Historical
175-472: Historical The Left Opposition ( Russian : Левая оппозиция , romanized : Levaya oppozitsiya ) was a faction within the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) from 1923 to 1927 headed de facto by Leon Trotsky . The Left Opposition was formed by Trotsky to mount a struggle against the bureaucratic degeneration that began within the party leadership headed by Stalin during
350-674: A constitutional referendum on whether to adopt Russian as a second official language. According to the Central Election Commission, 74.8% voted against, 24.9% voted for and the voter turnout was 71.1%. Starting in 2019, instruction in Russian will be gradually discontinued in private colleges and universities in Latvia, and in general instruction in Latvian public high schools. On 29 September 2022, Saeima passed in
525-453: A federation . In The Question of Nationalities, or 'Autonomisation' (1923), Lenin said: [N]othing holds up the development and strengthening of proletarian class solidarity so much as national injustice; "offended" nationals are not sensitive to anything, so much as to the feeling of equality, and the violation of this equality, if only through negligence or jest – to the violation of that equality by their proletarian comrades. The role of
700-519: A new education law which requires all schools to teach at least partially in Ukrainian, with provisions while allow indigenous languages and languages of national minorities to be used alongside the national language. The law faced criticism from officials in Russia and Hungary. The 2019 Law of Ukraine "On protecting the functioning of the Ukrainian language as the state language" gives priority to
875-493: A capitalist stage of development and government. Hence, revolutionary workers should ally politically with peasant political organisations, not capitalist political parties. In contrast, Stalin and his allies proposed that alliances with capitalist political parties were essential to realising a revolution where communists were too few. Said Stalinist practice failed, especially in the Northern Expedition portion of
1050-548: A consistent defender of a multi-party system and favoured a coalition government to bureaucratic rule . Other figures such as Isaac Deutscher and Ernest Mandel maintain that the intra-party reforms proposed by the Left Opposition from 1923-1926 would have revitalised party democratization, mass participation , worker's self-management and eventually a multi-party socialist democracy . The Left Opposition received active support primarily from intellectuals and
1225-668: A counter-revolution in Soviet cultural life which revived patriotic propaganda , the Tsarist programme of Russification and traditional, military ranks which had been criticized by Lenin as expressions of "Great Russian chauvinism". Daniels also regarded Stalinism to represent an abrupt break with the Leninist period in terms of economic policies in which a deliberated, scientific system of economic planning that featured former Menshevik economists at Gosplan had been replaced with
1400-564: A critical alternative to the Stalin-Bukharin majority in a number of areas. Daniels stated that the Left Opposition would have prioritised industrialisation but never contemplated the " violent uprooting " employed by Stalin and contrasted most directly with Stalinism on the issue of party democratization and bureaucratization . Concurrently, Daniels believed that the practical differences in their international policy with other factions had been exaggerated and he contended that Trotsky
1575-636: A definite action; it rules out all criticism which disrupts or makes difficult the unity of an action decided on by the Party. Before the October Revolution , despite supporting moderate political reform—including Bolsheviks elected to the Duma when opportune—Lenin said that capitalism could only be overthrown with proletarian revolution , not with gradual reforms—from within ( Fabianism ) and from without ( social democracy )—which would fail because
1750-437: A domestic labour aristocracy with a slightly higher standard of living than most workers, ensuring peaceful labour–capital relations in the capitalist homeland. Therefore, a proletarian revolution of workers and peasants could not occur in capitalist countries whilst the imperialist global-finance system remained in place. The first proletarian revolution would have to occur in an underdeveloped country, such as Imperial Russia,
1925-457: A fairly considerable period of time and in fairly varied political situations, their ability to apply this truth in practice have not yet learned to help the revolutionary class in its struggle to emancipate all toiling humanity from the exploiters. And this applies equally to the period before and after the proletariat has won political power. In Chapter II, "Proletarians and Communists", of The Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx and Engels present
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#17327657878762100-640: A form of Marxism, revolutionary Leninism was criticised as an undemocratic interpretation of socialism . In The Nationalities Question in the Russian Revolution (1918), Rosa Luxemburg criticised the Bolsheviks for the suppression of the All Russian Constituent Assembly (January 1918); the partitioning of the feudal estates to the peasant communes; and the right of self-determination of every national people of
2275-431: A formula with V standing for the nucleus (vowel) and C for each consonant, the maximal structure can be described as follows: (C)(C)(C)(C)V(C)(C)(C)(C) Leninism Leninism ( Russian : Ленинизм , Leninizm ) is a political ideology developed by Russian Marxist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin that proposes the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat led by a revolutionary vanguard party as
2450-558: A hard or soft counterpart, and the distinction is a prominent feature of the language, which is usually shown in writing not by a change of the consonant but rather by changing the following vowel. Another important aspect is the reduction of unstressed vowels . Stress , which is often unpredictable, is not normally indicated orthographically , though an optional acute accent may be used to mark stress – such as to distinguish between homographic words (e.g. замо́к [ zamók , 'lock'] and за́мок [ zámok , 'castle']), or to indicate
2625-600: A hasty version of planning with unrealistic targets, bureaucratic waste, bottlenecks and shortages . Revisionist historians and some post–Cold War and otherwise dissident Soviet historians, including Roy Medvedev , argue that "one could list the various measures carried out by Stalin that were actually a continuation of anti-democratic trends and measures implemented under Lenin", but that "in so many ways, Stalin acted, not in line with Lenin's clear instructions, but in defiance of them." In doing so, some historians have tried to distance Stalinism from Leninism to undermine
2800-484: A language that "belongs to the European cultural space". The financing of Russian-language content by the state will cease, which the concept says create a "unified information space". However, one inevitable consequence would be the closure of public media broadcasts in Russian on LTV and Latvian Radio, as well as the closure of LSM's Russian-language service. In Lithuania , Russian has no official or legal status, but
2975-539: A lesser extent in the Baltic states and Israel . Russian has over 258 million total speakers worldwide. It is the most spoken native language in Europe , the most spoken Slavic language , as well as the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia . It is the world's seventh-most spoken language by number of native speakers , and the world's ninth-most spoken language by total number of speakers . Russian
3150-588: A lesser extent the languages to the south and the east: Uralic , Turkic , Persian , Arabic , and Hebrew . According to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California , Russian is classified as a level III language in terms of learning difficulty for native English speakers, requiring approximately 1,100 hours of immersion instruction to achieve intermediate fluency. Feudal divisions and conflicts created obstacles between
3325-622: A minority language under the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities . 30% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 2% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. In Azerbaijan , Russian has no official status, but is a lingua franca of the country. 26% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 5% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. In Georgia , Russian has no official status, but it
3500-526: A qualitatively new entity can be said to emerge—the general language of the working class... capitalism has the tendency of creating the general urban language of a given society. In 2010, there were 259.8 million speakers of Russian in the world: in Russia – 137.5 million, in the CIS and Baltic countries – 93.7 million, in Eastern Europe – 12.9 million, Western Europe – 7.3 million, Asia – 2.7 million, in
3675-552: A symptom of the undemocratic nature of a ruling bureaucracy. During the 1920s and the 1930s, Stalin fought and defeated the political influence of Trotsky and the Trotskyists in Russia using slander, antisemitism , censorship , expulsions, exile (internal and external), and imprisonment. The anti-Trotsky campaign culminated in the executions (official and unofficial) of the Moscow Trials (1936–1938), which were part of
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#17327657878763850-473: A united, working-class proletariat in a predominantly agrarian society. Moreover, because industrialisation was financed chiefly with foreign capital, Imperial Russia did not possess a revolutionary bourgeoisie with political and economic influence upon the workers and the peasants, as had been the case in the French Revolution (1789–1799) in the 18th century. Although Russia's political economy
4025-539: Is Belarusian, among ethnic Belarusians this share is 28.5%; the highest share of those who speak Belarusian at home is among ethnic Poles — 46.0%. In Estonia , Russian is spoken by 29.6% of the population, according to a 2011 estimate from the World Factbook, and is officially considered a foreign language. School education in the Russian language is a very contentious point in Estonian politics, and in 2022,
4200-481: Is a co-official language per article 5 of the Constitution of Kyrgyzstan . The 2009 census states that 482,200 people speak Russian as a native language, or 8.99% of the population. Additionally, 1,854,700 residents of Kyrgyzstan aged 15 and above fluently speak Russian as a second language, or 49.6% of the population in the age group. In Tajikistan , Russian is the language of inter-ethnic communication under
4375-401: Is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian , and a moderate degree of it in all modern Slavic languages, at least at the conversational level. Russian is written using a Cyrillic alphabet. The Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters. The following table gives their forms, along with IPA values for each letter's typical sound: Older letters of
4550-610: Is a post-posed definite article -to , -ta , -te similar to that existing in Bulgarian and Macedonian. In the Southern Russian dialects , instances of unstressed /e/ and /a/ following palatalized consonants and preceding a stressed syllable are not reduced to [ɪ] (as occurs in the Moscow dialect), being instead pronounced [a] in such positions (e.g. несл и is pronounced [nʲaˈslʲi] , not [nʲɪsˈlʲi] ) – this
4725-523: Is based upon The Communist Manifesto (1848), identifying the communist party as "the most advanced and resolute section of the working class parties of every country; that section which pushes forward all others." As the vanguard party, the Bolsheviks viewed history through the theoretical framework of dialectical materialism , which sanctioned political commitment to the successful overthrow of capitalism, and then to instituting socialism ; and, as
4900-488: Is being used less frequently by Russian-speaking typists in favor of the extension of Unicode character encoding , which fully incorporates the Russian alphabet. Free programs are available offering this Unicode extension, which allow users to type Russian characters, even on Western 'QWERTY' keyboards. The Russian language was first introduced to computing after the M-1 , and MESM models were produced in 1951. According to
5075-624: Is called yakanye ( яканье ). Consonants include a fricative /ɣ/ , a semivowel /w⁓u̯/ and /x⁓xv⁓xw/ , whereas the Standard and Northern dialects have the consonants /ɡ/ , /v/ , and final /l/ and /f/ , respectively. The morphology features a palatalized final /tʲ/ in 3rd person forms of verbs (this is unpalatalized in the Standard and Northern dialects). During the Proto-Slavic (Common Slavic) times all Slavs spoke one mutually intelligible language or group of dialects. There
5250-748: Is critical of Leninism. Contemporary left-communist organisations, such as the Internationalist Communist Tendency and the International Communist Current , view Lenin as an essential and influential theorist but remain critical of Leninism as political praxis for the proletarian revolution . Nonetheless, the Bordigism of the International Communist Party abides Bordiga's strict Leninism. Ideologically aligned with
5425-493: Is directed against oppression, and it is this content that we unconditionally support. At the same time, we strictly distinguish it from the tendency towards national exclusiveness. ... Can a nation be free if it oppresses other nations? It cannot. The socialist internationalism of Marxism and Bolshevism is based upon class struggle and a people's transcending nationalism, ethnocentrism , and religion—the intellectual obstacles to progressive class consciousness —which are
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5600-573: Is more spoken than English. Sizable Russian-speaking communities also exist in North America, especially in large urban centers of the US and Canada, such as New York City , Philadelphia , Boston , Los Angeles , Nashville , San Francisco , Seattle , Spokane , Toronto , Calgary , Baltimore , Miami , Portland , Chicago , Denver , and Cleveland . In a number of locations they issue their own newspapers, and live in ethnic enclaves (especially
5775-713: Is nonsense”. Conversely, Trotsky held that socialism in one country would economically constrain the industrial development of the Soviet Union and thus required assistance from the new socialist countries in the developed world—which was essential for maintaining soviet democracy—in 1924, much undermined by the Russian Civil War of White Army counter-revolution. Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution proposed that socialist revolutions in underdeveloped countries would further dismantle feudal régimes and establish socialist democracies that would not pass through
5950-564: Is odd") – чу́дно ( chúdno – "this is marvellous"), молоде́ц ( molodéts – "well done!") – мо́лодец ( mólodets – "fine young man"), узна́ю ( uznáyu – "I shall learn it") – узнаю́ ( uznayú – "I recognize it"), отреза́ть ( otrezát – "to be cutting") – отре́зать ( otrézat – "to have cut"); to indicate the proper pronunciation of uncommon words, especially personal and family names, like афе́ра ( aféra , "scandal, affair"), гу́ру ( gúru , "guru"), Гарси́я ( García ), Оле́ша ( Olésha ), Фе́рми ( Fermi ), and to show which
6125-762: Is one of two official languages aboard the International Space Station , one of the six official languages of the United Nations , as well as the fourth most widely used language on the Internet . Russian is written using the Russian alphabet of the Cyrillic script ; it distinguishes between consonant phonemes with palatal secondary articulation and those without—the so-called "soft" and "hard" sounds. Almost every consonant has
6300-402: Is recognized as a minority language under the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities . Russian is the language of 9% of the population according to the World Factbook. Ethnologue cites Russian as the country's de facto working language. In China , Russian has no official status, but it is spoken by the small Russian communities in the northeastern Heilongjiang and
6475-569: Is sometimes considered to have played a significant role in the formation of modern Russian. Also, Russian has notable lexical similarities with Bulgarian due to a common Church Slavonic influence on both languages, but because of later interaction in the 19th and 20th centuries, Bulgarian grammar differs markedly from Russian. Over the course of centuries, the vocabulary and literary style of Russian have also been influenced by Western and Central European languages such as Greek, Latin , Polish , Dutch , German, French, Italian, and English, and to
6650-585: Is spoken by 14.2% of the population according to an undated estimate from the World Factbook. In 2005, Russian was the most widely taught foreign language in Mongolia, and was compulsory in Year 7 onward as a second foreign language in 2006. Around 1.5 million Israelis spoke Russian as of 2017. The Israeli press and websites regularly publish material in Russian and there are Russian newspapers, television stations, schools, and social media outlets based in
6825-518: Is the stressed word in a sentence, for example Ты́ съел печенье? ( Tý syel pechenye? – "Was it you who ate the cookie?") – Ты съе́л печенье? ( Ty syél pechenye? – "Did you eat the cookie?) – Ты съел пече́нье? ( Ty syel pechénye? "Was it the cookie you ate?"). Stress marks are mandatory in lexical dictionaries and books for children or Russian learners. The Russian syllable structure can be quite complex, with both initial and final consonant clusters of up to four consecutive sounds. Using
7000-601: Is today the basis of party activity. The party follows revolutionary tradition and experiences in this work during these periods of revolutionary reflux and the proliferation of opportunist theories, which had as their violent and inflexible opponents Marx, Engels, Lenin, and the Italian Left." In The Lenin Legend (1935), Paul Mattick said that the council communist tradition, begun by the Dutch-German leftists, also
7175-470: The 2011 Lithuanian census , Russian was the native language for 7.2% of the population. In Moldova , Russian was considered to be the language of interethnic communication under a Soviet-era law. On 21 January 2021, the Constitutional Court of Moldova declared the law unconstitutional and deprived Russian of the status of the language of interethnic communication. 50% of the population
Left Opposition - Misplaced Pages Continue
7350-579: The All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions Mikhail Tomsky . In late 1924, as Stalin proposed his new socialism in one country theory, Stalin drew closer to the Right Opposition and his triumvirate with Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev slowly broke up over the next year (Zinoviev and Kamenev were both executed in 1936). The Right Opposition were allied to Stalin's Centre from late 1924 until their alliance broke up in
7525-1000: The Apollo–Soyuz mission, which first flew in 1975. In March 2013, Russian was found to be the second-most used language on websites after English. Russian was the language of 5.9% of all websites, slightly ahead of German and far behind English (54.7%). Russian was used not only on 89.8% of .ru sites, but also on 88.7% of sites with the former Soviet Union domain .su . Websites in former Soviet Union member states also used high levels of Russian: 79.0% in Ukraine, 86.9% in Belarus, 84.0% in Kazakhstan, 79.6% in Uzbekistan, 75.9% in Kyrgyzstan and 81.8% in Tajikistan. However, Russian
7700-830: The Chinese Revolution of 1925-27 , which confirmed the United Opposition's critical analysis of the Communist Party of China 's support for the nationalist Kuomintang , the last United Opposition members were expelled from the Communist Party Central Committee; and in November 1927, Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the Communist Party itself, after holding a street demonstration on the tenth anniversary of
7875-480: The Communist Party , each ideological faction denied the political legitimacy of the opposing faction. Until shortly before his death, Lenin countered Stalin's disproportionate political influence in the Communist Party and the bureaucracy of the Soviet government, partly because of abuses he had committed against the populace of Georgia and partly because the autocratic Stalin had accumulated administrative power disproportionate to his office of General Secretary of
8050-413: The Constitution of Tajikistan and is permitted in official documentation. 28% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 7% used it as the main language with family, friends or at work. The World Factbook notes that Russian is widely used in government and business. In Turkmenistan , Russian lost its status as the official lingua franca in 1996. Among 12% of the population who grew up in
8225-543: The Great Purge of Old Bolsheviks who had led the Revolution. Some historians such as Richard Pipes consider Stalinism as the natural consequence of Leninism, that Stalin "faithfully implemented Lenin's domestic and foreign policy programs". Robert Service notes that "institutionally and ideologically Lenin laid the foundations for a Stalin ... but the passage from Leninism to the worse terrors of Stalinism
8400-777: The Moscow Trials of 1936–1938. According to Rogovin, 80-90% of the members of the Central Committee elected at the Sixth through to the Seventeenth Congresses were physically annihilated. The Right Opposition and Left Opposition have been held by some scholars as representing political alternatives to Stalinism despite their shared beliefs in Leninism due to their policy platforms which were at variance with Stalin. This ranged from areas related to economics , foreign policy and cultural matters. As
8575-519: The Old Bolsheviks and leading figures in the military and scientific fields had "undoubtedly" weakened the nation. Some Marxist theoreticians have disputed the view that the Stalinist dictatorship was a natural outgrowth of the Bolsheviks' actions as most of the original central committee members from 1917 were later eliminated by Stalin. George Novack stressed the initial efforts by
8750-544: The Russian Civil War . In March 1921, the New Economic Policy (NEP, 1921–1929) allowed limited local capitalism (private commerce and internal free trade) and replaced grain requisitions with an agricultural tax managed by state banks. The NEP was meant to resolve food-shortage riots by the peasantry and allowed limited private enterprise; the profit motive encouraged farmers to produce the crops required to feed town and country; and to economically re-establish
8925-574: The Russian Civil War : "We stand for organized terror—this should be frankly stated." Some scholars have had a differing view and attributed the establishment of the one-party system in the Soviet Union to the wartime conditions imposed on Lenin's government and others have highlighted the initial attempts to form a coalition government with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries . According to historian Marcel Liebman , Lenin's wartime measures such as banning opposition parties
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#17327657878769100-745: The Ukraine Sovnarkom , Boris Souvarine of the French Communist Party , and the Central Committee of the Polish Communist Party that was led by prominent theoreticians such as Maksymilian Horwitz , Maria Koszutska , and Adolf Warski . Russian language Russian is an East Slavic language belonging to the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family . It is one of
9275-584: The Ukrainian language in more than 30 spheres of public life: in particular in public administration , media, education, science, culture, advertising, services . The law does not regulate private communication. A poll conducted in March 2022 by RATING in the territory controlled by Ukraine found that 83% of the respondents believe that Ukrainian should be the only state language of Ukraine. This opinion dominates in all macro-regions, age and language groups. On
9450-641: The United States Census , in 2007 Russian was the primary language spoken in the homes of over 850,000 individuals living in the United States. Russian is one of the official languages (or has similar status and interpretation must be provided into Russian) of the following: The Russian language is also one of two official languages aboard the International Space Station – NASA astronauts who serve alongside Russian cosmonauts usually take Russian language courses. This practice goes back to
9625-841: The anarchists and the Mensheviks , factions of the Socialist Revolutionary Party and the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries . The Russian Civil War (1917–1922), which included the fight against the White Army , Entente intervention , left-wing uprisings against the Bolsheviks and widespread peasant rebellions was an external and internal war which transformed Bolshevik Russia into the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic (RSFSR),
9800-410: The cultural status quo that the capitalist ruling class manipulates in order to divide the working classes and the peasant classes politically. To overcome that barrier to establishing socialism, Lenin said that acknowledging nationalism, as a people's right of self-determination and right of secession, naturally would allow socialist states to transcend the political limitations of nationalism to form
9975-584: The means of production and helping the Soviet Union move towards parity with Western capitalist countries, which would also increase the proportion of the economy which was part of the socialised sector of the economy and definitively shift the Soviet Union towards a socialist mode of production . There was also the Right Opposition , which was led by the leading party theoretician and Pravda editor Nikolai Bukharin and supported by Sovnarkom Chairman (prime minister) Alexei Rykov and Chairman of
10150-530: The proletariat than the Leninism of the Communist International at their first (1919) and second (1920) congresses. Proponents of left communism include Amadeo Bordiga , Herman Gorter , Paul Mattick , Sylvia Pankhurst , Antonie Pannekoek and Otto Rühle . Historically, the Dutch-German communist left has been most critical of Lenin and Leninism, yet the Italian communist left remained Leninist. Bordiga said: "All this work of demolishing opportunism and 'deviationism' (Lenin: What Is To Be Done? )
10325-462: The totalitarian view that the negative facets of Stalin were inherent in communism from the start. Critics include anti-Stalinist communists such as Leon Trotsky , who pointed out that Lenin attempted to persuade the Russian Communist Party to remove Stalin from his post as its General Secretary . Lenin's Testament , the document which contained this order, was suppressed after Lenin's death. Trotsky also argued that he and Lenin had intended to lift
10500-432: The "political campaign" (socialist changes to society), which required the decisive, revolutionary leadership of the Bolshevik vanguard party. Based upon the First International (IWA, International Workingmen's Association, 1864–1876), Lenin organised the Bolsheviks as a democratically centralised vanguard party; wherein free political speech was recognised as legitimate until policy consensus; afterwards, every member of
10675-408: The 1930s such as the underdeveloped consumer base along with the priority focus on heavy industry were due to a number of avoidable problems. He argued that the industrial drive had been enacted under more severe circumstances, several years later and in a less rational manner than originally conceived by the Left Opposition. American historian Robert Vincent Daniels viewed the Left Opposition as
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#173276578787610850-405: The 20th century, Russian was a mandatory language taught in the schools of the members of the old Warsaw Pact and in other countries that used to be satellites of the USSR. According to the Eurobarometer 2005 survey, fluency in Russian remains fairly high (20–40%) in some countries, in particular former Warsaw Pact countries. In Armenia , Russian has no official status, but it is recognized as
11025-412: The Belarusian society the Russian language prevails, so according to the 2019 census 6,718,557 people (71.4% of the total population) stated that they speak Russian at home, for ethnic Belarusians this share is 61.4%, for Russians — 97.2%, for Ukrainians — 89.0%, for Poles — 52.4%, and for Jews — 96.6%; 2,447,764 people (26.0% of the total population) stated that the language they usually speak at home
11200-408: The Bolsheviks to form a government with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries and bring other parties such as the Mensheviks into political legality. Tony Cliff argued the Bolshevik-Left Socialist Revolutionary coalition government dissolved the democratically elected Russian Constituent Assembly due to a number of reasons. They cited the outdated voter-rolls which did not acknowledge the split among
11375-433: The CC received only 2,790 voted whereas the Opposition received 6,594. Among the military and administrative delegates elected to regional conferences in Moscow, 1,708 voted for the CC, while 878 voted for the Opposition. Internationally, Trotsky's opposition and criticism of the ruling troika received support from several Central Committee members of foreign communist parties. This included Christian Rakovsky , Chairman of
11550-402: The Chinese Revolution (1926–1928), which resulted in the right-wing Kuomintang 's massacre of the Chinese Communist Party . Despite the failure, Stalin's policy of mixed-ideology political alliances nonetheless became Comintern 's policy. Until exiled from Russia in 1929, Trotsky developed and led the Left Opposition (and the later Joint Opposition) with members of the Workers' Opposition ,
11725-445: The Communist Party . The counter-action against Stalin aligned with Lenin's advocacy of the right of self-determination for the national and ethnic groups of the deposed Tsarist Empire . Lenin warned the Party that Stalin had "unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution" and formed a faction with Leon Trotsky to remove Stalin as
11900-514: The Communist Party and the bureaucracy of the Soviet government. In 1922, Lenin allied with Leon Trotsky against the party's growing bureaucratisation and the influence of Joseph Stalin . Lenin himself never mentioned the concept of "Trotskyism" after Trotsky became a member of the Bolshevik party but the term was employed by Stalin and the troika to present Trotsky's views as factional and anathematical to Leninist thought. After Lenin's death (21 January 1924), Trotsky ideologically battled
12075-503: The Communist Party in 1928, although they never regained their former influence and eventually perished in the Great Purge . Trotsky and his supporters, on the other hand, refused to capitulate to Stalin and were exiled to remote areas of the Soviet Union in early 1928. Trotsky was eventually expelled from the country in February 1929, sent into exile in Turkey. Trotsky's supporters remained in exile, but their resolve began to waver in 1929 as Stalin turned against Bukharin and Rykov and adopted
12250-553: The Communist Party were key arguments of Trotsky's Left Opposition and the later Joint Opposition . In instituting government policy, Stalin promoted the doctrine of socialism in one country (adopted 1925), wherein the Soviet Union would establish socialism upon Russia's economic foundations (and support socialist revolutions elsewhere). In a 1936 interview with journalist Roy W. Howard , Stalin articulated his rejection of world revolution and stated that “We never had such plans and intentions” and that “The export of revolution
12425-419: The Decembrists and (later) the Zinovievists. Trotskyism predominated the politics of the Left Opposition, which demanded the restoration of soviet democracy , the expansion of democratic centralism in the Communist Party, national industrialisation, international permanent revolution and socialist internationalism. According to historian Sheila Fitzpatrick , the scholarly consensus was that Stalin appropriated
12600-422: The Dutch-German left, among the ideologists of contemporary communisation , the theorist Gilles Dauvé criticised Leninism as a "by-product of Kautskyism ". In The Soviet Union Versus Socialism (1986), Noam Chomsky said that Stalinism was the logical development of Leninism and not an ideological deviation from Lenin's policies, which resulted in collectivisation enforced with a police state . In light of
12775-618: The General Secretary of the Communist Party. To that end followed proposals reducing the administrative powers of party posts to reduce bureaucratic influence upon the policies of the Communist Party. Lenin advised Trotsky to emphasise Stalin's recent bureaucratic alignment in such matters (e.g. undermining the anti-bureaucratic workers' and peasants' Inspection) and argued to depose Stalin as General Secretary. Despite advice to refuse "any rotten compromise", he did not heed Lenin's advice and General Secretary Stalin retained power over
12950-532: The Great and developed from the Moscow ( Middle or Central Russian ) dialect substratum under the influence of some of the previous century's Russian chancery language. Prior to the Bolshevik Revolution , the spoken form of the Russian language was that of the nobility and the urban bourgeoisie. Russian peasants, the great majority of the population, continued to speak in their own dialects. However,
13125-480: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), Lenin's economic analyses indicated that capitalism would transform into a global financial system , by which industrialised countries exported financial capital to their colonies and so realise the exploitation of the labour of the natives and the exploitation of the natural resources of their countries. Such superexploitation allows wealthy countries to maintain
13300-590: The Institute of Russian Language of the Russian Academy of Sciences, an optional acute accent ( знак ударения ) may, and sometimes should, be used to mark stress . For example, it is used to distinguish between otherwise identical words, especially when context does not make it obvious: замо́к ( zamók – "lock") – за́мок ( zámok – "castle"), сто́ящий ( stóyashchy – "worthwhile") – стоя́щий ( stoyáshchy – "standing"), чудно́ ( chudnó – "this
13475-543: The Leninist vanguard party was to politically educate the workers and peasants to dispel the societal false consciousness of religion and nationalism that constitute the cultural status quo taught by the bourgeoisie to the proletariat to facilitate their economic exploitation of peasants and workers. Influenced by Lenin, the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party stated that the development of
13650-583: The Leninist vanguard party would be one of many political parties competing for election to government power. Nevertheless, because of the Russian Civil War (1917–1924) and the anti-Bolshevik terrorism of opposing political parties aiding the White Armies' counter-revolution, the Bolshevik government banned all other political parties, which left the Leninist vanguard party as the only political party in Russia. Lenin said that such political suppression
13825-526: The Middle East and North Africa – 1.3 million, Sub-Saharan Africa – 0.1 million, Latin America – 0.2 million, U.S., Canada , Australia, and New Zealand – 4.1 million speakers. Therefore, the Russian language is the seventh-largest in the world by the number of speakers , after English, Mandarin, Hindi -Urdu, Spanish, French, Arabic, and Portuguese. Russian is one of the six official languages of
14000-604: The October Revolution. In December 1927, the XVth Party Congress declared Left Opposition and Trotskyist views to be incompatible with Communist Party membership and expelled all leading Left Opposition supporters from the Party. After their expulsion by the XVth Congress, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and their supporters immediately surrendered to Stalin, "admitted their mistakes" and were readmitted to
14175-514: The Right Opposition leader, Bukharin, had elaborated on Stalin's socialism in one country policy, giving it a theoretical justification. This solidified the Right Opposition as Stalin's main allies, as the triumvirate of Stalin-Zinoviev-Kamenev from recent years broke up. Soon after the April 1925 Conference, Zinoviev and Kamenev formed the New Opposition , but they were defeated by Stalin, who
14350-807: The Russian alphabet include ⟨ ѣ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ е ⟩ ( /je/ or /ʲe/ ); ⟨ і ⟩ and ⟨ ѵ ⟩ , which both merged to ⟨ и ⟩ ( /i/ ); ⟨ ѳ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ ф ⟩ ( /f/ ); ⟨ ѫ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ у ⟩ ( /u/ ); ⟨ ѭ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ ю ⟩ ( /ju/ or /ʲu/ ); and ⟨ ѧ ⟩ and ⟨ ѩ ⟩ , which later were graphically reshaped into ⟨ я ⟩ and merged phonetically to /ja/ or /ʲa/ . While these older letters have been abandoned at one time or another, they may be used in this and related articles. The yers ⟨ ъ ⟩ and ⟨ ь ⟩ originally indicated
14525-458: The Russian principalities before and especially during Mongol rule. This strengthened dialectal differences, and for a while, prevented the emergence of a standardized national language. The formation of the unified and centralized Russian state in the 15th and 16th centuries, and the gradual re-emergence of a common political, economic, and cultural space created the need for a common standard language. The initial impulse for standardization came from
14700-542: The Russias. That the strategic (geopolitical) mistakes of the Bolsheviks would create significant dangers for the Russian Revolution , such as the bureaucratisation that would arise to administrate the large country that was Bolshevik Russia. In defence of the expedient revolutionary practice, in "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920), Lenin dismissed the political and ideological complaints of
14875-640: The Socialist Revolutionary party and the assemblies conflict with the Russian Congress of the Soviets as an alternative democratic structure. A similar analysis is present in more recent works such as those of Graeme Gill, who argues that "[Stalinism was] not a natural flow-on of earlier developments; [it formed a] sharp break resulting from conscious decisions by leading political actors." However, Gill notes that "difficulties with
15050-420: The Soviet economy while in their opinion, the centrally planned, socialised sector of the economy languished (including the mostly state-run heavy industries which were seen as essential not only for continued industrialisation but also defence). The platform called for the state to adopt a programme for mass industrialisation and to encourage the mechanization and collectivisation of agriculture, thereby developing
15225-405: The Soviet era can speak Russian, other generations of citizens that do not have any knowledge of Russian. Primary and secondary education by Russian is almost non-existent. In Uzbekistan , Russian is the language of inter-ethnic communication. It has some official roles, being permitted in official documentation and is the lingua franca of the country and the language of the elite. Russian
15400-403: The United Nations. Education in Russian is still a popular choice for both Russian as a second language (RSL) and native speakers in Russia, and in many former Soviet republics. Russian is still seen as an important language for children to learn in most of the former Soviet republics. In Belarus , Russian is a second state language alongside Belarusian per the Constitution of Belarus . 77% of
15575-761: The XIII Party Conference in January 1924. Following Lenin's death in January 1924, the confrontation between the Left Opposition and the triumvirate expanded more openly into a dispute over Trotsky's policies, with the triumvirate accusing Trotsky's policies of being "anti- Leninist ". At the XIIIth Communist Party Congress in May 1924, the triumvirate's position was further strengthened at the Left Opposition's expense. Another confrontation took place from October to December 1924, during
15750-492: The anti-Bolshevik critics, who claimed ideologically correct stances that were to the political left of Lenin. In Marxist philosophy, left communism is a range of left-wing political perspectives among communists. Left communism criticizes the Bolshevik Party 's ideology as the revolutionary vanguard. Ideologically, left communists present their perspectives and approaches as authentic Marxism and thus more oriented to
15925-406: The application of this principle in practice will sometimes give rise to disputes and misunderstandings; but only on the basis of this principle can all disputes and all misunderstandings be settled honourably for the Party. ... The principle of democratic centralism and autonomy for local Party organisations implies universal and full freedom to criticise, so long as this does not disturb the unity of
16100-467: The ban on the opposition parties such as the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries as soon as the economic and social conditions of Soviet Russia had improved. Various historians have cited Lenin's proposal to appoint Trotsky as a Vice-chairman of the Soviet Union as evidence that he intended Trotsky to be his successor as head of government. In his biography of Trotsky, Polish-British historian Isaac Deutscher says that, on being faced with
16275-575: The basis of the Fourth International , founded in Paris in 1938. Several members of the Left Opposition also engaged in literary-intellectual activities following their forced exile from Moscow during the interwar period . Radek wrotn a biographical account of Lenin , Rakovsky produced a work on the left-wing socialist Saint-Simon , Preobrazhensky completed books on the Soviet economy and
16450-491: The bourgeoisie of the various countries and among the various groups or types of bourgeoisie within the various countries, and also by taking advantage of any, even the smallest, opportunity of winning a mass ally, even though this ally is temporary, vacillating, unstable, unreliable and conditional. Those who do not understand this reveal a failure to understand even the smallest grain of Marxism, of modern scientific socialism in general. Those who have not proved in practice, over
16625-491: The bourgeoisie's control of the means of production determined the nature of political power in Russia. As epitomised in the slogan "For a Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Peasantry", a proletarian revolution in underdeveloped Russia required a united proletariat (peasants and industrial workers) to assume government power in the cities successfully. Moreover, owing to the middle-class aspirations of much of
16800-403: The broader sense of expanding the use of Russian alongside or in favour of other languages. The current standard form of Russian is generally regarded as the modern Russian literary language ( современный русский литературный язык – "sovremenny russky literaturny yazyk"). It arose at the beginning of the 18th century with the modernization reforms of the Russian state under the rule of Peter
16975-501: The capitalist interests of the kulak in the countryside and destroying them as a social class. Initially, the Stalinists also rejected the national industrialisation of Russia but then pursued it in full, sometimes brutally. In both cases, the Left Opposition denounced the regressive nature of Stalin's policy towards the wealthy kulak social class and the brutality of forced industrialisation. Trotsky described Stalinist vacillation as
17150-440: The capitalists and organised its own socialist production, would stand up against the rest of the world, the capitalist world. In "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920), Lenin wrote: The more powerful enemy can be vanquished only by exerting the utmost effort, and by the most thorough, careful, attentive, skillful and obligatory use of any, even the smallest, rift between the enemies, any conflict of interests among
17325-418: The communist party as the political vanguard solely qualified to lead the proletariat in revolution: The Communists, therefore, are, on the one hand, practically the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding
17500-496: The core and largest republic that founded the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). As revolutionary praxis , Leninism originally was neither a proper philosophy nor a discrete political theory. Leninism comprises politico-economic developments of orthodox Marxism and Lenin's interpretations of Marxism, which function as a pragmatic synthesis for practical application to the actual conditions (political, social, economic) of
17675-572: The country. There is an Israeli TV channel mainly broadcasting in Russian with Israel Plus . See also Russian language in Israel . Russian is also spoken as a second language by a small number of people in Afghanistan . In Vietnam , Russian has been added in the elementary curriculum along with Chinese and Japanese and were named as "first foreign languages" for Vietnamese students to learn, on equal footing with English. The Russian language
17850-410: The democratisation of the Central Committee and recruitment of 50–100 ordinary workers into the lower organs of the party. Nikita Khrushchev , Stalin's successor, argued that Stalin's regime differed profusely from the leadership of Lenin in his " Secret Speech ", delivered in 1956. He was critical of the cult of the individual which was constructed around Stalin whereas Lenin stressed “the role of
18025-533: The economy of medieval Europe , Smilga chronicled the Bukharian school of thought, and Dingelstedt produced essays on the social structure of India . "We say that there can now be no doubt whatever that, as the evolution of the directing line of the faction (i.e., the majority of the Central Committee) has shown, the main core of the 1923 opposition correctly warned against the danger of a shift from
18200-479: The evidence, "only the blind and the deaf could be unaware of the contrast between Stalinism and Leninism." According to Stalin's secretary, Boris Bazhanov , Stalin was jubilant over Lenin's death while “publicly putting on the mask of grief”. French historian Pierre Broue disputed the historical assessments of the early Soviet Union by modern historians such as Dmitri Volkogonov in which he argued had falsely equated Leninism, Stalinism and Trotskyism to present
18375-427: The exploiters will be, in one or another form, restricted ...is a question of the specific national features of this or that capitalism." In chapter five of The State and Revolution (1917), Lenin describes the dictatorship of the proletariat as: the organisation of the vanguard of the oppressed as the ruling class for the purpose of crushing the oppressors. ... An immense expansion of democracy, which, for
18550-533: The factories and the trade unions but excluded the capitalist social class to establish a proletarian government by and for the working class and the peasants. Concerning the political disenfranchisement of the capitalist social class in Bolshevik Russia, Lenin said that "depriving the exploiters of the franchise is a purely Russian question, and not a question of the dictatorship of the proletariat, in general. ... In which countries ...democracy for
18725-413: The factory and the industrial plant their local peasant dialects with their phonetics, grammar, and vocabulary, and the very process of recruiting workers from peasants and the mobility of the worker population generate another process: the liquidation of peasant inheritance by way of leveling the particulars of local dialects. On the ruins of peasant multilingual, in the context of developing heavy industry,
18900-456: The final reading amendments that state that all schools and kindergartens in the country are to transition to education in Latvian . From 2025, all children will be taught in Latvian only. On 28 September 2023, Latvian deputies approved The National Security Concept, according to which from 1 January 2026, all content created by Latvian public media (including LSM ) should be only in Latvian or
19075-427: The first time, becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for the rich ... and suppression by force, i.e. exclusion from democracy, for the exploiters and oppressors of the people—this is the change which democracy undergoes during the 'transition' from capitalism to communism. Concerning the disenfranchisement from democracy of the capitalist social class, Lenin said: "Democracy for
19250-573: The former Right Opposition . Historian Pierre Broué stated that the opposition groups were dissolved in early 1933, when many of its members were arrested. However, some documents found in 2018 showed that the Underground Left Opposition stayed active even in prison; in fact, the prisons became their centers of activity. In the meantime, Trotsky founded the International Left Opposition in 1930. It
19425-647: The four extant East Slavic languages, and is the native language of the Russians . It was the de facto and de jure official language of the former Soviet Union . Russian has remained an official language of the Russian Federation , Belarus , Kazakhstan , Kyrgyzstan , and Tajikistan , and is still commonly used as a lingua franca in Ukraine , Moldova , the Caucasus , Central Asia , and to
19600-477: The freedom to express a real variety of opinions existed in the party, and in carrying out political decisions, consideration was given to the positions of not only the majority, but a minority in the party". He compared this practice with subsequent leadership blocs which violated party tradition, ignored proposals of opponents and expelled the Opposition from the party on falsified charges which culminated with
19775-631: The generation of immigrants who started arriving in the early 1960s). Only about 25% of them are ethnic Russians, however. Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union , the overwhelming majority of Russophones in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn in New York City were Russian-speaking Jews. Afterward, the influx from the countries of the former Soviet Union changed the statistics somewhat, with ethnic Russians and Ukrainians immigrating along with some more Russian Jews and Central Asians. According to
19950-480: The government bureaucracy for the lack of a reliable tool of communication in administrative, legal, and judicial affairs became an obvious practical problem. The earliest attempts at standardizing Russian were made based on the so-called Moscow official or chancery language, during the 15th to 17th centuries. Since then, the trend of language policy in Russia has been standardization in both the restricted sense of reducing dialectical barriers between ethnic Russians, and
20125-486: The industrialised countries. In Germany, Marxist social democracy was the political perspective of the Social Democratic Party of Germany , inspiring Russian Marxists, such as Lenin. In the early 20th century, the socio-economic backwardness of Imperial Russia (1721–1917) — characterized by combined and uneven economic development — facilitated rapid and intensive industrialisation, which produced
20300-457: The infamous Article 58 and who established the autocratic system within the Russian Communist Party . Proponents also note that Lenin put a ban on factions within the party and introduced the one-party state in 1921, a move that enabled Stalin to get rid of his rivals easily after Lenin's death and cite Felix Dzerzhinsky , who exclaimed during the Bolshevik struggle against opponents in
20475-510: The influence of Stalin, who formed ruling blocs within the Russian Communist Party (with Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev , then with Nikolai Bukharin and then by himself) and so determined soviet government policy from 1924 onwards. The ruling blocs continually denied Stalin's opponents the right to organise as an opposition faction within the party—thus, the reinstatement of democratic centralism and free speech within
20650-464: The lack of consistency from members of the Left Opposition over the issue of democratization . She argued that Trotsky and Preobrazhensky overly focused on intra-party democracy rather than widespread democratization outside of the party during the 1920s. Trotsky would develop his writings of political pluralism in the 1930s. Although, Weissman acknowledged the heterogenous views of the Left Opposition and described one of their members, Victor Serge , as
20825-472: The lines of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement. The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: Formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat. The revolutionary purpose of the Leninist vanguard party is to establish the dictatorship of
21000-524: The mid-late 1930s along with the Oppositionists who remained unrepentant. Some of its members, while claiming to have given up on their old views, participated in the underground opposition in the USSR. They, like I. N. Smirnov , even maintained contact with Trotsky and his son Sedov . During this period, the Trotskyists formed an opposition bloc with several other groups, for example the members of
21175-524: The northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region . Russian was also the main foreign language taught in school in China between 1949 and 1964. In Kazakhstan , Russian is not a state language, but according to article 7 of the Constitution of Kazakhstan its usage enjoys equal status to that of the Kazakh language in state and local administration. The 2009 census reported that 10,309,500 people, or 84.8% of
21350-498: The notion of ideological continuity and reinforce the position of counter-communism . Other revisionist historians, such as Orlando Figes , whilst critical of the Soviet era, acknowledge that Lenin had actively sought to counter the growing influence of Stalin through a number of actions such as his alliance with Trotsky in 1922–23, opposition to Stalin on foreign trade , the Georgian affair and proposed party reforms which included
21525-424: The one hand and a triumvirate (also known by its Russian name Troika ) of Communist International (Comintern) chairman Grigory Zinoviev , Communist Party General Secretary Joseph Stalin and Politburo chairman Lev Kamenev on the other hand. The Left Opposition argued that the New Economic Policy had weakened the Soviet Union by allowing the private sector to achieve an increasingly important position in
21700-515: The other hand, before the war, almost a quarter of Ukrainians were in favour of granting Russian the status of the state language, while after the beginning of Russia's invasion the support for the idea dropped to just 7%. In peacetime, the idea of raising the status of Russian was traditionally supported by residents of the south and east . But even in these regions, only a third of the respondents were in favour, and after Russia's full-scale invasion , their number dropped by almost half. According to
21875-461: The other three languages in the East Slavic branch. In many places in eastern and southern Ukraine and throughout Belarus, these languages are spoken interchangeably, and in certain areas traditional bilingualism resulted in language mixtures such as Surzhyk in eastern Ukraine and Trasianka in Belarus. An East Slavic Old Novgorod dialect , although it vanished during the 15th or 16th century,
22050-446: The parliament approved a bill to close up all Russian language schools and kindergartens by the school year. The transition to only Estonian language schools and kindergartens will start in the 2024-2025 school year. In Latvia , Russian is officially considered a foreign language. 55% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 26% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. On 18 February 2012, Latvia held
22225-594: The party membership) had voted for the platform of the Opposition during the 1923 discussion. He noted that the majority of the party organisation, especially in Moscow , had voted for the Opposition in 1923. At the same time, Stalin approved the appointmnet of Amayak Nazaretian, the head of his personal secretariat, who would later falsify voting results of party meetings which were then reported to Pravda magazine. However, political scientist Susan Weissman criticized
22400-412: The party was expected to abide by the agreed policy. Democratic debate was Bolshevik practice, even after Lenin banned factions among the Party in 1921. Despite being a guiding political influence, Lenin did not exercise absolute power and continually debated to have his points of view accepted as a course of revolutionary action. In Freedom to Criticise and Unity of Action (1905), Lenin said: Of course,
22575-470: The party", "had worked with Lenin during his life”. He also contrasted the “severe methods” used by Lenin in the “most necessary cases” as a “struggle for survival” during the Civil War with the extreme methods and mass repressions used by Stalin even when the Revolution was “already victorious”. In his memoirs, Khrushchev argued that Stalin's widespread purges of the "most advanced nucleus of people" among
22750-441: The peasantry, Leon Trotsky said that the proletarian leadership of the revolution would ensure truly socialist and democratic socio-economic change. In Bolshevik Russia , government by direct democracy was realised and effected by the soviets (elected councils of workers), which Lenin said was the "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat" postulated in orthodox Marxism . The soviets comprised representative committees from
22925-453: The peasants' speech was never systematically studied, as it was generally regarded by philologists as simply a source of folklore and an object of curiosity. This was acknowledged by the noted Russian dialectologist Nikolai Karinsky , who toward the end of his life wrote: "Scholars of Russian dialects mostly studied phonetics and morphology. Some scholars and collectors compiled local dictionaries. We have almost no studies of lexical material or
23100-415: The people as the creator of history”. He also emphasized that Lenin favored a collective leadership which relied on personal persuasion and recommended the removal of Stalin from the position of General Secretary. Khrushchev contrasted this with the “despotism” of Stalin which require absolute submission to his position and he also highlighted that many of the people who were later annihilated as “enemies of
23275-475: The policy of collectivization , which appeared to be close to the policies that the Left Opposition had advocated earlier. The Left Opposition attempted to field opposition candidates against the official Communist Party candidates in the 1929 elections , but to no avail. Most (but not all) prominent Left Opposition members recanted between 1929 and 1934, but they nearly all perished during the Great Purge of
23450-497: The political prelude to the establishment of communism . Lenin's ideological contributions to the Marxist ideology relate to his theories on the party , imperialism , the state , and revolution. The function of the Leninist vanguard party is to provide the working classes with the political consciousness (education and organisation) and revolutionary leadership necessary to depose capitalism . Leninist revolutionary leadership
23625-509: The politically weakest country in the capitalist global-finance system in the early 20th century. In the United States of Europe Slogan (1915), Lenin wrote: Workers of the world, unite! —Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. Hence the victory of socialism is possible, first in several, or even in one capitalist country taken separately. The victorious proletariat of that country, having expropriated
23800-459: The population aged 15 and above, could read and write well in Russian, and understand the spoken language. In October 2023, Kazakhstan drafted a media law aimed at increasing the use of the Kazakh language over Russian, the law stipulates that the share of the state language on television and radio should increase from 50% to 70%, at a rate of 5% per year, starting in 2025. In Kyrgyzstan , Russian
23975-418: The population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 67% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. According to the 2019 Belarusian census , out of 9,413,446 inhabitants of the country, 5,094,928 (54.1% of the total population) named Belarusian as their native language, with 61.2% of ethnic Belarusians and 54.5% of ethnic Poles declaring Belarusian as their native language. In everyday life in
24150-404: The position of the Left Opposition on such matters as industrialisation and collectivisation . The Trotskyist demands countered Stalin's political dominance of the Communist Party, which was officially characterised by the " cult of Lenin ", the rejection of permanent revolution, and advocated the doctrine of socialism in one country . The Stalinist economic policy vacillated between appeasing
24325-577: The post- emancipation agrarian society of Imperial Russia in the early 20th century. As a political-science term, Lenin's theory of proletarian revolution entered common usage at the fifth congress of the Communist International (1924), when Grigory Zinoviev applied the term Leninism to denote "vanguard-party revolution." Leninism was accepted as part of Russian Communist Party (b) 's vocabulary and doctrine around 1922, and in January 1923, despite objections from Lenin, it entered
24500-438: The proletarian line, and against the ominous growth of the apparatus regime." Party speech of Grigory Zinoviev in 1926. According to historian Sheila Fitzpatrick , the scholarly consensus was that Stalin appropriated the position of the Left Opposition on such matters as industrialisation and collectivisation . Trotsky maintained that the disproportions and imbalances which became characteristic of Stalinist planning in
24675-461: The proletariat with the working class 's support. The communist party would lead the popular deposition of the Tsarist government and then transfer government power to the working class; that change of the ruling class—from the bourgeoisie to the proletariat —makes establishing socialism possible. In What Is To Be Done? (1902), Lenin said that a revolutionary vanguard party, recruited from
24850-411: The proletariat in every territory of the deposed Russian Empire (1721–1917). In The Right of Nations to Self-determination (1914), Lenin said: We fight against the privileges and violence of the oppressor nation, and do not in any way condone strivings for privileges on the part of the oppressed nation. :... The bourgeois nationalism of any oppressed nation has a general democratic content that
25025-479: The pronunciation of ultra-short or reduced /ŭ/ , /ĭ/ . Because of many technical restrictions in computing and also because of the unavailability of Cyrillic keyboards abroad, Russian is often transliterated using the Latin alphabet. For example, мороз ('frost') is transliterated moroz , and мышь ('mouse'), mysh or myš' . Once commonly used by the majority of those living outside Russia, transliteration
25200-472: The proper pronunciation of uncommon words or names. Russian is an East Slavic language of the wider Indo-European family . It is a descendant of Old East Slavic , a language used in Kievan Rus' , which was a loose conglomerate of East Slavic tribes from the late 9th to the mid-13th centuries. From the point of view of spoken language , its closest relatives are Ukrainian , Belarusian , and Rusyn ,
25375-484: The public vocabulary. In the 19th century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), in which they called for the political unification of the European working classes in order to achieve communist revolution ; and proposed that because the socio-economic organisation of communism was of a higher form than that of capitalism , a workers' revolution first would occur in
25550-491: The respondents), while according to the 2002 census – 142.6 million people (99.2% of the respondents). In Ukraine , Russian is a significant minority language. According to estimates from Demoskop Weekly, in 2004 there were 14,400,000 native speakers of Russian in the country, and 29 million active speakers. 65% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 38% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. On 5 September 2017, Ukraine's Parliament passed
25725-555: The revolutionary national government, to realise the socio-economic transition by all means. In the aftermath of the October Revolution in 1917, Leninism was the dominant version of Marxism in Russia. In establishing the socialist mode of production in Soviet Russia – with the 1917 Decree on Land , war communism (1918–1921) and the New Economic Policy (1921–1928) – the revolutionary régime suppressed most political opposition, including Marxists who opposed Lenin's actions,
25900-425: The serious illness of the Bolshevik founder Vladimir Lenin . The degeneration intensified after Lenin's death in January 1924. The Left Opposition advocated for a programme of rapid industrialization , voluntary collectivisation of agriculture, and the expansion of a worker's democracy . Intellectuals who had previously lived in exile during the Tsarist era would constitute the core of the Left Opposition during
26075-665: The so-called "Literary Discussion" and criticism of Trotsky's permanent revolution policy as Stalin proposed socialism in one country . This resulted in the removal of Trotsky from his ministerial post on 6 January 1925, although Stalin opposed Zinoviev's demand that Trotsky be expelled from the Party. With Trotsky largely marginalized, Zinoviev and Kamenev had a falling out with Stalin at the XIVth Communist Party Conference in April 1925 over Stalin's October 1924 proposal of socialism in one country , which Zinoviev and Kamenev now openly opposed. By this time,
26250-553: The socialist workers' culture should not be "hamstrung from above" and opposed the Proletkult (1917–1925) organisational control of the national culture. In post- Revolutionary Russia, the Stalinist application of Marxism–Leninism ( socialism in one country ), and Trotskyism ( permanent world revolution ) were the principal philosophies of communism that claimed legitimate ideological descent from Leninism; thus, within
26425-401: The socially progressive nature of Lenin's policies such as universal education , universal healthcare and equal rights for women . Conversely, Stalin's regime reversed Lenin's policies on social matters such as sexual equality , legal restrictions on marriage , rights of sexual minorities and protective legislation . Historian Robert Vincent Daniels also viewed the Stalinist period as
26600-518: The succession period. Members represented the most internationalist elements of the party and held offices at the highest responsibility with Christian Rakovsky , Adolph Joffe , and Nikolay Krestinsky holding ambassadorial posts in London , Paris , Tokyo , and Berlin . Originally, the battle lines were drawn between Trotsky and his supporters who signed The Declaration of 46 in October 1923 on
26775-679: The survey carried out by RATING in August 2023 in the territory controlled by Ukraine and among the refugees, almost 60% of the polled usually speak Ukrainian at home, about 30% – Ukrainian and Russian, only 9% – Russian. Since March 2022, the use of Russian in everyday life has been noticeably decreasing. For 82% of respondents, Ukrainian is their mother tongue, and for 16%, Russian is their mother tongue. IDPs and refugees living abroad are more likely to use both languages for communication or speak Russian. Nevertheless, more than 70% of IDPs and refugees consider Ukrainian to be their native language. In
26950-459: The syntax of Russian dialects." After 1917, Marxist linguists had no interest in the multiplicity of peasant dialects and regarded their language as a relic of the rapidly disappearing past that was not worthy of scholarly attention. Nakhimovsky quotes the Soviet academicians A.M Ivanov and L.P Yakubinsky, writing in 1930: The language of peasants has a motley diversity inherited from feudalism. On its way to becoming proletariat peasantry brings to
27125-730: The tenets of socialism, Leninism was a right-wing deviation from Marxism. The vanguard-party revolution of Leninism became the ideological basis of the communist parties in the socialist political spectrum. In the People's Republic of China, the Chinese Communist Party organised itself with Maoism (the Thought of Mao Zedong), socialism with Chinese characteristics . In Singapore, the People's Action Party (PAP) featured internal democracy and initiated single-party dominance in
27300-786: The two. Others divide the language into three groupings, Northern , Central (or Middle), and Southern , with Moscow lying in the Central region. The Northern Russian dialects and those spoken along the Volga River typically pronounce unstressed /o/ clearly, a phenomenon called okanye ( оканье ). Besides the absence of vowel reduction, some dialects have high or diphthongal /e⁓i̯ɛ/ in place of Proto-Slavic * ě and /o⁓u̯ɔ/ in stressed closed syllables (as in Ukrainian) instead of Standard Russian /e/ and /o/ , respectively. Another Northern dialectal morphological feature
27475-462: The urban working class, who had lost many workers to fight the counter-revolutionary Civil War. The NEP nationalisation of the economy then would facilitate the industrialisation of Russia, politically strengthen the working class, and raise the standards of living for all Russians. Lenin said that the appearance of new socialist states was necessary for strengthening Russia's economy in establishing Russian socialism. Lenin's socio-economic perspective
27650-511: The use of the language has some presence in certain areas. A large part of the population, especially the older generations, can speak Russian as a foreign language. However, English has replaced Russian as lingua franca in Lithuania and around 80% of young people speak English as their first foreign language. In contrast to the other two Baltic states, Lithuania has a relatively small Russian-speaking minority (5.0% as of 2008). According to
27825-422: The use of the term reflect problems with the concept of Stalinism itself. The major difficulty is a lack of agreement about what should constitute Stalinism." Revisionist historians such as Sheila Fitzpatrick have criticized the focus on the upper levels of society and the use of Cold War concepts such as totalitarianism, obscuring the system's reality. Russian historian Vadim Rogovin stated that "Under Lenin,
28000-480: The vast majority of the people, and suppression by force, i.e. exclusion from democracy, of the exploiters and oppressors of the people—this is the change democracy undergoes during the transition from capitalism to communism." The dictatorship of the proletariat was effected with soviet constitutionalism , a form of government opposite to the dictatorship of capital (privately owned means of production) practised in bourgeois democracies. Under soviet constitutionalism,
28175-469: The working class, should lead the political campaign because only in that way would the proletariat successfully realise their revolution; unlike the economic campaign of trade-union-struggle advocated by other socialist political parties and the anarcho-syndicalists . Like Marx, Lenin distinguished between the aspects of a revolution, the "economic campaign" ( labour strikes for increased wages and work concessions) that featured diffused plural leadership; and
28350-509: The years from 1928 to 1930 over strategy towards the kulaks and NEPmen . Trotsky and his supporters in the Left Opposition were joined by the Group of Democratic Centralism to form the United (or Joint) Opposition . The first confrontation between the Left Opposition and the triumvirate occurred from October 1923 to January 1924 over industrialization policies. The triumvirate won decisively at
28525-437: The youth section of the Moscow party base. Party histories and documents such as the " Great Soviet Encyclopedia " recorded varying levels of support for the Left Opposition across the membership base. At a meeting of workers' cells, 9,843 voters were cast for the Central Committee (CC) which was controlled by Zinioviev, Kamenev, and Stalin at the time whereas 2,223 voted for the Opposition. Conversely, at meetings of student cells,
28700-699: Was again supported by Bukharin and Rykov, at the XIVth Party Congress in December 1925. Soon after their defeat at the Congress, Zinoviev and Kamenev joined forces with Trotsky's Left Opposition in early 1926, in what became known as the United Opposition . From July to October 1926, the United Opposition lost out to Stalin, and its leaders were expelled from the ruling Politburo. In October 1927, soon after catastrophic events regarding
28875-470: Was agrarian and semi-feudal , the task of democratic revolution fell to the urban, industrial working class as the only social class capable of effecting land reform and democratisation, in view that the Russian bourgeoisie would suppress any revolution. In the April Theses (1917), the political strategy of the October Revolution (7–8 November 1917), Lenin proposed that the Russian revolution
29050-405: Was first introduced in North America when Russian explorers voyaged into Alaska and claimed it for Russia during the 18th century. Although most Russian colonists left after the United States bought the land in 1867, a handful stayed and preserved the Russian language in this region to this day, although only a few elderly speakers of this unique dialect are left. In Nikolaevsk, Alaska , Russian
29225-421: Was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 19% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. According to the 2014 Moldovan census , Russians accounted for 4.1% of Moldova's population, 9.4% of the population declared Russian as their native language, and 14.5% said they usually spoke Russian. According to the 2010 census in Russia , Russian language skills were indicated by 138 million people (99.4% of
29400-697: Was meant to be an opposition group within the Comintern, but members of the Comintern were immediately expelled as soon as they joined (or were suspected of joining) the ILO. The ILO therefore concluded that opposing Stalinism from within the Communist organizations controlled by Stalin's supporters had become impossible, so new organizations had to be formed. In 1933, the ILO was renamed the International Communist League (ICL), which formed
29575-491: Was no more prepared than other Bolshevik figures to risk war or the loss of trade opportunities despite his support for world revolution . Russian historian, Vadim Rogovin , argued that the Left Opposition, led by Trotsky, was a political movement that "offered a real alternative to Stalinism, and that to crush this movement was the primary function of the Stalinist terror". Rogovin also stated that contemporary historians believed that 40,000 to 50,000 people (more than 10% of
29750-528: Was not an isolated national event but a fundamentally international event—the first socialist revolution in the world. Lenin's practical application of Marxism and proletarian revolution to the social, political, and economic conditions of agrarian Russia motivated and impelled the "revolutionary nationalism of the poor" to depose the absolute monarchy of the three-hundred-year dynasty of the House of Romanov (1613–1917), as tsars of Russia. In Imperialism,
29925-468: Was not philosophically inherent to the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Bolshevik government nationalised industry and established a foreign-trade monopoly to allow the productive coordination of the national economy and so prevent Russian national industries from competing against each other. To feed the populaces of town and country, Lenin instituted war communism (1918–1921) as a necessary condition—adequate supplies of food and weapons—for fighting
30100-471: Was not smooth and inevitable." Historian and Stalin biographer Edvard Radzinsky believes that Stalin was a genuine follower of Lenin, exactly as he claimed himself. Proponents of continuity cite a variety of contributory factors, in that it was Lenin, rather than Stalin, whose civil war measures introduced the Red Terror with its hostage-taking and internment camps ; that it was Lenin who developed
30275-453: Was prompted by the fact that several political parties either took up arms against the new Soviet government , or participated in sabotage, collaborated with the deposed Tsarists , or made assassination attempts against Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders. Liebman also argued that the banning of parties under Lenin did not have the same repressive character as later bans enforced under the Stalinist regime. Several scholars have highlighted
30450-587: Was supported by the German Revolution of 1918–1919 , the Italian insurrection and general strikes of 1920, and worker wage-riots in the UK, France, and the US. In recognising and accepting nationalism among oppressed peoples, Lenin advocated their national right to self-determination and so opposed Russian chauvinism because such ethnocentrism was a cultural obstacle to establishing the dictatorship of
30625-402: Was the sixth-most used language on the top 1,000 sites, behind English, Chinese, French, German, and Japanese. Despite leveling after 1900, especially in matters of vocabulary and phonetics, a number of dialects still exist in Russia. Some linguists divide the dialects of Russian into two primary regional groupings, "Northern" and "Southern", with Moscow lying on the zone of transition between
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