dropped, a faction within the Bolshevik party known as the Workers’ Opposition campaigned unsuccessfully during 1919 and 1920 for trade unions to have a greater role in running the Soviet economy. See also: EDINONACHALIE; FEBRUARY REVOLUTION; WORKERS’ OPPOSITION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Smith, Stephen A. (1983). Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917-1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wade, Rex. (2000). The Russian Revolution, 1917. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
The Workers’ Opposition (Rabochaya oppozitsia) was a group of trade union leaders and industrial administrators within the Russian Communist Party who opposed party leaders’ policy on workers and industry from 1919 to 1921. The group formed in the fall of 1919, when its leader, Alexander Shlyapnikov, called for trade unions to assume leadership of the highest party and state organs. Leading members of the Metalworkers’ Union supported Shlyapnikov, who criticized the growing bureaucratization of the Communist Party and Soviet government, which he feared would stifle worker initiative. The Workers’ Opposition advocated management of the economy by a hierarchy of elected worker assemblies, organized according to branches of the economy (metalworking, textiles, mining, etc.).
Shlyapnikov, the chairman of the All-Russian Metalworkers’ Union, was the most prominent leader of the Workers’ Opposition. Thirty-eight individuals signed the theses of the Workers’ Opposition in December 1920. Most of them had been metalworkers; they represented the Metalworkers’ Union, Mners’ Union, and the leading organs of heavy industry. Alexandra Kollontai advised the Workers’ Opposition and was a spokesperson for it. She wrote a pamphlet about the group (Rabochaya oppozitsia), which circulated among delegates to the Tenth Communist Party Congress in 1921.
Leaders of the Opposition used the resources and organizations of major trade unions (metalworkers, miners, textile workers) to mobilize support. Many meetings were arranged by personal letter or word of mouth. Metalworkers or former metalworkers composed the membership, all of whom were also Communists.
The Workers’ Opposition drew attention to a divide between Soviet industrial workers and the Communist Party, which claimed to rule in the name of the working class. Party leaders feared that the Workers’ Opposition would inspire opponents of the regime. At the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921, the party banned the Workers’ Opposition. See also: CIVIL WAR OF 1917-1922; KOLLONTAI, ALEXANDRA MIKHAILOVNA; SHLYAPNIKOV, ALEXANDER GAV-RILOVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Holmes, Larry E. (1990). For the Revolution Redeemed: The Workers Opposition in the Bolshevik Party, 1919 -1921 (Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, no. 802). Pittsburgh, PA : University of Pittsburgh Center for Russian and East European Studies. Kollontai, Alexandra. (1971). The Workers Opposition in Russia.. London: Solidarity.
See RABKRIN.
When Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels implored workers of the world to unite, they announced a new vision of international politics: world socialist revolution. Although central to Marxist thought, the importance of world revolution evoked little debate until World War I. It was Vladimir Lenin who revitalized it, made it central to Bolshevik political theory, and provided an institutional base for it. Although other Marxists, such as Nikolai Bukharin and Rosa Luxemburg, devoted serious attention to it, Lenin’s ideas had the most profound impact because they persuasively linked an analysis of imperialism with the struggle for world socialist revolution.
In Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), Lenin argued that modern war was due to conflicts among imperialist powers and that any revolution within the imperialist world would weaken capitalism and hasten socialist revolution. The contradictions of capitalism and imperialism provided the soil that nourished world revolution. In the fall of 1917, when Lenin cajoled his comrades to seize power, he argued that the Russian Revolution was “one of the links in a chain of socialist revolutions” in Europe. He believed in the imminence of such revolutions, which he deemed essential to the Bolshevik revolution’s survival and success. His optimism was not unfounded, as revolutionary unrest engulfed Central and Eastern Europe in 1918-1920.
In 1919 Lenin helped to create the Communist International (Comintern) to guide the world revolution. As the revolutionary wave waned in the 1920s, Stalin claimed that world revolution was not essential to the USSR’s survival. Rather, he argued,
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
1675
developing socialism in one country (the USSR) was essential to keeping the world revolutionary movement alive. Other Bolshevik leaders, notably Leon Trotsky, disagreed, but in vain. Nonetheless, until it adopted the Popular Front policy in 1935, the Comintern pursued tactics for world revolution. Unlike previous Comintern policies, which sought to spark revolution, the Popular Front was a defensive policy designed to stem the rise of fascism. It marked the end of Soviet efforts to foment world socialist revolution. See also: LENIN, VLADIMIR ILICH
McDermott, Kevin, and Agnew, Jeremy. (1997). The Comintern: A History of International Communism from Lenin to Stalin. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Nation, R. Craig. (1989). War on War: Lenin, the Zim-merwald Left, and the Origins of Communist Internationalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Imperial Russia entered World War I in the summer of 1914 along with allies England and France. It remained at war with Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy, and Turkey until the war effort collapsed during the revolutions of 1917.
In 1914 military theory taught that new technologies meant that future wars would be short, decided by initial, offensive battles waged by mass conscript armies on the frontiers. Trapped between two enemies, Germany planned to defeat France in the west before Russia, with its still sparse railway net, could mobilize. Using French loans to build up that net, Russia sought to speed up the process, rapidly invade East Prussia, and so relieve pressure on the French. Berlin therefore feared giving Russia a head start in mobilizing and, rightly or wrongly, most statesmen accepted that if mobilization began, war was inevitable.
On June 28, 1914, a nationalist Serbian student shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, at Sarajevo. To most statesmen’s surprise, this provoked a crisis when Austria, determined to punish the Serbs, issued an unacceptable ultimatum on July 23. Over the next six days, pressure mounted on Nicholas II but, rec1676 ognizing that mobilization meant war, he refused to order a general call-up that would force a German response. Then Vienna declared war on Serbia, Nicholas’s own efforts to negotiate with Kaiser William II collapsed, and on July 30 he finally approved a general mobilization. When St. Petersburg ignored Berlin’s demand for its cancellation within twelve hours, Germany declared war on August 1. Over the next three days Germany invaded Luxembourg, declared war on France on August 4, and by entering Belgium, added Britain to its enemies.
THE WAR OF MOVEMENT: SUMMER 1914-APRIL 1915
Some Social Democrats aside, Russia’s educated public rallied in a Sacred Union behind their ruler. Strikes and political debate ended, and on August 2, crowds in St. Petersburg cheered Nicholas II after he signed a declaration of war on Germany. Local problems apart, the mobilization proceeded apace as 3,115,000 reservists and 800,000 militiamen joined the 1,423,000-man army to provide troops for Russian offensives into Austrian Galicia and, as promised, France and East Prussia.
