Lenin’s Fight Against Stalinism and the Emergence of the Left Opposition
More than 70 years have passed since Joseph Stalin’s death. Yet even today, any project claiming the banner of communism must address the legacy of Stalinism. On one hand, this is because of the countless accounts by anti-communist historians that sought to frame Stalinism as the natural continuation of Leninism and revolutionary Marxism. On the other hand, a certain rehabilitation of Stalinism has even taken shape within the Left (see, for example, the publication in 2023 of the English translation of Domenico Losurdo’s Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend), which must also be rejected. The fight for socialist liberation today must understand why the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet Union took place, defending the Bolshevik experience but without any apologia for the murderous dictatorship led by Stalin that usurped its legacy and reversed its victories.
The question is not simply a historiographic one, nor is it a question relevant to the experience of the Soviet Union alone. Rather, it is one with major strategic implications for the Left internationally in the 21st century. The Russian Revolution of October 1917 served as a beacon for millions and inspired revolutionary movements worldwide. At the same time, the official Communist Parties that claimed to be its heirs acted as a brake on these revolutions, and ultimately paved the way for their defeat. Zig-zagging between sectarianism and opportunist collaboration with the left wing of the bourgeoisie, Stalinism was chiefly responsible for the failures of numerous socialist revolutions throughout the world in the 20th century—China in the 1920s, Spain in the 1930s, and Greece in the 1940s are just a few examples. And the Stalinist program did not disappear with Stalin’s death in 1953, nor even with Khrushchev’s “secret speech” denouncing Stalin’s crimes in 1956. The leaders of official Communism around the world, from Khrushchev to Tito to Mao, even while distancing themselves to varying degrees from Stalin the man, continued to carry out the Stalinist program. Nowhere was this more evident than the merciless suppression by the Kremlin of the uprisings led by communists within the so-called Soviet Bloc, such as Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968.
For those of us concerned with preserving the revolutionary aspects of Marxism, it is necessary to revisit another experience: the fight against Stalin led by Vladimir Lenin himself and continued by the Left Opposition, led by Leon Trotsky, after Lenin’s death in 1924. This example offers a window into how we can construct a socialism based in the organs of worker democracy, like the soviets; put forward an internationalism that rejects all national prejudices; and make common cause with the oppressed, such as women, people of color, LGBTQ people, immigrants, and the poor.
The debate is as alive today as ever, as the polycrisis of capitalism—exemplified by the growth of a powerful far Right around the world and the widespread attack on democratic rights, a climate emergency threatening the lives of hundreds-of-millions, and the quickly deteriorating conditions of the working class and poor—demands a fight for a socialist alternative. Those concerned with liberation and an end to capitalist exploitation should seek to understand Stalinism: its roots, its consequences, and the alternative that existed in the early years of the Russian Revolution.
A revolution of world-historic
proportions
The revolution of October 1917 led by Lenin, Trotsky, and the Bolshevik Party was among the most earth-shaking moments in human history, thoroughly transforming Russian society from top to bottom and bringing the working class to power for the first time in world history. Its impact was felt around the world in the decades that followed—the many revolutions of the twentieth century, from Germany, to Spain, to China, to Cuba, to Vietnam, among others, took direct inspiration from it—and it continues to resonate in the minds of workers and oppressed people around the world today, more than 100 years later.
The accomplishments of the October Revolution are too numerous to name so we will have to restrict ourselves to a few of the most notable. Just days after the seizure of power, the Bolshevik Party declared an immediate armistice, and later negotiated peace with Germany, ending its participation in World War I—by then the bloodiest conflict the world had ever known. The party nationalized, without compensation, all large land estates, along with the land of the church, and the monarchy, and redistributed it among the peasantry. It expropriated the capitalist
class and established worker control in all major industries. It nationalized the banks and all foreign trade. It transferred power to “soviets”—democratic councils of workers, soldiers, and peasants that first formed in the unsuccessful 1905 revolution and resurged in the revolutions of 1917. Women, ethnic and religious minorities, and other oppressed groups won unprecedented freedoms. For example, the Bolsheviks legalized divorce on demand and granted women the right to abortion in 1920, nearly half-a-century before it was (temporarily) legalized across the United States. Same-sex relationships were decriminalized. National minorities such as Muslims earned self-determination across wide swaths of the former empire. The Red Army, led by Trotsky and composed in large part by volunteers, defeated 14 invading armies, and later, fought back the White Army forces financed and aided by the imperialist powers.
War communism and the New Economic Policy
Nearly immediately, the revolution faced the threat of violent suppression, first from external enemies among the Allied nations, including the United States, Britain, France and Japan. Then, as the country was plunged into civil war, it faced internal counterrevolutionary forces supported by foreign imperialism, which launched offensives throughout the country. The toll was devastating. More than one million Red Army soldiers, many of whom were workers or peasants, lost their lives in the fighting. Only through the extraordinary military leadership of Trotsky and the courage of the revolutionary workers and peasants did the Bolsheviks triumph after nearly five years.
Yet the impact of the wars remained for years after the fighting had ceased. During the years of civil war, hunger became widespread, particularly in the cities. Many millions perished from starvation, and industrial output declined, as workers were displaced from industry and peasants from the farms to fight in the Red Army, and the struggle against the Whites required enormous resources to supply the Reds. In response, the Bolsheviks implemented a policy of “War Communism,” which included drastic measures such as the forced requisition of grain from the upper layers of the peasantry, the rationing of foodstuffs in the cities, “Communist Saturdays” (volunteer workdays by party members to increase industrial output), and the creations of “Soviet Farms”—large scale farms run by the Soviet government or local soviets that employed wage labor. In some cases, the measures appeared in direct contradiction to the socialist aims of the leaders of the October Revolution. Requiring greater labor discipline, the Bolsheviks incorporated the previously autonomous factory committees into the trade unions, and the trade unions in turn into the state. In certain industries “worker control” was replaced by one-man management.
The results of the policy were uneven. The labor discipline imposed generally maintained industrial production, at least at sufficient levels to maintain the war effort. However, in the countryside, War Communism failed to increase the production of grain; indeed, grain production dropped sharply. The threat of requisitions removed all incentive the peasantry had to produce a surplus. By 1920 when the fighting ended, a sizable portion of the peasantry had reverted to subsistence farming. Faced with the urgent need to increase agricultural output, the Bolshevik leaders reversed course on the policies of War Communism and put forward a new program—known as the New Economic Policy, or NEP—which would grant concessions to the middle and upper layers of the peasantry in order to incentivize greater production. The NEP ended requisitions and allowed the peasantry to sell any surplus, aside from a tax-in-kind to the Soviet government, on the market. Private production by artisans and small enterprises was encouraged in order to offer the peasants access to goods necessary for agriculture. Expanding private production and encouraging the creation of new markets obviously ran counter to the objective of a planned economy. However, these concessions were seen by the Bolsheviks as a necessary evil to stave off hunger, peasant rebellions, and the collapse of the workers’ state—as Lenin put it, “a retreat for a new attack.”
In urban industry, factories, now consolidated into large trusts, were encouraged to produce commodities for barter with the countryside. Lenin noted, however, that “the exchange of goods broke loose” and this quickly became a system of “buying and selling” not dissimilar from the capitalist economy of pre-revolutionary Russia. It was in this context that a new actor emerged in Soviet society, the “Nepman.” This sector was made up of merchants who began to profit from the opportunities afforded by the liberalized economy. According to historian E.H. Carr, “this rising class” soon went from “petty traders” to “large-scale entrepreneurs who spread their tentacles into every sector of the economy.”1 A crisis in industry remained nevertheless, since the demand for industrial products did not match that for agricultural products, as the Soviet leaders intended. The result was a “scissors crisis,” as Trotsky put it, in which the price of agricultural products rose steadily, while the price of goods from the factories slid in inverse proportion. This had devastating effects for the urban proletariat, the historical base of the Bolshevik Party. With demand for their goods heavily reduced, factories cut jobs, and those workers who remained saw wages (often paid in rations) drop precipitously.
The growth of the state and party bureaucracy
The grievances of the workers were compounded by the increasing number of so-called “Red Managers,” experienced managers recruited to oversee the state-owned factories, many of whom had managed or even owned capitalist businesses before the revolution. Carr notes that these managers tended to receive salaries high above those of the workers they supervised and “acquired a recognized and respected place in the Soviet hierarchy; some of them were admitted to party membership—a reward for distinguished service.” These Red Managers and Nepmen formed the social base for a powerful and privileged state and party bureaucracy; Stalin would soon seize on this new bureaucracy as a base for his power and build it up to terrifying dimensions.
The tensions around the country penetrated even the Bolshevik Party itself. In the midst of civil war, the Workers’ Opposition faction, led by party leaders Alexandra Kollontai and Alexander Shlyapnikov, waged a struggle in 1920 for the autonomy of trade unions that threatened to split the party. This eventually led the Bolshevik leaders to temporarily ban party factions in 1921.
The prohibition of factions was initially supported by all the leading Bolsheviks, including Lenin and Trotsky, although it was intended only as a temporary measure to secure unity within the party at a time when political tensions throughout the country had reached a boiling point. In the winter of 1921, in the city of Kronstadt, thousands of sailors and their supporters launched an armed mutiny, an event that came to be known as the Kronstadt Rebellion. The sailors of Kronstadt demanded an end to requisitions in the countryside, economic freedoms for artisans, new elections to the soviets via secret ballots, political freedoms for parties such as the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, and eventually, “Soviets without Communists.2” The mutiny held out for 16 days until it was finally suppressed by 50,000 Red Army troops, in an order signed by Trotsky. Though the Kronstadt sailors were defeated, danger of armed rebellion against the revolution elsewhere remained. Within the party, the prolonged ban on factions eventually strengthened the bureaucracy. After Lenin’s death, the prohibition of factions remained in place indefinitely and became a cudgel in the hands of Stalin against his enemies—real and imagined—within the party.
Lenin’s last struggle
In the last years of his life, Lenin’s health was in dire straits. He suffered three strokes during the years 1922 to 1923, which, as he would later recount to Trotsky, lost him the ability to speak for several months. His declining health necessarily limited his political activity in these years. Yet even in these conditions, Lenin became increasingly aware of the bureaucratization of the Soviet state in the context of isolation, economic backwardness, and the growing alienation of the party and the state apparatus from the working class.
It was none other than the historic leader of the Bolshevik Party who launched an attack on the growing Soviet bureaucracy—and Stalin in particular—in the last years of his life. As historian Moshe Lewin notes in his book Lenin’s Last Struggle, the controversy centered primarily around the state monopoly on foreign trade, self-determination for Georgia and other historically oppressed nations under Tsarism, and the increasing concentration of power in Stalin’s hands.
Following the October Revolution, the Soviet state implemented a monopoly on foreign trade, as the Bolsheviks considered it essential to maintain control on the price of consumer goods and to check the power of speculators. Following the implementation of the NEP however, a few party members, including Stalin and Bukharin, argued for a relaxation of these controls, or even an outright abolition of the state monopoly. Lenin and Trotsky stood firmly for the monopoly to remain untouched. “The foreigners will buy up and take home with them everything of value,” said Lenin, should Soviet traders be allowed to directly export goods abroad.
Lenin, keenly aware of the growing ranks of petty traders, the wealthiest peasants or kulaks, and state apparatchiks, decided urgent action was needed. In the fall of 1922, he proposed to Trotsky to form a “bloc against bureaucracy in general and against the Organizational Bureau [directed by Stalin] in particular” and suggested that Trotsky should lead a special party committee to that end. Through the action of Lenin and Trotsky, the party’s Central Committee reversed course and abandoned its plans to undercut the state monopoly on foreign trade. But it would be the last victory for the two greatest leaders of the October Revolution.
Stalin became aware of the increasing cooperation between Lenin and Trotsky and maneuvered to inhibit any further joint political work. Stalin had shrewdly assumed control of Lenin’s care during his illness, a role that allowed him to greatly restrict the flow of information between the Bolshevik leader and others in the party. Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife and a long-time party member, recalled that Stalin levelled “unworthy abuse and threats” toward her for facilitating the political work of Lenin, supposedly in defiance of doctor’s orders, and threatened to have her brought up on charges before the party’s Control Commission.
The same month, Lenin dictated a series of letters that were directed to the 12th party congress to be held in April of the following year; these letters later came to be known as his last testament. In it, Lenin expresses his reservations about Stalin’s political power. Stalin, now the General Secretary of the Party, “has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution.” This reproach was somewhat blunted by the criticisms Lenin directed at other party leaders, such as Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin. Even Trotsky receives criticisms for “excessive self-assurance and … excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of the work” in the testament, though he remains, in Lenin’s estimate, “perhaps the most capable man in the present [Central Committee].”
Yet just four days later, Lenin was convinced that Stalin’s defects meant he could no longer hold his post in the Central Committee and his post as General Secretary. His letter of December 29, 2022, reads:
“Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealing among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a Secretary-General. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his stead who in all other respects differs from Comrade Stalin in having only one advantage, namely, that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc.”
However, we should not conclude from the Testament that Lenin’s distrust of Stalin was motivated by the General Secretary’s personal characteristics alone. Rather, it was that Stalin’s rudeness, disloyalty, and intolerance served his political program, which included, above all, consolidating the power of the state and party bureaucracy, the Nepmen and the upper layers of the peasantry—in short, a counterrevolutionary program that would reverse the gains of the most exploited and oppressed layers of Soviet society. The Soviet bureaucracy, wrote Max Shachtman, the one-time American communist leader, represented “the pressure of alien classes,” i.e., the Nepmen and the kulaks, and it was Stalin above all who “was the personification of this bureaucratic tendency.” Lenin was among the first to see in Stalin’s ambitions to party leadership the reinstatement of alien class rule over the proletariat and poor peasants.
The fight carried out by Lenin and Trotsky against the bureaucratization of the Soviet state and the Bolshevik Party increasingly became linked to another struggle, namely the fight to defend the historically oppressed nations, particularly Georgia, against “Great Russian chauvinism.” And just as Stalin had personified the bureaucratic tendency, he also personified the increasing incursions by the Soviet state on the democratic freedoms of the Georgian people. Himself a Georgian who had once, at the encouragement of Lenin, written a pamphlet on the oppressed nations, Stalin was selected to be the Peoples’ Commissar for Nationalities following the October Revolution. In this role, he was entrusted with overseeing relations with the historically oppressed nations within the Soviet Federation. Trotsky became aware of Stalin’s chauvinist role in Georgia before Lenin, who initially defended Stalin in the controversy.
Yet Lenin would soon realize the General Secretary could no longer responsibly safeguard the self-determination and democratic rights of Georgian people. In March 1923, Lenin dictated the following letter, to be sent to Trotsky:
“I earnestly ask you to undertake the defense of the Georgian affair at the Central Committee of the Party. That affair is now under ‘persecution’ at the hands of Stalin and Dzerzhinsky and I cannot rely on their impartiality. Indeed, quite the contrary! If you would agree to undertake its defense, I could be at rest. If for some reason you do not agree, send me back all the papers. I will consider that a sign of your disagreement.
With the very best comradely greetings,
LENIN”
Lenin also wrote to Stalin, threatening to “break off all personal relations,” as a result of the latter’s conduct, particularly toward Lenin’s wife Krupskaya. Krupskaya would tell Kamenev that Lenin was preparing to “crush Stalin politically,” while Lenin’s secretaries would later relate that the Bolshevik leader had a “bombshell” (in Lenin’s words) against Stalin that he was preparing to detonate at the upcoming party congress.
However, this struggle was seriously hampered by Lenin’s worsening health that year. After suffering a second stroke in May 1923, Lenin lost the ability to speak permanently. Eleven months later, Lenin would be dead. Yet, although the old Bolshevik leader did not triumph over Stalin, his fight was carried on by the Left Opposition, led by Trotsky, the only figure who came close to rivaling Lenin in prestige among the Soviet masses.
The Left Opposition and the fight to preserve Lenin’s legacy
The Left Opposition first materialized in a statement signed by forty-six party leaders in October 1923, later known as the “Declaration of the Forty-Six.” Though not signed by Trotsky himself, the declaration echoed nearly all of the criticisms Trotsky himself had raised in the years following the NEP. These Bolsheviks, who had organized clandestinely during tsarism, lived through exile or prison sentences, took part in the October Revolution, and served in the Red Army. They were now courageously confronting the Soviet bureaucracy and at its head, the triumvirate of Stalin, Kamenev, and Zinoviev. By 1938, Stalin and his clique would execute nearly all of these and other revolutionaries from the party’s left wing along with most of his former allies from the party’s center and right, like Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky.
The forty-six demanded an end to the ban on party factions, since it had become a bludgeon to suppress all opposition to the policy of the leading faction. Widespread measures, they stated, were needed to increase state planning of the economy and rapid industrialization to meet the urgent needs of the working class and the peasantry. They denounced the ballooning number of “professional party functionaries” many of whom did not take part in the October Revolution and joined the party only recently. In the early years, the Left Opposition would come to include figures like Christian Rakovsky, the head of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and a defender of Georgian self-determination, the leading Soviet economist Yevgeni Preobrazhensky, the former secretary of the Comintern, Karl Radek, to name only a few of the many who declared their opposition to the Stalinist course and would later pay with their lives.
Toward the end of 1924, Stalin put forward his infamous “theory” of Socialism in One Country, abandoning once and for all the principle of internationalism that had long guided the Bolshevik Party. The counter-revolutionary policies of Stalin in the revolutions that shook China (1925-27) and Spain (1931-1939) and the Hitler-Stalin pact concluded in 1939 made it clear that “socialism in one country” actually meant defending the capitalist order in the rest of the world. It was the Left Opposition who most fiercely defended the principles of Lenin during these years: insisting on the independence of the working class, the defense of the historically oppressed nations, and the rejection of all conciliation with the class enemy.
Why reclaim the memory of the Left Opposition to Stalin today?
Stalinist terror reached its apogee in 1936-38 with the Moscow Trials and the torture and executions of thousands upon thousands of honest revolutionaries. This terror was not simply about consolidating Stalin’s grip on personal power but went hand in hand with his pursuit of a counter-revolutionary program that the Soviet workers and oppressed would never have otherwise accepted. Counter-revolutionary because, on one hand, Stalinism blocked the possibility of socialist revolution abroad (for example supporting the Kuomintang party against the revolutionary Chinese
workers or compelling the Communists in Spain to join the Popular Front together with the left wing of the bourgeoisie and to renounce seizures of land) and on the other because it reversed the historic gains of Soviet workers and oppressed people, won after the October Revolution. In 1933, Stalin signed a decree to re-criminalize same sex relationships and in 1936, ended the right to an abortion. Women were encouraged to serve as caretakers in the household just as they had during the oppressive years of tsarism; in 1944 Stalin created “The Order of Maternal Glory,” which was awarded to women who bore seven children or more. The right to self-determination was seized from Georgians, Ukrainians, Muslims, and other oppressed nationalities and religious groups.
However, the Soviet workers’ state, as precarious as it was, was living proof that the working class could seize power—expropriate the expropriators (in the words of Marx) and govern the state. The Left Opposition saw the risk that Stalin and the growing bureaucracy posed to the survival and expansion of the revolution and waged a historic struggle to preserve its gains. Despite a great many differences in circumstances, many of lessons from their struggle are as relevant today as they were a century ago: the necessity of the political independence and self-organization of the working class based in workers’ councils, assemblies or soviets, and the indispensability of internationalism (placing the objective of international revolution before the narrow needs of any national struggle).
The Russian Left Opposition did not survive the Stalinist terror. Many prominent members “recanted” their views under the threat of violence to them or their family members (and often even this did not save them). Thousands were shot in Stalin’s prisons—Isaac Deutscher writes that many of them shouted “Long live Trotsky!” as they were executed—or else died in suspicious circumstances. But their influence was critical to the construction of the International Left Opposition, with sections around the world; this culminated in the establishment of the Fourth International in 1938, which for a brief period of time included thousands of members and parties throughout Europe, Latin America, Asia, and beyond.
Trotsky, the guiding light of the Left Opposition, was driven into exile following Stalin’s consolidation of power, first to Alma Ata in present day Kazakhstan, then to Prinkipo, Turkey, then Norway, and finally to Mexico. It was there that a Stalinist agent, Ramón Mercader, finally succeeded in taking the life of the great Soviet revolutionary leader.
But the lasting impact made by Trotsky and the Left Opposition can be seen across the world throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century. In the United States, the communists adhering to the International Left Opposition formed the Communist League of America and later the Socialist Workers Party. Its members included dozens of leading figures from the U.S. Left in early to the mid-20th century, including James Cannon, Joseph Hansen, C.L.R. James, Raya Dunevskaya, Harry Braverman, and George Novack among others, and, in 1934, party members played a leading role in the historic Teamster Rebellion and general strike in Minnesota. In the middle of the century, Bolivian Trotskyists won important influence within the working class, particularly among the miners—in 1947, the Miners Federation adopted as their program a declaration of principles authored by the Trotskyist Partido Obrero Revolucionario—and helped lead the uncompleted revolution of 1952 in Bolivia. Elsewhere, such as France, China, Vietnam, and Sri Lanka, thousands of Trotskyist workers and militants were involved in important processes of class struggle in the post-War period. Today, the Trotskyist parties of the Left and Workers’ Front of Argentina have led numerous worker and popular struggles, such as the recovery and worker management of several shuttered factories; in the poorest parts of the country, they have earned as much as 20 percent of the vote in congressional elections.
Throughout the world, Trotskyists—those who represented the true revolutionary principles of Lenin and the Bolshevik spirit—faced the dual threat of suppression by Stalin and his ideological successors on one hand and by the bourgeoisie on the other. The historian Pierre Broué wrote that in 1936, prosecuted by both anti-communists and Stalinists, “The great majority of [Greek] Trotskyist militants were arrested and thrown into prisons from
which many did not emerge.” A decade later, a member of the Greek Communist Party’s Political Bureau boasted, “We killed more than 800 Trotskyists.” Winston Churchill himself intervened in Greek affairs to prevent, in his words, “triumphant Trotskyism,” at the same time he concluded deals with Stalin. In the 1940s in Vietnam, Trotskyist leaders were murdered or disappeared during a campaign of bloody repression by the Vietminh. In 1952, three years after the Communist Party took power in China, Mao rounded up 1,000 suspected Trotskyists, jailing them for years or even decades on end.
In these circumstances of isolation and persecution, many of the organizations around the world that claimed the banner of Trotskyism degenerated into opportunist blocs with Stalinists and social democrats or else sectarian withdrawal from the real processes of class struggle. Yet the example of the fight by Lenin against bureaucratization, the Left Opposition and the early Trotskyist movement show that a socialist alternative based in worker democracy exists and that Stalinism is not the natural successor to Leninism and Marxism, but rather a degeneration of the socialist project. It is through the far-sighted, principled, and dedicated communists of the Left Opposition that the legacy of Lenin lived on and whose lessons we should return to in this new era of capitalist crisis and upheaval.
Robert Belano is a writer and editor for Left Voice.
—Left Voice, March 24, 2025
https://www.leftvoice.org/lenins-fight-against-stalinism-and-the-emergence-of-the-left-opposition/
1 E.H. Carr, The October Revolution: Before and After, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969.
2 “Soviets without Communists” referred to a movement during the Russian Revolution and Civil War that advocated for the original concept of Soviets (councils) as organs of popular power, independent of the Bolshevik (Communist) Party’s control.
https://www.google.com/search?q=who+were+the+“Soviets+without+Communists.”