ABSTRACT
Joseph Stalin’s majority at every Party plenum was formally well established; the number of votes he got for every resolution was apparently impressive. Stalin’s experiment in Britain in 1926 had lowered his status in the Politburo, and his policy in China in 1927 brought him close to losing his majority altogether. Stalin and Nikolai Bukharin, seeking to compensate for the loss of Russian prestige in Germany by manipulating a Communist success in the East, adapted every principle” to the new effort. In Russia, with Stalin’s foreign policy toppling down about his head, the Opposition was in the ascendant. The increased popularity that the Bloc won by the crashing defeat of Stalin’s policy in Britain and China posed the question of immediate action. The defeat in China had been so decisive, and so clearly the result of their policy, that Stalin and Bukharin were afraid of having the delegates even hears the oppositionist attack.
