Early Dissensions in the Communist Party

Abstract

The disputes within the communist party between 1919 and 1921 differed in character from those of 1918. The patent anarchy which had resulted from the over-hasty putting into practice of extreme socialist doctrines, especially workers’ control, had cured the utopian left wing of its illusions. Its intellectual leader, Bukharin veered gradually to the right. By 1920 he fully accepted the need for disciplined management of industry and state compulsion as the inevitable accompaniments of the long transitional phase to communism, when all compulsion would at last cease to be necessary.¹ The acrimonious wrangles of the years of ‘war communism’ (as the years of extremist socialism which preceded the introduction of Lenin’s New Economic Policy in 1921 came to be known) sprang from causes quite different from those which had engendered Lenin’s disputes with the left communist intellectuals in 1918. The party struggles of this period can be divided into two phases: the first phase, up to the spring of 1920, during which a fairly united party leadership struggled against a wave of disappointment and dissatisfaction in the lower ranks of the party; and the second phase, culminating in the Tenth Party Congress, in March 1921, during which a struggle for power among different groups within the party leadership was going on at the same time as a struggle by the centre for control over a more organized and clearly-defined opposition from below.