large territories, including Estonia, Latvia and Poland were passed over to German control, and Ukraine was converted into a separate state under German dominance. Moreover, the Soviet Government undertook to pay an indemnity to the Germans.
The Moscow Regional Bureau of the Party, of which the 'Left Communists' (Bukharin, Ossinsky, Yakovleva, Stukov and Mantsev had temporarily seized control, passed a resolution of no-confidence in the Central Committee. The Bureau declared that it considered 'a split in the Party in the very near future scarcely avoidable.' Moreover the resolution declared that 'In the interests of the international revolution, we consider it expedient to consent to the possible loss of the Soviet power, which has now become purely formal.' Lenin branded this decision as 'strange and monstrous.'
Later official Soviet history stated that this move on behalf of Trotsky, Bukharin and their followers had been part of a conspiracy to break the Brest-Litovsk agreement and to overthrow Lenin.
7th Party Congress
The debate on the peace question was a major issue at the 7th party congress, inaugurated on March 6, 1918. This was the first congress held after the party had taken power. It was attended by 46 delegates with vote and 58 delegates with voice but no vote, representing 145,000 Party members. Actually, the membership of the Party at that time was not less than 270,000. The discrepancy was because, owing to the urgency with which the congress met, a large number of the organizations were unable to send delegates in time; and the organizations in the territories then occupied by the Germans were unable to send delegates at all.Reporting at this congress on the Brest-Litovsk Peace, Lenin said that '...the severe crisis which our Party is now experiencing, owing to the formation of a Left opposition within it, is one of the gravest crises the Russian revolution has experienced.'
The resolution submitted by Lenin on the subject of the Brest-Litovsk Peace was adopted by 30 votes against 12, with 4 abstentions. On the day following the adoption of this resolution, Lenin wrote an article entitled 'A Distressful Peace', in which he said:
Intolerably severe are the terms of peace. Nevertheless, history will claim its own. . . . Let us set to work to organize, organize and organize. Despite all trials, the future is ours.
Lenin, Collected Works, Russ. ed., Vol. XXII, p. 288.
In its resolution, the congress declared that further military attacks on the Soviet Republic were inevitable, and that therefore the congress considered it the fundamental task of the Party to adopt the most resolute measures to organize the Red Army and to introduce universal military training.
Moreover, the congress decided to change the name of the party to Russian Communist Party (bolsheviks), in order to differentiate it from the Mensheviks and other remaining factions originating from the RSDLP.
At the congress a special commission, which included Lenin and Stalin, was elected to draw up a new Party program, Lenin's draft program having been accepted as a basis.
Invasion, Civil War and War Communism
The Soviet Republic soon found itself under military attack, both from a large number of foreign states as well as domestic opposition, the so-called Whites. In response to the military threats against the Soviet Republic the RCP(b) proclaimed the country an armed camp and placed its economic, cultural and political life on a war footing. The Soviet Government announced that 'the Socialist fatherland is in danger' and called mobilization into the Red Army. Lenin issued the slogan, 'All for the front!'. About half the membership of the party and of the Young Communist LeagueKomsomol
The Communist Union of Youth , usually known as Komsomol , was the youth division of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The Komsomol in its earliest form was established in urban centers in 1918. During the early years, it was a Russian organization, known as the Russian Communist Union of...
went to the front. In the propaganda of the party it was a war for the fatherland, a war against the foreign invaders and against the revolts of the exploiting classes whom the revolution had overthrown. The Council of Workers' and Peasants' Defence, organized by Lenin, directed the work of supplying the front with reinforcements, food, clothing and arms.
At this juncture the Socialist-Revolutionaries, began assassinating leading party members. They killed Uritsky and Volodarsky, and had made an attempt on the life of Lenin. Following this, the 'Red terror
Red Terror
The Red Terror in Soviet Russia was the campaign of mass arrests and executions conducted by the Bolshevik government. In Soviet historiography, the Red Terror is described as having been officially announced on September 2, 1918 by Yakov Sverdlov and ended about October 1918...
' was unleashed upon them and throughout Russia the Socialist-Revolutionaries were crushed.
The party took active part in the military affairs, through the Political Commissars within the Red Army. The Political Commissats were responsible for political and ideological training with the army units.
Faced with a situation of extreme material hardships, the Soviet Government introduced the policies of War Communism
War communism
War communism or military communism was the economic and political system that existed in Soviet Russia during the Russian Civil War, from 1918 to 1921...
. It took under its control the middle-sized and small industries, in addition to large-scale industry, so as to accumulate goods for the supply of the army and the agricultural population. It introduced a state monopoly of the grain trade, prohibited private trading in grain and established the surplus-appropriation system, under which all surplus produce in the hands of the peasants was to be registered and acquired by the state at fixed prices, so as to accumulate stores of grain for the provisioning of the army and the workers. Lastly, it introduced universal labour service for all classes. In the viewpoint of the party, the principle of 'He who does not work, neither shall he eat' was put into practice.
Defeat of Germany
The First World War ended with the defeat of Germany and the overthrow of the German government. The Soviet Government now annulled its commitment to the Brest-Litovsk agreement and initiated a military and political struggle to reclaim Estonia, Latvia, Byelorussia, Lithuania, Ukraine and Transcaucasia.Foundation of the Third International
Ever since the break with the Second International, the Bolsheviks had argued for the creation of a new Third, Communist International. In the new situation in Europe, with Soviet rule established in Russia and revolutionary uprisings taking place in Germany, Austria and Hungary and with the traditional Social Democracy divided in many countries, a constitutive congress of the Communist International was held in March 1919. The RCP(b) was one of the founding parties of the new international and its headquarters were based in Moscow.8th Party Congress
The Eighth Congress of RCP(b) was held in March 1919. It assembled in the midst war. The congress was attended by 301 delegates with vote, representing 313,766 members of the Party, and 102 delegates with voice but no vote. In his inaugural speech, Lenin paid homage to the memory of Y. M. Sverdlov, who had died on the eve of the congress.The congress adopted Lenin's proposal to include in the program in addition to a definition of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism, the description of industrial capitalism and simple commodity production contained in the old program adopted at the Second Party Congress (of the RSDLP). Lenin considered it essential that the program should take account of the complexity of the economic system and note the existence of diverse economic formations in the country, including small commodity production, as represented by the middle peasants.
Bukharin, however, proposed that the clauses dealing with capitalism, small commodity production, the economy of the middle peasantry, should have been left out of the program.
Bukharin and Pyatakov differed with Lenin on the national question. Bukharin and Pyatakov argued against the inclusion in the program of a clause on the right of nations to self-determination; claiming that the slogan that would hinder the victory of the proletarian revolution and the union of the proletarians of different nationalities. Lenin refuted the standpoints of Bukharin and Pyatakov.
An important place in the deliberations of the Eighth Congress was devoted to policy towards the middle peasants. The Decree on the Land had resulted in a steady growth in the number of middle peasants, who now comprised the majority of the peasant population. In the analysis of the party, the attitude and conduct of the middle peasantry was of momentous importance for the fate of the Civil War and Socialist construction. The analysis stipulated that the outcome of the Civil War would largely depended on which way the middle peasantry would swing, which group would win its allegiance.
The new policy towards the middle peasant proclaimed by Lenin at the Eighth Congress required that the proletariat should rely on the poor peasant, maintain a stable alliance with the middle peasant and fight against the 'kulak
Kulak
Kulaks were a category of relatively affluent peasants in the later Russian Empire, Soviet Russia, and early Soviet Union...
' (rich peasant). The policy of the party before the Eighth Congress was in general one of neutralizing the middle peasant. This meant that the Party strove to prevent the middle peasant from siding with the kulak and with the bourgeoisie in general. But now this was not enough. The Eighth Congress passed from a policy of neutralization of the middle peasantry to a policy of stable alliance with them for the purpose of the struggle against the Whites and foreign intervention.
The problems connected with the building up of the Red Army held a special place in the deliberations of the congress, where the so called 'Military Opposition' appeared in the field. This 'Military Opposition' comprised a number of former members of the now shattered group of 'Left Communists'; but it also included some party cadres who had never participated in any oppositional activity, but were dissatisfied with the way Trotsky was conducting the affairs of the army. The 'Military Opposition' was hostile to Trotsky on the grounds that he relied on military experts of the old tsarist army, enemies in the eyes of the 'Military Opposition'.
Lenin and Stalin condemned the 'Military Opposition', because it defended the survival of the guerrilla mode of operations and resisted the creation of a regular Red Army, the utilization of the military experts of the old army and the establishment of strict military discipline. In his response to the 'Military Opposition', Stalin said:
A Military Commission was set up at the congress. The motivation behind this decision was to strengthen the Red Army and to bring it still closer to the party.
The congress further discussed party and Soviet affairs and the guiding role of the party in the Soviets. During the debate on the latter question the congress repudiated the view of the Sapronov-Ossinsky group which held that the Party should not guide the work of the Soviets.
Lastly, in view of the huge influx of new members into the Party, the congress outlined measures to improve the social composition of the party and decided to conduct a re-registration of its members. This initiated the first purge of the Party ranks.
On March 25, 1919, the Central Committee elected by the 8th congress appointed a Politburo consisting of Kamenev, N. Krestinsky, Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky, and with Bukharin, Zinovyev and Kalinin as candidate members.
9th Party Congress
The 9th Party Congress met at the end of March 1920. It was attended by 554 delegates with vote, representing 611,978 Party members, and 162 delegates with voice but no vote. The congress defined the immediate tasks of the country in the sphere of transportation and industry. It particularly stressed the necessity of the trade unions taking part in the building up of the economic life.Special attention was devoted by the congress to a single economic plan for the restoration, in the first place, of the railways, the fuel industry and the iron and steel industry. The major item in this plan was a project for the electrification of the country, which Lenin advanced as 'a great program for the next ten or twenty years'. This formed the basis of the plan of the State Commission for the Electrification of Russia (GOELRO).
The congress rejected the views of agroup which called itself the Group of Democratic Centralism
Group of Democratic Centralism
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 Congress...
and was opposed to one-man management and the undivided responsibility of industrial directors. It advocated unrestricted 'group management' under which nobody would be personally responsible for the administration of industry. The chief figures in this group were Sapronov, Ossinsky and Y. Smirnov. They were supported at the congress by Rykov and Tomsky.
In Baku
On February 20, 1920 the local cell of the party in BakuBaku
Baku , sometimes spelled as Baki or Bakou, is the capital and largest city of Azerbaijan, as well as the largest city on the Caspian Sea and of the Caucasus region. It is located on the southern shore of the Absheron Peninsula, which projects into the Caspian Sea. The city consists of two principal...
merged with the Hummat Party
Muslim Social Democratic Party
The Muslim Social Democratic Party, usually referred to as Hummet , was a political party in South Caucasus. In 1920, it merged with "Adalat" communist cell in Baku, forming the first Communist Party of Azerbaijan.- "Old" Hummet :...
, the Adalat Party and the Ahrar Party of Iran, forming the Communist Party of Azerbaijan.
Merger of the Party of Revolutionary Communism
In 1920, after the 2nd World Congress of the Comintern2nd World Congress of the Comintern
The 2nd World Congress of the Comintern was a gathering of approximately 220 voting and non-voting representatives of Communist and revolutionary socialist political parties from around the world, held in Petrograd and Moscow from July 19 to August 7, 1920...
had decided that there should be only one communist party in every country, the Party of Revolutionary Communism
Party of Revolutionary Communism
Party of Revolutionary Communism was a political party in Russia. It was formed by a Narodnik group which broke away from the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries after the latter's mutiny in July 1918. In September 1918, they constituted themselves as a party at a congress in Moscow...
dissolved itself, and its members joined the RCP(b).
Tenth Party Congress
The party initially allowed free and open debate at party meetings, but this changed due to the Civil War. At the Tenth Party Congress of 1921, factions were banned in the party, including the Workers' OppositionWorkers' Opposition
The Workers' Opposition was a faction of the Russian Communist Party that emerged in 1920 as a response to the perceived over-bureaucratisation that was occurring in Soviet Russia.-Membership:...
, and in 1922 the Communist Party became the only legal political party.
In 1922 the Jewish Communist Party (Poalei Zion) (EKP) merged into the Yevsektsiya
Yevsektsiya
Yevsektsiya , , the abbreviation of the phrase "Еврейская секция" was the Jewish section of the Soviet Communist party. Yevsektsiya was established to popularize Marxism and encourage loyalty to the Soviet regime among Russian Jews. The founding conference of Yevsektsiya took place on October 20,...
, the Jewish section of the party. This was one of two Poalei Zion (left zionists
Zionism
Zionism is a Jewish political movement that, in its broadest sense, has supported the self-determination of the Jewish people in a sovereign Jewish national homeland. Since the establishment of the State of Israel, the Zionist movement continues primarily to advocate on behalf of the Jewish state...
) groupings active in Russia at the time. The other, the Jewish Communist Labour Party (Poalei Zion)
Jewish Communist Labour Party (Poalei Zion)
The Jewish Communist Labour Party was the new name, from 1922 to its dissolution in 1928, of the Jewish Social Democratic Labour Party , a Zionist socialist political party founded in 1906, part of the international Poalei Zion movement.The JSDLP had suffered a major split in August 1919, when a...
, was prohibited in 1928.
Stalin's rise to power
The authority of the party increased as a result, as did its control over the government and within the party the power of the Politburo grew. Stalin was appointed General Secretary of the Communist PartyGeneral Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the title given to the leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. With some exceptions, the office was synonymous with leader of the Soviet Union...
in April 1922.
The next month Lenin suffered his first stroke and the question of who would be his successor became paramount as his health deteriorated. Lenin's role in government declined. He suffered a second stroke in December 1922 and the Politburo
Politburo
Politburo , literally "Political Bureau [of the Central Committee]," is the executive committee for a number of communist political parties.-Marxist-Leninist states:...
ordered that he be kept in isolation. His third stroke in March 1923 left him bedridden and unable to speak though he was still able to communicate through writing. Lenin finally died as the result of a fourth stroke in January 1924.
As a result of Lenin's illness, the position of general secretary became more important than had originally been envisioned and Stalin's power grew. Following Lenin's third stroke a troika
Triumvirate
A triumvirate is a political regime dominated by three powerful individuals, each a triumvir . The arrangement can be formal or informal, and though the three are usually equal on paper, in reality this is rarely the case...
made up of Stalin, Zinoviev
Grigory Zinoviev
Grigory Yevseevich Zinoviev , born Ovsei-Gershon Aronovich Radomyslsky Apfelbaum , was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a Soviet Communist politician...
and Kamenev emerged to take day to day leadership of the party and the country and try to block Trotsky from taking power. Lenin, however, had become increasingly uneasy about Stalin and, following his December 1922 stroke dictated a letter to the party criticising him and urging his removal as general secretary. Stalin was aware of Lenin's Testament
Lenin's Testament
Lenin's Testament is the name given to a document written by Vladimir Lenin in the last weeks of 1922 and the first week of 1923. In the testament, Lenin proposed changes to the structure of the Soviet governing bodies...
and acted to keep Lenin in isolation for health reasons and increase his control over the party apparatus.
Zinoviev and Bukharin became concerned about Stalin's increasing power and proposed that the Orgburo
Orgburo
The Orgburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union existed from 1919–52, until the 19th Congress, when the Orgburo was abolished and its functions were transferred to the enlarged Secretariat....
which Stalin, but no other members of the Politburo
Politburo
Politburo , literally "Political Bureau [of the Central Committee]," is the executive committee for a number of communist political parties.-Marxist-Leninist states:...
, be abolished and that Zinoviev and Trotsky be added to the party secretariat thus diminishing Stalin's role as general secretary. Stalin reacted furiously and the Orgburo was retained but Bukharin, Trotsky and Zinoviev
Grigory Zinoviev
Grigory Yevseevich Zinoviev , born Ovsei-Gershon Aronovich Radomyslsky Apfelbaum , was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a Soviet Communist politician...
were added to the body.
Due to growing political differences with Trotsky and his Left Opposition
Left Opposition
The 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 the fall of 1923, the troika of Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev reunited. At the Twelfth Party Congress in 1923, Trotsky failed to use Lenin's Testament
Lenin's Testament
Lenin's Testament is the name given to a document written by Vladimir Lenin in the last weeks of 1922 and the first week of 1923. In the testament, Lenin proposed changes to the structure of the Soviet governing bodies...
as a tool against Stalin for fear of endangering the stability of the party.
Lenin died in January 1924 and in May his Testament was read aloud at the Central Committee
Central Committee
Central Committee was the common designation of a standing administrative body of communist parties, analogous to a board of directors, whether ruling or non-ruling in the twentieth century and of the surviving, mostly Trotskyist, states in the early twenty first. In such party organizations the...
but Zinoviev and Kamenev argued that Lenin's objections had proven groundless and that Stalin should remain General Secretary. The Central Committee decided not to publish the testament.
Meanwhile the campaign against Trotsky intensified and he was removed from the position of People's Commissar of War before the end of the year. In 1925, Trotsky was denounced for his essay Lessons of October which criticised Zinoviev and Kamenev for initially opposing Lenin's plans for an insurrection in 1917. Trotsky was also denounced for his theory of permanent revolution
Permanent Revolution
Permanent revolution is a term within Marxist theory, established in usage by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels by at least 1850 but which has since become most closely associated with Leon Trotsky. The use of the term by different theorists is not identical...
which contradicted Stalin's position that socialism could be built in one country
Socialism in One Country
Socialism in One Country was a theory put forth by Joseph Stalin in 1924, elaborated by Nikolai Bukharin in 1925 and finally adopted as state policy by Stalin...
, Russia, without a worldwide revolution. As the prospects for a revolution in Europe, particularly Germany, became increasingly dim through the 1920s, Trotsky's theoretical position began to look increasingly pessimistic as far as the success of Russian socialism was concerned.
With the resignation of Trotsky as War Commissar the unity of the troika began to unravel. Zinoviev and Kamenev again began to fear Stalin's power and felt that their positions were threatened. Stalin moved to form an alliance with Bukharin and his allies on the right of the party who supported the New Economic Policy
New Economic Policy
The New Economic Policy was an economic policy proposed by Vladimir Lenin, who called it state capitalism. Allowing some private ventures, the NEP allowed small animal businesses or smoke shops, for instance, to reopen for private profit while the state continued to control banks, foreign trade,...
and encouraged a slowdown in industrialisation efforts and a move towards encouraging the peasants to increase production via market incentives. Zinoviev and Kamenev denounced this policy as a return to capitalism. The conflict erupted at the Fourteenth Party Congress held in December 1925 with Zinoviev and Kamenev now protesting against the dictatorial policies of Stalin and trying to revive the issue of Lenin's Testament
Lenin's Testament
Lenin's Testament is the name given to a document written by Vladimir Lenin in the last weeks of 1922 and the first week of 1923. In the testament, Lenin proposed changes to the structure of the Soviet governing bodies...
which they had previously buried. Stalin now used Trotsky's previous criticisms of Zinoviev and Kamenev to defeat and demote them and bring in allies like Molotov
Vyacheslav Molotov
Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov was a Soviet politician and diplomat, an Old Bolshevik and a leading figure in the Soviet government from the 1920s, when he rose to power as a protégé of Joseph Stalin, to 1957, when he was dismissed from the Presidium of the Central Committee by Nikita Khrushchev...
, Voroshilov
Kliment Voroshilov
Kliment Yefremovich Voroshilov , popularly known as Klim Voroshilov was a Soviet military officer, politician, and statesman...
and Mikhail Kalinin
Mikhail Kalinin
Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin , known familiarly by Soviet citizens as "Kalinych," was a Bolshevik revolutionary and the nominal head of state of Russia and later of the Soviet Union, from 1919 to 1946...
. Trotsky was dropped from the politburo entirely in 1926. The Fourteenth Congress also saw the first developments of the Stalin personality cult with Stalin being referred to as "leader" for the first time and becoming the subject of effusive praise from delegates.
Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev formed a United Opposition
United Opposition
The 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...
against the policies of Stalin and Bukharin but they had lost influence as a result of the party struggles and no longer posed a serious threat to Stalin. In October 1927 Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the Central Committee and at the Fifteenth Party Congress held in December 1927 the remaining members of the left opposition were subjected to insults and humiliations and in 1928 Trotsky and the Left Opposition were expelled from the Communist Party itself.
Stalin now moved against Bukharin by appropriating Trotsky's criticisms of his right wing policies. Stalin now promoted a new general line favouring collectivization of the peasantry and rapid industrialization of industry forcing Bukharin and his supporters into a Right Opposition
Right Opposition
The Right Opposition was the name given to the tendency made up of Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov, Mikhail Tomsky and their supporters within the Soviet Union in the late 1920s...
.
At the Central Committee meeting held in July 1928, Bukharin and his supporters argued that Stalin's new policies would cause a breach with the peasantry. Bukharin also alluded to Lenin's Testament. While Bukharin had support from the party organization in Moscow and the leadership of several commisariats Stalin's control of the secretariat was decisive in that it allowed Stalin to manipulate elections to party posts throughout the country giving him control over a large section of the Central Committee. The right opposition was defeated, Bukharin attempted to form an alliance with Kamenev and Zinoviev but it was too late.
Purge of the Old Bolsheviks
In the 1930s other senior Communists, many of whom had been Stalin's allies were removed and many of them were executed or died in mysterious circumstances, including Lev KamenevLev Kamenev
Lev 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....
, Grigory Zinoviev
Grigory Zinoviev
Grigory Yevseevich Zinoviev , born Ovsei-Gershon Aronovich Radomyslsky Apfelbaum , was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a Soviet Communist politician...
and Nikolai Bukharin
Nikolai Bukharin
Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin , was a Russian Marxist, Bolshevik revolutionary, and Soviet politician. He was a member of the Politburo and Central Committee , chairman of the Communist International , and the editor in chief of Pravda , the journal Bolshevik , Izvestia , and the Great Soviet...
. Joseph Stalin instigated a series of purges against senior members of the party, culminating in the Great Purge
Great Purge
The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938...
of 1935 to 1938, with the key processes known as Moscow Trials
Moscow Trials
The Moscow Trials were a series of show trials conducted in the Soviet Union and orchestrated by Joseph Stalin during the Great Purge of the 1930s. The victims included most of the surviving Old Bolsheviks, as well as the leadership of the Soviet secret police...
.
There are theories that purges were initiated as a tool in Stalin's struggle for power. At the 17th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (b)
17th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (b)
The 17th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was held during 26 January - 10 February 1934. The congress was attended by 1,225 delegates with a casting vote and 736 delegates with a consultative vote, representing 1,872,488 party members and 935,298 candidate members.Nicknamed "The...
(February 1934) Sergei Kirov only received three negative votes in the election to the Politburo
Politburo
Politburo , literally "Political Bureau [of the Central Committee]," is the executive committee for a number of communist political parties.-Marxist-Leninist states:...
showing himself to be the most popular Soviet leader while Stalin received 267 negative votes ranking him the least popular. According to Molotov's memoirs as well as other reports, a number of party members at the Congress had approached Kirov with the proposal that he run for the position of General Secretary against Stalin.
Whether or not Stalin initiated the Purge as a response to opposition to him within the party and whether or not Stalin was personally behind the assassination of Kirov in December 1934 in order to remove a rival, that was used as a pretext for the Purge, the fact remains that of the 1,966 delegates who attended the 1934 "Congress of Victors", 1,108 were ultimately arrested by the secret police. Of 139 members of the Central Committee
Central Committee
Central Committee was the common designation of a standing administrative body of communist parties, analogous to a board of directors, whether ruling or non-ruling in the twentieth century and of the surviving, mostly Trotskyist, states in the early twenty first. In such party organizations the...
, 98 were arrested.
Ostensibly, the purge began as an investigation into Kirov's murder. Zinoviev
Grigory Zinoviev
Grigory Yevseevich Zinoviev , born Ovsei-Gershon Aronovich Radomyslsky Apfelbaum , was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a Soviet Communist politician...
and his former supporters were charged with the murder and subjected to show trial
Show trial
The term show trial is a pejorative description of a type of highly public trial in which there is a strong connotation that the judicial authorities have already determined the guilt of the defendant. The actual trial has as its only goal to present the accusation and the verdict to the public as...
s before being executed. The "investigation" continued and soon found thousands of alleged conspirators who were similarly rounded up and shot or put into labor camp
Labor camp
A labor camp is a simplified detention facility where inmates are forced to engage in penal labor. Labor camps have many common aspects with slavery and with prisons...
s. Stalin claimed that Kirov's assassin, Leonid Nikolaev
Leonid Nikolaev
Leonid Nikolaev was the assassin of Sergei Kirov, the first secretary of the Leningrad branch of the Communist Party.-Early life:...
, was part of a larger conspiracy led by Zinoviev
Grigory Zinoviev
Grigory Yevseevich Zinoviev , born Ovsei-Gershon Aronovich Radomyslsky Apfelbaum , was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a Soviet Communist politician...
, Kamenev and ultimately Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky , born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army....
against the Soviet government.
Additional triggers for the purge may have been the refusal by the Politburo
Politburo
Politburo , literally "Political Bureau [of the Central Committee]," is the executive committee for a number of communist political parties.-Marxist-Leninist states:...
in 1932 to approve the execution of M. N. Riutin, an Old Bolshevik who had distributed a 200-pg pamphlet calling for the removal of Stalin and their refusal in 1933 to approve the execution of A.P. Smirnov, who had been a party member since 1896 and had also been found to be agitating for Stalin’s removal.
The failure of the Politburo to act ruthlessly against anti-Stalinists in the Party may have combined in Stalin’s mind with Kirov’s growing popularity to convince him of the need to move decisively against his opponents, real or perceived, and destroy them and their reputations as a means of consolidating Stalin and the bureaucracy’s power over the party and the state.
The Moscow Trials
Moscow Trials
The Moscow Trials were a series of show trials conducted in the Soviet Union and orchestrated by Joseph Stalin during the Great Purge of the 1930s. The victims included most of the surviving Old Bolsheviks, as well as the leadership of the Soviet secret police...
lasted until 1938 and were used to blame various former oppositionists (as well as numerous supporters of Stalin who were considered suspect for some reason or another) with the failure of Stalin's Five Year Plan
First Five-Year Plan
The First Five-Year Plan, or 1st Five-Year Plan, of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a list of economic goals that was designed to strengthen the country's economy between 1928 and 1932, making the nation both militarily and industrially self-sufficient. "We are fifty or a hundred...
to meet its goals as well as other problems in the Soviet Union. Numerous Bolshevik luminaries such as Bukharin, Radek
Karl Radek
Karl Bernhardovic Radek was a socialist active in the Polish and German movements before World War I and an international Communist leader after the Russian Revolution....
, Rykov
Alexei Rykov
Aleksei Ivanovich Rykov was a Russian Bolshevik revolutionary and a Soviet politician most prominent as Premier of Russia and the Soviet Union from 1924–29 and 1924–30 respectively....
and Rakovsky
Christian Rakovsky
Christian Rakovsky was a Bulgarian socialist revolutionary, a Bolshevik politician and Soviet diplomat; he was also noted as a journalist, physician, and essayist...
were accused of plotting to overthrow Stalin or even conspiring with Hitler against the USSR and were tried and executed.
The Great Purge saw the removal of 850,000 members from the Party, or 36% of its membership, between 1936 and 1938. Many of these individuals were executed or perished in prison camps. “Old Bolsheviks” who had been members of the Party in 1917 were especially targeted.
At the 18th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (b)
18th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (b)
The 18th Congress of the Russian Communist Party was held during 10-21 March 1939 in Moscow. This is the first Congress to be dominated by the "purified" leadership of the Soviet Union after the Great Purge...
held in 1939, only 2% of the delegates had also been delegates to the last congress held in 1934.
Stalinism
The labor camps were expanded into the infamous GulagGulag
The Gulag was the government agency that administered the main Soviet forced labor camp systems. While the camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners, large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas and other instruments of...
system under Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
in his war against so-called "class enemies". Stalin also undertook massive resettlements of Kulak
Kulak
Kulaks were a category of relatively affluent peasants in the later Russian Empire, Soviet Russia, and early Soviet Union...
s, similarly to the Tsarist penal system of ssylka (resettlement in remote areas) which had been established to deal with political dissidents and common criminals without executing them.
As Stalin consolidated his rule the party itself ceased to be a serious deliberative body under Stalin with Party Congresses, particularly after the Great Purge, being little more than show pieces in which delegates would sing the praises of Stalin in what became a cult of personality
Cult of personality
A cult of personality arises when an individual uses mass media, propaganda, or other methods, to create an idealized and heroic public image, often through unquestioning flattery and praise. Cults of personality are usually associated with dictatorships...
. No party congresses were held at all between 1939 and 1952. The role of the secret police became paramount in Soviet society and within the party with party members closely monitored to ensure their adherence to Stalin. Similarly the Central Committee and even the Politburo became rubber stamps for Stalin's dictatorship and without any ability to challenge his power or question his decision.
At the 1952 party congress, Stalin had Molotov
Vyacheslav Molotov
Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov was a Soviet politician and diplomat, an Old Bolshevik and a leading figure in the Soviet government from the 1920s, when he rose to power as a protégé of Joseph Stalin, to 1957, when he was dismissed from the Presidium of the Central Committee by Nikita Khrushchev...
and Mikoyan
Anastas Mikoyan
Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan was an Armenian Old Bolshevik and Soviet statesman during the rules of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, and Leonid Brezhnev....
removed from the Politburo
Politburo
Politburo , literally "Political Bureau [of the Central Committee]," is the executive committee for a number of communist political parties.-Marxist-Leninist states:...
and diluted the power of executive members by replacing the body with a twenty-five member Presidium (plus eleven candidates) that was twice the old Politburo's size. However, an informal Bureau of the Presidium, comparable to the old Politburo, was established in order to make decision-making more manageable. This bureau consisted of Stalin, Lavrentiy Beria
Lavrentiy Beria
Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria was a Georgian Soviet politician and state security administrator, chief of the Soviet security and secret police apparatus under Joseph Stalin during World War II, and Deputy Premier in the postwar years ....
, Georgy Malenkov
Georgy Malenkov
Georgy Maximilianovich Malenkov was a Soviet politician, Communist Party leader and close collaborator of Joseph Stalin. After Stalin's death, he became Premier of the Soviet Union and was in 1953 briefly considered the most powerful Soviet politician before being overshadowed by Nikita...
, Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War. He served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, and as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or Premier, from 1958 to 1964...
, Nikolai Bulganin
Nikolai Bulganin
Nikolai Alexandrovich Bulganin was a prominent Soviet politician, who served as Minister of Defense and Premier of the Soviet Union . The Bulganin beard is named after him.-Early career:...
, Kliment Voroshilov
Kliment Voroshilov
Kliment Yefremovich Voroshilov , popularly known as Klim Voroshilov was a Soviet military officer, politician, and statesman...
, Lazar Kaganovich
Lazar Kaganovich
Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich was a Soviet politician and administrator and one of the main associates of Joseph Stalin.-Early life:Kaganovich was born in 1893 to Jewish parents in the village of Kabany, Radomyshl uyezd, Kiev Governorate, Russian Empire...
, Maksim Saburov
Maksim Saburov
Maksim Zakharovich Saburov was a Soviet engineer, economist and politician, three-time Chairman of Gosplan and later First Deputy Premier of the Soviet Union...
, and Mikhail Pervukhin
Mikhail Pervukhin
Mikhail Gyeorgievich Pervukhin was a Soviet official during the Stalin Era, Khrushchev Era and the early Brezhnev Era. He served as a First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers, literally First Vice-Premier of the Soviet Union, from 1955 to 1957....
, with future decision-making limited in practice to the first four or five of these.
After Stalin
Stalin's death on March 5, 1953 unleashed a new struggle for succession to the leadership of the party and the country. Molotov had been widely thought to be Stalin's obvious successor but he had fallen into disfavour during Stalin's final years and had been removed from the Politburo in 1952 (though he was reinstated after Stalin's death). The struggle for succession became a contest between BeriaLavrentiy Beria
Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria was a Georgian Soviet politician and state security administrator, chief of the Soviet security and secret police apparatus under Joseph Stalin during World War II, and Deputy Premier in the postwar years ....
(the feared leader of the NKVD
NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power of the Soviets, including political repression, during the era of Joseph Stalin....
), Malenkov
Georgy Malenkov
Georgy Maximilianovich Malenkov was a Soviet politician, Communist Party leader and close collaborator of Joseph Stalin. After Stalin's death, he became Premier of the Soviet Union and was in 1953 briefly considered the most powerful Soviet politician before being overshadowed by Nikita...
and Khrushcev
Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War. He served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, and as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or Premier, from 1958 to 1964...
.
At the meeting of the Presidium's inner bureau held immediately after Stalin's death, Beria proposed Malenkov as Chairman
Premier of the Soviet Union
The office of Premier of the Soviet Union was synonymous with head of government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics . Twelve individuals have been premier...
of the Council of Ministers (or Premier). The size of the Presidium was also cut in half in order to remove the influence of the new members that had been appointed in 1952 – the new Presidium had exactly the same membership as the old bureau of the Presidium except that Molotov and Mikoyan were reinstated. Malenkov also became First Secretary of the Party (as the position of General Secretary was now known) but had to relinquish that position and leave the party Secretariat
Secretariat of the CPSU Central Committee
The Secretariat of the CPSU Central Committee was a key body within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and was responsible for the central administration of the party as opposed to drafting government policy which was usually handled by the Politburo...
on March 14, 1953 in the name of collective leadership
Collective leadership
Collective leadership or Collectivity of leadership , was considered an ideal form of governance in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics...
due to the dissatisfaction of others in the leadership with Malenkov's assumption of both leadership roles.
Despite Beria's history as Stalin's most ruthless subordinates, he was at the forefront of destalinization and liberalisation after Stalin's death, possibly as a means of winning support for his campaign to become leader. Beria not only publicly denounced the Doctors' plot
Doctors' plot
The Doctors' plot was the most dramatic anti-Jewish episode in the Soviet Union during Joseph Stalin's regime, involving the "unmasking" of a group of prominent Moscow doctors, predominantly Jews, as conspiratorial assassins of Soviet leaders...
as a "fraud" but he instigated the release of hundreds of thousands of political prisoners from the gulag
Gulag
The Gulag was the government agency that administered the main Soviet forced labor camp systems. While the camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners, large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas and other instruments of...
s (prisoners he had had a hand in arresting in the first place), brought in a liberal policy towards non-Russian nationalities in the Soviet Union thus reversing decades of Russification
Russification
Russification is an adoption of the Russian language or some other Russian attributes by non-Russian communities...
and persuaded the Presidium and the Council of Ministers to urge the Ulbricht
Ulbricht
Ulbricht can refer to:*Walter Ulbricht German communist politician*Daniel Ulbricht New York City Ballet principal dancer...
regime in Germany to slow down the "construction of socialism" and institute liberal economic and political reforms.
The surviving party leadership feared Beria and Khrushchev in particular saw him as his most serious rival. Khrushchev was unable to win conservatives in the Presidium such as Molotov to his side until one of Beria's initiatives, his German policy, resulted in calamity for Soviet power. At Beria's urging the East German government sent the public signals about an easing up in the regime thus raising expectations but when they equivocated on implementing changes such as cancelling a plan to increase labour production (and thus workload on individual workers) a mass protest movement resulted that threatened the existence of the government and resulted in a hard crackdown using Soviet troops (see Uprising of 1953 in East Germany
Uprising of 1953 in East Germany
The Uprising of 1953 in East Germany started with a strike by East Berlin construction workers on June 16. It turned into a widespread anti-Stalinist uprising against the German Democratic Republic government the next day....
).
The events in Germany convinced conservatives and supporters of Beria such as Molotov, Malenkov and Bulganin that his policies were dangerous and destabilising to Soviet power (his policy towards the nationalities was seen as a threat to the unity of the USSR itself). Days after the events in Germany, Khrushchev persuaded them to support an effective putsch against Beria. In June 1953, three months after Stalin's death, the members of the Presidium (the renamed Politburo) under the instigation of Khrushchev agreed to ambush Beria at a Presidium meeting surprising him by bringing in army officers to put him under arrest. He was tried and shot in December 1953 though Khrushchev was later to claim that he shot Beria himself at the June meeting of the Presidium.
With Beria, Malenkov's ally, out of the way, Khrushchev was in a position to outmanoeuver Malenkov for power. Khrushchev became First Secretary in September, 1953 ushering in a period in which Malenkov and Khrushchev shared power. Khrushchev won the support of Bulganin
Nikolai Bulganin
Nikolai Alexandrovich Bulganin was a prominent Soviet politician, who served as Minister of Defense and Premier of the Soviet Union . The Bulganin beard is named after him.-Early career:...
to move against Malenkov and at the Central Committee meeting in January 1955, Malenkov was criticized for his close relationship with Beria as well as his failure to implement promises to increase the production of consumer goods. The next month he was dismissed as head of the government.
The 20th Congress of the CPSU
20th Congress of the CPSU
The 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was held during 14– 25 February 1956. It is known especially for Nikita Khrushchev's "Secret Speech", which denounced the personality cult and dictatorship of Joseph Stalin....
held in 1956 marked the party's formal break with Stalin (three years after his death) when First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War. He served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, and as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or Premier, from 1958 to 1964...
gave his famous Secret Speech denouncing the crimes and excesses of Stalin. This ushered in a period of destalinisation which saw an end to the personality cult which had grown around Stalin, the release of tens of thousands of political prisoners and a thaw in political and cultural discourse. This was too much for conservatives in the Presidium (the renamed Politburo). Malenkov, Kaganovich, Molotov and Bulganin attempted to oust Khrushchev in the summer of 1957 and won a vote in the Presidium to oust Khrushchev but Georgy Zhukov
Georgy Zhukov
Marshal of the Soviet Union Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov , was a Russian career officer in the Red Army who, in the course of World War II, played a pivotal role in leading the Red Army through much of Eastern Europe to liberate the Soviet Union and other nations from the Axis Powers' occupation...
the defence minister and war hero, supported Khrushchev's demands that the matter be sent to the Central Committee which overturned the Presidium vote. Khrushchev ousted the so-called Anti-Party Group
Anti-Party Group
The Anti-Party Group was a group within the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that unsuccessfully attempted to depose Nikita Khrushchev as First Secretary of the Party in May 1957. The group, named by that epithet by Khrushchev, was led by former Premiers Georgy Malenkov and...
from the Presidium and ultimately from the party and, in 1958 became Premier while retaining the position of First Secretary.
The execution of Beria also brought the NKVD
NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power of the Soviets, including political repression, during the era of Joseph Stalin....
and its successor, the KGB
KGB
The KGB was the commonly used acronym for the . It was the national security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 until 1991, and was the premier internal security, intelligence, and secret police organization during that time.The State Security Agency of the Republic of Belarus currently uses the...
under party control where, under Stalin, the state security apparatus had become more powerful than the party and the military. The reversal caused by Beria's arrest and execution brought an end to much of the arbitrary arrest and the system of forced labour in Gulag
Gulag
The Gulag was the government agency that administered the main Soviet forced labor camp systems. While the camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners, large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas and other instruments of...
s that had marked the Stalin era.
Khrushchev attempted to reorganize the party structure in 1962 along economic rather than geographical lines. This led to confusion and the alienation of many party officials.
Khrushchev's prestige was severely damaged as a result of the Cuban Missile Crisis
Cuban Missile Crisis
The Cuban Missile Crisis was a confrontation among the Soviet Union, Cuba and the United States in October 1962, during the Cold War...
which ended in what many in the party saw as a humiliating climbdown by Khrushchev. He was removed from power in October 1964 by the Central Committee due to the Cuban Missile Crisis as well as the failure of his agricultural and industrial policies. Destalinisation came to a halt under the new General Secretary, Leonid Brezhnev
Leonid Brezhnev
Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev – 10 November 1982) was the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union , presiding over the country from 1964 until his death in 1982. His eighteen-year term as General Secretary was second only to that of Joseph Stalin in...
who emerged as the new party leader after first plotting with Nikolai Podgorny
Nikolai Podgorny
Nikolai Viktorovich Podgorny was a Soviet Ukrainian statesman during the Cold War. He served as First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, or leader of the Ukrainian SSR, from 1957 to 1963 and as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet from 1965 to 1977...
to oust Khrushchev and then outmanoeuvering Podgorny to take the party leadership (Podgrony became the ceremonial head of state as a consolation until Brezhnev took that position for himself in 1977). However, there was no return to the policies of terror against party members. While internal party struggles would result in expulsions there were no executions of party members after the execution of Lavrentiy Beria
Lavrentiy Beria
Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria was a Georgian Soviet politician and state security administrator, chief of the Soviet security and secret police apparatus under Joseph Stalin during World War II, and Deputy Premier in the postwar years ....
in 1953. When Georgy Malenkov
Georgy Malenkov
Georgy Maximilianovich Malenkov was a Soviet politician, Communist Party leader and close collaborator of Joseph Stalin. After Stalin's death, he became Premier of the Soviet Union and was in 1953 briefly considered the most powerful Soviet politician before being overshadowed by Nikita...
, Molotov, Kaganovich and other members of the so-called Anti-Party Group
Anti-Party Group
The Anti-Party Group was a group within the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that unsuccessfully attempted to depose Nikita Khrushchev as First Secretary of the Party in May 1957. The group, named by that epithet by Khrushchev, was led by former Premiers Georgy Malenkov and...
were expelled from the Presidium and ultimately from the party for allegedly plotting against Khrushchev they were not put on trial or imprisoned but simply demoted to minor posts (such as ambassador to Mongolia
Mongolia
Mongolia is a landlocked country in East and Central Asia. It is bordered by Russia to the north and China to the south, east and west. Although Mongolia does not share a border with Kazakhstan, its western-most point is only from Kazakhstan's eastern tip. Ulan Bator, the capital and largest...
in the case of Molotov) or pensioned off as when Khrushchev himself was deposed in 1964.
Though initially, the USSR was again under a collective leadership, this time with Brezhnev as General Secretary, Podgorny as Chairman of the Presidium and Alexei Kosygin as Premier of the Soviet Union
Premier of the Soviet Union
The office of Premier of the Soviet Union was synonymous with head of government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics . Twelve individuals have been premier...
. Brezhnev was able to consolidate power to become the leading figure, but he was never able to gather as much powers as Stalin and Khrushchev had done previously. At the 23rd Congress of the CPSU held in 1966, Brezhnev was able to have himself declared General Secretary of the party, reviving a title that had not existed since Stalin. The Presidium also reverted to its previous name of Politburo. While Kosygin attempted to pursue a policy of favouring light industry and consumer good production over heavy industry (see Kosygin reform
1965 Soviet economic reform
The 1965 Soviet economic reform, widely referred to simply as the Kosygin reform or Liberman reform, was a reform of economic management and planning, carried out between 1965 and 1971...
), Brezhnev favoured military expansion which necessitated a continued emphasis on heavy industry. While Kosygin remained Premier, it was Brezhnev's policies that won out and by 1968 he was the undisputed leader of both the party and the country. The Brezhnev period ushered in an unparalleled period of stability in the party, a stability that ultimately led to stagnation. Almost half of the members of the 1981 Central Committee had been on the body in 1966 while the average age of Politburo members rose from 55 in 1966 to 68 in 1982. The aging Soviet leadership led to its being described as a gerontocracy
Gerontocracy
A gerontocracy is a form of oligarchical rule in which an entity is ruled by leaders who are significantly older than most of the adult population. Often the political structure is such that political power within the ruling class accumulates with age, so that the oldest hold the most power...
. Brezhnev suffered a stroke in 1975 but continued in power despite deteriorating health until his death in November 1982 at the age of 76. His final years were marked by an attempt to create a personality cult around himself as well as growing corruption within the party as members increasingly paid lip service to socialist ideas and instead saw their positions as a route to self enrichment.
Gorbachev
Mikhail GorbachevMikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev is a former Soviet statesman, having served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991, and as the last head of state of the USSR, having served from 1988 until its dissolution in 1991...
became the party's general secretary in 1985 following an interregnum after Brezhnev's death
Death and funeral of Leonid Brezhnev
On 10 November 1982, Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, the third General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the fifth leader of the Soviet Union, died a 75 year-old man after suffering a heart attack following years of serious ailments. His death was officially acknowledged on 11...
in 1982 when the party was led first by Yuri Andropov
Yuri Andropov
Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov was a Soviet politician and the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 12 November 1982 until his death fifteen months later.-Early life:...
and then by Konstantin Chernenko
Konstantin Chernenko
Konstantin Ustinovich Chernenko was a Soviet politician and the fifth General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He led the Soviet Union from 13 February 1984 until his death thirteen months later, on 10 March 1985...
. When Brezhnev died Andropov was proclaimed General Secretary within days and by the official coverage in the Soviet media it was clear that he was the leader. Andropov died on February 9, 1984 and Chernenko was elected his replacement on February 13 but Chernenko was a compromise stopgap candidate as Gorbachev – Andropov's protege – lacked sufficient support in the Politburo. However, Chernenko was already an ill man and his duties were increasingly carried out by others, particularly Gorbachev who was nominated by Andrei Gromyko
Andrei Gromyko
Andrei Andreyevich Gromyko was a Soviet statesman during the Cold War. He served as Minister of Foreign Affairs and as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet . Gromyko was responsible for many top decisions on Soviet foreign policy until he retired in 1987. In the West he was given the...
to become General Secretary when Chernenko died. There are indications Gorbachev may have been in control prior to Chernenko's death as he was announced as the new General Secretary the day after Chernenko died on March 10, 1985.
Gorbachev instituted policies of glasnost
Glasnost
Glasnost was the policy of maximal publicity, openness, and transparency in the activities of all government institutions in the Soviet Union, together with freedom of information, introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev in the second half of the 1980s...
, perestroika
Perestroika
Perestroika was a political movement within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during 1980s, widely associated with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev...
, and acceleration. Glasnost allowed freedom of speech in the Soviet Union and a flourishing of political debate within the Communist Party to a degree not seen since the Russian Revolution
Russian Revolution of 1917
The Russian Revolution is the collective term for a series of revolutions in Russia in 1917, which destroyed the Tsarist autocracy and led to the creation of the Soviet Union. The Tsar was deposed and replaced by a provisional government in the first revolution of February 1917...
, perestroika was an attempt to restructure the political and particularly the economic organisation of the country, while acceleration meant faster development of the economy. This period of liberalisation ultimately ended in the dissolution of the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe.
At the 27th Congress of the CPSU in 1986, Boris Yeltsin
Boris Yeltsin
Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin was the first President of the Russian Federation, serving from 1991 to 1999.Originally a supporter of Mikhail Gorbachev, Yeltsin emerged under the perestroika reforms as one of Gorbachev's most powerful political opponents. On 29 May 1990 he was elected the chairman of...
became a candidate member of the Politburo and offended party members in a speech that attacked the hidden privileges of the party elite.
At the 1988 Party Conference Gorbachev launched reforms to reduce the party's control over the government including proposals for multicandidate elections to regional and local legislatures and the positions of local and regional party first secretaryships. While Gorbachev was able to receive approval for his reforms from the party, the membership of the CPSU was becoming increasingly resistant to Gorbachev's policies and rather than being a locus for change became a bulwark of conservatism. Increasingly, Gorbachev bypassed the party in order to implement his reforms relying instead on governmental bodies.
End of Communist rule
In 1989 Gorbachev allowed other political associations (de facto political parties) to coexist with the Communist Party and in 1990 obtained the repeal of Article Six of the USSR constitution which gave the party supremacy over all institutions in society, thus ending its vanguardVanguard party
A vanguard party is a political party at the forefront of a mass action, movement, or revolution. The idea of a vanguard party has its origins in the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels...
status. The Communist Party's power over the state formally ended that same year with the newly-created Soviet Presidency, whose first and only President was Party General Secretary Gorbachev.
The growing likelihood of the dissolution of the USSR itself led hardline elements in the CPSU to launch the August Coup
Soviet coup attempt of 1991
The 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt , also known as the August Putsch or August Coup , was an attempt by a group of members of the Soviet Union's government to take control of the country from Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev...
in 1991 which temporarily removed Gorbachev from power. On August 19, 1991, a day before the New Union Treaty
New Union Treaty
Union of Sovereign States was the proposed name of a reorganization of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics into a new confederation body. Proposed by Mikhail Gorbachev, the proposal was an attempt to avert the collapse of the Soviet Union. The proposal was never implemented in the wake of the...
was to be signed devolving power to the republics, a group calling itself the "State Emergency Committee" seized power in Moscow declaring that Gorbachev was ill and therefore relieved of his position as president. Soviet vice-president Gennadiy Yanayev was named acting president. The committee's eight members included KGB
KGB
The KGB was the commonly used acronym for the . It was the national security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 until 1991, and was the premier internal security, intelligence, and secret police organization during that time.The State Security Agency of the Republic of Belarus currently uses the...
chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov
Vladimir Kryuchkov
Vladimir Alexandrovich Kryuchkov was a former Soviet politician and Communist Party member, having been in the organization from 1944 until he was dismissed in 1991...
, Internal Affairs Minister Boris Pugo, Defense Minister Dmitriy Yazov, and Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov
Valentin Pavlov
Valentin Sergeyevich Pavlov was a Soviet official who became a Russian banker following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Born in the city of Moscow, then part of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Pavlov began his political career in the Ministry of Finance in 1959...
. The coup dissolved because of large public demonstrations and the efforts of Boris Yeltsin
Boris Yeltsin
Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin was the first President of the Russian Federation, serving from 1991 to 1999.Originally a supporter of Mikhail Gorbachev, Yeltsin emerged under the perestroika reforms as one of Gorbachev's most powerful political opponents. On 29 May 1990 he was elected the chairman of...
who became the real power in Russia as a result. Gorbachev returned to Moscow as president but resigned as General Secretary and vowed to purge the party of hardliners. Yeltsin had the CPSU formally banned within Russia on August 26. The KGB was disbanded as were other CPSU-related agencies and organisations. Yeltsin's action was later declared unconstitutional but by this time the USSR had ceased to exist.
The Communist Party in between Gorbachev's resignation and its suspension was politically impotent. By the time of the 28th Congress of the CPSU
28th Congress of the CPSU
28th Congress of the CPSU was held in Moscow. It was held a year ahead of the traditional schedule and turned out to be the last Communist Party of the Soviet Union congress in the history of the party....
in July 1990, the party was largely regarded as being unable to lead the country and had, in fifteen republics, split into opposing factions favouring either independent republics or the continuation of the Soviet Union. Stripped of its leading role in society the party lost its authority to lead the nation or the cohesion that kept the party united. Its last General Secretary was Vladimir Ivashko
Vladimir Ivashko
Vladimir Antonovich Ivashko , was briefly the acting General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during the period from 24 August 1991 to 29 August 1991. On 24 August Mikhail Gorbachev resigned, and on 29 August the CPSU was suspended by the Supreme Soviet...
, chosen on August 24. Actual political power lay in the positions of President of the Soviet Union
President of the Soviet Union
The President of the Soviet Union , officially called President of the USSR was the Head of State of the USSR from 15 March 1990 to 25 December 1991. Mikhail Gorbachev was the only person to occupy the office. Gorbachev was also General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union between...
(held by Gorbachev) and President of the Russian SFSR (held by Yeltsin). Ivashko remained for five days as acting General Secretary until August 29 when the party's activity was suspended by the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union.
CPSU activity in territory of Russia has been stopped by the Decree of the president of Russian SFSR Boris Yeltsin №169 from November, 6th 1991, its structures are dismissed, and the property is nationalised. This event is the actual end of the CPSU. Later the Constitutional court of the Russian Federation has specified that CPSU dissolution is lawful also its restoration is inadmissible. (The decision of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation №9-П from November, 30th 1992).
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union
Dissolution of the Soviet Union
The dissolution of the Soviet Union was the disintegration of the federal political structures and central government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , resulting in the independence of all fifteen republics of the Soviet Union between March 11, 1990 and December 25, 1991...
, Russian adherents to the CPSU tradition, particularly as it existed before Gorbachev, reorganised themselves as the Communist Party of the Russian Federation
Communist Party of the Russian Federation
The Communist Party of the Russian Federation is a Russian political party. It is the second major political party in the Russian Federation.-History:...
. Today there is a widespread flora of parties in Russia, claiming to be the successors of CPSU. Several of them used the name CPSU. However, CPRF is generally seen (due to its massive size) as the inheritor of the CPSU in Russia. Besides CPRF was founded during the Gorbachev era, several years before CPSU was abolished and was seen as a "Russian-nationalist" counterpart to CPSU.
In other republics, communists established the Armenian Communist Party
Armenian Communist Party
The Armenian Communist Party is a communist political party in Armenia.It considers itself the successor of the Communist Party of Armenia of the Soviet Union, since the former leadership of this party, headed by Aram Gasparovich Sarkisyan, dissolved it and established the Democratic Party of...
, Communist Party of Azerbaijan, Party of Communists of Kyrgyzstan
Party of Communists of Kyrgyzstan
The Party of Communists of Kyrgyzstan is a political party in Kyrgyzstan. PKK was founded on June 22, 1992.It was the largest single party in the Legislative Assembly of Kyrgyzstan between 2001 and 2005 with 15 of the 60 seats. Since 2005 it has only 1 of 75 seats. It was led by Absamat...
, Communist Party of Ukraine
Communist Party of Ukraine
The Communist Party of Ukraine is a political party in Ukraine, currently led by Petro Symonenko.The party fights the Ukrainian national self-determination by identifying any Ukrainian national parties as the National-Fascist ones The Communist Party of Ukraine is a political party in Ukraine,...
, Party of Communists of Belarus
Party of Communists of Belarus
The Belarusian United Left Party "Fair World" or the Belarusian Party of United LeftistsA Just World, known until October 2009 as the Party of Belarusian Communists , is a left-wing political party in Belarus, which opposes the government of president Alexander Lukashenko.Founded as the Party of...
, Party of Communists of the Republic of Moldova, Communist Party of Kazakhstan
Communist Party of Kazakhstan
The Communist Party of Kazakhstan is a political party in Kazakhstan. -Origin:The Communist Party of Kazakhstan was founded 1936 when Kazakhstan was granted a Union Republic status within the Soviet Union...
and the Communist Party of Tajikistan
Communist Party of Tajikistan
The Communist Party of Tajikistan is a political party in Tajikistan.At the last legislative elections, 27 February and 13 March 2005, the party won 13.97% of the popular vote and 4 out of 63 seats....
. Along with the CPRF, these parties formed the Union of Communist Parties – Communist Party of the Soviet Union (SKP-KPSS).
In Turkmenistan
Turkmenistan
Turkmenistan , formerly also known as Turkmenia is one of the Turkic states in Central Asia. Until 1991, it was a constituent republic of the Soviet Union, the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic . Turkmenistan is one of the six independent Turkic states...
, the local party apparatus led by Saparmurat Niyazov
Saparmurat Niyazov
Saparmurat Atayevich Niyazov; , was a Turkmen politician who served as President of Turkmenistan from 2 November 1990 until his death in 2006...
was converted into the Democratic Party of Turkmenistan
Democratic Party of Turkmenistan
The Democratic Party of Turkmenistan is the only political party in Turkmenistan. The DPT was led by former Soviet provincial Party leader Saparmurat Niyazov from the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s until his death in 2006...
.
In Uzbekistan
Uzbekistan
Uzbekistan , officially the Republic of Uzbekistan is a doubly landlocked country in Central Asia and one of the six independent Turkic states. It shares borders with Kazakhstan to the west and to the north, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to the east, and Afghanistan and Turkmenistan to the south....
, Islam Karimov converted the CPSU branch into the Democratic People's Party.
In Georgia
Georgia (country)
Georgia is a sovereign state in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, it is bounded to the west by the Black Sea, to the north by Russia, to the southwest by Turkey, to the south by Armenia, and to the southeast by Azerbaijan. The capital of...
, the Socialist Labour Party was founded in 1992. This party would later evolve into the Communist Party of Georgia
Communist Party of Georgia
Communist Party of Georgia is a communist political party in Georgia. The party was founded on February 23, 1992 as the Socialist Labour Party. It was registered at the Ministry of Justice on February 27, 1998. In the 1992 elections it won four MPs. During the period 1994-1995 it maintained a...
(SKP). Another communist faction in Georgia, which is larger than SKP, is the United Communist Party of Georgia
United Communist Party of Georgia
The United Communist Party of Georgia is a political party in Georgia. It was founded in 1994 through the merger of the Stalin Society, the Georgian Workers Communist Party and the Union of Communists of Georgia...
(SEKP).
In Estonia
Estonia
Estonia , officially the Republic of Estonia , is a state in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland, to the west by the Baltic Sea, to the south by Latvia , and to the east by Lake Peipsi and the Russian Federation . Across the Baltic Sea lies...
, the CPSU branch was in the hands of reformers, who converted it into the Estonian Democratic Labour Party (EDTP). A minority regrouped into the Communist Party of Estonia
Communist Party of Estonia (1990)
Communist Party of Estonia is a political party in Estonia. The party, initially known as Communist Party of Estonia Communist Party of Estonia (in Estonian: Eestimaa Kommunistlik Partei, in Russian: Kommunisticheskaya Partiya Estonii) is a political party in Estonia. The party, initially known...
.
In Lithuania
Lithuania
Lithuania , officially the Republic of Lithuania is a country in Northern Europe, the biggest of the three Baltic states. It is situated along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, whereby to the west lie Sweden and Denmark...
, the CPSU was officially banned in 1991. Branch of "progressive" communists led by Algirdas Brazauskas
Algirdas Brazauskas
Algirdas Mykolas Brazauskas was the first President of a newly independent post-Soviet Union Lithuania from 1993 to 1998 and Prime Minister from 2001 to 2006....
converted into the Democratic Labour Party of Lithuania
Democratic Labour Party of Lithuania
Democratic Labour Party of Lithuania was a social democratic political party in Lithuania, that emerged out of the Lithuanian section of the CPSU in December 1989 LDDP was led by Algirdas Brazauskas, the first president of independent Lithuania. Because Brazauskas was elected as the first...
, established in 1992. In Latvia
Latvia
Latvia , officially the Republic of Latvia , is a country in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by Estonia , to the south by Lithuania , to the east by the Russian Federation , to the southeast by Belarus and shares maritime borders to the west with Sweden...
, communist organizations were officially banned and a major part of the party there had broken away in 1990 and formed the Latvian Social Democratic Party
Latvian Social Democratic Party
The Latvian Social Democratic Party was a political party in Latvia formed by a reformist wing of the Communist Party of Latvia.On 14 April 1990, a pro-independence faction under Ivars Ķezbers split off from the LKP to form the Independent Communist Party of Latvia . The main body of the LKP,...
. The remnants of CPSU became the Union of Communists of Latvia, which went underground. Later communists regrouped into the Socialist Party of Latvia
Socialist Party of Latvia
The Socialist Party of Latvia was formed in 1994 as a successor party to the Communist Party of Latvia, which was banned in 1991. In essence, the party is communist; according to the programme of the party, the LSP was founded as an organization upholding socialist ideas after the 1991 events that...
.