Trotsky expelled from the party

In mid-November 1927 a joint meeting of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) expelled Leon Trotsky and Grigory Zinoviev from the party. Ten years earlier the first had directed the coup that brought the Bolsheviks to power, while the second had for years been chairman of the Communist International. Now they were accused of splitting the party and of organising an “anti-Soviet” demonstration on the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. The expulsion brought to an end a power struggle that had lasted several years since Lenin’s death. The victor was Joseph Stalin, the party’s General Secretary. In December the Fifteenth Party Congress expelled further opposition leaders; in January 1928 Trotsky was exiled to Alma-Ata, and in February 1929 he was deported from the Soviet Union. He never returned.

12 or 14 November

English-language chronologies usually give the date as 12 November 1927. The resolution expelling Trotsky and Zinoviev, however, is dated 14 November. It was adopted on that day by the joint meeting of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission, and that is the date given in Russian editions of party documents and by most of Trotsky’s biographers.

From the “troika” to the United Opposition

The dispute began while Lenin was still alive. In 1923 Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and Stalin formed a “troika” within the Politburo, intended to prevent Trotsky – after Lenin the best-known Bolshevik leader and the creator of the Red Army – from inheriting power. In the autumn of 1923 Trotsky and a group of his supporters attacked the bureaucratisation of the party and the rule of the apparatus. This was the birth of the Left Opposition. After Lenin’s death in January 1924 the troika kept Stalin in his post, even though Lenin in his Testament had advised removing him, and stripped Trotsky of his influence step by step. In January 1925 he lost the War Commissariat.

Stalin then turned against his allies. Relying on Nikolai Bukharin, the premier Alexei Rykov and the trade union leader Mikhail Tomsky, he defeated Zinoviev and Kamenev at the Fourteenth Congress in December 1925. In 1926 the former enemies – Trotsky on one side, Zinoviev and Kamenev on the other – joined forces in what became known as the United Opposition. They criticised the slogan of “socialism in one country” and called for faster industrialisation, higher taxes on the rich peasants, the kulaks, and freedom of debate within the party. They stood no chance. The party apparatus, which Stalin had for years been filling with his own people, controlled the selection of delegates, the press and the control commissions. Opposition meetings were broken up, and its supporters were dismissed from their jobs and transferred to remote regions. In the summer and autumn of 1926 Zinoviev, Trotsky and Kamenev were dropped from the Politburo, and Zinoviev lost the leadership of the Comintern.

1927

The year 1927 handed the opposition arguments, but not victory. In April Chiang Kai-shek, until then an ally of the Chinese Communists, whom Moscow had ordered to work with him in a united front, carried out the massacre of Communists in Shanghai. Trotsky blamed the disaster on the policy of Stalin and Bukharin. In May Britain broke off diplomatic relations with the USSR, and on 7 June in Warsaw the émigré Boris Koverda shot dead the Soviet envoy Pyotr Voykov. A war scare swept the country. The leadership portrayed the opposition’s criticism as weakening the state in the face of danger. Trotsky supplied it with an argument when he declared that in the event of war the opposition would, like Georges Clemenceau in France in 1917, fight to replace an incompetent leadership in order to defend the country more effectively.

In September the opposition drew up its programmatic platform for the forthcoming party congress. The leadership refused to print it, and when the oppositionists began to duplicate it on their own, the OGPU staged a provocation: a supposed “Wrangel officer”, in reality an agent of the political police, turned up at the illegal printing shop, which made it possible to accuse the opposition of links with the White émigrés. On 23 October a plenum of the Central Committee removed Trotsky and Zinoviev from its membership. Trotsky spoke amid shouts and insults, and objects were thrown at him from the hall.

7 November

The opposition decided to appeal to the party rank and file on the day that was meant to be Stalin’s great celebration: the tenth anniversary of the revolution. On 7 November 1927 its supporters joined the official parades in Moscow and Leningrad carrying their own banners: “Carry out Lenin’s testament!”, “Down with the kulak, the NEPman and the bureaucrat!”, “Against opportunism, for the true unity of the Leninist party!”. Squads from the apparatus and the militia tore down the banners and beat the demonstrators. In Moscow shots were fired at Trotsky’s car, and his supporters who had hung banners from a balcony in the city centre were pelted with stones and dragged down by force. In Leningrad Zinoviev and his followers were hemmed in and cut off from the parade. The workers on whom the opposition had counted for the most part looked on passively.

For the leadership this was the opportunity it had been waiting for. The gathering of supporters in the street under their own slogans was branded an “anti-Soviet demonstration” and a breach of party discipline. On 14 November the joint meeting of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission expelled Trotsky and Zinoviev from the party, and removed Kamenev, Christian Rakovsky and other oppositionists from the party’s governing bodies. The decision was taken two weeks before the congress, so that the opposition leaders could not speak from its platform. Trotsky had to leave his flat in the Kremlin.

On 16 November Adolph Joffe, the former diplomat who in 1921 had negotiated the Peace of Riga and was one of Trotsky’s closest friends, shot himself in Moscow; he was ill and had been denied treatment abroad. In his farewell letter he wrote to Trotsky that he had been right, but had too often given up the fight. On 19 November, over his grave at the Novodevichy Cemetery, Trotsky gave his last public speech in the Soviet Union.

Congress, exile, banishment

The Fifteenth Party Congress, which sat from 2 to 19 December 1927, declared the opposition’s views incompatible with party membership and expelled several dozen more of its activists, Kamenev among them. The United Opposition fell apart. Zinoviev and Kamenev capitulated, renounced their views and were readmitted to the party in 1928. Trotsky and most of his supporters refused. On 17 January 1928 OGPU officers carried Trotsky out of his flat by force, as he had refused to leave voluntarily, and sent him into exile in Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan. Thousands of his supporters were sent into exile or to prison. From Alma-Ata Trotsky kept up an extensive correspondence with oppositionists across the country. In January 1929 the Politburo decided to deport him from the USSR. In February a ship carried him to Constantinople, and he then settled on the island of Büyükada (Prinkipo) in the Sea of Marmara. In 1932 he was stripped of Soviet citizenship.

Did Stalin already hold absolute power?

A widely held view is that the expulsion of Trotsky gave Stalin “unchallenged control” of the Soviet Union. This is a considerable simplification. In November 1927 Stalin was the strongest man in the party, but the Politburo still included Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky, with whom he shared power. A few weeks after the congress, faced with a crisis in grain procurement, Stalin himself turned to coercion of the countryside – that is, to a policy closer to what the opposition had demanded. Bukharin and his allies opposed this and in 1928–1929 were removed from power as the “Right deviation”. Only then, at the end of 1929, when his fiftieth birthday was celebrated with great pomp and the country was entering forced collectivisation and the first Five-Year Plan, did Stalin become sole ruler. Trotsky was thus the last great rival on the left, but not the last opponent.

Significance

The expulsion of Trotsky meant that there was no longer any room for organised opposition in the Bolshevik party. Disputes which under Lenin had been fought out at congresses and in the press were from now on settled by the apparatus, and the losers had to confess their errors publicly. From there a straight road led to the 1930s, when the same men – Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Rykov – were accused in show trials of espionage and of conspiring on behalf of Germany and Japan, and were shot. “Trotskyism” became a charge for which hundreds of thousands of people died in the Great Purge, among them a large part of the command of the Red Army that Trotsky had created.

Stalin’s victory also weighed on the fate of Europe. In 1928 the Comintern under his direction declared social democracy to be “social fascism” and the Communists’ main enemy. In Germany Ernst Thälmann’s party fought the Social Democrats instead of Hitler, while Trotsky, from exile, called in vain on the German Communists to form a common front against the Nazis. He also warned that Stalin might come to terms with Hitler. In August 1939 that is what happened. A year later, on 20 August 1940, in Coyoacán near Mexico City, the Soviet intelligence agent Ramón Mercader fatally wounded Trotsky with an ice axe.