The Russian Communist Left 1918-1930

The Left Communist currents in Russia bear comparison to the groups of the communist left in Germany and Italy, even if the speed and brutality of the Stalinist counter-revolution succeeded in burying the Russian left communists earlier and more thoroughly than their European counter-parts. For example, the Workers’ Group around Miasnikov and others, formed in 1923, formulated a critique of the Communist International’s opportunist tactic of the United Front and the Workers’ Government in terms very similar to those elaborated by Bordiga in the same period; and its understanding of the tasks of revolutionaries faced with the degeneration of the proletarian party are certainly on the same wavelength as the conception of the left fraction which was developed most coherently by Bilan in the 1930s. Other groups, such as the Democratic Centralists, had important insights into the process of the degeneration of the Bolshevik party and the Soviet state.