ABSTRACT
Within only a few months of the ouster of Trotsky and the United Opposition from the Bolshevik party, a new split began to occur, this time between Stalin and his former allies in the Politburo, including Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky. Following the United Opposition’s defeat, Stalin stole many of their ideas. At the Fifteenth Party Congress in December 1927, Stalin had proclaimed that the period of capitalist stabilization was drawing to a close and that: “We are living on the eve of a new revolutionary upswing.”1 He repeated this new line at the Ninth Plenum of the Communist International, held in February 1928, and at the Sixth Comintern Congress, during June 1928. Stalin now adopted Trotsky’s and the United Opposition’s highly criticized agricultural platform. Rykov, Tomsky, and Kalinin quickly opposed Stalin’s call for harsher treatment of the peasants. Bukharin’s decision to join this group in June 1928 marked the formal beginning of the Right Opposition. Stalin’s preferred method of political infighting seemed to include rapid
shifts from right to left. While the United Opposition was accused of a leftist deviation, the new opposition under Bukharin was accused of being on the right. In fact, the Right Opposition did not have a “background as a deviation, for the simple reason that before its appearance as an opposition it had been, both as a group of men and as a program, an indistinguishable part of the party leadership itself.”2 Therefore, it is perhaps easier to see that the use of such terms as “left” and “right” in this new round of disputes had less to do with actual policy differences than as a powerful weapon that Stalin used to rid himself of an unwanted rival-Bukharin. The main issues under discussion were Stalin’s plan for rapid indus-
trialization-including a Five-Year Plan, an idea originally proposed by Trotsky-and the collectivization of agriculture, while a secondary disagreement was over China; following Trotsky’s expulsion, Stalin moved to the left on China, and now advocated the creation of soviets in China, and when Bukharin disagreed, Stalin accused him of right deviationism. Since Stalin could not count on a clear majority in the nine-member Politburo, because the loyalty of Kalinin and Voroshilov was suspect, he had to maneuver carefully.3 This chapter will show how Stalin used a carefully timed uprising
in Bargu, part of China’s Inner Mongolian province, to discredit Bukharin during an important Moscow party committee meeting in mid-September 1928.
Following Trotsky’s expulsion, the Comintern faced a chaotic world. Bukharin still saw himself as a Centrist, and now attacked the political right:
