Workers’ Opposition

Workers’ Opposition, in the history of the Soviet Union, a group within the Communist Party that achieved prominence in 1920–21 as a champion of workers’ rights and trade union control over industry. Its defeat established a precedent for suppressing dissent within the party, thus enabling Joseph Stalin eventually to establish his dictatorial control.

The group began to develop in 1919, resisting the domination of central party organs over local party units and trade unions. The group also resisted the party’s minimization of the role of workers in controlling industrial enterprises, the increasing use of so-called bourgeois specialists in industry, and the party’s efforts to replace group control of enterprises with one-man management. It became a distinct opposition group in 1920–21 when it objected to Leon Trotsky’s plan to transform trade unions into state organs.

The Workers’ Opposition, composed largely of trade unionists and led by A.G. Shlyapnikov, S.P. Medvedev, and later Aleksandra Kollontay, not only objected to the subordination of the trade unions but also insisted that the unions, as the institutions most directly representing the proletariat, should control the national economy and individual enterprises. Although the group received substantial support from the rank-and-file party membership, no major leaders joined its cause.

At the 10th Party Congress (March 1921) its platform was rejected, its ideas were condemned, and it was ordered to disperse. Its members, nevertheless, continued to agitate, complaining particularly about the lack of democracy within the party, the central leadership’s lack of respect for the workers and local autonomy, and the manner in which the party leaders were endeavouring to break up the opposition by transferring its adherents to remote regions.

The 11th Party Congress (March–April 1922) refrained from expelling the Workers’ Opposition leaders from the party but censured them and forced them to curtail their activities. In 1926 the remaining members of the Workers’ Opposition briefly joined other opposition elements in an unsuccessful effort to prevent Stalin from gaining complete control over the party. By 1933 all the leaders of the Workers’ Opposition had been expelled from the party; with the purges of the 1930s all except Kollontay disappeared.