Statement of the Opposition

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At the Fourteenth Party Congress and afterwards, we disagreed with the majority of the congress and of the Central Committee on a number of questions of principle. Our views are laid down in official documents as well as in speeches delivered by us at the congress, at plenums of the Central Committee, and in the Politburo. We stand at present on the basis of these views. We categorically reject the theory and practice of “freedom of factions and groupings,” and recognize that such theory and practice are contrary to Leninism and the decisions of the party. We consider it our duty to carry out the decisions of the party regarding the impermissibility of factional activity.

At the same time, we consider it to be our duty to admit openly before the party that we and our supporters, in putting forward our views on a number of occasions after the Fourteenth Congress, have committed acts which violated party discipline, and that we have followed a factional course which goes beyond the limits of ideological struggle within the party laid down by the party. In recognizing these acts as wrong, we declare that we emphatically renounce factional methods of propagating our views, as these methods endanger the unity of the party, and we call upon all comrades who share our views to do the same. We call for the immediate dissolution of all factional groupings which have been formed around the views of the “Opposition.”

At the same time, we admit that by our appearances in Moscow and Leningrad in October, we violated the decision of the Central Committee on the impermissibility of a discussion, in that we opened such a discussion against the decisions of the Central Committee.

It was equally wrong to mention the Stockholm Congress at the Fourteenth Congress, for this remark could be regarded as a hint and a threat of a split, although this was in no way intended by Comrade N.K. Krupskaya. We unanimously repudiate such a prospect, which is harmful and has nothing in common with our standpoint.

We emphatically condemn any criticism of the Comintern or the policy of our party which goes over to incitement, which weakens the position of the Comintern as the fighting organization of the international proletariat, that of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as the outpost of the Comintern, or that of the Soviet Union as the first state of the proletarian dictatorship. Not only the agitation of Korsch and his consorts, who have broken with communism, but anybody who goes beyond these limits will meet with energetic resistance on our part. We categorically reject the right of those who carry on agitation of any sort against the Comintern, the CP, or the Soviet Union, to lay claim to any solidarity with us.

While recognizing the right of every member of the Comintern to advocate his views within the limits of the statutes and decisions of the congresses of the Comintern and of the ECCI, we consider it absolutely impermissible to support either directly or indirectly the factionalism of any group in the various sections of the Comintern against the line of the Comintern, be it the Souvarine group in France, the Maslow-Fischer-Urbahns-Weber group in Germany, the Bordiga group in Italy, or any other group, no matter what their attitude may be toward our views. We consider particularly impermissible any support of the activity of persons such as Ruth Fischer and Maslow, who have already been expelled by the Comintern and the party.

The views of Ossovsky, which are expressed in his articles, and of Medvedev, which were analyzed in Pravda (the theory of “two parties,” advocating the liquidation of the Comintern and the Profintern, attempts to unite with the Social Democrats, widening of the concessions policy beyond the limits laid down by Lenin, etc.), we considered and consider to be profoundly erroneous, anti-Leninist, and fundamentally opposed to our views. The assessment Lenin made of the platform of the “Workers Opposition,” defended by Comrades Shlyapnikov and Medvedev, we shared and share completely.

We consider the decisions of the Fourteenth Congress, the party CC, and the CCC to be absolutely binding for ourselves, and we will unconditionally submit to them and carry them out in practice.

Moreover, that is precisely what we urge all comrades to do who share our views.

Each one of us pledges to defend his views only in the forms established by the statutes and decisions of the congresses and the CC, in the conviction that everything that is correct in our views will be adopted by the party in its subsequent work.

In the course of recent months, a number of comrades were expelled from the party for one or another violation of party discipline and for the use of factional methods of struggle for Opposition views. From all that has been said above, it is clear that the political responsibility for these activities rests with the undersigned. We express firm hope that a real cessation of factional struggle on the part of the Opposition will open the way for the expelled comrades, who have acknowledged their errors as regards the breach of party discipline and the interests of party unity, to return to the ranks of the party; and we pledge ourselves to render every possible assistance to the party in the liquidation of factional struggle and to combat new breaches of discipline.

G. Zinoviev

L. Kamenev

Yu. Pyatakov

G. Sokolnikov

L. Trotsky

G. Yevdokimov