Soviet Revolutionary Communists (Bolsheviks)
Encyclopedia
Soviet Revolutionary Communists (Bolsheviks) was an early anti-revisionist
Anti-Revisionist
In the Marxist–Leninist movement, anti-revisionism refers to a doctrine which upholds the line of theory and practice associated with Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, and usually either Mao Zedong or Enver Hoxha as well...

 movement claimed to be an underground political outfit in 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....

 which criticized the leadership of 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...

 as revisionist. It upheld the legacy of 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 accused the post-Stalin Soviet leadership of deviating from the socialist path. It represented the line taken by the People's Republic of China
People's Republic of China
China , officially the People's Republic of China , is the most populous country in the world, with over 1.3 billion citizens. Located in East Asia, the country covers approximately 9.6 million square kilometres...

 and People's Republic of Albania after the Sino-Soviet Split
Sino-Soviet split
In political science, the term Sino–Soviet split denotes the worsening of political and ideologic relations between the People's Republic of China and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics during the Cold War...

. Little is known about the group.Jacobsson, Benny. Sovjetunionen idag - Kritik av KPML(r):s prosovjetiska politik. Stockholm
Stockholm
Stockholm is the capital and the largest city of Sweden and constitutes the most populated urban area in Scandinavia. Stockholm is the most populous city in Sweden, with a population of 851,155 in the municipality , 1.37 million in the urban area , and around 2.1 million in the metropolitan area...

: Kommunistiska Arbetarförlaget, 1984. p. 106.

Programme document

A programmatic document of the group was released in connection with the 1964 congress of the Party of Labour of Albania. It was moreover claimed that the document had been distributed clandestinely amongst communists in the Soviet Union. The document harshly criticized the wealthy lifestyles of the upper sections of the Soviet bureaucracy, argued that such lifestyles were in contradiction to socialism.

The first known English-language edition of the document was released in Albania at this point. In the beginning of 1967 a French language
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

 translation was published through French and Belgian leftwing publications. In the same year a Swedish language
Swedish language
Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...

 edition was published by KFML
Communist Party of Sweden (1967)
Kommunistiska Förbundet Marxist-Leninisterna was formed at the 1967 party congress of VPK, when a pro-Chinese group left the party.-1967–1980:...

, with a preface by Nils Holmberg
Nils Holmberg
Nils Gösta Holmberg was a communist leader in Sweden. Holmberg was born on December 23, 1902 in Stockholm. Holmberg was a member of the Young Communist League of Sweden . From 1926 to 1929 he was a member of the executive committee of SKU. Later on, the became a leading member of the mother party,...

.

An Albanian hoax?

Since the only information about the group comes from contemporary official Albanian sources, there has been speculation about whether the group actually existed or was simply a fictional construct of the Albanian Party. In any case, the existence of 'Revolutionary Communists' within the Soviet Union was used in the Albanian rhetoric to claim legitimacy for their position within the international communist movement, i.e. that they represented the original Bolshevik line of Lenin and Stalin.

Involvement of Molotov?

At the time the programme document began circulating in Western Europe, a general assumption amongst its Western distributors was that the group had been formed around the former Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs, V.M. Molotov. This assumption was based on a study of the language used in the text and direct references to Molotov and his associates in inner party struggles. Molotov had been expelled from the CPSU after the takeover by Khrushchev.

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