Left Communism - Russian Left Communism

Russian Left Communism

Russian left communism began in 1918 as a faction within the Russian Communist Party named the Left Communists, which opposed the signing of the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty with Imperial Germany. The Left Communists wanted international proletarian revolution across the world. The leader of this faction, in the beginning, was Nikolai Bukharin. They stood for a revolutionary war against the Central Powers; opposed the right of nations to self-determination (specifically in the case of Poland, since there were many Poles in this communist group and they did not want a Polish capitalist state to be established); and they generally took a voluntarist stance regarding the possibilities for social revolution at that time.

They began to publish a newspaper, Kommunist, which offered a critique of the direction in which the Bolsheviks were heading. They argued against the over-bureaucratisation of the state and further argued that full state ownership of the means of production should proceed at a quicker pace than Lenin desired.

The Left Communists faded as the world revolutionary wave died down in militancy; Lenin had shifted to a more right-wing position and proved too strong a figure. They also lost Bukharin as a leading figure, since his position became more right-wing until he eventually came to agree with Lenin. Being defeated in internal debates, they then dissolved. A few very small left communist groups surfaced within the RSFSR in the next few years, but later fell victim to repression by the state. In many ways, the positions of the Left Communists were inherited by the Workers Opposition faction and Gabriel Myasnikov's Workers Group of the Russian Communist Party and to some extent by the Decists.