Ban on factions in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

In 1921, factions were banned in the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks).^[1]

Since 1920 a majority of

Resolution on Party Unity 1921

Factions were also commencing to criticize Lenin's leadership. Consequently, the 10th Party Congress passed a Resolution On Party Unity, a ban on factions to eliminate factionalism within the party in 1921.^[2] The resolution stated as follows.

• Under the present conditions (apparently, the ongoing Kronstadt rebellion), party unity was more necessary than ever.
• The Kronstadt rebellion was being exploited by "the
  bourgeois counter-revolutionaries and whiteguards in all countries of the world" in order to "secure the overthrow of the dictatorship of the proletariat
  in Russia".
• Criticism, "while absolutely necessary", was supposed to be "submitted immediately, without any delay", that is, without prior deliberation in any faction, "for consideration and decision to the leading local and central bodies of the Party."
• The "deviation towards syndicalism and anarchism" was rejected "in principle", but the central proposals of the Democratic Centralism group were accepted.
• All factions were dissolved.

The ban on factions after Lenin's death

Faction members (such as members of "Workers' Truth") would be expelled from the Party in December 1923. Big opposition factions (such as Leon Trotsky's 'Left Opposition' and such as oppositionist groups around Nikolai Bukharin and Grigory Zinoviev) again appeared after the civil war ended. These factions were tolerated for several years, leading some modern Marxists to claim that the ban on factions was intended to be temporary.^[3] When Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled on November 12, 1927, the ban on factions was however used to justify this, and there is no language in the discussion at the 10th Party Congress suggesting that it was intended to be temporary (Protokoly 523-548).^{[original research?]}

A sense of a deficit in democracy was present in calls by Trotsky and The Declaration of 46 in 1923.

Historians T. H. Rigby and

Historian Vadim Rogovin stated that the banning of factions did not translate into a ban of inner-party discussions and cited a statement from the Tenth Congress of the RKP which stated "wide discussions on all the most important questions, discussions about them with full freedom of inner-party criticism". Rogovin also cited Lenin's concluding speech on party unity in 1921 which spoke out against a proposed amendment that would have forbidden elections to the Congress according to platforms.^[6]

References