Misplaced Pages

#627372

154-468: “He is an unprincipled intriguer, who subordinates everything to the preservation of his own power. He changes his theory according to whom he needs to get rid of.” Bukharin on Stalin's theoretical position, 1928. The struggle for power in the Soviet Union after the death of Vladimir Lenin saw the development of three major tendencies within the Communist Party . These were described by Leon Trotsky as left, right, and centre tendencies, each based on

308-622: A Corsier conference they agreed to launch the paper from Munich , where Lenin relocated in September. Containing contributions from prominent European Marxists, Iskra was smuggled into Russia, becoming the country's most successful underground publication since 1850s. He first adopted the pseudonym Lenin in December 1901, possibly based on the Siberian River Lena ; he often used the fuller pseudonym of N. Lenin, and while

462-587: A Group of International Marxists appeared after its founders left the ranks of the KPO. This group signed a declaration of independent socialist parties, many associated with the International Workers' Front which had left the ICO and KPO. From this point on, there is little mention of either the new group or the KPO itself, with the fall of France , the leadership of the KPO had been forced to flee again and

616-436: A Lutheran by upbringing, was largely indifferent to Christianity , a view that influenced her children. Ilya Ulyanov was from a family of former serfs ; Ilya's father's ethnicity remains unclear, with suggestions that he was of Russian , Chuvash , Mordvin , or Kalmyk ancestry. Despite a lower-class background, he had risen to middle-class status, studying physics and mathematics at Kazan University before teaching at

770-528: A one-party state . Within the party, a Political Bureau (Politburo) and Organisation Bureau (Orgburo) were established to accompany the existing Central Committee ; decisions of these bodies had to be adopted by Sovnarkom and the Council of Labour and Defence . Lenin was the most significant figure in this governance structure, being Chairman of Sovnarkom and sitting on the Council of Labour and Defence,

924-949: A "bourgeoisie-democratic revolution" of the middle classes had to take place before a "socialist revolution" of the proletariat, Lenin believed that in Russia the proletariat could overthrow the Tsarist regime without an intermediate revolution. In February 1917, the February Revolution broke out in Saint Petersburg, renamed Petrograd at the beginning of the First World War, as industrial workers went on strike over food shortages and deteriorating factory conditions. The unrest spread to other parts of Russia, and fearing that he would be violently overthrown, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated. The State Duma took over control of

1078-411: A "socialist sense of justice". November also saw the military restructured with egalitarian measures, abolition of previous ranks, titles, and medals, and the establishment of soldiers' committees to elect commanders. Communist Party Opposition The Communist Party of Germany (Opposition) ( German : Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (Opposition) ), generally abbreviated as KPO or KPD(O),

1232-683: A Marxist interpretation of societal development and counter the claims of the Narodniks. He wrote a paper on peasant economics; it was rejected by the liberal journal Russian Thought . In late 1893, Lenin moved to Saint Petersburg . There, he worked as a barrister's assistant and rose to a senior position in a Marxist revolutionary cell that called itself the Social-Democrats after the Marxist Social Democratic Party of Germany . Championing Marxism within

1386-518: A Russian language translation of Marx and Friedrich Engels 's 1848 political pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto . He began to read the works of the Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov , agreeing with Plekhanov's argument that Russia was moving from feudalism to capitalism and so socialism would be implemented by the proletariat , or urban working class, rather than the peasantry. This Marxist perspective contrasted with

1540-540: A bomb. Before the attack could take place, the conspirators were arrested and tried, and Alexander was executed by hanging in May 1887. Despite the emotional trauma of his father's and brother's deaths, Lenin continued studying, graduated from school at the top of his class with a gold medal for exceptional performance, and decided to study law at Kazan University. Upon entering Kazan University in August 1887, Lenin moved into

1694-704: A coalition government with other socialist parties. Though Sovnarkom refused a coalition with the Mensheviks or Socialist-Revolutionaries, it allowed the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries five cabinet posts in December 1917. This coalition lasted only until March 1918, when the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries left the government over disagreements about the Bolsheviks' approach to ending the First World War. At their 7th Congress in March 1918,

SECTION 10

#1732765352628

1848-510: A country controlled by the workers and power to the Soviets. Lenin and many other Bolsheviks expected proletariat revolution to sweep across Europe in days or months. The Provisional Government had planned for a Constituent Assembly to be elected in November 1917; despite Lenin's objections, Sovnarkom allowed the vote as scheduled. In the election , the Bolsheviks gained about a quarter of

2002-539: A country estate in Alakaevka village, Samara Oblast , in the hope that her son would turn his attention to agriculture. He had little interest in farm management, and his mother soon sold the land, keeping the house as a summer home. In September 1889, the Ulyanov family moved to the city of Samara , where Lenin joined Alexei Sklyarenko 's socialist discussion circle. There, Lenin fully embraced Marxism and produced

2156-666: A culturally Polish part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire , he used Jagiellonian University 's library to conduct research. He stayed in close contact with the RSDLP, which was operating in the Russian Empire, convincing the Duma's Bolshevik members to split from their parliamentary alliance with the Mensheviks. In January 1913, Stalin, whom Lenin referred to as the "wonderful Georgian", visited him, and they discussed

2310-655: A factional truce between the party's feuding left and right. Perhaps 1,000 members of the German Communist Party were affected. These expulsions paralleled similar efforts to purge the Soviet Communist Party of followers of Nikolai Bukharin , Alexei Rykov and Mikhail Tomsky . The KPO initially conceived of itself as a factional influence group, attempting to change the political line of the Communist Party of Germany rather than

2464-492: A family life with Nadya's mother Elizaveta Vasilyevna, in Shushenskoye the couple translated English socialist literature into Russian. There, Lenin wrote A Protest by Russian Social-Democrats to criticise German Marxist revisionists like Eduard Bernstein who advocated a peaceful, electoral path to socialism. He also finished The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899), his longest book to date, which criticised

2618-821: A few places, communist groups affiliated with the ICO achieved more success than the Comintern-affiliated organizations. For example, in Sweden, the Socialist Party of Karl Kilbom and Nils Flyg , affiliated with the ICO, received 5.7% of the vote in the 1932 elections to the Riksdag , outpolling the Comintern section that received 3.9%. In Spain, the ICO-affiliated Bloque Obrero y Campesino (BOC), led by Joaquín Maurín ,

2772-583: A job in Nizhny Novgorod , rising to become Director of Primary Schools in the Simbirsk district six years later. Five years after that, he was promoted to Director of Public Schools for the province, overseeing the foundation of over 450 schools as a part of the government's plans for modernisation. In January 1882, his dedication to education earned him the Order of Saint Vladimir , which bestowed on him

2926-581: A meeting of the Bolshevik Central Committee on 10 October, where he again argued that the party should lead an armed insurrection to topple the Provisional Government. This time the argument won with ten votes against two. Critics of the plan, Zinoviev and Kamenev, argued that Russian workers would not support a violent coup against the regime and that there was no clear evidence for Lenin's assertion that all of Europe

3080-594: A multi-party Constituent Assembly , but by 1918 centralised power in the new Communist Party. Opponents were suppressed in the Red Terror , and tens of thousands were killed or interned in concentration camps. Responding to devastation, famine , and popular uprisings, Lenin reversed his policy of war communism in 1921, and encouraged economic growth through the New Economic Policy . His administration defeated right and left-wing anti-Bolshevik armies in

3234-400: A nearby flat. There, he joined a zemlyachestvo , a form of university society that represented the men of a particular region. This group elected him as its representative to the university's zemlyachestvo council, and he took part in a December demonstration against government restrictions that banned student societies. The police arrested Lenin and accused him of being a ringleader in

SECTION 20

#1732765352628

3388-417: A new party in competition with it. The organization held a second conference in November 1929 at which in the words of M. N. Roy it "declared unequivocally that between Social Democracy and Communism there is no half-way house". Roy claimed that the KPO had 6,000 dues-paying members and was publishing eight weekly and bi-monthly publications by the fall of 1929, with a combined circulation of 25,000. Brandler

3542-474: A news sheet, Rabochee delo ( Workers' Cause ), he was among 40 activists arrested in St. Petersburg and charged with sedition. Refused legal representation or bail, Lenin denied all charges against him but remained imprisoned for a year before sentencing. He spent this time theorising and writing. In this work he noted that the rise of industrial capitalism in Russia had caused large numbers of peasants to move to

3696-556: A passage for them through Germany, with which Russia was then at war. Recognising that these dissidents could cause problems for their Russian enemies, the German government agreed to permit 32 Russian citizens to travel by train through their territory, among them Lenin and his wife. For political reasons, Lenin and the Germans agreed to a cover story that Lenin had travelled by sealed train carriage through German territory, but in fact

3850-480: A pure communist society . He began arguing for a Bolshevik-led armed insurrection to topple the government, but at a clandestine meeting of the party's central committee this idea was rejected. Lenin then headed by train and by foot to Finland, arriving at Helsinki on 10 August, where he hid away in safe houses belonging to Bolshevik sympathisers. In August 1917, while Lenin was in Finland, General Lavr Kornilov ,

4004-514: A reduction of frequency and by 1932 the paper was being issued only once a week. Despite Roy's protestations that the KPO did not constitute an independent political party, it was not long before it had entered the field with its own candidates for office. It ran its own candidates in the 7 December 1929 provincial election in Thuringia, one of the organization's strongholds, although these garnered just 12,000 votes. In other elections, it supported

4158-453: A result, Nin, a former Trotskyist , became the POUM's new leader. In all, the ICO had member parties in fifteen countries during the 1930s. However, the ICO and its affiliates did not consider themselves a new international, but a "faction" that was involuntarily excluded from the Comintern and that was anxious to return to it if only the Comintern would change its policies and allow ICO members

4312-474: A revolutionary government which took steps towards socialism, while his critics accuse him of establishing a dictatorship which oversaw mass killings and political repression . Lenin was born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov in Streletskaya Ulitsa, Simbirsk, now Ulyanovsk , on 22 April 1870, and baptised six days later; as a child, he was known as Volodya the common nickname variant of Vladimir. He

4466-424: A series of Petrograd safe houses. Fearing that he would be killed, Lenin and fellow senior Bolshevik Grigory Zinoviev escaped Petrograd in disguise, relocating to Razliv . There, Lenin began work on the book that became The State and Revolution , an exposition on how he believed the socialist state would develop after the proletariat revolution, and how from then on the state would gradually wither away, leaving

4620-480: A specific class or caste. Trotsky argued that his tendency, the Left Opposition , represented the internationalist traditions of the working class . The tendency led by Joseph Stalin was described as being in the centre , based on the state and party bureaucracy, tending to shift alliances between the left and the right. The right tendency was identified with the supporters of Nikolai Bukharin and Rykov. It

4774-425: A speech to Bolshevik supporters condemning the Provisional Government and again calling for a continent-wide European proletarian revolution. Over the following days, he spoke at Bolshevik meetings, lambasting those who wanted reconciliation with the Mensheviks and revealing his " April Theses ", an outline of his plans for the Bolsheviks, which he had written on the journey from Switzerland. He publicly condemned both

Right Opposition - Misplaced Pages Continue

4928-630: A spy, Roman Malinovsky , to act as a vocal Lenin supporter within the party. Various Bolsheviks expressed their suspicions about Malinovsky to Lenin, although it is unclear if the latter was aware of the spy's duplicity; it is possible that he used Malinovsky to feed false information to the Okhrana. In August 1910, Lenin attended the 8th Congress of the Second International , an international meeting of socialists, in Copenhagen as

5082-813: A threat to the faction of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union headed by Joseph Stalin, who saw in Thälmann a reliable ally during a time of bitter factional warfare. As a result, the Presidium of the Comintern countermanded the German Central Committee's action, restoring Thälmann as secretary. In October 1928, Brandler returned to Germany against the KPD's wishes. The corruption of Thälmann's Hamburg organization and its protection by

5236-584: Is one such group. The Gruppe Arbeiterpolitik, founded by Heinrich Brandler, is effectively a successor organisation. The Communist Opposition of Austria was established in late 1929 when the politburo of the official Communist Party of Austria expelled Willi Schlamm , A. Reisinger, Joseph Klein]], and Richard Vovesny. They had their own periodical, Der Neue Mahnruf until the Dolfuss dictatorship came to power in 1934. Jay Lovestone happened to be in Austria at

5390-632: The All India Forward Bloc , Roy sharply diverged to the point where he even came to oppose the Congress-led Quit India campaign. The split between Bose and Roy was in many ways analogous to the American split between Bertram Wolfe and Jay Lovestone. While never an official member of the ICO, a Right Oppositionist group led by José Penelon split from the Communist Party of Argentina in 1928. Penelon's group formed

5544-722: The Bolsheviks , Lenin led the October Revolution which established the world's first socialist state . His government won the Russian Civil War and consolidated power in a one-party state under the Communist Party . Ideologically a Marxist , his developments to the ideology are called Leninism . Born into a middle-class family in Simbirsk , Lenin embraced revolutionary socialist politics following his brother 's 1887 execution. Expelled from Kazan Imperial University for participating in protests against

5698-522: The Communist Party in December 1927. However, once Trotsky was out of the way and the Left Opposition had been illegalized, Stalin soon became alarmed at the danger posed to the Soviet state by the rising power of the capitalistic kulaks and NEPmen, who had become emboldened by the Left Opposition's illegalization. Sensing this danger, Stalin then turned on his Right Opposition allies. Bukharin and

5852-595: The Great Purge trials. The various right oppositional groups loosely aligned with Bukharin within the Comintern were forced to form their own organisations when they were, in their turn, purged from the national sections of the Comintern. In Europe, the most important and substantial of these new organisations was the Communist Party Opposition (KPO) in Germany, led by Heinrich Brandler . In

6006-790: The Great Purges in Russia. A number of KPO militants in exile were to travel to Spain and fought in the International Brigades that supported the Second Spanish Republic . Some were to find themselves persecuted by the Stalinists, a fate they shared with militants belonging to the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM). There seems to have been a tendency within the KPO which wanted it to break more clearly from any support of Stalinism and in 1939

6160-455: The July Days , took place while Lenin was away, but upon learning that demonstrators had violently clashed with government forces, he returned to Petrograd and called for calm. Responding to the violence, the government ordered the arrest of Lenin and other prominent Bolsheviks, raiding their offices, and publicly alleging that he was a German agent provocateur . Evading arrest, Lenin hid in

6314-521: The N did not stand for anything, a popular misconception later arose that it represented Nikolai . Under this pseudonym, in 1902 he published his most influential publication to date, the pamphlet What Is to Be Done? , which outlined his thoughts on the need for a vanguard party to lead the proletariat to revolution. Nadya joined Lenin in Munich and became his secretary. They continued their political agitation, as Lenin wrote for Iskra and drafted

Right Opposition - Misplaced Pages Continue

6468-719: The October Revolution , in which the Bolsheviks overthrew the regime. Lenin's government redistributed land to the peasantry, issued a number of legislative decrees , nationalised banks and industry, withdrew from the war by signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Central Powers , and promoted world revolution through the Communist International . It initially shared power with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries and allowed

6622-670: The Paris Commune of 1871 , which he considered an early prototype for a proletarian government. Financed by his mother, he stayed in a Swiss health spa before travelling to Berlin , where he studied for six weeks at the Staatsbibliothek and met the Marxist Wilhelm Liebknecht . Returning to Russia with a stash of illegal revolutionary publications, he travelled to various cities distributing literature to striking workers. While involved in producing

6776-686: The Partido Comunista de Region Argentina ("Communist Party of the Argentine Region"), which was later renamed the Partido Concentracion Obrera (" Labour Gathering Party "). It merged with the Social Democrats in 1971. The Marxist Workers Bloc of Mexico was founded in early 1937. It published a few issues of a newspaper called La Batalla (after POUM's journal) and announced its adherence to

6930-657: The Party of Proletarian Unity in December 1930. The small national Opposition group joined the expelled Seine Federation of the SFIO in 1938 to form the Workers and Peasants' Socialist Party . A separate ICO party, the Opposition Communist Party of Alsace-Lorraine (KPO), was created in Alsace . The Alsatian KPO campaigned for autonomy for Alsace, and formed an alliance with clerical autonomist. The Alsatian KPO

7084-445: The Penza Institute for the Nobility . In mid-1863, Ilya married Maria, the well-educated daughter of a wealthy Swedish Lutheran mother and a Russian Jewish father who had converted to Christianity and worked as a physician. According to historian Petrovsky-Shtern , it is likely that Lenin was unaware of his mother's half-Jewish ancestry, which was only discovered by Anna after his death. Soon after their wedding, Ilya obtained

7238-407: The Saarland . In the Saarland, they were able to function legally for a little longer due to its status as a French occupation zone. When a plebiscite was held on the matter of the region being returned to Germany, the KPO called on its supporters to vote for a Räterepublik ( soviet ) Saarland and to oppose unity with Nazi Germany . This was in contrast to the position of the KPD which supported

7392-501: The Tsarist government , he devoted the following years to a law degree before relocating to Saint Petersburg in 1893 and becoming a prominent Marxist activist. In 1897, Lenin was arrested for sedition and exiled to Siberia for three years. He then moved to Western Europe, where he became a key figure in the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party . In the party's 1903 schism, he led his Bolshevik faction against Julius Martov 's Mensheviks . Lenin briefly returned to Russia during

7546-426: The "Friends of the People" Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats ; around 200 copies were illegally printed in 1894. Hoping to cement connections between his Social-Democrats and Emancipation of Labour , a group of Russian Marxists based in Switzerland , Lenin visited the country to meet group members Plekhanov and Pavel Axelrod . He proceeded to Paris to meet Marx's son-in-law Paul Lafargue and to research

7700-427: The 1930s. Vladimir Lenin Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (22 April [ O.S. 10 April] 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin , was a Russian revolutionary, politician and political theorist who was the founder and first head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 until his death in 1924, and of the Soviet Union from 1922 until his death. The founder and leader of

7854-447: The Bolshevik Centre to Paris; although Lenin disagreed, he moved to the city in December 1908. Lenin disliked Paris, lambasting it as "a foul hole", and while there he sued a motorist who knocked him off his bike. Lenin became very critical of Bogdanov's view that Russia's proletariat had to develop a socialist culture to become a successful revolutionary vehicle. Instead, Lenin favoured a vanguard of socialist intelligentsia who would lead

SECTION 50

#1732765352628

8008-553: The Bolshevik faction between his and Bogdanov's followers, accusing the latter of deviating from Marxism. In May 1908, Lenin lived briefly in London, where he used the British Museum Reading Room to write Materialism and Empirio-criticism , an attack on what he described as the "bourgeois-reactionary falsehood" of Bogdanov's relativism. Lenin's factionalism began to alienate increasing numbers of Bolsheviks, including his former close supporters Alexei Rykov and Lev Kamenev . The Okhrana exploited his factionalist attitude by sending

8162-438: The Bolshevik newspaper Pravda , and giving public speeches in Petrograd aimed at converting workers, soldiers, sailors, and peasants to his cause. Sensing growing frustration among Bolshevik supporters, Lenin suggested an armed political demonstration in Petrograd to test the government's response. Amid deteriorating health, he left the city to recuperate in the Finnish village of Neivola. The Bolsheviks' armed demonstration,

8316-416: The Bolsheviks changed their name from the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party to the Russian Communist Party, as Lenin wanted to distance his group from the increasingly reformist German Social Democratic Party and emphasize its goal of a communist society. Although ultimate power officially rested with Sovnarkom and the Executive Committee (VTSIK) elected by the All-Russian Congress of Soviets (ARCS),

8470-519: The Bolsheviks regained dominance of the RSDLP at its Fifth Congress , held in London in May 1907. As the Tsarist government cracked down on opposition, both by disbanding Russia's legislative assembly, the Second Duma , and by ordering its secret police, the Okhrana , to arrest revolutionaries, Lenin fled Finland for Switzerland. There, he tried to exchange those banknotes stolen in Tiflis that had identifiable serial numbers on them. Alexander Bogdanov and other prominent Bolsheviks decided to relocate

8624-432: The Bolsheviks split completely with the Mensheviks; many Bolsheviks refused, and both groups attended the Third RSDLP Congress , held in London in April 1905. Lenin presented many of his ideas in the pamphlet Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution , published in August 1905. Here, he predicted that Russia's liberal bourgeoisie would be sated by a transition to constitutional monarchy and thus betray

8778-418: The Bolsheviks to return to the open political arena. Fearing a counter-revolution from right-wing forces hostile to socialism, the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries who dominated the Petrograd Soviet had been instrumental in pressuring the government to normalise relations with the Bolsheviks. Both the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries had lost much popular support because of their affiliation with

8932-430: The Bolsheviks' activities, Lenin endorsed the idea of robbing post offices, railway stations, trains, and banks. Under the lead of Leonid Krasin , a group of Bolsheviks began carrying out such criminal actions, the best-known taking place in June 1907, when a group of Bolsheviks acting under the leadership of Joseph Stalin committed an armed robbery of the State Bank in Tiflis , Georgia. Although he briefly supported

9086-448: The Central Committee, and the Politburo. The only individual with comparable influence was Lenin's right-hand man, Yakov Sverdlov , who died in March 1919 as a result of the Spanish flu pandemic. In November 1917, Lenin and his wife took a two-room flat within the Smolny Institute; the following month, they went on a brief holiday in Halila, Finland. In January 1918, he survived an assassination attempt in Petrograd; Fritz Platten , who

9240-411: The Communist International and the influence of the CPSU in the Comintern and its sections, and over Stalin's international policy, particularly the Third Period and the subsequent popular front policies. In addition, as the Moscow trials entered their second phase and turned against Bukharin and his supporters, disputes broke out within the ICO regarding whether there was any point in continuing with

9394-422: The Communist Party in 1929 took mayors or city councilors from Clichy , Auffay , Saint-Denis , Pierrefitte-sur-Seine , Villetaneuse and Paris. The party's general secretary and the editor of L'Humanité were also demoted. However, not all of the expelled necessarily adhered to the ICOs positions; the Parisian councilors, for instance, formed their own party, Workers and Peasants Party , which in turn joined

SECTION 60

#1732765352628

9548-418: The Communist Party was de facto in control of Russia, as acknowledged by its members at the time. By 1918, Sovnarkom began acting unilaterally, citing a need for expediency, with the ARCS and VTSIK becoming increasingly marginalized, so the soviets no longer had a role in governing Russia. During 1918 and 1919, the government expelled Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries from the soviets. Russia had become

9702-405: The Communist leadership, only to be expelled in 1943. One cantonal section of the Swiss Communist Party , in Schaffhausen , did secede and form a communist opposition group . For a while, it was quite successful, dominating the local labor movement, especially among tool and watchmakers. In the 20 October 1933 elections, the CPO elected 10 of the 30 local councilors and CPO leader Walther Bringolf

9856-432: The German Communist Party. The major exception was Paul Frölich , who had been allied with a third, so-called Conciliator faction which stood between the future KPO and the KPD leadership. Frölich and his partner Rosi Wolfstein , like Brandler and Thalheimer, had been allies and pupils of Rosa Luxemburg . Throughout 1929, the KPD expelled followers of Brandler and Thalheimer as well as the Conciliator faction, who sought

10010-411: The Germans. The Norwegian and Swedish groups left later that year to join the new "centrist" International Buro for Revolutionary Socialist Unity (or London Bureau) established in Paris that August. The Czechoslovak affiliate was weakened by the defection of its Czech members in December, making the party a largely Sudeten German group at a time when that community was becoming increasingly attracted to

10164-470: The Highest Stage of Capitalism , which argued that imperialism was a product of monopoly capitalism , as capitalists sought to increase their profits by extending into new territories where wages were lower and raw materials cheaper. He believed that competition and conflict would increase and that war between the imperialist powers would continue until they were overthrown by proletariat revolution and socialism established. He spent much of this time reading

10318-401: The Hungarian Communist Party was already an underground movement, and the opposition claimed about 10% of its membership. While never a formal organization, there was a tendency within the Polish Communist Party usually known as the "three Ws" after the leaders: Adolf Warski , Henryk Walecki , and Maria Koszutska (pseudonym Wera Kostrzewa). As the Party was already underground in Poland, and

10472-434: The ICO. It was never heard from again. There is little information available on the International Communist Opposition in English. The only book length study is Robert J Alexander's The Right Opposition; The Lovestoneites and the International Communist Opposition of the 1930s ( ISBN   0-313-22070-0 ). Issues of Revolutionary History journal have reprinted a number of texts from members of Right Oppositional groups of

10626-432: The KPD after organising a meeting to combat what they saw as corruption in their party after its central leader Ernst Thälmann defended a protégé, John Wittorf, from charges of theft despite his guilt. Thälmann was deposed by the Central Committee only to be reinstated by Joseph Stalin through the agency of the Comintern. The secretary of the Hamburg organization of the KPD was found to have embezzled 2,000 marks from

10780-502: The KPD on most public issues, but it did stand their own candidates in some elections and ran other campaigns. Their members were also active in the existing trade unions in contrast to the KPD which launched a policy of forming radical dual unions during the so-called Third Period between 1929 and 1934. In the period when the KPD was denouncing the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) as social fascists and retreating from joint anti-fascist work with non-Communists, Brandler and

10934-478: The KPO weekly Arbeiterpolitik was banned for 13 weeks for violating President Paul von Hindenburg 's emergency decree "against political excesses" by the conservative German government headed by Chancellor Franz von Papen . The ban was to take effect immediately, continuing until 15 November. The ban, along with similar measures taken against other organs of the left-wing press, helped make coordinated action against German ultranationalism more difficult. Following

11088-568: The KPO were strongly in favor of the establishment of a united front against the menace of Nazism and were particularly critical of the Communist Party's conception that "once the Nazis get into power, then will the united front of the proletariat rise and brush them aside". Instead, the KPO called for the immediate formation of a broad anti-fascist alliance including the Social Democratic-controlled trade union federation,

11242-538: The Left Opposition, they did not tend to form separate parties as they considered themselves loyal to the Communist International (Comintern). Stalin and his "centre" faction were allied with Bukharin and the Right Opposition from late 1924, with Bukharin elaborating Stalin's theory of socialism in one country . Together, they expelled Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, and the United Opposition from

11396-547: The Mensheviks accused Lenin of being a despot and autocrat. Enraged at the Mensheviks, Lenin resigned from the Iskra editorial board and in May 1904 published the anti-Menshevik tract One Step Forward, Two Steps Back . The stress made Lenin ill, and to recuperate he holidayed in Switzerland. The Bolshevik faction grew in strength; by spring 1905, the whole RSDLP Central Committee was Bolshevik, and in December they founded

11550-503: The Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries, who dominated the influential Petrograd Soviet , for supporting the Provisional Government, denouncing them as traitors to socialism. Considering the government to be just as imperialist as the Tsarist regime, he advocated immediate peace with Germany and Austria-Hungary, rule by soviets , the nationalisation of industry and banks, and the state expropriation of land, all with

11704-513: The Nazis. The Austrian group had to go underground after the Dollfus putsch of March 1934, and the majority of the Alsatian section was expelled that summer for its pro-Nazi sympathies. The Swiss affiliate went over to the Social Democrats in 1936, and M. N. Roy took his Indian group out in 1937. Furthermore, the suppression of POUM in May 1937 and the execution of Bukharin and other "rights" in

11858-528: The Provisional Government and its unpopular continuation of the war. The Bolsheviks capitalised on this, and soon the pro-Bolshevik Marxist Trotsky was elected leader of the Petrograd Soviet. In September, the Bolsheviks gained a majority in the workers' sections of both the Moscow and Petrograd Soviets. Recognising that the situation was safer for him, Lenin returned to Petrograd. There he attended

12012-853: The RSDLP programme, attacking ideological dissenters and external critics, particularly the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR), a Narodnik agrarian-socialist group founded in 1901. Despite remaining a Marxist, he accepted the Narodnik view on the revolutionary power of the Russian peasantry, accordingly, penning the 1903 pamphlet To the Village Poor . To evade Bavarian police, Lenin moved to London with Iskra in April 1902, where he befriended fellow Russian-Ukrainian Marxist Leon Trotsky . Lenin fell ill with erysipelas and

12166-799: The RSDLP's representative, following this with a holiday in Stockholm with his mother. With his wife and sisters, he then moved to France, settling first in Bombon and then Paris. Here, he became a close friend to the French Bolshevik Inessa Armand ; some biographers suggest that they had an extra-marital affair from 1910 to 1912. Meanwhile, at a Paris meeting in June 1911, the RSDLP Central Committee decided to move their focus of operations back to Russia, ordering

12320-613: The Right Opposition were, in their turn, sidelined and removed from important positions within the Communist Party and the Soviet government from 1928 to 1930, with Stalin ending the NEP and beginning the first five-year plan . One of the last attempts of the Rightists to resist Stalin was the Ryutin affair in 1932, where a manifesto against the soviet policy of collectivization and Stalin was circulated. It openly called for "The Liquidation of

12474-473: The Russian Civil War, after which several non-Russian nations that had broken away from the empire after 1917 were re-united in the new Soviet Union in 1922; others, notably Poland, gained independence. Lenin suffered three debilitating strokes in 1922 and 1923 before his death in 1924, with Joseph Stalin succeeding him as the pre-eminent figure in the Soviet government. Widely considered one of

12628-761: The Russian Republic into the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic . The government also switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar , aligning Russia with Europe. In November 1917, Sovnarkom abolished Russia's legal system, replacing it with "revolutionary conscience". Courts were replaced by Revolutionary Tribunals for counter-revolutionary crimes, and People's Courts for civil and criminal cases, instructed to follow Sovnarkom decrees and

12782-705: The Saarland remaining under the control of France. In exile with the leadership in Paris, the KPO continued to publish Gegen den Strom . Politically, it continued the previous line of the KPO and was supportive of the Comintern and of the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union , its criticisms being reserved for the KPD. This began to change with the beginning of the Spanish Civil War and the deepening of

12936-624: The Social Democrats, Communists and the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (SAPD). Campaigning for a united front as a small group did not give the KPO more influence with the general public, but the threat of the Nazis did lead to a leftward movement within the SPD. This leftist tendency in the SPD left that party in 1931 and organised themselves as the SAPD which elements within the KPO felt they should join. After an internal struggle in which

13090-647: The Soviet Union and the Comintern in January 1929. Brandler and Thalheimer gathered their supporters into a new organization called the Communist Party of Germany (Opposition) (KPO), a group which was founded at the 30 December 1928 meeting which had originally prompted the wave of expulsions. The group also launched a new communist opposition journal, Gegen den Strom ( Against the Current ). Most of those who attended this conference were factional allies of Brandler and Thalheimer from previous years when they had headed

13244-737: The Soviet Union had convinced many that the Communist International could not be reformed and the idea of being an "opposition" within it was untenable. At a conference in February 1938, the International Communist Opposition affiliated with the London Bureau. This led to some confusion as to whether affiliates of the ICO were also affiliates of the London Bureau as organizations themselves. To straighten out this overlapping another conference

13398-474: The Stalin faction in Moscow was used as a pretext for Brandler and Thalheimer to issue a call for a meeting of their followers on 11 November 1928. Brandler, Thalheimer and their associates were bitterly criticized in an open letter from the Comintern on 19 December. Expulsion soon followed, with both Brandler and Thalheimer removed from the Communist Party of Germany in December 1928 and from the Communist Party of

13552-725: The United States, Jay Lovestone , Bertram Wolfe , and their supporters founded the Communist Party (Opposition) and published the newspaper Workers Age . In Canada, the Marxian Educational League was formed as part of Lovestone's CP(O), and it became affiliated with the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation . However, by the end of 1939, both the Toronto and Montreal groups of this organization had ceased to function. In

13706-754: The agrarian-socialists and promoted a Marxist analysis of Russian economic development. Published under the pseudonym of Vladimir Ilin, upon publication it received predominantly poor reviews. After his exile, Lenin settled in Pskov in early 1900. There, he began raising funds for a newspaper, Iskra ( Spark ), a new organ of the Russian Marxist party, now calling itself the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). In July 1900, Lenin left Russia for Western Europe; in Switzerland he met other Russian Marxists, and at

13860-446: The cities, where they formed a proletariat. From his Marxist perspective, Lenin argued that this Russian proletariat would develop class consciousness , which would in turn lead them to violently overthrow Tsarism , the aristocracy , and the bourgeoisie and to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat that would move toward socialism. In February 1897, Lenin was sentenced without trial to three years' exile in eastern Siberia. He

14014-558: The city of Kazan , but not the university. On his return, he joined Nikolai Fedoseev 's revolutionary circle, through which he discovered Karl Marx 's 1867 book Capital . This sparked his interest in Marxism , a socio-political theory that argued that society developed in stages, that this development resulted from class struggle , and that capitalist society would ultimately give way to socialist society and then communist society . Wary of his political views, Lenin's mother bought

14168-656: The civil war for freedom is blazing up. Moscow and the South, the Caucasus and Poland are ready to join the proletariat of St. Petersburg. The slogan of the workers has become: Death or Freedom! — Lenin on the Revolution of 1905 In response to the revolution of 1905, which had failed to overthrow the government, Tsar Nicholas II accepted a series of liberal reforms in his October Manifesto . In this climate, Lenin felt it safe to return to Saint Petersburg. Joining

14322-594: The closure of the Bolshevik Centre and its newspaper, Proletari . Seeking to rebuild his influence in the party, Lenin arranged for a party conference to be held in Prague in January 1912, and although 16 of the 18 attendants were Bolsheviks, he was heavily criticised for his factionalist tendencies and failed to boost his status within the party. Moving to Kraków in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria ,

14476-478: The commander-in-chief of the Russian Army, sent troops to Petrograd in what appeared to be a military coup attempt against the Provisional Government. Premier Alexander Kerensky turned to the Petrograd Soviet, including its Bolshevik members, for help, allowing the revolutionaries to organise workers as Red Guards to defend the city. The coup petered out before it reached Petrograd, but the events had allowed

14630-429: The communists already weak the group decided not to create a formal organization, though they were often depicted as followers of Brandler and Thalheimer by the leadership. All three died in gulags. In Switzerland, the official Communist Party's leader, Jules Humbert-Droz , was sympathetic to the Right Opposition, and because of that lost his powerful position in the Comintern. Later, he self-criticized and capitulated to

14784-434: The concept of being an opposition within the communist movement rather than openly create a new international rival to the Comintern, as Trotsky did with his Fourth International . The ICO began to disintegrate in 1933. With the coming to power of the Nazis, the German party had to go underground and establish an exile branch in Paris. Paris was also the new home of the international ICO headquarters, which became dominated by

14938-408: The continent to convert the "imperialist war" into a continent-wide "civil war" with the proletariat pitted against the bourgeoisie and aristocracy. In July 1916, Lenin's mother died, but he was unable to attend her funeral. Her death deeply affected him, and he became depressed, fearing that he too would die before seeing the proletarian revolution. In September 1917, Lenin published Imperialism,

15092-559: The country, establishing the Russian Provisional Government and converting the Empire into a new Russian Republic . When Lenin learned of this from his base in Switzerland, he celebrated with other dissidents. He decided to return to Russia to take charge of the Bolsheviks but found that most passages into the country were blocked due to the ongoing conflict. He organised a plan with other dissidents to negotiate

15246-539: The demonstration; he was expelled from the university, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs exiled him to his family's Kokushkino estate. There, he read voraciously, becoming enamoured with Nikolay Chernyshevsky 's 1863 pro-revolutionary novel What Is to Be Done? Lenin's mother was concerned by her son's radicalisation, and was instrumental in convincing the Interior Ministry to allow him to return to

15400-713: The dictatorship of Stalin and his clique". Later, some rightists joined a secret bloc with Leon Trotsky , Grigory Zinoviev , and Lev Kamenev in order to oppose Stalin. Historian Pierre Broué stated that it dissolved in early 1933. Bukharin was isolated from his allies abroad, and, in the face of increasing Stalinist repression, was unable to mount a sustained struggle against Stalin. Unlike Trotsky, who built an anti-Stalinist movement, Bukharin and his allies capitulated to Stalin and admitted their "ideological errors". They were temporarily rehabilitated, though they were allowed only minor posts and did not return to their former prominence. Bukharin and his allies were later executed during

15554-446: The editorial board of Novaya Zhizn ( New Life ), a radical legal newspaper run by Maria Andreyeva , he used it to discuss issues facing the RSDLP. He encouraged the party to seek out a much wider membership, and advocated the continual escalation of violent confrontation, believing both to be necessary for a successful revolution. Recognising that membership fees and donations from a few wealthy sympathisers were insufficient to finance

15708-470: The failed Revolution of 1905 , and during the First World War campaigned for its transformation into a Europe-wide proletarian revolution , which, as a Marxist, he believed would cause the end of capitalism and the rise of socialism . After the February Revolution of 1917 ousted Tsar Nicholas II and established a Provisional Government , Lenin returned to Russia and played a leading role in

15862-421: The freedom to advocate their positions. Despite being identified with Bukharin, the ICO generally supported Stalin's economic policies (which Bukharin opposed), such as the five-year plans to achieve rapid industrialization, and the collectivization of agriculture . Furthermore, they even supported the early Moscow trials . Their main difference with Stalin and the Comintern was over the issue of democracy within

16016-413: The future of non-Russian ethnic groups in the Empire. Due to the ailing health of both Lenin and his wife, they moved to the rural town of Biały Dunajec , before heading to Bern for Nadya to have surgery on her goitre . The [First World] war is being waged for the division of colonies and the robbery of foreign territory; thieves have fallen out–and to refer to the defeats at a given moment of one of

16170-536: The government in the Winter Palace and overcame it and arrested its ministers after the cruiser Aurora , controlled by Bolshevik seamen, fired a blank shot to signal the start of the revolution. During the insurrection, Lenin gave a speech to the Petrograd Soviet announcing that the Provisional Government had been overthrown. The Bolsheviks declared the formation of a new government, the Council of People's Commissars , or Sovnarkom. Lenin initially turned down

16324-603: The idea of reconciliation between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, Lenin's advocacy of violence and robbery was condemned by the Mensheviks at the Fourth RSDLP Congress , held in Stockholm in April 1906. After Lenin escaped to Finland from Russia, he was involved in setting up a Bolshevik Centre in Kuokkala , Grand Duchy of Finland , which was at the time an autonomous state controlled by the Russian Empire, before

16478-413: The intention of establishing a proletariat government and pushing toward a socialist society. By contrast, the Mensheviks believed that Russia was insufficiently developed to transition to socialism and accused Lenin of trying to plunge the new Republic into civil war. Over the coming months Lenin campaigned for his policies, attending the meetings of the Bolshevik Central Committee, prolifically writing for

16632-557: The leading position of Chairman , suggesting Trotsky for the job, but other Bolsheviks insisted and ultimately Lenin relented. Lenin and other Bolsheviks then attended the Second Congress of Soviets on 26 and 27 October and announced the creation of the new government. Menshevik attendees condemned the illegitimate seizure of power and the risk of civil war. In the early days of the regime, Lenin adjusted his rhetoric so as not to alienate Russia's population, and spoke about having

16786-402: The majority of the KPO backed Brandler and Thalheimer, a minority led by Frölich and Jacob Walcher refused to accept the decisions of the fourth conference of the KPO held in January 1932. The leadership replied to this challenge by stating that the breach of discipline implied the minority had excluded itself from the organisation. The minority responded by joining the SAPD. On 10 August 1932,

16940-428: The most significant and influential figures of the 20th century, Lenin was the posthumous subject of a pervasive personality cult within the Soviet Union until its dissolution in 1991. Under Stalin, he became an ideological figurehead of Marxism–Leninism and a prominent influence over the international communist movement . A controversial and highly divisive figure, Lenin is praised by his supporters for establishing

17094-470: The need for a strong leadership with complete control over the party. Lenin's supporters were in the majority, and he termed them the "majoritarians" ( bol'sheviki in Russian; Bolsheviks ); in response, Martov termed his followers the "minoritarians" ( men'sheviki ; Mensheviks ). Arguments between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks continued after the conference; the Bolsheviks accused their rivals of being opportunists and reformists who lacked discipline, while

17248-775: The newspaper Vperyod ( Forward ). In January 1905, the Bloody Sunday massacre of protesters in St. Petersburg sparked a spate of civil unrest in the Russian Empire known as the Revolution of 1905 . Lenin urged Bolsheviks to take a greater role in the events, encouraging violent insurrection. In doing so, he adopted SR slogans regarding "armed insurrection", "mass terror", and "the expropriation of gentry land", resulting in Menshevik accusations that he had deviated from orthodox Marxism. In turn, he insisted that

17402-546: The organisation was effectively dissolved. Of the leading figures in the KPO, Brandler and Thalheimer were to spend the war exiled in Cuba, where the latter was to perish. Brandler returned to West Germany in 1949 and played a leading role in the Gruppe Arbeiterpolitik which stood in the tradition of the KPO, but he was never able to recover its former influence. Brandler died in 1967, but the group still exists and

17556-473: The party treasury for his own use. When accountants from national party headquarters discovered the crime, they were threatened with expulsion from the party by party leader Thälmann if they exposed the theft. The Comintern got wind of the scandal which led to a crisis in the German party with the Central Committee acting to remove Thälmann, with Thälmann joining in the unanimous vote. This presented

17710-421: The revolution; instead, he argued that the proletariat would have to build an alliance with the peasantry to overthrow the Tsarist regime and establish the "provisional revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry". The uprising has begun. Force against Force. Street fighting is raging, barricades are being thrown up, rifles are cracking, guns are booming. Rivers of blood are flowing,

17864-694: The right Opposition in the United Kingdom was represented principally within the Independent Labour Party . Oppositionists joined the Revolutionary Policy Committee , part of which represented their line within the ILP. An independent Opposition group was formed in 1935, but had little influence. By 1938 the line of the ICO had turned towards the "centrist" position of the ILP leadership under Fenner Brockway and

18018-560: The right of self-determination ... Long live the revolution! — Lenin's political programme, October 1917 Upon taking power, Lenin's regime issued several decrees. The first was the Decree on Land , nationalizing the landed estates of the aristocracy and the Orthodox Church for redistribution to peasants by local governments. This contrasted with Lenin's preference for agricultural collectivisation but acknowledged

18172-546: The right to secede and form independent nation-states. Many declared independence ( Finland , Lithuania in December 1917, Latvia and Ukraine in January 1918, Estonia in February 1918, Transcaucasia in April 1918, and Poland in November 1918). The Bolsheviks then promoted communist parties in these new states, while at the Fifth All-Russian Congress of the Soviets in July 1918, a constitution reformed

18326-440: The rise to power of Adolf Hitler and his ultranationalist Nazi Party on 30 January 1933 and the wave of anti-radical repression which ensued, Brandler and most of the KPO leadership fled to France. Brandler lived in Paris until the beginning of World War II , where he continued to be involved in communist politics. The KPO was only able to work legally for one more year before the Nazis came to power in January 1933. However, it

18480-441: The slate of candidates of the official Communist Party of Germany, including the candidacy of Ernst Thälmann for President in the election of March 1932. The KPO counted approximately 1,000 members after its supporters had been expelled from the KPD, many of them local leaders of the party. In the years that followed, they failed to recruit any further adherents from outside the party and gradually decreased in number. The KPO backed

18634-404: The socialist movement, he encouraged the founding of revolutionary cells in Russia's industrial centres. By late 1894, he was leading a Marxist workers' circle, and meticulously covered his tracks to evade police spies. He began a romantic relationship with Nadezhda "Nadya" Krupskaya , a Marxist school teacher. He also authored a political tract criticising the Narodnik agrarian-socialists, What

18788-489: The status of hereditary nobleman . Both of Lenin's parents were monarchists and liberal conservatives , being committed to the emancipation reform of 1861 introduced by the reformist Tsar Alexander II ; they avoided political radicals and there is no evidence that the police ever put them under surveillance for subversive thought. Every summer they holidayed at a rural manor in Kokushkino . Among his siblings, Lenin

18942-775: The thieves in order to identify the interests of all thieves with the interests of the nation or the fatherland is an unconscionable bourgeois lie. — Lenin on his interpretation of the First World War Lenin was in Galicia when the First World War broke out. The war pitted the Russian Empire against the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and due to his Russian citizenship, Lenin was arrested and briefly imprisoned until his anti-Tsarist credentials were explained. Lenin and his wife returned to Bern, before relocating to Zürich in February 1916. Lenin

19096-636: The time of the anchluss in early March 1938 at the invitation of a group called Der Funke and was able to arrange eight fake passports for eight leaders of the Austrian opposition. They left Vienna on March 14, the day before Hitler arrived in the city. Schlamm later edited a paper for Austrian exiles in Prague, Weltbühne , then emigrated to the US. An Opposition group was established in Hungary in 1932. At that time

19250-465: The time, Lenin's elder brother Alexander, whom he affectionately knew as Sasha, was studying at Saint Petersburg University . Involved in political agitation against the absolute monarchy of the reactionary Tsar Alexander III , Alexander studied the writings of banned leftists and organised anti-government protests. He joined a revolutionary cell bent on assassinating the Tsar and was selected to construct

19404-530: The train was not truly sealed, and the passengers were allowed to disembark to, for example, spend the night in Frankfurt. The group travelled by train from Zürich to Sassnitz , proceeding by ferry to Trelleborg , Sweden, and from there to the Haparanda – Tornio border crossing and then to Helsinki before taking the final train to Petrograd. Arriving at Petrograd's Finland Station in April, Lenin gave

19558-541: The transfer without compensation of all land—landlord, imperial, and monastery—to the peasants' committees; it will defend the soldiers' rights, introducing a complete democratisation of the army; it will establish workers' control over industry; it will ensure the convocation of the Constituent Assembly on the date set; it will supply the cities with bread and the villages with articles of first necessity; and it will secure to all nationalities inhabiting Russia

19712-415: The various Right Oppositions could be described as a single international tendency, since they were usually concerned only with the issues relevant for their own countries and their own communist parties. Therefore, the Right Opposition was far more fragmented than the Left Opposition. Nevertheless, the various Right Opposition groups did come together to form an International Communist Opposition (ICO). Unlike

19866-614: The view of the agrarian-socialist Narodnik movement, which held that the peasantry could establish socialism in Russia by forming peasant communes, thereby bypassing capitalism. This Narodnik view developed in the 1860s with the People's Freedom Party and was then dominant within the Russian revolutionary movement. Lenin rejected the premise of the agrarian-socialist argument but was influenced by agrarian-socialists like Pyotr Tkachev and Sergei Nechaev and befriended several Narodniks. In May 1890, Maria, who retained societal influence as

20020-606: The vote, losing to the agrarian-focused Socialist-Revolutionaries. Lenin argued that the election did not reflect the people's will, claiming the electorate was unaware of the Bolsheviks' programme, and that candidacy lists were outdated, having been drawn up before the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries split from the Socialist-Revolutionaries. Nevertheless, the newly elected Russian Constituent Assembly convened in Petrograd in January 1918. Sovnarkom claimed it

20174-723: The widespread peasant land seizures that had already taken place. In November 1917, the government issued the Decree on the Press, closing opposition media outlets deemed counter-revolutionary. Although claimed to be temporary, the decree faced criticism, including from Bolsheviks, for undermining freedom of the press . In November 1917, Lenin issued the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia , granting non-Russian ethnic groups

20328-645: The widow of a nobleman, persuaded the authorities to allow Lenin to take his exams externally at the University of St Petersburg, where he obtained the equivalent of a first-class degree with honours. The graduation celebrations were marred when his sister Olga died of typhoid . Lenin remained in Samara for several years, working first as a legal assistant for a regional court and then for a local lawyer. He devoted much time to radical politics, remaining active in Sklyarenko's group and formulating ideas about how Marxism applied to Russia. Inspired by Plekhanov's work, Lenin collected data on Russian society, using it to support

20482-465: The work of independent factions within the party became less tenable. The leading Indian communist M. N. Roy was an early and outspoken supporter of the Right Opposition. While he never had more than a marginal following, he wielded extraordinary influence on the left wing of the Indian National Congress and played an instrumental role in the election of Subhas Chandra Bose to the leadership of Congress. However, after Bose split with Congress and formed

20636-405: The working-classes in revolution. Furthermore, Bogdanov, influenced by Ernst Mach , believed that all concepts of the world were relative, whereas Lenin stuck to the orthodox Marxist view that there was an objective reality independent of human observation. Bogdanov and Lenin holidayed together at Maxim Gorky 's villa in Capri in April 1908; on returning to Paris, Lenin encouraged a split within

20790-529: The works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel , Ludwig Feuerbach , and Aristotle , all of whom had been key influences on Marx. This changed Lenin's interpretation of Marxism; whereas he once believed that policies could be developed based on predetermined scientific principles, he concluded that the only test of whether a policy was correct was its practice. He still perceived himself as an orthodox Marxist, but he began to diverge from some of Marx's predictions about societal development; whereas Marx had believed that

20944-409: Was a communist opposition organisation established at the end of 1928 and maintaining its existence until 1939 or 1940. After the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party to power in January 1933, the KPO existed only as an illegal and underground organization. The group initially sought to modify, later to replace, the mainstream Communist Party of Germany (KPD) headed by Ernst Thälmann . The KPO

21098-399: Was angry that the German Social Democratic Party was supporting the German war effort, which was a direct contravention of the Second International's Stuttgart resolution that socialist parties would oppose the conflict and saw the Second International as defunct. He attended the Zimmerwald Conference in September 1915 and the Kienthal Conference in April 1916, urging socialists across

21252-554: Was asserted that they represented the influence of the peasantry and the danger of capitalist restoration. Their policy was closely identified with the New Economic Policy (NEP), with former left communist Bukharin slowly moving to the right of the Bolshevik Party and becoming a strong supporter of the NEP starting in 1921. Right Opposition policies encouraging kulaks and NEPmen to "get rich" were seen by Right Opposition supporters as encouraging kulaks and NEPmen to "grow into" socialism. Robert J. Alexander has questioned whether

21406-401: Was chosen as mayor. By 1936, the CPO had merged with the Swiss Socialist Party . There was some resistance in the Italian party to the new Third Period line. At first the two Italian ECCI members, Palmiro Togliatti and Angelo Tasca , opposed the Comintern's actions with regard to the German party. However, at the Tenth Plenum in June 1929, Togliatti capitulated to Stalin's wishes while Tasca

21560-517: Was closest to his sister Olga , whom he often bossed around; he had an extremely competitive nature and could be destructive, but usually admitted his misbehaviour. A keen sportsman, he spent much of his free time outdoors or playing chess, and excelled at school, the disciplinarian and conservative Simbirsk Classical Gymnasium. In January 1886, when Lenin was 15, his father died of a brain haemorrhage. Subsequently, his behaviour became erratic and confrontational, and he renounced his belief in God. At

21714-408: Was counter-revolutionary because it sought to remove power from the soviets, but the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks denied this. The Bolsheviks presented a motion to strip the Assembly of most of its legal powers; when the Assembly rejected this, Sovnarkom declared it counter-revolutionary and forcibly disbanded it. Lenin rejected repeated calls, including from some Bolsheviks, to establish

21868-403: Was expelled. Later, at a May 1930 plenum of the Party, Politburo members Pasquini and Santini were removed for opposing the Third Period and "organizational measures" were taken against lower cadres. A Danish Opposition group was founded in 1933. It lasted at least until February 1938 when its representative attended the ICO unity conference with the London Bureau. In France the initial purge of

22022-400: Was for a time larger and more important than the official Spanish Communist Party. Later, the BOC merged with Andrés Nin 's Izquierda Comunista in 1935 to form the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification ( POUM ) which was to be a major party backing the Second Spanish Republic in the Spanish Civil War . Maurin became general secretary of the POUM but was arrested early in the civil war. As

22176-441: Was granted a few days in Saint Petersburg to put his affairs in order and used this time to meet with the Social-Democrats, who had renamed themselves the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class . His journey to eastern Siberia took 11 weeks, for much of which he was accompanied by his mother and sisters. Deemed only a minor threat to the government, he was exiled to Shushenskoye , Minusinsky District , where he

22330-428: Was held in Paris in April 1939 which dissolved both entities into a new organization, the International Revolutionary Marxist Centre , to be headquartered in Paris. Membership in the new group was quickly ratified by the ILLA, the KPO, POUM, PSOP, the ILP, and the Archeio-Marxists. It ceased to exist after the fall of France. A few groups continue the tradition of this current today. The Gruppe Arbeiterpolitik in Germany

22484-476: Was kept under police surveillance; he was nevertheless able to correspond with other revolutionaries, many of whom visited him, and permitted to go on trips to swim in the Yenisei River and to hunt duck and snipe . In May 1898, Nadya joined him in exile, having been arrested in August 1896 for organising a strike. She was initially posted to Ufa , but persuaded the authorities to move her to Shushenskoye, where she and Lenin married on 10 July 1898. Settling into

22638-422: Was led by Charles Hueber (mayor of Strasbourg , 1929–1935) and Jean-Pierre Mourer (member of the French National Assembly ). It ran a daily newspaper of its own, Die Neue Welt . The Alsatian KPO gradually moved towards pro-Nazi positions, and was expelled from ICO in 1934. A small group remained loyal to the ICO and published a weekly, Arbeiter Politik , but had little influence. During most of its history

22792-430: Was named Secretary of the organization at this time. While the group never met with broad influence or electoral success, it nevertheless became the first as well as one of the most prominent parties to be identified with the so-called International Right Opposition . On 1 January 1930, the KPO attempted to expand its influence even further with the launch of a daily newspaper, Arbeiterpolitik. Financial problems led it

22946-533: Was on the verge of proletarian revolution. The party began plans to organise the offensive, holding a final meeting at the Smolny Institute on 24 October. This was the base of the Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC), an armed militia largely loyal to the Bolsheviks that had been established by the Petrograd Soviet during Kornilov's alleged coup. In October, the MRC was ordered to take control of Petrograd's key transport, communication, printing and utilities hubs, and did so without bloodshed. Bolsheviks besieged

23100-403: Was the first national section affiliated to the International Communist Opposition (ICO). The KPO represented the so-called Right Opposition in the KPD in distinction to the Trotskyist or Trotskyist-sympathising Left Opposition and the pro- Comintern centre faction. It was led by Heinrich Brandler and August Thalheimer who had led the KPD between 1921 and 1923. They were expelled from

23254-447: Was the third of eight children, having two older siblings, Anna (born 1864) and Alexander (born 1866). They were followed by three more children, Olga (born 1871), Dmitry (born 1874), and Maria (born 1878). Two later siblings died in infancy. His father, Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov , was a devout member of the Russian Orthodox Church and baptised his children into it, although his mother, Maria Alexandrovna Ulyanova (née Blank),

23408-422: Was to go underground immediately in order to avoid persecution as far as possible. They were able to hold a conference in Denmark in April 1934 and maintain a national structure. In 1935, the Nazis stepped up the repression of all communist groups and trials of KPO members were reported in Weimar , Jena and elsewhere. The organisation ceased to operate at a national level and was now confined to exile circles and

23562-434: Was unable to take such a leading role on the Iskra editorial board; in his absence, the board moved its base of operations to Geneva . The second RSDLP Congress was held in London in July 1903. At the conference, a schism emerged between Lenin's supporters and those of Julius Martov . Martov argued that party members should be able to express themselves independently of the party leadership; Lenin disagreed, emphasising

23716-489: Was with Lenin at the time, shielded him and was injured by a bullet. Concerned by Petrograd's vulnerability to German attack, Sovnarkom began relocating to Moscow in March 1918. Lenin, Trotsky, and other Bolshevik leaders moved into the Kremlin . He survived another assassination attempt in August 1918. To All Workers, Soldiers and Peasants. The Soviet authority will at once propose a democratic peace to all nations and an immediate armistice on all fronts. It will safeguard

#627372