Letter to the CC of the Metal Workers Union, July 1, 1927

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Resolution of the All-Russia Metal Workers Union

To the Central Committee of the Metal Workers Union:

Dear Comrades:

At the seventh plenum of your Central Committee you adopted a resolution on the present situation based on the report by Comrade Lepse. This resolution contains such false and rudely slanderous assertions about the Opposition that we find it impossible — if for no other reason than respect for the Metal Workers Union — to pass over it in silence.

1. First of all, the fact should be noted that you brought questions that are in dispute within the party before the plenum of the CC, which is a non-party institution. There are no precedents for such an action in the past work of your union or in the work of any of our unions in general. By appealing to non-party people against the Opposition you apparently wish to force us to explain, not only to party members but to non-party people as well, that our position has nothing in common with the slanderous assertions in your resolution.

2. Your resolution asserts that the Opposition is carrying on "destructive propaganda activity in favor of its defeatist ideology.’’ What is meant by the term defeatism? In the whole past history of the party, defeatism was understood to mean desiring the defeat of one’s own government in a war with an external enemy and contributing to such a defeat by methods of internal revolutionary struggle. This referred of course to the attitude of the proletariat toward the capitalist state. But you carry the term defeatist over and apply it to the politics of the Opposition, i.e., an ideological tendency within the AUCP. By this you are saying that the Opposition wishes the defeat of the Soviet state in its struggle against external, i.e., capitalist, enemies, and that it wishes to contribute to such a defeat.

It is enough to simply define the term defeatism to make clear the vile absurdity of this imputation of a defeatist attitude on the part of the Opposition toward the Soviet state — in whose founding and preservation Oppositionists have played no less a role than anyone else in the party, both now and in the past.

3. By telling the masses of the people that hundreds of veteran party members, former underground revolutionaries, Lenin’s closest collaborators, organizers of and participants in the October Revolution, the civil war, and socialist construction, have at present become defeatists — by so doing you introduce the greatest confusion into the minds of the masses, which will have absolutely unfathomable consequences. All informed and honest readers among the workers or peasants are bound to think to themselves that either you are lying in making such a monstrous assertion, or the Soviet state has changed so fundamentally that even the people most closely involved in building that state have become its mortal enemies. You are driving the masses toward such conclusions, starting with their vanguard section, the metal workers.

4. Your words about defeatism are bound to seem more monstrous than ever to our workers and to workers internationally in view of the fact that the most important diplomatic posts, i.e., positions where the interests of the workers’ state are directly defended against the capitalist enemy, are held at the present almost entirely by Oppositionists: in Berlin, Krestinsky; in Paris, Rakovsky, Pyatakov, Preobrazhensky, and Vladimir Kosior; in Rome, Kamenev and Glebov-Avilov; in Prague, Antonov-Ovseenko and Kanatchikov; in Vienna, Ufimtsev and Semashko; in Stockholm, Kopp; in Persia, Mdivani; in Mexico, Kollontai; in Argentina, Kraevsky; and so on. All these comrades belong to the Opposition and the majority of them have already endorsed the so-called letter of the eighty-four, in which the Opposition defined its attitude toward the fundamental political questions. If the Oppositionists are “defeatists,” how could the CC of our party entrust to such “defeatists” the protection of the most vital interests of the workers’ state under the enemy’s direct blows? Your assertion is slander not only of the Opposition but also of the CC, which would be criminally guilty before the party and the workers’ state if it assigned diplomatic posts to “defeatists,” i.e., to advocates of “defeat” rather than victory for our state against the bourgeois world.

5. The problem is of course not limited to Oppositionist diplomats. By now more than three hundred comrades with records in the party from before October, including many with long experience in the underground, have signed the declaration of the Opposition. …

All these comrades, like the majority of other Old Bolsheviks who signed the declaration, are doing responsible work on assignment by the party. “Defeatists” — we repeat — are people who undermine the military power of the state or its economic might. Can defeatists be permitted in any serious work whatsoever? The direct responsibility for the defeatists in the eyes of the party and the workers’ state would fall on the CC of the party in such a case.

6. You of course know that the CC is not guilty of the crime you ascribe to it. You would not dare to assert that the Oppositionists carry out the military, diplomatic, economic, or other work assigned to them more poorly than supporters of the majority. You yourselves know very well that the phrase about the “defeatism” of the Opposition is a poisonous lie and nothing more. You have put this lie into circulation for the purposes of factional struggle against an ideological tendency in the party to which we belong in common. In doing this you have stooped to compromising the party in a terrible way and are doing great harm to the workers’ state. By attributing such monstrous views to the Opposition and circulating such views, you establish and legitimize a banner for genuine enemies of the Soviet state. In genera] it is hard to imagine any more disruptive or divisive action than that represented by your resolution.

7. We will not go into the other assertions made about the Opposition in your resolution. They are all on roughly the same level. Our elementary revolutionary duty to the party and the workers’ state commands us to take all measures within our power to refute your malicious and slanderous assertions before the eyes of the party and non-party masses.

CC members Yevdokimov, Zinoviev, and Trotsky