The Reflux of Revolution

Abstract

The ultra left and the VKPD majority were not able for long to bask in the sunshine of the ECCI’s approval. The change in attitude was indicated by Karl Radek — often the bell-wether of Comintern tactical turns — in an article of 10 May 1921, in which he criticised the VKPD Zentrale for speaking of an ‘offensive’ when the March Action was really a ‘defensive offensive’.¹ This argument opened the way to the compromise formulation of the Third Comintern Congress: ‘The March Action was not an offensive but a response to Hörsing’s police provocation.’ According to Trotsky this decision was not arrived at without severe disagreements within the Russian Politburo.² The German left and its ‘theory of the offensive’ was upheld by Zinoviev and Bukharin and opposed by Lenin, Trotsky and Kamenev. The Russian delegation to the Third Congress was similarly divided, and only preserved its public unanimity thanks to a compromise resolution. Lenin was keen to bury the theory of the offensive quickly, and he exposed his objections in detail to Zinoviev on 10 June:

It is stupid and harmful to write that the period of propaganda has gone by and the period of action has begun … It is necessary to fight unceasingly and systematically to win the majority of the working class, at the outset within the old trade unions … All those who have not understood that the tactic of the Open Letter is obligatory must be expelled from the International within a month. I see clearly that it was a mistake on my part to have agreed to the admission of the KAPD. This must be corrected as rapidly as possible.