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Title: Bolshevik Opposition to Lenin
Author: Paul Avrich
Date: 1984
Language: en
Topics: workers’ opposition, syndicalism, Leninism, Bolshevik Party, Russian Revolution, work
Source: Retrieved on 2nd August 2020 from http://struggle.ws/russia/bol_opp_lenin_avrich.html.  Proofread online source http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=4880, retrieved on November 17, 2020.
Notes: (RUSSIAN REVIEW, Vol. 43, 1984 pp. 1–29)

Paul Avrich

Bolshevik Opposition to Lenin

Part One

During Lenin’s years in power, from October 1917 until his death in

January 1924, a number of groups took shape within the Russian Communist

Party-the Democratic Centralists and the Workers’ Opposition are the

best known-which criticized the Bolshevik leadership for abandoning the

principles of the revolution. The revolution, as sketched by Lenin in

The State and Revolution and other works had promised the destruction of

the centralized bureaucratic state and its replacement with a new social

order, modeled on the Paris Commune of 1871, in which the direct

democracy of the workers would be realized. The cardinal feature of this

“commune state,” as Lenin called it, was to be its repudiation of

bureaucratic authority. The workers themselves would administer the

government through grass-roots organizations, of which the soviets were

the foremost example. Workers’ control, through factory committees and

trade unions, would function similarly in economic life, replacing

private ownership and management with a system of industrial democracy

and self-administration in which the rank and file would shape their own

destiny. Mistakes would be made, Lenin conceded, but the workers would

learn by experience. “The most important thing,” he declared, “is to

instill in the oppressed and laboring masses confidence in their own

power.”’ Such was Lenin’s vision before October. Once in power, however,

he saw things from a different perspective. Overnight, as it were, the

Bolsheviks were transformed from a revolutionary into a governing party,

from an organization that encouraged spontaneous action against existing

institutions into one that sought to contain it. As time went by,

moreover, they faced a growing array of difficulties-civil war, economic

dislocation, rising popular discontent, sheer physical exhaustion-that

threatened their very survival. Lenin and the Central Committee sought

to come to terms with the problems that crowded in around them. In the

process, theories were modified or abandoned, principles compromised or

shelved. The retention of power dwarfed all other objectives. The party

of opposition and revolt had become the party of discipline and order.

Under mounting pressures, the Bolshevik leadership assumed an

increasingly dictatorial position. One by one, the goals of 1917

proletarian democracy, social equality, workers’ self-management-were

thrust aside. The institutions of the new society were recast in an

authoritarian mold, and a new bureaucratic edifice was constructed, with

its attendant corruption and red tape. In government and party, in

industry and army, hierarchy and privilege were restored. For collective

management of the factories Lenin substituted one-man management and

strict labor discipline. He reinstated higher pay for specialists and

managers, along with piece rates and other discarded features of

capitalism. Soviets, trade unions, and factory committees were

transformed into tools of the state apparatus. Authority was

increasingly concentrated in the hands of a party elite.

Such policies could not fail to arouse opposition. What had they to do

with the original goals of the party? Was it for this that the

revolution had been made? Questions of this sort troubled a growing

number of Bolshevik stalwarts. Unable to remain silent, dissidents on

the left wing of the party raised their voices in protest. Among them

was Gavriii ll’ich Miasnikov, a metalworker from the Urals and a

Bolshevik since 1906. One of the most vocal of the early oppositionists,

he is also one of the most obscure. Yet during the early 1920s he blazed

into prominence as a critic of Lenin’s policies, posing questions of the

utmost importance: Who is to decide what is in the interests of the

workers? What methods are permissible in resolving disputes among

revolutionaries? At what point does honest criticism of party officials

become “deviation” or insubordination? Miasnikov, seeing his deepest

revolutionary aspirations thwarted, evolved an elaborate and penetrating

critique of the dictatorship in the making, pointing to dangers whose

full consequences were not yet apparent.

Miasnikov’s criticisms became the focus of acrimonious debate. It

figured largely at both the Eleventh and Twelfth Party Congresses,

drawing fire from virtually every prominent party leader, above all from

Lenin himself. The debate, moreover, had international repercussions,

involving the Communist International as well as foreign parties and

organizations.

Miasnikov, then, merits closer attention than he has hitherto received

from Western historians. The object of the present article is not only

to tell his story in proper detail, but also to relate it to the broader

issues surrounding the emergence of the Bolshevik dictatorship.

Miasnikov, it is true, was a secondary figure in the portrait gallery of

the revolution. Nevertheless, he was a brave and colorful individual and

deserves to be better known. He added a strong proletarian voice to the

debate over the meaning of socialism. But what lends his story

particular poignancy is that he was a dedicated revolutionary, a

Bolshevik of long standing, who cherished the ideals of October only to

see them compromised and crushed. His defeat, in a sense, symbolized the

defeat of the revolution itself.

Of Miasnikov’s early years little is known. He began life in 1889, a

native of the Urals, which had a tradition of working-class militancy

reaching back to the eighteenth century. Himself possessed of a militant

temper, he took an active part in the Revolution of 1905. Only sixteen

at the time, he helped organize a workers’ Soviet in the large metals

factory in which he worked, at Motovilikha, a village on the Kama River

a few miles above Perm’. The following year he joined the Bolshevik

party. Arrested soon after, he was imprisoned and then banished to

Siberia, serving a total of seven and a half years at hard labor’

Miasnikov proved a refractory inmate. He was beaten for insubordination,

spent seventy-five days on hunger strikes, and escaped no less than

three times, rejoining the Bolshevik underground after each flight.

Small wonder that he acquired a reputation for fortitude and dedication!

Bold, determined, unyielding, a man of passion and of tempestuous

energy, he already exhibited those traits of character that were to set

him against the party hierarchy. He was high-minded, independent,

implacable, a stormy petrel of revolutionary militancy who, with his

long hair and beard and piercing eyes, combined the qualities of a tough

labor activist with those of a visionary and romantic. Stamped with the

mentality of an Old Believer-one wonders whether, like Shliapnikov of

the Workers’ Opposition, he came from a schismatic background-he tended

to view social and political issues in terms of moral absolutes. For the

rest of his life he retained an attitude of sectarian fundamentalism,

rejecting any adulteration of revolutionary ideals.

On returning from exile, Miasnikov resumed his underground activity.

With the collapse of the autocracy in February 1917, he threw himself

into the revolution in his native district, forming a workers’ committee

in the Motovilikha factory and serving in both the Perm’ Soviet and the

local Bolshevik organization. In October 1917 he took part in the

Bolshevik seizure of power in the Urals. Three months later, in January

1918, he was sent as a delegate from Perm’ Province to the Third

Congress of Soviets, at which the dissolution of the Constituent

Assembly was approved. Soon afterwards occurred his first known break

with Lenin; he allied himself with the Left Communist faction and

opposed the ratification of the Brest-Litovsk treaty. In May 1918, at an

all-city party conference in Perm’, Miasnikov spoke out against the

treaty. Convinced that a European revolution was imminent, and that

without it the Bolshevik regime could not survive, he favored a

“revolutionary war” that would ignite the proletariat of the West and

bring about the final destruction of capitalism.

Miasnikov, however, did rally behind Lenin during the summer of 1918,

when the intensification of civil war saw the fading of the Left

Communists and a restoration of unity within the party. Now a member of

the Urals Regional Soviet, he gained a measure of notoriety for his role

in the liquidation of the imperial family. He was personally responsible

for the murder of Grand Duke Michael, the tsar’s younger brother, who

had been deported to Perm’. On the night of July 12–13, 1918, a group of

workmen, led by Miasnikov, arrived at Michael’s apartment with forged

papers of the provincial Cheka. They awakened the Grand Duke, took him

and his English secretary, Nicholas Johnson, to the Motovilikha factory,

and there shot them to death.

Whether Miasnikov undertook the assassination on his own initiative or

was acting on orders from higher authority is unclear. Vera Kornoukhova,

secretary of the Perm’ Bolshevik Party Committee, afterwards testified

that Miasnikov was “a bloodthirsty and embittered man, and not

altogether sane,” implying that he alone was responsible for the act.

Yet the fact that, as soon as the assassination was carried out,

Miasnikov left for Moscow and reported directly to Lenin, suggests that

he had acted under instructions. Four days later, it might be added, the

tsar and his family were shot, on Bolshevik orders, in the Urals city of

Ekaterinburg.

For the remainder of the Civil War Miasnikov remained a loyal Bolshevik.

By 1920 he was chairman of the Perm’ Provincial Party Committee, having

headed its agitprop section. In September of that year he was a delegate

to the Ninth Party Conference, held in Moscow, where he spoke on

propaganda work within the party. He did not, like several other

delegates at the conference, criticize the party leadership. Yet he was

seething with disaffection. He was deeply troubled by the oligarchical

tendencies within the party, the drift towards authoritarianism and

elite rule, a process greatly accelerated by the Civil War. He was

dismayed by the growing concentration of power in the hands of the

Central Committee, the divorce of the leadership from the rank and file,

and the suppression of local initiative and debate. Equally disturbing,

though he did not yet raise his voice in public protest, was the

introduction of labor discipline in the factories, along with the

elevation of technical specialists to positions of authority and the

replacement of workers’ control by one-man management and bureaucratic

administration.

To Miasnikov all this represented a flagrant breach of Bolshevik

promises, a surrender of the conquests of October. With hierarchy and

discipline resurrected, what, he wondered, had the workers won? With the

class enemy once again running the factories, what had become of the

workers’ power? Miasnikov was a bitter man. He could not reconcile

himself to the abandonment of the principles of proletarian democracy

enunciated in 1917. He believed heart and soul in the revolution. The

central purpose of the revolution, as Miasnikov saw it, had been to

abolish capitalist forms of exploitation, and thereby release the

creative energies of the workers and establish conditions for their

dignity and equality. For Miasnikov, the course on which Lenin was now

embarked was neither necessary nor expedient. Soon after the Ninth Party

Conference, Miasnikov began to speak out. Returning to the Urals, he

protested openly and vociferously against the whole tendency or

Bolshevik policy and its divergence from the line of 1917. He lashed out

at the rise of bureaucratism in the party, the arbitrariness and

high-handedness of party officials, and the growing number of nonworkers

in the party ranks and in positions of power. He railed against any

accommodation with the old order, any retention of capitalist forms and

methods.

Miasnikov strove to restore the party to its original path. Nothing less

than a clean sweep of the bourgeois order, with its inequality and

injustice, its subjugation and degradation of the workers, would satisfy

his thirst for the millennium. He called for the realization of the

program of 1917-anti-bureaucratic, egalitarian, and internationalist-as

Lenin himself had outlined it in The State and Revolution. The advance

towards socialism depended on internal democracy within the party,

greater local autonomy and popular initiative, and the restoration of

power to the soviets. It depended on the participation of the working

class, non-Communist as well as Communist, at all levels of political

and economic life.

Much of what Miasnikov was saying echoed ideas already voiced by the

Democratic Centralists and the Workers’ Opposition. He shared with these

dissenters a common outlook of left-wing idealism, a common

dissatisfaction with the policies of the Bolshevik leadership, a common

revulsion against the whole authoritarian program that the regime, under

Lenin’s direction, had adopted. Yet Miasnikov went his own way.

Notwithstanding subsequent charges that he had been an “active member”

of the Workers’ Opposition, he did not, apart from the most ephemeral

contacts, associate himself with this group. Miasnikov, for the time

being, remained a one-man opposition. Always independent in his views,

he differed with both the Democratic Centralists and the Workers’

Opposition on important points and went beyond them in the sweeping

nature of his attack on the party hierarchy. He was one of the few

Bolsheviks at this time to espouse the cause of the peasantry,

especially its poorer elements, advocating the formation of peasant

unions; for this he was accused of harboring Socialist Revolutionary

sympathies. During the trade-union controversy, moreover, he did not

adhere to any of the contending platforms, least of all to that of Lenin

and his supporters, as Shliapnikov mistakenly maintained. For Miasnikov,

on the contrary, the trade unions had outlived their usefulness, owing

to the existence of the Soviets. The Soviets, he argued in a syndicalist

vein, were revolutionary rather than reformist bodies. Unlike the

unions, they embraced not merely one or another segment of the

proletariat, this or that trade or occupation, but “all the workers,”

and along the “lines of production” rather than of craft. The unions

should therefore be dismantled, Miasnikov urged, together with the

Councils of National Economy, which were riddled with “bureaucratism and

red tape”; the management of industry, he said, should be vested in the

workers’ soviets.

Miasnikov’s unorthodox pronouncements aroused the ire of the party

authorities. On orders from the Central Committee, he was transferred

(“banished for correction” was how he himself put it) from the Urals to

Petrograd, where he could be kept under supervisions This occurred in

the fall of 1920. The Civil War had been won, and the atmosphere in the

old capital seemed festive. A closer look, however, revealed widespread

discontent. “Red Petrograd,” Miasnikov noted, was a “Potemkin village.”

Behind the facade of victory loomed a serious crisis. Bolshevik

influence among the workers was swiftly declining. Within the party,

favoritism and corruption were rife. The Astoria Hotel, where many high

officials lived, was the scene of debauchery, while ordinary citizens

went without the bare necessities. Assigned to a party unit detailed to

forage for food, Miasnikov found that his colleagues were not

“bread-gatherers” but “bread-eaters,” and that a new type of Communist

was emerging, the toadying careerist who “knows how to please his

superiors.”

At first Miasnikov hesitated to protest. But soon he began to speak out

again. Zinoviev, the party chairman in Petrograd, responded with

threats. At one point he warned Miasnikov to stop complaining “or we

shall expel you from the party, You are either an SR or a sick man.” But

Miasnikov refused to be silenced. His prolonged struggle against the

tsarist order had given him a taste for freedom of speech that he was

loath to sacrifice, even for the sake of party discipline. He deplored

the suppression of criticism by the Central Committee. Communists who

ventured an independent opinion, he protested, were stigmatized as

heretics and counterrevolutionaries. “You think you are smarter than

ll’ich!” they were told. As Miasnikov, in spite of repeated warnings,

continued to speak out, other disgruntled voices joined in. In early

1921, the working class of Petrograd was in ferment. In February,

factory after factory went out on strike, and party spokesmen were often

barred from workers’ meetings. By the end of the month, the city was on

the verge of a general strike. Then, in March, came the Kronstadt

rebellion. Miasnikov was deeply affected. Unlike the Democratic

Centralists and Workers’ Opposition, he refused to denounce the

insurgents. Nor would he have participated in their suppression had he

been called upon to do so. For he attributed the rising to “the regime

within the party.” “if someone dares to have the couurage of his

convictions,” Miasnikov declared, he is either a self-seeker or, worse,

a counterrevolutionary, a Menshevik or an SR. Such was the case with

Kronstadt. Everything was nice and quiet. Then suddenly, without a word,

it hits you in the face: “What is Kronstadt? A few hundred Communists

are fighting against us.” What does this mean? Who is to blame if the

ruling circles have no common language not only with the nonparty masses

but with rankand-f’ile Communists? So much do they misunderstand one

another that they reach for their weapons. What then is this? It is the

brink, the abyss.

Clearly it had been a mistake to bring Miasnikov to Petrograd. The

Central Committee, recognizing its error, ordered him to return to the

Urals. Miasnikov complied. Back on native grounds, however, he resumed

his agitation, stirring up a hornet’s nest in the local party

organization. In May 1921, moreover, he exploded a bombshell in the form

of a memorandum to the,Central Committee, calling for sweeping reform. A

crushing indictment of the Communist leaders, their theories and

methods, the memorandum demanded the abolition of the death penalty, the

liquidation of bureaucratic forms of organization, and the transfer of

industrial administration to producers’ Soviets-, it counterpoised

revolutionary principle to the expedients promoted by the Central

Committee.

The most striking demand of the memorandum was for unrestricted freedom

of the press. Criticizing the Tenth Party Congress for stifling debate,

Miasnikov called for freedom of the press for everyone, “from

monarchists to anarchists inclusive,” as he put it, a phrase that would

reverberate through the polemics that followed. Miasnikov was the only

Bolshevik to make such a demand. He saw freedom of the press as the only

means of curbing the abusive tendencies of power and of maintaining

honesty and efficiency within the party. No government, he realized,

could avoid error and corruption when critical voices were silenced.

In the Urals, meanwhile, Miasnikov waged a vigorous campaign to bring

his ideas before the workers. Again and again he spoke out against the

dictatorial behavior of party officials and the growing concentration of

authority at the center. To prevent the situation from getting worse, he

appealed for the immediate revival of democracy within the party and a

greater measure of autonomy for the Soviets. He warned that the

displacement of the Soviets by the party apparatus, combined with the

tendency towards centralization within the party, presented a danger to

the realization of socialism.

Miasnikov’s criticisms kindled a revolt within the Urals party

organization. A man of magnetic character and obvious sincerity, he won

a following in both Perm’ and Motovilikha, cauldrons of proletarian

discontent. The local Bolshevik officials became alarmed. In May 1921,

shortly after Miasnikov dispatched his memorandum to the Central

Committee, the Perm’ Provincial Committee forbade him to propagate his

views at party meetings. But Miasnikov refused to desist. On June 21 he

spoke at a provincial party conference in Perm’, chastizing both the

Central Committee and the Provincial Committee.29 A month later, on July

27, he went even further, publishing a pamphlet called Bol’nye voprosy

(Vexed Questions), in which he reiterated the demands of his memorandum,

above all for freedom of criticism. “The Soviet government,” he boldly

declared, “should maintain detractors at its own expense, as did the

Roman emperors.” Meanwhile the Perm’ Committee had not been idle,

Following Miasnikov’s speech of June 21, it appealed to the Central

Committee to investigate his conduct. On July 29, two days after the

appearance of Bot’nye voprosy, the Orgburo formed a special commission,

consisting of Bukharin, P. A. Ziluisky, and A. A. Sol’ts, to took into

the matter. Bukharin found Miasnikov’s memorandum of sufficient interest

to pass on to Lenin. Thus it was that Lenin became involved in the

affair.

Lenin glanced over the memorandum. On August 1, he wrote Miasnikov a

brief note, inviting him to the Kremlin for a talk. What kind of freedom

do you want? Lenin asked. For SRs and Mensheviks? All at once? In your

memorandum it is not clear. On August 5, Lenin followed this up with a

long letter. By then he had read both the memorandum and Bot’nye

voprosy. He saw some truth in Miasnikov’s criticisms. The man, though

naive, was plainly sincere. He was also an Old Bolshevik, a veteran of

tsarist prisons, a hero of the revolution and Civil War. Lenin felt he

owed him a reply. He hoped, at the same time, to bring him to heel.

Addressing him as “Comrade Miasnikov” and closing “with communist

greetings,” his tone was friendly but firm. Like a schoolmaster, he

spoke now sympathetically, now condescendingly, to his wayward pupil.

Freedom of the press, Lenin sought to convince Miasnikov, would, under

existing circumstances, strengthen the forces of counter-revolution.

Lenin rejected “freedom” in the abstract. Freedom for whom? he demanded.

Under what conditions? For which class? “We do not believe in

‘absolutes.’ We laugh at ‘pure democracy.”’ Freedom of the press, Lenin

maintained, would mean “freedom of political organization for the

bourgeoisie and its most loyal servants, the Mensheviks and SRs.” The

capitalists are still strong, he argued, stronger than the Communists.

They mean to crush us. To give them freedom of the press would

facilitate this task. But we will not do it. We have no intention of

committing suicide. Freedom of the press, according to Lenin, was a

“nonparty, antiproletarian slogan.” Lenin attributed Miasnikov’s

espousal of it to a failure of nerve combined with an inability to grasp

Marxist theory. Far from adopting a class analysis, Miasnikov had made a

“sentimental” appraisal of the existing crisis. Confronted with

adversity, he had succumbed to panic and despair. Lenin urged Miasnikov

to pull himself together, to calm down and think things over. After

sober reflection, Lenin hoped, he would recognize his errors and return

to useful party work.

Miasnikov was not convinced by Lenin’s arguments. He drafted a strong

reply. Reminding Lenin of his revolutionary credentials, he wrote: “You

say that I want freedom of the press for the bourgeoisie. On the

contrary, I want freedom of the press for myself, a proletarian, a

member of the party for fifteen years,” and not abroad but inside

Russia, facing danger and arrest. Miasnikov told of his experience in

tsarist prisons, his hunger strikes, beatings, and escapes. Surely he

had earned a little freedom of the press, “within the party at least. Or

is it that I must take my leave as soon as I disagree with you in the

evaluation of social forces?” If so, this is a crude way of settling

differences. You say, Miasnikov went on, that the jaws of the

bourgeoisie must be cracked.

“The trouble is that, while you raise your hand against the capitalist,

you deal a blow to the worker. You know very well that for such words as

I am now uttering hundreds, perhaps thousands, of workers are

languishing in prison. That I myself remain at liberty is only because I

am a veteran Communist, have suffered for my beliefs, and am known among

the mass of workers. Were it not for this, were I just an ordinary

mechanic from the same factory, where would I be now? In a Cheka prison

or, more likely, made to ‘escape,’ just as I made Mikhail Romanov

‘escape.’ Once more I say: You raise your hand against the bourgeoisie,

but it is I who am spitting blood, and it is we, the workers, whose jaws

are being cracked.”

At this Lenin broke off the correspondence. On August I 1, he sent a

telegram to the Perm’ Provincial Party Committee, requesting that his

letter to Miasnikov, together with Miasnikov’s memorandum and Bol’nye

voprosy, be read before its members, as well as before the Motovilikha

District Committee. Lenin’s purpose, it seems clear, was to demonstrate

the unreasonableness of Miasnikov’s position and to justify the party’s

efforts to curb him. Miasnikov, however, would not be subdued. In

mid-August he staged a walkout of the Motovilikha delegation from a

party conference in Perm’, handing a note of protest to the Provincial

Party Committee, which had been trying to silence him.

This action sealed Miasnikov’s fate. On August 22, the Orgburo of the

Central Committee, having heard the report of the commission looking

into Miasnikov’s activities, pronounced his views “incompatible with the

interests of the party” and forbade him to disseminate them at future

gatherings. Miasnikov was summoned to Moscow and placed under the

control of the Central Committee. Yet even now he refused to yield. In

defiance of the Central Committee, he returned to the Urals and resumed

his agitation. At the end of August he appeared before a general meeting

of Motovilikha party members and succeeded in winning them over to his

side. Adopting a resolution against the Orgburo’s censure of Miasnikov,

they branded his transfer to Moscow a form of “banishment” and demanded

that he be allowed “full freedom of speech and press within the party.”

Asserting his right of free expression, Miasnikov, in November 1921,

published in pamphlet form his memorandum to the Central Committee

together with Bol’nye voprosy, Lenin’s letter of August 5, his reply to

it, the Orgburo’s decision of August 22, and the resolution of the

Motovilikha party organization against this decision. Labeled “for party

members only” and printed in only 500 copies, the pamphlet was intended

by Miasnikov not as a charter of rebellion but as a vehicle for the

discussion of his views in advance of the Eleventh Party Congress,

scheduled to meet the following spring. Miasnikov, at the same time,

sought to rally his supporters in Motovilikha and Perm’ behind his

program. On November 25, moreover, he wrote to B. A.Kurzhner, a

sympathizer in Petrograd, urging a campaign of agitation in preparation

for the party congress. “We must unite all dissident elements in the

party under a single banner,” he declared. By now Miasnikov was being

watched by the Cheka, and his letter to Kurzhner was intercepted. For

Lenin, this was the last straw. Having suppressed the Workers’

Opposition with no small difficulty, he feared the emergence of yet

another group within the party claiming to represent the true interests

of the proletariat. “We must devote greater attention to Miasnikov’s

agitation,” he wrote to Molotov on December 5, “and to report on it to

the Politburo twice a month.” To deal with Miasnikov, meanwhile, the

Orgburo formed a new commission, of which Molotov, himself a native of

Perm’, served as a member.

There now began for Miasnikov tribulations that never ended. On February

15, 1922, the Orgburo commission, having completed its investigation,

recommended his expulsion from the party. This recommendation was

referred to the Politburo, which, on February 20, declared Miasnikov

expelled for “repeated violations of party discipline,” and especially

for attempting to organize a faction within the party, contrary to the

resolution on party unity passed by the Tenth Congress. The Politburo,

however, added the proviso that, should Miasnikov reform his ways, he

might apply for readmission after a year. For the first time, then, the

penalty prescribed by the Tenth Congress for factionalism had been

imposed. This was the first instance, moreover, except for that of S. A.

Lozovsky in 1918, who was reinstated the next year, where Lenin actually

expelled a well-known Bolshevik of long standing.

The following day, February 21, 1922, Lenin instructed Kamenev and

Stalin to publish his letter to Miasnikov, or at least substantial

extracts, to show that, before expelling Miasnikov” he had endeavored to

reason with him. For there was still widespread reluctance within the

party to take extreme measures against veteran members, especially one

with Miasnikov’s reputation for courage and dedication. Lenin himself

shared these hesitations, Yet his patience with Miasnikov had been

exhausted. Russia stood alone in a hostile world, surrounded by enemies

on all sides. The hoped-for revolution had not erupted in the ‘West. In

such circumstances, Lenin felt, to criticize the Central Committee, to

call for democratic procedure, was to play into the hands of the

counterrevolutionaries. Furthermore, if Miasnikov’s demands were

granted, if freedom of the press and free elections to the soviets were

permitted, the party would be swept from power and a reaction inevitably

follow, of which the Bolsheviks, Miasnikov included, would be the first

victims. Such was Lenin’s position. For Miasnikov, Lenin’s “defense of

the revolution” was in reality the defense of the leadership’s monopoly

to power. In Lenin’s demand for party unity he saw an excuse to silence

dissent. Miasnikov persisted in his criticisms. On February 26, 1922,

less than a week after his expulsion from the party, he joined a group

of dissenters, including Shliapnikov, Medvedev, and Kollontai of the

Workers’ Opposition, in filing a petition with the Executive Committee

of the Communist International. This petition, known as the Appeal of

the Twenty-Two, was partly occasioned by Miasnikov’s excommunication. In

strong terms it denounced the Central Committee for muzzling criticism,

flouting workers’ democracy, and admitting nonworkers into the party in

such numbers as to alter its proletarian characters. On March 4, at the

recommendation of a special commission whose members included Vasil

Kolarov of Bulgaria, Clara Zetkin of Germany, and Marcel Cachin of

France, the Comintern Executive Committee pronounced these complaints

unfounded. Upholding Lenin and the Bolshevik Central Committee, it

rejected the Appeal of the Twenty Two as a “weapon against the party and

the proletarian dictatorship.” At home Miasnikov had also been busy. In

his factory at Motovilikha he secured the election of a new workers’

committee, with an anti-Leninist majority. A general meeting of the

Motovilikha party organization, apparently at his instigation, passed a

resolution endorsing the Appeal of the Twenty-Two, and one party cell,

on March 22, issued a denunciation of bourgeois managers and

“bureaucratic rulers.”

Matters came to a head at the Eleventh Party Congress, which, opening on

March 27, was the last in which Lenin participated. Miasnikov was

sharply taken to task; Molotov, Trotsky, and Lenin all spoke against

him. For six months, complained Molotov, the Central Committee had

engaged in “talks, consultations, exchanges of views” with Miasnikov, in

an effort to persuade him to accept the “general party line.” All in

vain. Molotov called for a purge of the party to remove such “unstable”

elements from its ranks. Trotsky, acting as chief prosecuting attorney,

lashed out at Miasnikov for giving aid and comfort to the enemy. It was

no accident, he declared, that the Polish government had broadcast

extracts from Miasnikov’s pamphlet, or that Chernov, Miliukov, and

Martov had quoted it in their newspaper editorials. Such antiparty

tracts -Kollontai’s Workers’ Opposition was another-provided grist to

the mill of those who would again raise the banner of Kronstadt — “only

of Kronstadt!” Lenin, speaking after Trotsky, acknowledged the right of

the signers of the Appeal of the Twenty-Two to petition the Communist

International; they had no right, he insisted, to protest in behalf of

Miasnikov, who had violated the decisions of the Tenth Party Congress.

Lenin harked back to his correspondence with Miasnikov: “I saw that the

man had ability, that it was worthwhile to talk things over with him.

But one had to tell the man that if he persisted in criticizing in the

same vein it would not be tolerated.”

Miasnikov found no defenders at the cotigress. But one delegate, V. V.

Kosior, argued that Lenin had taken the wrong approach to the question

of dissent. If someone, said Kcisior, had the courage to point out

deficiencies in party work, he was marked down as an oppositionist,

relieved of authority, placed under surveillance, and-a reference to

Miasnikov-even expelled from the party. The party, Kosior, warned, was

alienating itself from the workers.

Following Kosior, Shliapnikov and Medvedev of the Workers’ Opposition

defended the Appeal of the Twenty-Two, They had gone to the Comintern,

they explained, because the leadership had rejected their complaints.

They had not formed a separate faction, they insisted, nor launched a

conspiracy against the Central Committee. A private meeting had been

held, Medvedev admitted, to draw up the appeal. “Miasnikov was there

with yidu,” a voice interrupted from the floor. Yes, acknowledged

Medvedev, but our aim was to reform the party, not to divide it.

The congress, following the example of the Comintern, set up a

commission, consisting of Dzerzhinsky, Zinoviev, and Stalin, to

investigate the matter. On April 2, the last day of the congress, the

commission delivered its report in closed session. Finding the signers

of the appeal guilty of organizing a faction, it recommended the

expulsion from the party of five of their number, Shliapnikov, Medvedev,

and Kollontai, along with two lesser-known Workers’ Oppositionists, F.

A. Mitin and N. V. Kuznetsov. The congress, however, chose to expel only

Minin and Kuznetsov, letting the first three off with a warning.

Miasnikov did not go unmolested. Shortly after the congress he was taken

into custody by the GPU, becoming the first prominent Communist

political prisoner in Soviet Russia. Nor was this all. In the course of

his arrest an attempt was made to “escape” him, as he had foretold in

his letter to Lenin. Somehow the scheme miscarried: three shots were

fired at him, but they failed to find their mark. Characteristically, as

soon as he was placed behind bars, Miasnikov declared a hunger strike,

as he had previously done under the tsar. Twelve days later he was

released.

From this point Miasnikov remained under continuous surveillance. Of his

activities during the remainder of 1922, nothing is known. By early

1923, however, he was once again in trouble with the authorities.

Miasnikov was now living in Moscow. A year had passed since his ouster

from the party and, following the stipulation in the expulsion order, he

petitioned the Central Committee for readmission. His request was

denied. Miasnikov thereupon appealed to the Executive Committee of the

Comintern, which, on March 27, 1923, ruled. that, far from having mended

his ways, he had continued to utter opinions of which an “agent of the

bourgeoisie seeking to create a schism in the Russian Communist Party”

would approve.

Miasnikov had in fact gone even further. In the opening weeks of 1923,

he had, as Lenin had all along feared, organized a clandestine

opposition. Calling it, despite his expulsion, the “Workers’ Group of

the Russian Communist Party,” he claimed that it, and not the Bolshevik

leadership, represented the authentic voice of the proletariat. Joining

hands in the venture were P. B. Moiseev, a Bolshevik since 1914, and N.

V. Kuznetsov, the former Workers’ Oppositionist who, we have seen, had

been expelled from the party at the Eleventh Congress for his role in

the Appeal of the Twenty-Two. The three men, all workers, constituted

themselves as the “Provisional Central Organizational Bureau” of the

group, of which Miasnikov was the actual founder and guiding spirit.

Their first act, in February 1923, was to draw up a statement of

principles in anticipation of the Twelfth Party Congress, scheduled to

assemble in April. This took the form of a lengthy document, the

“Manifesto of the Workers’ Group of the Russian Communist Party,” based

on an unpublished pamphlet by Miasnikov called Treyozhnye voprosy

(Alarming Questions), itself an updated version of his 1921 memorandum

and Bol’nw voprosy. Miasnikov was thus the principal author of the

manifesto, Kuznetsov and Moiseev confining themselves to editorial

revision.

The manifesto recapitulated the program of Miasnikov’s earlier writings:

workers’ self-determination and self-management, the removal of

bourgeois specialists from positions of authority, freedom of discussion

within the party, and the election of new sovicts centered in the

factories. As before, Miasnikov protested against administrative

high-handedness, the expanding bureaucracy, the predominance of

nonworkers within the party, and the suppression of local initiative and

debate. He charged that the party leadership had no confidence in the

workers, in whose name it professed to rule.

There were, however, some changes. For one thing, Miasnikov’s view of

civil liberties had narrowed since 1921. While freedom of speech and

press remained a high priority, it was to be limited to manual workers.

“Let the bourgeoisie keep quiet,” declared the manifesto, “but who would

dare contest the right of free speech for the proletarian, who has

defended his power with his blood?” As for professors, lawyers, and

doctors, the best policy was to “bash their faces in .” Miasnikov,

furthermore, denounced the New Economic Policy, inaugurated in 1921, as

an abandonment of the goals of October and a sellout to the bourgeoisie.

The proliferation of bureaucrats and entrepreneurs, with wide scope for

profiteering and corruption, filled him with disgust. It was a hateful

and unbearable sight, a symbol of the deterioration of the revolution,

of the decay of the socialist ideal. In spite of the abolition of

private ownership, the worst features of capitalism had been preserved:

wage slavery, differences of income and status, hierarchical authority,

bureaucratism. The initials “NEP,” asserted the manifesto, stood for

“New Exploitation of the Proletariat.”

Part Two

For Miasnikov the NEP had come as a shock. He viewed it as a

continuation of the retreat from socialism begun during the Civil War.

Its roots could be traced to the Ninth Party Congress, which had

endorsed one-man management and the employment of technical specialists.

By this action, as Miasnikov saw it, Lenin had deprived the workers of

their most fundamental revolutionary conquest, the chief lever with

which to advance their cause. “The organization of industry since the

Ninth Congress of the Russian Communist Party,” declared the manifesto,

had been carried forward in a “purely bureaucratic way” and “without the

direct participation of the working class.” The manifesto demanded that

the administration of industry be turned over to the workers themselves,

beginning with the workers in each factory. It denounced the bureaucrats

and apporatchiki for whom such words as “solidarity” and “brotherhood”

were empty shibboleths and who were concerned only with increasing their

privileges and power. It attacked them at every turn-their insolence and

hypocrisy, their contempt for ordinary workers, their pious mouthing of

socialist phrases, belied by their bourgeois ambitions and way of life.

In his strong anti-intellectual bias, coupled with his scorn for

managers and bureaucrats, Miasnikov resembled Jan Waclaw Machajski, a

Polish radical who, at the turn of the century, had foreseen the

emergence, in the name of socialism, of a new class of intellectuals and

specialists bent on riding to power on the backs of the workers.

Miasnikov was thus tarred with the brush of “Makhaevism.” There is no

evidence that he had ever heard of Machajski, much less been influenced

by his ideas, but the similarities between them are undeniable. For

bureaucrats and intellectuals Miasnikov’s contempt was unbridled. He

branded the Bolshevik hierarchy an “oligarchical caste,” a “high-handed

bunch of intellectuals,” a “managerial fraternity” that held the reins

of industry and government in its hands. Should the present course

continue, he warned in the manifesto, “we are faced with the danger of’

the transformation of the proletarian power into the power of a firmly

entrenched clique animated by a determination to Preserve both political

and economic power in its hands-naturally under the guise of’ the

noblest purposes: ‘in the interests’ of the proletariat, of world

revolution, and other lofty ideas!”

What then was to be done? For Miasnikov the degeneration of the

revolution could be halted only by the restoration of proletarian

democracy. He remained unshakable in his belief in the initiative and

capacity of the workers, the class from which he himself had sprung. The

defects of the regime could no longer be corrected by the Bolshevik

leadership. Remedies, rather, must come from the working-class rank and

file, both party and nonparty. Without worker participation in every

area, he insisted, the attainment of socialism would be impossible.

Lenin, by contrast, lacking Miasnikov’s faith in mass initiative, clung

to administrative solutions, rejecting any proposal that would have

allowed a democratic breeze to blow through the party apparatus. This he

considered more dangerous than bureaucratism itself. He relied, to the

very end, on bureaucrats to reform the bureaucracy, setting one section

of the apparatus against another.

For Miasnikov such remedies were worthless, as they failed to attack the

problem at its root. Real reform, he was convinced. was possible only

from below. Calling for an all-out assault against capitalism, abroad as

well as at home, he condemned the “united front” policy advanced by the

Communist International, rejecting cooperation with moderate socialists

and the struggle for limited economic gains. Partial reforms, he

insisted, could only weaken the revolutionary elan of the proletariat

and deflect it from its mission of overthrowing the capitalist system.

“The time when the working class could improve its material and legal

situation by strikes and parliamentary action has irretrievably passed,”

the manifesto declared. To put an end to exploitation and oppression,

the proletariat “must struggle not for additional kopecks, not for a

shorter working day. That was at one time necessary, but now it is a

struggle for power.” No compromise with the existing order should be

tolerated. The workers of advanced industrial countries must press on

with a social revolution, not in the distant future, but “now, today,

tomorrow.” “Sound the alarm! Gather for the battle! ... With all our

strength and energy we must summon the proletariat of all countries to a

civil war, a ruthless and bloody war.”

The battle, however, must begin at home. In his manifesto, Miasnikov

wondered whether the Russian proletariat might not be compelled “to

start anew the struggle-and perhaps a bloody one-for the overthrow of

the oligarchy.” Not that he contemplated an immediate insurrection. He

sought, rather, to rally the workers, Communist and non-Communist, to

press for the elimination of bureaucratism and the revival of

proletarian democracy. Within the party he defended-the right to form

factions and draw up platforms, the decisions of the Tenth Congress

notwithstanding. “If criticism does not have a distinct point of view,”

he wrote to Zinoviev, “a platform on which to rally a majority of party

members, on which to develop a new policy with regard to this or that

question, then it is not really criticism but a mere collection of

words, nothing but chatter.” Miasnikov went even further, calling into

question the very Bolshevik. monopoly of power. Under a single-party

dictatorship, he argued, elections remained “an empty formality.” To

speak of “workers’ democracy” wttile insist-ing on one-party government,

he told Zinoviev, was to entwine oneself in a contradiction, a

“contradiction in terms.”

Such were the contents of the Workers’ Group manifesto. By the spring of

1923 it was circulating illegally in hectographed form. Copies filtered

across the border into Poland, where, as with Miasnikov’s 1921

memorandum, excerpts were broadcast by the government. In Berlin it

attracted the attention of the Menshevik colony, whose journal,

Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, hailed the Workers’ Group as “honest

Bolshevik elements who have found the courage to raise the banner of

criticism.”

Inside Russia, too, the manifesto was having its effect, drawing fresh

recruits into the Workers’ Group. By summer the group had some 300

members in Moscow, where it was centered, as well as a sprinkling of

adherents in other cities. Many were Old Bolsheviks, and all, or nearly

all, were workers. Apart from the three founders (Miasnikov, Kuznetsov,

and Moiseev), its most active members were I.Makh, S. Ia. Tiunov, V. P.

Demidov, M, K. Berzina, I. M. Kotov, G.V.Shokhanov, and A. I. Medvedev

(not to be confused with the Workers’ Oppositionist S. P. Medvedev).

Makh, a veteran Bolshevik from Kharkov, had been a delegate to the Tenth

Party Congress. Tiunov, who joined the party in 1917 and was better

educated than his associates, was strong-minded, determined, and “not

devoid of Nechaevist traits,” according to Ante Ciliga, the Yugoslavian

Communist dissident, who afterwards encountered him in prison. Several

were former Workers’ Oppositionists, including Makh, Kuznetsov, Demidov,

and Barzitia, a Bolshevik since 1907 and one of the few female members

of the group.70 All shared Miasnikov’s views on the degeneration of the

party and the revolution, and three, in addition to Miasnikov, had

signed the Appeal of the Twenty-Two: Kuznetsov, Shokhanov, and Medvedev.

Kuznetsov, indeed, regarded the workers and the Bolshevik leadership as

“antithetical forces.” To his GPU interrogators he later declared,

“We see how the upper levels of the party bureaucracy, our comrades of

yesterday, increasingly distrust us, increasingly fear us. They regard

us as a declared proletariat, as politically illiterate and ignorant

people, and use such words as “proletariat” and “worker” merely as

rhetoric, as “window-dressing ”

The emergence of the Workers’ Group did not pass unnoticed. It figured

prominently at the Twelfth Party Congressi held in April 1923, which

convened in the absence of Lenin, who had suffered a series of strokes

that left him paralyzed and deprived of speech, On the eve of the

congress, an “anonymous platform” was circulated which called on “all

honest proletarian elements,” both inside and outside the party, to

unite on the basis of the manifesto of the Workers’ Group. The

authorship of this document, which denounced the triumvirate of

Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin and demanded their removal from the

Central Committee, apparently rested with the Workers’ Group, and

perhaps with Miasnikov himself.

In Lenin’s absence, the task of anathematizing the Workers’ Group fell

to Trotsky, Radek, and Zinoviev. Trotsky, denouncing Miasnikov’s

manifesto, recalled “the old theory of the now forgotten Machajski” that

“under socialism the state will be the apparatus for the exploitation

for the working class.” Radek poured contempt on Miasnikov’s “high-flown

formula” of freedom of the press. Zinoviev declared that “every

criticism of the party line, even a so-called left criticism, is now

objectively a Menshevik criticism.” Miasnikov, he added, maintains that

“the worker is against us and we are against him.” Such a notion is

“rubbish .” “I was personally bothered by him for almost a year.

Vladimir ll’ich occupied himself with Miasnikov, wrote to him, reasoned

with him.” A special commission, of which Bukharin was a member, sought

to bring him around. To no avail. Miasnikov “has betrayed our party.”

Whatever its mistakes, insisted Zinoviev, the party had driven the old

ruling elite from its entrenched power. The “hegemony of the proletariat

has survived under the most difficult circumstances, and will continue

to survive, I hope, to the end (applause).” .

Miasnikov had become an intolerable thorn in the leadership’s flesh. On

May 25, 1923, a month after the Twelfth Party Congress, he was arrested

by the GPU. Subjected to interrogation, he repeated his criticisms of

the bureaucracy as cynical, ruthless, and self-serving.

Surprisingly, Miasnikov was released from custody and permitted to leave

the country. He boarded a train for Germany, possibly as a member of a

Soviet trade mission, a device not infrequently used by the authorities

to rid themselves of dissenters. But Miasnikov did not abandon his

protests. In Berlin he formed ties with the ulim-radical German

Communist Workers’ Party (KAPD) and with the left wing of the German

Communist Party (KPD), headed by Arkady Maslow and Ruth Fischer; to them

he gave, as Fischer recalls, “a very discouraging picture of the state

of the Russian working class.

With the aid of these groups, Miasnikov was able to publish, in booklet

form, the manifesto of the Workers’ Group, prefaced by an appeal,

drafted by his associates in Moscow, “to Communist comrades of all

lands.” The appeal, in brief compass, recapitulated the main points of

the manifesto. Quoting Marx’s inaugural address to the First

International (“the liberation of the workers must be the task of the,

workers themselves”) and the second stanza of the “Internationale,” it

concluded with a set of slogans proclaiming the aims of the Workers’

Group: “The strength of the working class lies in its solidarity. Long

live freedom of speech and press for the proletarians! Long live Soviet

Power! Long live Proletarian Democracy! Long live Communism!”

During Miasnikov’s absence in Germany, the Workers’ Group, under

Kuznetsov and Moiseev, went on propagating his views. Moiseev soon

withdrew from the Provisional Central Organizational Bureau, but his

place was taken by Makh. On June 5, 1923, the group held a conference in

Moscow and elected a Moscow Bureau, consisting of either four or eight

members (the sources conflict on this point). According to Kuznetsov, a

six-man Provisional Komsomol Bureau was also established, and Makh, a

member of both the Moscow and the Central Bureaus, relates that the

group planned to publish a journal when circumstances should permit.

On a small scale, therefore, the group was assuming the appearance of a

separate party. While it professed loyalty to the Communist Party

program and pledged to resist “all attempts to overthrow the Soviet

power,” it established ties with discontented workers in several cities,

began negotiations with leaders of the now defunct Workers’ Opposition

(including Kollontai, Shliapnikov, and Medvedev), and tried to form a

Foreign Bureau into which it hoped to draw both Kollontai, with her

international contacts and knowledge of languages, and Maslow of the

KPD. Nothing came of these efforts. According to one report, however,

the group won support within the Red Army garrison quartered in the

Kremlin, a company of which had to be transferred to Smolensk.

An unexpected opportunity for the group to extend its influence came in

August and September 1923, when a wave of strikes, recalling that of

February 1921, swept Russia’s industrial centers. An economic crisis-the

so-called scissors’ crisis-had been deepening since the beginning of the

year, bringing cuts in wages and the dismissal of large numbers of

workers. The resulting strikes, which broke out in Moscow and other

cities, were a Spontaneous and unorganized phenomenon, sparked by

worsening conditions. There is no evidence to connect them with any

oppositionist faction. The Workers’ Group, however, sought to take

advantage of the unrest to oppose the party leadership. Stepping up its

agitation, it considered calling a one-day general strike and organizing

a mass demonstration of workers, on the lines of Bloody Sunday 1905,

with a portrait of Lenin at the lead.

The authorities became alarmed. As Bukharin later acknowledged, the

strikes, combined with the activities of dissident groups, drew

attention to “the necessity of lowering prices, the necessity of paying

more heed to wages, the necessity of raising the level of political

activity by members of our party organization.” At the same time, the

Central Committee branded the Workers’ Group as “anti-Communist and

anti-Soviet” and ordered the GPU to suppress it. By the end of September

its meeting places had been raided, literature seized, and leaders

arrested. Twelve members were expelled from the party, among them

Moiseev, Tiunov, Berzina, Demidov, Kotov, and Shokhanov, and fourteen

others received reprimands.

What of Miasnikov himself? In Germany since June, he had not been

involved in the strike agitation. Nonetheless he was considered

dangerous. In the fall of 1923, therefore, he was lured back to Russia

on assurances from Zinoviev and Krestinsky, the Soviet ambassador in

Berlin, that he would not be molested. Once on native soil, he was

immediately placed behind bars. The arrest was carried out by

Dzerzhinsky himself, a token of the gravity with which the government

viewed the case. In January 1924, Lenin died. By then the Workers’ Group

had been silenced. It was the last dissident movement within the party

to be liquidated while Lenin was still alive. It was also the last

rank-and-file group to be smashed with the blessing of all the top

Soviet leaders, who now began their struggle for Lenin’s mantle.

Miasnikov spent the next three and a half years in prison, first in

Moscow, then in Tomsk and Viatka. He continued his protests, writing to

Stalin and Zinoviev, to Bukharin and Rykov. In Tomsk he declared a

hunger strike, his second while in Bolshevik custody. Its aim, he

explained in a letter smuggled to the West, was “to force a formal

indictment and open court proceedings against me, or to secure my

liberation.” It succeeded in accomplishing neither. On the tenth day of

the strike he was subjected to forcible feeding. Miasnikov resisted. On

the thirteenth day his warders, reinforced by the, local GPU, dragged

him out of his cell and put him in an insane asylum, an act, Miasnikov

complained, which “sets a fine example for the Fascisti of the whole

world.” Indeed, he added, not even the fascists employed such methods.

“They have not gone that far yet, but here the motto is: Whoever

protests is crazy and belongs (among) the insane! Particularly when he

is of the working class and has been a Communist for twenty years.”

Returned to his cell, Miasnikov was kept in isolation. No one was

permitted to speak to him, neither the guards nor his fellow inmates.

His wife, Daia Grigor’evna, and their three small sons were meanwhile

sent into exile.

In 1927, Miasnikov himself was banished to the Armenian capital of

Erevan’.89 He was kept under police surveillance. Nevertheless on

November 7, 1928, the eleventh anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution,

he took part in an anti-government demonstration. Fearing arrest, he

decided to flee abroad. He cut’his hair, shaved off his beard, and,

stuffing his briefcase with manuscripts and notes, boarded a train for

Dzhul’fa, a town on the Persian border. Nearing Dzhul’fa, he leaped from

the train and crossed the Araks River into Persia, only to be

immediately arrested. After six months in prison, he was expelled,

without passport or visa, to Turkey, where he was continually harassed

by the police, In a letter to the Russian section of the Industrial

Workers of the World in Chicago, written from Constantinople on November

27, 1929, he described his unending persecution: “From 1922 up to the

present time I have never been free from kind attentions, sometimes of

the GPU, at other times of the Intelligence Departments of various

governments.” So hard was his lot that he approached the Soviet consul

at Trebizond about conditions for returning to Russia, but no agreement

could be reached. During the spring of 1929, Miasnikov entered into

correspondence with Trotsky, who himself had been exiled to Turkey that

year. That Miasnikov should have done this may seem surprizing, as it

was Trotsky, a few years before, who had led the offensive against the

oppositionists. By now, however, Trotsky, like Miasnikov, had been

expelled from the party and driven from the country. He, too, however

belatedly, had raised the banner of party democracy against the

dictatorship of the Bolshevik machine. And though he denied that this

meant a “justification of Miasnikov and his partisans,” the two men had

enough in common to engage in friendly discussion. Both cleaved to a

left-wing anti-Stalinist policy, in foreign and in domestic affairs.

With regard to China, for example, their positions were virtually

identical.

On some matters, however, agreement proved impossible, above all on

Miasnikov’s contention that Russia was no longer a “workers’ state.”

This idea Miasnikov advanced in a manuscript that he sent to Trotsky in

August 1929, asking him to contribute a preface. Trotsky refused,

clinging to the belief that, for all its bureaucratic deformities,

Russia remained a proletarian dictatorship. Miasnikov’s manuscript, the

last known work to issue from his pen, developed the main ideas of his

earlier writings. The bureaucracy, he declared, echoing Machajski, was

“completing its triumphal procession.” It had become a new exploiting

class, with its own interests and aspirations that diverged sharply from

those of the workers. Soviet Russia, as a result, had ceased to be a

workers’ state. It was a system of state capitalism, ruled by a

bureaucratic elite.

Insofar as state capitalism organized the economy more efficiently than

private capitalism had done, Miasnikov considered it historically

progressive. All the same, the workers had been cheated of the fruits of

the revolution and reduced to a “subject class.” For Miasnikov, the sole

remedy remained a revival of workers’ democracy. This would entail, as

he put it, “a multiparty form of government, securing all rights and

freedoms, de facto as well as de jure, to proletarians, peasants, and

intellectuals.” Miasnikov’s hostility towards intellectuals had softened

since the time of the Workers’ Group manifesto. He now distinguished

between bureaucrats and bosses, on the one hand, and “honest,

proletarian-minded intellectuals,” on the other. The latter, joining

forces with the workers and peasants, must endeavor to overthrow the

parasitic bureaucracy. Partial measures were useless, Miasnikov

insisted. Only the destruction of state capitalism and one party rule

could eliminate the “bureaucratic evil.”

Thus Miasnikov, having begun in 1920 by trying to reform the Communist

Party, ended by rejecting it as beyond redemption. Its place was to be

taken by the “Workers’ Communist Parties of the USSR”-parties he

emphasized, in the plural, as opposed to the existing single-party rule.

Yet a number of questions remained unanswered. By what process had the

goals of Bolshevism become perverted? How did it happen that a

revolution that was to lead towards the liberation of humanity, towards

a classless and stateless society in which oppression would have ceased

to exist, should have sunk into the mire of bureaucratism and

repression? To what extent was the degeneration due to conditions beyond

anyone’s control-to the isolation of the revolution in a backward and

impoverished country, the devastation caused by the Civil War, the

difficulties of administering a diverse and far-flung population in the

midst of revolutionary turmoil and civil strife? Surely these factors

were important. Degeneration could not be attributed to “bureaucracy”

alone, still less to the machinations of the Bolshevik leadership.

Besides, why should revolutionaries who hated autocratic tyranny have

built an oppressive bureaucracy of their own? Had not a similar fate

overtaken previous revolutions? Do all revolutions degenerate when

ideals clash with political, economic, and cultural realities?

On such questions Miasnikov shed little light. Nor, it must be added,

was he himself immune from criticism. Idealizing the proletariat, from

whose ranks he had emerged, he displayed a fierce intolerance of the

middle classes, an intolerance that would have doomed his own version of

socialism had it ever been put into practice. For all Lenin’s

authoritarianism and ethical blindness, was it not to his credit that he

had sought to reach an accommodation with technical specialists and

other nonproletarians and to enlist them in the task of economic

reconstruction? What, in any case, is a “workers’ state,” and whom would

it benefit? Surely it is a free society where individuals of different

backgrounds and interests can live together as diverse human beings

instead of as units of a party or class.

For the rest of his life the cult of the proletariat dominated

Miasnikov’s thinking. Neither his disillusioning experience in Russia

nor the bitterness of emigre life could shatter his high hopes and

fervent faith in the ultimate triumph of the workers. Following

Trotsky’s rebuff, however, he became an isolated figure. From

Constantinople he received permission to go to Paris, where he settled

in October 1930, finding work at his old trade in a metals factory. In

1931, he published his manuscript on the Soviet bureaucracy under the

title of Ocherednoi obman (The Current Deception). Two years later, when

the French Marxist Lucien Laurat issued a similar treatise, Trotsky was

quick to note the parallel. Laurat, he wrote, was “obviously unaware

that his entire theory had been formulated, only with much more fire and

splendor, over thirty years ago by the Russo-Polish revolutionist

Machajski,” and that, only recently, the same idea had been put forward

by Miasnikov, who maintained that “the dictatorship of the proletariat

in Soviet Russia has been supplanted by the hegemony of a new class, the

social bureaucracy.”

In Paris Miasnikov found it hard to adjust. Gradually, however, matters

improved. He learned to speak French and took a French wife (though Daia

Grigor’evna was still alive). He met two left-oppositionist

acquaintances, Ruth Fischer and Victor Serge, who mention him in their

memoirs.99 By 1939, when Fischer last saw him, he seemed reasonably

content. At the outbreak of World War 2, Fischer tells us, he took a

refresher course and graduated as an engineer He was then fifty years

old.

Miasnikov remained in France throughout the war. Then in1946, he

disappeared. His friends in Paris, seeking to find out what had become

of him, learned that he had been taken to Russia in a Soviet plane.

Whether he returned of his own will or was kidnapped by the MVD had not

been conclusively established. The most reliable account, provided by

Roy Medvedev, goes as follows. At the end of the war a representative of

the Soviet government came to see Miasnikov and tried to persuade him to

return. Miasnikov at first refused, perhaps recalling his experience in

1923, when he was lured back from Germany by false promises. He was

assured, however, that there was nothing to fear, that the past had been

forgotten, and that permission to live freely in Moscow had been granted

by the “highest authority,” meaning Stalin himself. Miasnikov, despite

his misgivings, finally agreed to go. When he landed in Moscow he was

arrested at the airport and taken to the Butyrki prison.

Tragedy had meanwhile befallen Miasnikov’s wife and children. During the

war against Hitler, all three of his sons had joined the Red Army and

perished at the front. As a result, Daia Grigor’evna had suffered a

nervous breakdown and been placed in a psychiatric hospital. Released

after a year, she never completely recovered. In 1946 came the final

shock. Visited by the police, she was informed that her husband, whom

she had not seen in twenty years, was in the Butyrki prison, and that

she would be allowed to visit him. Bewildered by the news, she sought

advice from friends. Finally, after a week’s delay, she went to the

Butyrki. She had come too late. Miasnikov, she was told, had been shot.

On hearing this, Daia Grigor’evna suffered another mental collapse and

was taken back to the hospital, where she died not long after.

Such was the fate of Miasnikov and his family. For his ideals he paid

the ultimate price. Yet he has not been erased from historical memory.

Whatever his faults, and they were many, his heroic career, his refusal

to compromise his principles under both tsarism and Bolshevism, are

sufficient proof of his revolutionary integrity. Such men are seldom

forgotten. The historian of Russia, exploring the years after 1917, is

driven again and again to oppositionists of Miasnikov’s stamp, to their

criticisms of official policy and their alternative proposal of the

construction of a socialist society, Miasnikov’s central vision-the

vision of workers’ participation in management, of proletarian and party

democracy, of freedom of discussion and debate-has survived in recent

Soviet dissent, and the day may yet come when his ideas, voiced with

such persistence and self-sacrifice, will influence the shaping of

Communist policy to the benefit of the Russian people.