11.01.1996

Zinoviev's report - keen duel with Bukharin

From 'The Workers’ Weekly', paper of the Communist Party of Great Britain, January 8 1926

FOLLOWING the delivery by Stalin of the political report of the central committee ... Zinoviev, supported by the Leningrad deputation, claimed and was accorded the right to submit a minority report.

Zinoviev urged that too many concessions had been made to the rich peasants who were dislocating plans of the Soviet government’s planning commission by a greedy hoarding of surplus grain.

It was this, he claimed, and not any error of education, which had produced the disappointing yield to the state of the last harvest.

He contended that the policy which had been pursued was one of state capitalism and not of state socialism - it was in fact an illusion to imagine that any such thing as ‘state’ socialism could be developed in any country, especially one at such a relatively backward state of economic development as Russia.

Failing an extension of the world revolution through Europe, Russia, remaining an oasis in a capitalist desert, would be driven more and more to develop in a capitalist direction or face the alternative of collapse.

Bukharin, replying for the central committee, said that Zinoviev had failed to discriminate between the rich and the middle peasantry. Such concessions as had been made had been directed towards the winning of these latter into closer cooperation with the socialist policy of the Soviet government.

To suggest that it was impossible to build a foundation for socialism without a world revolution was a complete deviation from the correct Leninist policy.

He contended that Zinoviev regarded the New Economic Policy as a retreat pure and simple, whereas it was a forward step in the only possible direction, that of developing the economic resources on which a Soviet economy must rest.

After a long and earnest debate, in which Kamenev and Krupskaya (Lenin’s widow) opposed the central committee and Tomsky and Rykov supported it, a resolution endorsing the report of the central committee was carried with only 67 dissentients - these being exclusively from the Leningrad delegation.