FIFTEENTH CONGRESS OF THE CPSU(B)

Moscow, December 2-19, 1927156

From THE RESOLUTION “ON THE REPORT OF THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE”

(Carried unanimously)

The Fifteenth Congress finds that despite the warning of the Thirteenth Congress of the Party, which 

took note of the “petty-bourgeois deviation” of the Trotsky group, and despite the warning of the Fifteenth All-Union Party Conference about a. “Social-Democratic deviation” united under the leadership of the Trotsky opposition, the latter continued, month in and month out, to deepen its revisionist errors and fight the CPSU(B) and the teaching of Lenin, and build up its own special party, taking the struggle outside the CPSU(B) and appealing to non-proletarian elements in the country against the dictatorship of the proletariat. The ideology of the opposition, which has openly formed a bloc with renegades to world communism (Maslow, Souvarine and Co.), has now taken final shape as Menshevism in its Trotskyite interpretation. Repudiation of the socialist nature of Soviet state enterprises, repudiation of the possibility of socialism being built successfully in our country, repudiation of the alliance of the working class with the main mass of the peasants, and repudiation of the organisational principles of Bolshevism (the policy of splitting the CPSU(B) and the Comintern) have logically brought the Trotsky-Menshevik opposition round to slandering the USSR with the allegation that it has degenerated into a Thermidorian state, to rejecting the proletarian dictatorship in the USSR and to waging a counter-revolutionary struggle against it.

As a result, the opposition has severed its ideological ties with Leninism, degenerated into a Menshevik group, taken the road of capitulation to the forces of the international and internal bourgeoisie and objectively become a third force against the proletarian dictatorship. That is why it has been given such a crushing rebuff by the entire Party membership and by the working class as a whole.

The Fifteenth Congress finds that all the decisions of the CC and CCC against the disorganising activities of the Trotskyites were correct and necessary as a minimum measure, and instructs the Central Committee to continue ensuring the Party’s Leninist unity at all costs.

Taking into account the fact that the divergences between the Party and the opposition have grown from tactical into programme disagreements, and that the Trotskyite opposition has objectively become a factor of the anti-Soviet struggle, the Fifteenth Congress proclaims affiliation to the Trotskyite opposition and the propagation of its views as incompatible with membership of the Bolshevik Party.

On behalf of the CPSU(B) and on behalf of the working class of the Soviet Union, the Fifteenth Congress expresses its firm proletarian confidence in the triumph of socialism in our country in spite of all difficulties. The historic experience of the decade of the existence of the proletarian dictatorship fully bears out the correctness of the Leninist line followed by the CPSU(B).  The Fifteenth Congress instructs the CC to continue steadfastly pursuing that line, rally ever larger masses of working people in our country round the banner of socialist construction, strengthen the fraternal ties of solidarity with the proletariat of all countries and unswervingly turn the USSR into an ever more powerful outpost of the world socialist revolution.

The CPSU in Resolutions etc.,

8th Russ. ed., Vol. 8, pp. 20-21.