JOINT PLENARY MEETING OF THE CC AND CCC CPSU(B)

JOINT PLENARY MEETING OF THE CC AND CCC CPSU(B)

July 29-August 9, 1927

RESOLUTION “ON VIOLATIONS OF PARTY DISCIPLINE BY ZINOVIEV AND TROTSKY”

Since 1923 the opposition, first with Trotsky at its head, and since 1926, led by Trotsky and Zinoviev, has used every difficulty that the Party has had to surmount in building socialism to strike at its unity and leadership, not shrinking from any violation of Party discipline.

In 1923, when the first serious difficulties stemming from the New Economic Policy and caused by the marketing crisis and the money reform were encountered, Trotsky and his group, mirroring the petty-bourgeois vacillation in the country, sought to use these difficulties for their factional purposes by declaring that the policy pursued by the Party had brought the country to the verge of ruin. However, the facts showed that the opposition was mistaken. It mistook its own defeat among the people for the country’s ruin. At the time the Party and the Comintern analysed the behaviour of the Trotskyite opposition, denounced it and characterised its views as amounting to a petty-bourgeois deviation.

At the close of 1925, when new difficulties linked with the relations between the working  class and 

the peasantry, were encountered by the Party, it became apparent that Zinoviev, Kamenev and others 

had gone over to Trotskyism.

The Fourteenth Party Congress (December 1925) was unanimous in its appraisal of this departure of 

the “New Opposition” (Zinoviev and others) from the Leninist line expressed by their repudiation of 

the socialist nature of our industry, underestimation of the middle peasant, demand for freedom for factions and groups, and so forth. In the spring and summer of 1926 the “New Opposition” finally formed a bloc with Trotsky and other factional groups, whose views had been denounced by the Party, and the “New Opposition” led by Zinoviev finally adopted the ideological positions of Trotskyism.

In the course of its unceasing attacks on the Party in the summer of 1926 the opposition went so far as to give concrete shape to its factional organisation, turning it into an illegal organisation and holding illegal meetings in the forest (the affair of Lashevich and others). The opposition furthered its factional activities by going over from secret meetings to open factional acts (at the Aviapribor, Krasny Putilovets and other factories) in an effort to force the Party to start a discussion on issues that had already been decided by the Party Congress. When it was given a unanimous rebuff by the entire Party and was most emphatically rejected by the workers belonging to Party cells, the opposition had to capitulate and give a pledge to the Party that it would cease its factional struggle (declaration of October 16, 1926).

In that declaration the opposition acknowledged “its duty to implement. . .” “the Party’s decision banning factional activity”.

In that declaration the opposition acknowledged that “no encouragement whatever was permissible for the activities of people already expelled from the Party and the Comintern, such as Ruth Fischer and Adolf Maslow”, who sided with the opposition in our Party.

In this declaration the opposition said: “We regard the decisions of the Fourteenth Congress and of the Party CC and CCC as binding and shall unconditionally submit to and put them into effect.”

The opposition stated: “We categorically repudiate the right of those who conduct any agitation against the Comintern, the CPSU or the USSR to claim any solidarity with us.” In its declaration it denounced “criticism of the Comintern or the policy of the Party which grows into baiting that weakens the position of the Comintern as the militant organisation of the proletariat, of  the CPSU as the advanced contingent of the Comintern, or of the USSR as the first state of the proletarian dictatorship”.

However, the experience of all the activities of the opposition after its October pledge showed that it had not fulfilled any of the commitments it had made to the Party, and instead of diminishing its factional activities it has steered towards a direct split and the organisation of another party.

Despite the fact that the Fifteenth Party Conference, whose decisions were endorsed by the Comintern Executive, had sternly condemned the opposition line as a Social-Democratic deviation, as a Right-wing deviation disguised by Left phrase-mongering, and despite the fact that the opposition has received no support in any Party cell it stubbornly continues its factional activities and  is becoming a growing menace to the Party’s unity.

Lately, in connection with the Soviet Union’s grave international difficulties and the partial setbacks of the Chinese revolution, the opposition has concentrated its attacks on the Party’s foreign policy (China, Britain). In answer to the threat of war, which has loomed large for the USSR, it has made pronouncements which undermine the Party’s efforts to mobilise the masses against this threat and to strengthen the Soviet Union’s defence capability. The allegations that the CC was degenerating into Thermidorianism, that the Party was following a national-conservative line and pursuing an Ustryalov-type* kulak policy, that “the most deadly danger was not the threat of war but the Party regime”—all these allegations, aimed at sapping the will of the world proletariat to defend the USSR, were assessed by a plenary meeting of the Comintern Executive as “a means, in face of the threat of war . . . to conceal their desertion from the workers”.

This entire campaign has been accompanied by patently anti-Party factional activity, which has lately acquired an impermissible character. Instead of honouring the pledge given by it on October 16 to abide by Party discipline, the opposition has been printing factional literature and circulating it not only among Party members but also among non-Party people; organising underground factional groups, circles and conferences; distributing the grossly anti-Party Declaration of 84 containing unprecedented slanderous charges against the Party; Trotsky delivered a speech at the Eighth Plenary Meeting of the Comintern Executive in May 1927, which the Comintern Executive unanimously qualified as an anti-Party, flagrantly factional pronouncement; and Zinoviev spoke at a non-Party meeting on May 9, 1927, appealing to non-Party people against the Party and its leading bodies, thereby violating all the traditions of the Bolshevik Party and elementary Party discipline. Lastly, at a meeting of the Presidium of the Comintern Executive (in June 1927) Trotsky made an unheard-of charge against the Party, accusing it of Thermidorianism.

In spite of the fact that the CC had turned the question of Zinoviev’s disorganising speech over to the Central Control Commission, and despite the fact that the Comintern Executive has condemned Trotsky’s speech as patently factional, on June 9, 1927, at a time when British  imperialism was savagely attacking the USSR, Trotsky and Zinoviev took part in a political anti-Party demonstration organised by the opposition at a railway station on the pretext of giving a send-off to Smilga, who had for several weeks ignored the Party’s decision to send him to work in the Soviet  FarEast. At the  Yaroslavl  Railway Station Trotsky addressed the  demonstration, in which people    who had chanced to be at the railway station took part together with members of the opposition who had been assembled through the factional apparatus.

By these actions Trotsky and Zinoviev showed that:

(a) the pledge given by them to observe discipline was only a tactical manoeuvre designed to deceive the Party;

(b) at a time when war threatens, when the Party’s central task is to strengthen the rear, and the main condition for strengthening the rear is to enhance the Party’s preparedness for combat and its discipline, the opposition, in pursuance of its factional aims, steers towards the disintegration of Party discipline and helps to untie the hands of the anti-Soviet forces in our country.

At the Tenth Party Congress, in the resolution on Party unity, Lenin pointed out that it was necessary to show the Party “the experience of preceding revolutions, when the counter-revolution gave its support to petty-bourgeois groups standing closest to the most radically revolutionary party in order to shake and overthrow the revolutionary dictatorship and thereby open the road for the subsequent total victory of the counter-revolution, of the capitalists and landowners”.*

The joint Plenary Meeting of the CC and CCC draws the attention of the whole Party to the fact that 

on account of its factional activities the opposition is objectively becoming a rallying centre for anti-Party and anti-Soviet forces, a centre on whose corrupting activities the internal and foreign counter-revolution now counts.

For a number of years the Party has displayed the utmost tolerance and patience, repeatedly cautioning the opposition and trying to bring the leaders of the opposition round to observing Party discipline.

However, the latest pronouncements by Trotsky and Zinoviev show that although the Party has exhausted all the means of cautioning, it has been unable to get the leaders of the opposition really to submit to the will of the Party, that the leaders of the opposition are flagrantly and systematically flouting the very foundations of the Party spirit and Party discipline, which are binding on all Party members without exception, whoever they may be, and that the opposition, headed by the opposition members in the CC, is giving momentum to its factional activities, undermining the Party’s unity and steering towards a split.

Lastly, in view of the above-mentioned facts and on the basis of the debate at the present,  joint Plenary Meeting, the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission have to put on record:

(1) that in their factional blindness the opposition (Trotsky and Zinoviev) is sliding into a course against the absolute and unconditional defence of the USSR in the struggle against imperialist intervention; moreover, the opposition is trying to substantiate this erroneous line by alleging that the existing leading organs of the CPSU(B) and the USSR are of the “Thermidorian” type, in view of which, according to the opposition, it is necessary first to replace these organs and then to organise the defence of the USSR (Trotsky’s thesis on Clemenceau);

(2) that the opposition (Trotsky and Zinoviev) is steering towards a direct split of the Comintern by organising in Germany a second party headed by Adolf Maslow and Ruth Fischer, who have been 

expelled from the Comintern, and using it as a weapon to split the other European  sectionsof the Comintern;

(3) that the opposition (Trotsky and Zinoviev) is moving towards the organisation of a new party against the CPSU(B), towards an open split in the CPSU(B) systematically violating the decisions of 

our Party, shaking the Party spirit and Party discipline and thereby helping to disarm the proletariat of the USSR in face of the mounting threat of war.

The joint Plenary Meeting of the CC and CCC is obliged to state that through these crimes against the Party and the proletariat the leaders of the opposition (Trotsky and Zinoviev) have found themselves in a blind alley, alienated their relations with the Party and put the Party in a position where it has no alternative but to apply the Tenth Congress decision on Party unity to them.

That decision makes it incumbent upon the joint Plenary Meeting of the CC and CCC to raise the question not only of the expulsion of manifest splitters and disorganisers of the Party and the Comintern from the Central Committee but also their expulsion from the Party. Nevertheless, desiring to give the leaders of the opposition an opportunity to rectify their mistakes and stop their criminal actions against the Party, the Presidium of the CCC limited itself to proposing the expulsion of Trotsky and Zinoviev from the Central Committee of the CPSU(B).

Moreover, wishing to give the leaders of the opposition, who have driven themselves into an impasse, a way out and facilitate peace in the Party, the Presidium of the CCC and the joint Plenary Meeting of the CC and CCC made a last attempt to retain Trotsky and Zinoviev in the Central Committee by suggesting that they accept a number of elementary terms, which are binding on all members of the Bolshevik Party and vital to peace in the Party, namely:

(1) renounce Trotsky’s semi-defeatist theory in face of the threat of war (Trotsky’s thesis on Clemenceau), take the road of absolute and unconditional defence of our socialist motherland against imperialism and denounce the opposition’s slander that our Party and Soviet leadership have degenerated into Thermidorianism;

(2) renounce the policy of splitting the Comintern, denounce the party formed by Maslow and Fischer, who have been expelled from the Comintern, rupture all contacts with that anti-Leninist, divisive party and carry out all the decisions of the Communist International;

(3) renounce the policy of splitting the CPSU(B), denounce the attempt to form a second party, disband the faction and pledge to carry out all the decisions of the CPSU(B) and its Central Committee.

However, despite the pliability of the Plenary Meeting of the CC and CCC and the elementary nature 

of these terms, they were rejected by the leaders of the opposition.

It was only after the joint Plenary Meeting of the CC and CCC was compelled, in view of this stand,

to assume as a basis a resolution to expel Zinoviev and Trotsky from the Party Central Committee—it 

was only after this that the opposition found it necessary to beat a retreat, repudiate some of its errors, accept the proposal of the Plenary Meeting of the CC and CCC with reservations, and make the corresponding “statement”.

In view of this the joint Plenary Meeting of the CC and CCC passed a decision to remove from the agenda the question of the expulsion of Zinoviev and Trotsky from the Central Committee and sternly reprimand and caution them with the corresponding entry to be made in their Party registration card.

The joint Plenary Meeting of the CC and CCC considers that all this may prove to be a step towards 

peace in the Party. However, it is far from considering the “statement” of the opposition a sufficient act capable of ensuring the necessary peace in the Party.

Nevertheless, the joint Plenary Meeting of the CC and CCC has every reason to note withsatisfaction that:

(1) in its “statement” the opposition has had to repudiate a number of errors and its vacillation on the question of the nature of the Soviet Union’s future war against intervention and on the unconditional defence of the USSR against imperialism, although by its reluctance to condemn outright Trotsky’s semi-defeatist thesis on Clemenceau the opposition has left for itself soil for future possible vacillation on the question of the unconditional defence of the USSR;

(2) the opposition has had to repudiate its anti-Party slander to the effect that the Party leadership was degenerating into Thermidorianism, although by its reservation that the Party was not fighting Thermidorian trends in the country vigorously enough it left for itself a loophole for further attacks on the Party along this line;

(3) the opposition has had to abandon, on formal grounds, it is true, its organisational ties with the divisive, anti-Leninist Urbahns-Maslow group, although by its reluctance to withdraw support for this group it left itself a loophole for further attacks on the Comintern;

(4) the opposition has had to give up factional activity in the CPSU(B) and recognise the need for eradicating all elements of such factional activity, although by its reservation and attack on the “regime in the Party” it seeks to justify its previous divisive activity and, moreover, leaves itself soil for fresh attacks on the CPSU(B).

The joint Plenary Meeting of the CC and CCC has no grounds for guaranteeing that the opposition’s retreat and repudiation of some of its errors are genuinely sincere. The experience of a similar “statement” by the opposition on October 16, 1926 shows that it has never been inclined to honour its commitments to the Party. The reservations in its present “statement” on issues put before  it at this joint Plenary Meeting of the CC and CCC indicate that it has not renounced further struggle against the leadership of the Party and the Comintern. In view of this the joint Plenary Meeting of the CC and CCC makes it obligatory for the opposition forthwith to disband its faction and calls on all organisations and all members of our Party to take every measure to secure the total abolition of factional activities, actions and groups.

While systematically implementing inner-Party democracy and in no way hindering business- like comradely criticism of the Party’s shortcomings, the joint Plenary Meeting of the CC and CCC considers that on this point Party organisations must be guided by the decision of the Tenth Party Congress, which states:

“It must be a strict rule that unquestionably necessary criticism of shortcomings in the Party, every analysis of the Party’s general line or study of its practical experience, executive control and the methods of rectifying mistakes, and so forth shall be directed by every Party organisation not towards a discussion in groups forming round some ‘platform’ and so on, but towards a discussion by all members of the Party.”*

In putting an end to factional activity and upholding unity and iron discipline in the Party, the Party organisations must be guided by the decision of the same Tenth Congress, which states:

“The Congress directs that all groups that have formed round one platform or another shall be forthwith disbanded without exception, and instructs all organisations to make sure that no factional activity is pursued. Non-fulfilment of this decision of the Congress shall be followed by unconditional and immediate expulsion from the Party.”†