Left Bolsheviks
# Left Bolsheviks

The Left Bolsheviks (Russian: Левые большевики), also known as the Left Communists (Левые коммунисты), were a faction of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) which arose in 1918, during the debates on signing a separate peace with the Central Powers of World War I. The faction opposed such a peace, and instead advocated a "revolutionary war" to foment socialist revolution in Germany and elsewhere. It also held radical views on economic and social policy (including cultural, educational, and family policy) and on military organization, and was opposed to the concept of national self-determination (particularly an independent Poland). Its members included Andrei Bubnov, Nikolai Bukharin, Alexandra Kollontai, Valerian Osinsky, Valerian Kuybyshev, Georgy Pyatakov, Yevgeni Preobrazhensky, Karl Radek, and Vladimir Smirnov. The group was particularly strong in the party's Moscow bureau and Petrograd.

At the Seventh Party Congress (6–8 March 1918), which had been packed with supporters of the peace by Vladimir Lenin and Yakov Sverdlov, the Left Bolsheviks abstained from the vote calling for ratification of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918). They abandoned their advocacy of "revolutionary war", but in their journal Kommunist (published in four issues in Moscow in April–June 1918) continued to criticize the "pragmatism" and "conservatism" of Lenin and his allies, urging immediate nationalization of industry, workers' control, and no compromise with capitalists, domestic or foreign. Left Bolsheviks were dominant in VSNKh from 1917 to 1918 until their members were replaced by moderates such as Alexei Rykov, Vladimir Milyutin, and Yuri Larin.

The faction largely died out by the end of 1918, as its leaders accepted that much of their program was unrealistic in the circumstances of the developing Russian Civil War and as the policies of War Communism satisfied their demands for a radical transformation of the economy. The Military Opposition and the Workers' Opposition inherited some characteristics and members of the Left Bolsheviks, and the tendency re-emerged in Gavril Myasnikov's Workers Group of the Russian Communist Party during the debates on the New Economic Policy and the succession to Lenin. Most Left Bolsheviks were affiliated with the Left Opposition in the 1920s and expelled from the party at the 15th Party Congress (2–19 December 1927), and later killed in the Great Purge.

