International Teleconference of the History of the Anti-Stalinist Communist Opposition in the USSR Research Team:

"The Communist Opposition in the USSR in the Early 1930s: Recently Discovered Notebooks (2018) from the Verkhne-Uralsk Prison"

On March 28, a presentation was made via teleconference of the discovery in 2018 of the manuscripts of the Bolshevik-Leninists imprisoned by Stalinism in the 1930s in the Verkhne-Uralsk Political Isolator, in the city of Chelyabinsk, in the region of the Urals, Russia. The event was titled: "The Communist Opposition in the USSR in the Early 1930s: Recently Discovered Notebooks (2018) from the Verkhne-Uralsk Prison.
This presentation was exposed by three historians from different Russian universities who are conducting the historiographical investigation of the found notebooks and are members of the Research Team on the History of the Anti-Stalinist Communist Opposition in the USSR.
Alexander Fokin, who is currently Associate Professor of History at Tyumen State University and was a professor at Chelyabinsk University when the notebooks were found, gave an account of how the notebooks were discovered. He said it was in 2018, while repairs were being made to the old political isolator facility in Verkhne-Uralsk, in the city of Chelyabinsk, that Bolshevik-Leninist manuscripts dating from 1932-1933 were found. These were hidden on the pallets of cell No. 312. Fokin announced that of the 30-35 notebooks found, 27 of them could be identified and completely restored. The backbone of these texts, as explained by the professor, is to discuss the crisis of the revolution and the tasks of the working class.
Fokin closed his presentation by highlighting the importance of the discovery of these notebooks, which "reflect the voice of the militants who, confined in Stalin's prisons, confronted the Stalinist regime by raising an alternative program for the USSR in the 1930s." Alexander Fokin stated that these notebooks constitute the vision of the Left Opposition of how the Soviet Union should change, about collectivization, industrialization and all the problems of the USSR in the 1930s. The academic stated that “the Left Opposition described, criticized and presented a program about what was necessary to change in the Stalinist regime” and later added that “it can be assumed that the documents of the Verkhne-Uralsk prison focus not only on the life and the situation in prison, but on theoretical abstract questions ”.
In Fokin's words, "the core of the Opposition consisted of the so-called 'irreconcilables' who, despite pressure from the state, continued to hold visions and present alternative ideas to the general line of the communist party."
Then Alexey Gusev, Associate Professor of History at the Lomonosov Moscow State University, took the floor, who first referred to the conditions of the Bolsheviks-Leninists within Stalin's political isolators and prisons. He explained that“freedom within the walls of the prison ”, which included the possibility of holding meetings, accessing a library and newspapers, etc.,“ coincided with harsh prison conditions: shortages, insufficient diet, cold water, brutal treatment of prisoners by the Stalinist GPU ”.He indicated at the same time that these conditions"caused various groups to go on hunger strikes and protests, followed by beatings and repressions, which led to torture."
Gusev focused his exposition by giving his vision of the different wings and tendencies that existed within the Bolshevik-Leninists within Stalin's prisons and his relationship with Trotsky and the International Left Opposition. In addition, he highlighted the key programmatic aspects that the Bolshevik-Leninists raised in the Ural prison to recover the USSR, highlighting, for example, the program that the Soviet working class has the right to form unions and workers' militias and that officials should win the average wage of a worker as established by the principles of the Paris Commune. On this he also stated that"the revolutionary methods of the armed struggle were not excluded, and the possible formation of the red workers' guard was being discussed."
Gusev stated that “in 1935 the political isolators were transformed into special prisons without traces of the previous political regime” and “almost all the members of the communist sector of the isolator met their end in the Vorkuta camps where they were physically exterminated in 1937-1938 by the Stalinism. There they fought their last battle in the form of hunger strikes and other forms of protest in prisons ”. Finally, Gusev ended his exposition by stating that the struggles of the oppositionists demonstrated "that Bolshevism was capable of producing not only Stalinism but also an inflexible resistance to it."
Finally, the presentation by Julia Gusev, translator and researcher of the Global Workers Institute, was developed, who centered her speech around the rise and triumph of fascism in Germany in the 1930s as a “key historical milestone” of world events.
Faced with this, Julia Gusev highlighted the importance of knowing the vision and program developed by the Bolshevik-Leninists in the Verkhne-Uralsk political isolator, which coincided with Trotsky's postulates and his criticism and struggle against the politics of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR and the Comintern.
J. Gusev referred to three of the documents found: the Theses "The W
world situation and the Comintern" of April 1932, "The crisis of the revolution and the tasks of the proletariat" of April 1933 and "The Fascist Coup in Germany ”, Written after Hitler's triumph in 1933. J. Gusev alluded to the fact that there the Bolshevik-Leninists of the Urals raised the crisis of revolutionary leadership as the key to defining the outcome of events in Germany, contrasting the need for a united front worker to crush fascism to the ultra-left policy of the "third period" of Stalinism that refused to this policy by cataloging the Social Democracy as "social-fascist".
In this regard, she stated that a “strategic error of the Comintern that the authors considered sectarian and ultra-left was the slogan of a united front only from below.Only this method led sections of the Comintern to fight against another component of the labor movement, the social democracy, rather than against the growing fascist threat. Meanwhile Trotsky and the subsequent authors of the document defend the tactic of the united workers' front, the interaction with the social democratic organizations to fight against fascism.The signatories did not defend a political unification with bourgeois parties. "
J. Gusev argued that the tactic proposed by the oppositionists should also be distinguished from the policy of class collaboration that Stalinism imposed in a particular way in those years. In the documents discovered, the Oppositionists give an account of the struggle they waged against the unification that Stalinism made of the Communist Party with the Kuomintang in China. But not only that. Then the Bolshevik-Leninists faced, in the so-called "third period", the sectarian policy of the German Communist Party and its claim that social democracy and fascism "were the same", thus dividing the working class ranks before Hitler's advance.

J. Gusev highlighted the huge internationalist policy of the Russian Left Opposition which called for the mobilization of the Red Army of the USSR to the border with Germany when Hitler was rising. He referred to the Bolshevik-Leninists who signed the document "Fascist Coup in Germany" and said: "In their opinion, the Communists should have called for the mobilization of the Red Army of the USSR to actively support the anti-fascist rebellion, class action German worker ”
J. Gusev also stated that the notebooks found show that in 1932, “the oppositionists, as well as Trotsky, fought to revive the Communist International, replacing the leadership that in those years they still considered centrist, openly and publicly condemning its strategic and tactical line, for the complete elimination of the bureaucratic regime in the Communist International and its sections ”.
Finally, J. Gusev made reference to the fact that in 1933, after the German experience, both the oppositionists from the Urals and Trotsky reached the conclusion that it was necessary to break with the Stalinist III International and fight for a new revolutionary world party. Julia Gusev said about this: “the authors of the theses came to the conclusion that the Comintern had gone over to the field of reaction and had to break with it (...) The oppositionists of the Verkhne-Uralsk prison took this conclusion in April 1933. They unequivocally state that the Comintern was liquidated by Stalin and that it can only be revived on new crystallized bases around Trotsky's communist left, the best revolutionary elements of the party and the revolutionary elements that were not of the party. and they were from the united workers' front ”.
From the Rudolph Klement Socialist Publishing House, we followed this event and we are in the task of translating the interventions made there into several languages. This conference call is now available in English and can be accessed in this publication.
The position of our current regarding the discovery of the notebooks was published in the Special Edition of "The International Workers' Organizer" of May 1, 2019, which we have published as a preview of the presentation of the manuscripts of the Soviet Left Opposition found in the former political isolator of Verkhne-Uralsk. In this special edition we published 4 documents of the Bolshevik-Leninists in Spanish: “Fascist coup in Germany” (1933), “Tactics and tasks of the Leninist Opposition”, “The situation in the country and the tasks of the Bolshevik-Leninists ”(1932) and “The crisis of the revolution and the tasks of the proletariat ”. This material is also available for downloading.
The Rudolph Klement Socialist Publishing House will soon publish a work that will include all the documents recovered from the Verkhne-Urask prison, which, as announced at the conference we report on, number 27. Our work will also contain the key political struggles of the Left Opposition and the heroic battles of the Soviet section prior to the founding of the Fourth International.
For us, these documents have enormous value not only from the historical point of view, but also because they are a great step in the fight to reconstitute the threads of continuity of the struggle of the Left Opposition in the first years of the decade of the '30s when, as a fraction of the III International, they fought to revolt it to recover the USSR as a bastion of the European and world revolution. Against the current revisionism of the renegades of Trotskyism who intend to mix the clean banners of the Fourth International with those of Stalinism at the world level, these documents, by themselves, are the proof and living testimony that both in the physical field and in the theoretical and programmatic, between Bolshevism and Stalinism, there is a river of blood.

Walter Montoya and Elisa Funes
For the Rudolph Klement Publishing House