ABSTRACT
Spector's Trotskyist sympathies had originated during a trip to Germany and Russia in 1923-24. The German Communists had made him conscious of Stalin's power drive and anti-Trotsky campaign long before most American Communists had sensed the seriousness of the struggle. In American terms, Cannon expected the Comintern to ensure the victory of the new "Right", represented by Lovestone, over the new "Left", represented by Foster and Bittelman. He viewed Trotskyism as the most principled expression of the Left, which was bound to come into its own with the reaction against Lovestone's anticipated victory. One of the five, Dr. Antoinette Konikow, was an unusual woman, then nearing sixty, a physician, pioneer of the birth-control movement, and a veteran of both the Russian and American revolutionary movements. In an anti-Stalinist form, it helped to perpetuate the dependence of all branches and offshoots of the American Communist movement on the Russian revolution and Russian revolutionaries.
