Bolsheviks
On the History of the Movement of Women Workers in Russia - Alexandra Kollontai
Written in 1919, Alexandra Kollontai's essay looks at the role of working class women in the history of Russian radicalism with particular focus on the 1905 revolution.
What year could be said to mark the beginning of the working women's movement in Russia?
Shliapnikov, Alexander, 1885-1937
Biography of working class Bolshevik, Alexander Shliapnikov, active in the Workers' Opposition movement who was eventually purged from the party and executed for his activities.
Alexander Shliapnikov was born in 1885 in Murom, Russia, into a Russian family belonging to the urban estate (meshchanstvo) and professing the Old Belief (a religious sect that split from the Russian Orthodox Church in the seventeenth century). His father died when he was three, leaving his mother to support four children by taking in washing.
Appeal of the 22 - Alexander Shliapnikov
Appeal by members of the Workers' Opposition group for support against Bolshevik forces trying to silence their dissent within the party. Distributed at the Eleventh Russian Communist Party Congress in 1922.
Dear comrades!
From our newspapers we have learned that the Executive Committee of the Communist International is discussing the “united workers’ front,” and we consider it our communist duty to inform you that in our country the “united front” is in bad shape not only in the broad sense of this term, but even in its application toward the ranks of our party.
Theses of the Workers Opposition - Alexander Shliapnikov
Original thesis of the Workers' Opposition group within the Bolshevik Party, arguing for greater trade union control of the economy. Written in 1919, it was published in Pravda on January 25, 1921.
General Tenets
On the relations between the Russian Communist Party, the soviets and production unions - Alexander Shliapnikov
Thesis of Workers' Opposition member, Alexander Shliapnikov, given at the ninth Bolshevik Party congress in March 1920.
In it he argues for increased democracy within the party and for more control of the economy to be handed over to the unions.
1. The three-year experience of the Russian Revolution shows that the single force consciously fighting for the organization of society on communist foundations is the Proletariat.
The Communist Left in Russia after 1920 - Ian Hebbes
A re-evaluation by the late Ian Hebbes of the continued existence of a Left Communist opposition within the USSR up until the 1930s.
Council Communism & The Critique of Bolshevism
Cajo Brendel on council communism and Bolshevism.
Council Communism & The Critique of Bolshevism
Bolshevism and Stalinism - Paul Mattick
Mattick analyses "the superficiality of the ideological differences between Stalinism and Trotskyism" and why "Trotsky's own past and theories", with his role in the construction of the Russian regime, "condemned 'Trotskyism' to remain a mere collecting agency for unsuccessful Bolsheviks".
Article source: The Council Communist Archive - www.kurasje.org
The largest collection of Mattick's work is at the Paul Mattick homepage - http://www.home.no/mattick/
'Bolshevism and Stalinism' was originally published in Politics Vol. 4 - no. 2 - Mar/Apr 1947.
The Nationalities Question in the Russian Revolution (Rosa Luxemburg, 1918)
Luxemburg reveals the counter-revolutionary nature and consequences of the Bolsheviks' nationalist policy of the "right of self-determination of peoples"
Originally published as Chapter II of the pamphlet The Russian Revolution, which was constituted out of notes prepared by Rosa Luxemburg in prison in 1918, and published posthumously.
The 'Left' Communists' Theses on the Current Situation (Russia, 1918)
Published by the academic journal Critique, Glasgow, in 1977, this text has long been unavailable in print and apparently never before freely available online. A very important text of the Russian Revolution, showing the divisions within the Bolshevik Party in their early days in power.
Such debates on strategy were soon to be suppressed in the name of 'party discipline'; not only in the Party, but within the larger society. Soon the only place where dissidents had the freedom to criticise and debate the nature of the new ruling regime would be in some Soviet prisons.
