Gavriii ll'ich Miasnikov

Miasnikov's 'Draft Platform' for the Communist Workers' International (1930)

Submitted by Internationalis... on Dec 18 2019 13:07

The document which follows is a translation from the French original. It was sent to us in the facsimile version kept in the NKVD files in Moscow by comrades of the Workers’ Group in the USA. The official stamp shows that the NKVD had received it by 8 July 1932 and, no doubt, it later played a part in sealing the ultimate fate of Gavril Miasnikov. Our translation is based on this version.

List otwarty do delegacji robotniczych udających się z Ameryki i Europy do Rosji (1927)

List opracowany przez międzynarodowych lewicowych komunistów zaadresowany do delegacji robotniczych udających się do Rosji w 1927 r. Autorzy proszą członków delegacji o odnalezienie lewicowych komunistów więzonych na Syberii, m.in. Miasnikowa z Grupy Robotniczej, i dostarczenie informacji na temat ich stanu.

The latest deception - Gabriel Miasnikov

In this essay first published in 1930 in France, the founder of the Workers Group denounces the bureaucracy that he claims seized power in a “coup d’état” in 1920 at the Ninth Congress of the CPSU(b)—its “latest deception” being its fraudulent appeals for “freedom of criticism” and “self-criticism” after a series of revolts by workers and peasants in the early to mid-1920s—and calls for a restoration of proletarian democracy (as exemplified by the Paris Commune) by democratizing the functions exercised by bureaucratic State institutions (production, distribution, oversight) and replacing them with Soviets (“Councils”), cooperatives and trade unions.

The same, only in a different way - Gabriel Miasnikov

In this essay written in 1920, the Bolshevik left communist Gabriel Miasnikov examines the limitations of the Russian trade unions in the context of what he perceived to be the economic and political supremacy of the soviet institutions, but concludes that the trade unions must be preserved for purposes of domestic public relations (due to the habits of the Russian workers) and international propaganda (due to the predominant concepts concerning revolution outside of Russia where soviet-type institutions do not exist or are quickly destroyed and revolution is conceived as a trade union affair) and therefore they must be given something to do to keep them busy.