#left opposition

Comrade Evgenia Bosh (Yevgenia Bosch) died on January 5, 1925. 

A Bolshevik from 1903, she was one of the founders of Soviet Ukraine and an important military-political leader of the Red Army during the Civil War. A bridge built across the Dnieper River in 1925 was named for her; it was blown up during the Great Patriotic War in 1941. 

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Under the Ruth Fischer leadership from 1924, as Mario Kessler’s chapter discussed, the party began a process of ‘Bolshevisation’, which included the creation of centralist structures. Ironically, the Left itself soon fell victim to this development and was removed from leadership in late 1926, then expelled from the KPD altogether. A significant reason for this was that the leaders of the Left pursued a course that was independent of Moscow, despite their support for Bolshevisation. It was only under the leadership of Ernst Thälmann in the second half of the 1920s that the KPD began to orient itself, without significant opposition, to the Stalinised CPSU, and thus towards a strictly hierarchical

organisation with military-style discipline. It was a culture that contrasted starkly with the party’s early years. The formation of party factions was forbidden in 1925, debate was largely prohibited, and conflicts were not ‘resolved’ politically but rather organisationally – through expulsions. Thälmann’s Central Committee banned critics from speaking or summarily removed them from the party. Overall, the membership and leadership underwent an enormous turnover. For example, by 1929 only two of the sixteen officials who had been top-ranking in 1923 and 1924 were still in the Politbüro; no fewer than eleven had been expelled.

As in the Soviet Union, this bloodletting led to an ideological ossification. Political positions within the KPD became increasingly dogmatic or, in the words of historian Sigrid Koch-Baumgarten, the Soviet Union was ‘stylised as the holy land and Marx, Engels, and Lenin […] as founders of a religion’. Hermann Weber stated that Thälmann became ‘as the infallible leader a German copy of Stalin’

Left Opposition to Stalinisation

Left Communists rebelled against this process. They fought back against bureaucraticisation and advocated a return to the ‘old KPD’. Despite their heterogeneity, this resolute opposition to Stalinisation united all left-wing groups. As the ‘Letter of the 700’ makes clear, they also espoused a fundamental critique of the developments in the Soviet Union. On this point, they differed from, for example, the other major oppositional tendency within the KPD, namely the party’s ‘right wing’ – around Heinrich Brandler and August Thalheimer – which in 1929 founded the Communist Party of Germany (Opposition) (KPO). Although they opposed the KPD’s Stalinisation, the new party refrained from criticising the Soviet Union’s domestic politics under Stalin for a long time.

The Left published its views in the KPD press and put its positions up for debate at party meetings for as long as it was possible to do so. But opportunities to do so became increasingly infrequent. In this respect, the ‘Letter of the 700’ was, in a way, the high point in the struggle for the party. Indeed, the leadership felt forced to respond to the Opposition’s demand and permitted discussion of the ‘Russian Question’. But, at the same time, it also intensified its fight against the Left. As Günter Wernicke wrote, ‘The decisive phase of degeneration from what had once been a radical Marxist party to a Stalinised party machine had begun’.

Prominent representatives of the Opposition like Hugo Urbahns, Werner Scholem and Anton Grylewicz were expelled in the months that followed. The wave of repression would ultimately reach its height in March 1927 at the KPD’s Eleventh Congress in Essen when in the months before, some 1300 officials were expelled, as were entire local branches.

The wave of expulsions forced the oppositional Communists to take more decisive steps. In late 1926, a national conference of the Left elected its own national leadership and passed a resolution to publish a bi-weekly newsletter. In contrast with the increasingly undemocratic party, the Opposition was ‘one of the strongholds of political discussion’. In March 1928, the Left finally decided to establish an independent organisation: the Leninbund. This was prompted by Zinoviev and Kamenev’s ‘capitulation’ to Stalin and the ensuing collapse of the ‘United Opposition’ in the Soviet Union. Most of the German opposition was composed of Zinoviev supporters, but, in this instance, they did not follow his lead. Given that they regarded the Soviet Opposition’s relative disorganisation as a primary reason for its failure, they instead continued to strive to unite left-wing communists.

153 delegates and approximately 100 guests participated in the founding congress of the Leninbund during Easter 1928. Most members of the new organisation came from the KPD, although the majority had already been forced to leave it. Pierre Broué thus describes the Leninbund as ‘undoubtedly a revolutionary workers’ organisation […] a legitimate child of Spartacus, the left wing of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany and the United KPD’. Hermann Weber pointed out that it 'included the most prominent names from all the left opposition groups’. In fact, it had managed to

bring together almost all well-known left-wing critics of the KPD. With Fischer, Maslow, Scholem, Urbahns, Paul Schlecht, and Fritz Schimanski, the new organisation included six former members of the Central Committee. Moreover, various representatives to the Reichstag and state parliaments also joined, including Wolfgang Bartels, Gustav Müller, Guido Heym, and Anton Grylewicz. Unfortunately, it is still very difficult to determine precisely how many members the organisation had, but was in the region of 3000 to 6000.

Before the Leninbund was founded, its leaders explicitly stated that the organisation would not be a second communist party. However, at Hugo Urbahns’s suggestion, the founding congress voted to field a candidate in the forthcoming Reichstag elections. Left Communists had previously debated this question in detail. Fischer and Maslow, for example, spoke resolutely against running an independent slate Even Trotsky, who had been following the discussion, warned from abroad that

Running your own candidates will mean saying that the KPD is no longer communist and down with it. It is a step that will complete the split and will make it impossible to retake the party.

The ‘electoral question’ broke the fragile unity of the Leninbund. The conflict led Scholem and Max Hesse to leave the organisation just a few weeks after it was founded. They were critical of the fact that, ‘A majority guided by entirely apolitical considerations decided to run its own slate in the upcoming elections’. This decision, ‘in fact means the formation of a second communist party, although it is clear that there is no possibility or justification for its existence’.

The Comintern’s renewed ‘left turn’ in 1928 was also part of the controversy. Scholem and his colleagues hoped that Moscow would now orient itself to the Left’s policies of 1924, which would mean rejecting the ‘united front’ in favour of a directly ‘revolutionary’ policy. Shortly afterward, the German Zinoviev supporters – Fischer, Maslow, Schlecht, Bruno Mätzchen and Schimanski – also left the Leninbund.

Consequently, the last promising attempt in the history of the Weimar Republic to unite the KPD’s opposition to Stalinism in a single organisation failed. After that, the Leninbund fragmented in four directions: 

Some members remained under the leadership of Hugo Urbahns, but the rump organisation lost important publications, suffered from financial difficulties, and putting up candidates for the Reichstag elections proved to be a fiasco; 

Fischer and Maslow, among others, reapplied to rejoin the KPD on the terms set out by the Comintern, but only Schimanski was readmitted; 

Other members joined the SPD, notably in the former stronghold of Suhl in Thuringia under Guido Heym, while the daily newspaper, Volkswille, also went to the Social Democrats; 

Contacts between the rump Leninbund and Trotsky, now in exile, complicated the organisation’s development.

Differences between Urbahns and Trotsky, over the vexed issue of whether to reform the KPD or create a new party, led to a split. In February 1930, those who supported Trotsky, like Grylewicz and Kurt Landau, were expelled and came together with part of the Wedding Opposition and the Leipzig-based Bolshevik Unity organisation to form the United Left Opposition of the KPD – the first explicit Trotskyist organisation in Germany.

After this new split in 1930, ‘the Leninbund, which had struggled with signs of decay since its founding, lost even more significance’. In 1932, the group only had about 500 members. But after a year, the newly established ‘United Left Opposition’ also disintegrated into two groups, each of which referred to itself as the Left Opposition of the KPD. While both groups did subsequently undergo a certain ‘boom’, their combined membership of little more than 1000 people kept them far removed from their goal of reforming the KPD – a project that had probably been illusory from the outset. Social Democrat Walter Riest correctly stated in 1932 that, ‘These splinter groups will have no influence on the fate of the KPD, to say nothing of the labour movement’.”

“With some 14,000 members in 1922, Greater Hamburg – which was organised within the party district of Wasserkante – was one of the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands ’s local strongholds. Its radicalism was shown during the so-called ‘March Action’ of 1921, when Hamburg was the only major city outside of central Germany to join the uprising. The outcome of what amounted to a communist putsch produced an acrimonious feud within the party. 

Some party leaders, most notably Heinrich Brandler and Ernst Meyer, now supported the Communist International’s (Comintern) ‘united front’ policy.... Thälmann, however, did not. At the Third Congress of the Comintern in the summer of 1921 and at the ensuring KPD Congress in Jena, he represented the Left’s continued adherence to a policy anticipating imminent revolution, opposing even tactical co-operation with the leadership of the Social Democratic Party. However, unlike in Berlin, leftists in the Wasserkante party leadership, including most notably Thälmann and Hugo Urbahns, submitted to what the Comintern termed ‘international discipline’ and, into the second half of 1922, set out to put the policy into practice.

At this time, Thälmann presented the ‘united front’ as a means of strengthening the KPD for the next revolutionary ‘offensive’. At various meetings of party officials and activists in early 1922, for example, he reminded those assembled that, after the disastrous impact of the ill-fated ‘March Uprising’, the ‘united front’ policy had revived the party’s campaigning, increased the membership and allowed the KPD to become a strong minority in the workforce.

In the shipyards, Thälmann worked with Hans von Borstel, a railway worker and senior figure in the Hamburg party, to win over Social Democratic workers by pursuing a more vigorous defence of pay and conditions than their own leadership; the outcome was the KPD taking ninety-two of the shipyard’s 148 works councillors in 1922. Similarly, at public meetings organised to show solidarity with Soviet Russia, which also attracted Social Democrats, Thälmann moved resolutions in support of the Comintern’s ‘united front’ policy. These meetings were drenched in an atmosphere of loyalty to the Bolsheviks, with collections for ‘Aid for Soviet Russia’ and the omnipresence of the symbols of the communist movement, from Soviet flags and banners and the singing of revolutionary songs to speeches by international guests from France, Italy and Britain, as well as Russian sailors passing through the harbour. Thälmann’s famously theatrical speeches aimed to serve this cause fully. However, the Hamburg KPD was increasingly aware of mounting hostility to the ‘united front’ among party activists and officials. At one meeting, an official stated that the full-time, salaried party leadership had become divorced from rank-and-file workers, who did not want co-operation with the SPD, however tactically, and especially not in parliament.Another party official opposed the Comintern’s slogan ‘To the Masses’, stating that, ‘A thousand good members who are loyal to their principles are worth 100,000 wavering comrades’. Party activists even organised a protest rally in the hope of influencing the leadership before the Fourth World Congress of the Comintern met at the end of 1922.20 Already in the spring of 1922, Thälmann had informed a meeting of the district leadership that local officials and rank-and-file members feared the ‘united front’ was leading to ‘reformism’. The ‘Monarchists Danger’ The issue making the KPD’s stance towards the Weimar Republic and its self-proclaimed ‘party of state’, the SPD, acute was the vast upsurge in far-right ‘nationalist’ violence against the new political regime and the labour movement. The wave of attacks hit Hamburg in May 1922. A memorial to the German Revolution was bombed, the offices  of the KPD press and the Comintern publisher, Hoym, suffered arson attacks, a hand grenade exploded outside the Thälmann’s ffamily home, and other prominent local Communists received death threats. 

In line with the ‘united front’ policy, Thälmann called on the SPD in the city parliament, the Bürgerschaft, to act against the forces of monarchism by banning their highly public commemorations of battles and regimental days and purging them from all state offices. The Hamburg SPD, however, rejected the KPD ‘united front’ offer and refused to take legal action against these public shows of anti-republicanism.

However, precisely this issue returned at the national level with the assassination of Foreign Minister, Walther Rathenau on 24 June, by the Organisation Consul – a secret organisation of former army offers. In the minds of the völkisch Right, Rathenau – as a politician ‘fulfilling’ the demands of the Versailles Treaty, an intellectual, and a Jew – was a symbolic hate figure. For the workers’ movement, however, the assassination brought about a rare moment of spontaneous cooperation in many localities, including Hamburg and Berlin.

 Under Ernst Meyer’s leadership, a joint declaration was signed with the Social Democratic parties and unions, the ‘Berlin Agreement’, which foresaw making common cause against the enemies of the Republic. However, following a letter from Zinoviev to the KPD leadership on 28 June, which insisted on maintaining ‘independence of agitation’, the party ended the most significant ‘united front’ action since the general strike against the Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch in March 1920, which had attempted to sweep away the new democracy.28 When the Reichstag voted for the ‘Law for the Protection of the Republic’ on 18 July, the KPD’s parliamentary fraction now voted against it, arguing – not without some reason – that this was a weapon against communism.”

“In 1921, the Berlin Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KPD) was led by Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow. Both came from well-to-do Jewish families, having broken with their middle-class backgrounds and now part of the party’s educated, intellectual wing. Two other figures of the Berlin Left had a similar background: the journalist and member of the Prussian Landtag, Werner Scholem, and his close friend, the historian Arthur Rosenberg, both of them from middle-class Jewish families.

The intellectual makeup of the Berlin district leadership is striking. In conflicts, they were branded a clique of academic scatterbrains whose actions were disconnected from the ‘proletarian masses’. Clara Zetkin once said that:

The opposition did not recruit supporters from the party masses so much as from the ranks of certain underwhelming, semi-educated bureaucrats. That is why they had a relatively easy time making their presence felt […] Their only support among the wider masses within the party lay where the rank and file were effectively politically untrained and recruited emotionally on ‘revolutionary’ terms. Party comrades such as these imposed Maslow’s cynical brashness, Ruth Fischer’s resounding rhetoric, and Scholem’s scatter-brained impudence.

This notion that the intellectuals were outsiders and demagogues has also been passed on in the historiography. Werner T. Angress wrote that:

On average they were ten years younger than the party leaders in the Zentrale and almost all of them came from the bourgeoisie. […] In contrast to the class consciousness of their older comrades, who came of age in the school of militant social struggle with strikes, ockouts, and often imprisonment, they lacked political experience, class pride, and maturity.

Maslow, Fischer, and Rosenberg may fit this image, but the stereotype starts to break down with Werner Scholem. He had spent ten months in a military prison in 1917 for participating in an anti-war demonstration.

Contrary to the prevailing image, many Communists from working-class backgrounds were active in the Berlin district leadership. Among them were the mechanic Anton Grylewicz, who was the head of the KPD in Berlin in 1920-21; toolmaker Hans Pfeiffer; and locksmith Ottomar Geschke – the latter two both came from the Spartacus Group. Another working-class functionary was Paul

Schlecht, who also made a living as a toolmaker. And finally, this list would be incomplete without Max Hesse, whose father had been a co-founder of the German Metalworkers Union. Hesse was the same age as Scholem and they both joined the SPD’s youth organisation in 1912. It is striking that Hesse, Schlect, Pfeiffer, Geschke and Grylewicz were all members of the Revolutionary Shop Stewards (Revolutionäre Obleute, RSS) during the First World War. This

socialist anti-war movement only accepted veteran union members into its conspiratorial ranks. Such a cluster of so many old shop stewards indicates that there was a well-organised network within the KPD’s Berlin district leadership, which is to say that the ‘Berlin Opposition’ had a symbiotic structure. 

It was not made up exclusively of intellectuals, but had just as many radical workers and trade unionists. While the intellectuals may have been the opposition’s front line, evidence of tension between them and union veterans is scarce. Oskar Wischeropp, a lathe operator and member of the district leadership, was explicitly opposed to anti-intellectualism, stating that: ‘As far as acting against the intellectuals is concerned, I have to say that I’m against […] For me, a man only has a part to play if he represents the interests of the party, whether he’s a worker or an intellectual.’

Maslow, Scholem, and Ruth Fischer’s Jewish backgrounds did not appear to be an issue within the Berlin KPD. In this regard, the Berlin KPD of 1921 appeared to be similar to the pre-war SPD. For example, in 1915, Werner Scholem had noted that: ‘None of that is very noticeable in Berlin because anti-Semitism generally amounts to nothing there. It is something you only notice when you leave [Berlin].’ Among the Left Opposition outside Berlin Jews also worked with non-Jews and intellectuals with workers on equal terms. Merchant’s son Iwan Katz, for example, operated as an advocate of the left in Hanover.

Another opposition stronghold was the northern German KPD district of Wasserkante, led by primary school teacher Hugo Urbahns and Ernst Thälmann, who had started his working life as a transporter worker. The Left Opposition was far from merely an intellectual circle that would have remained an ‘isolated clique’ without the ‘proletarian backup’ of men like Thälmann. The Berlin example shows just how distinctly it fell within the tradition of local working-class radicalism.”