The Left Communists (Russian: левые коммунисты, levyye kommunisty) or Left Bolsheviks (левые большевики, levyye bolsheviki) were a faction of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) which arose in 1918, during the debates on signing a separate peace with the Central Powers of World War I.
[1] The faction also held radical positions on economic and social policies, including support for more worker control and a more democratic military, and rejected the idea of national self-determination, particularly in the form of an independent Poland.
[2] The faction was led by Nikolai Bukharin, and included Andrei Bubnov, Alexandra Kollontai, Valerian Osinsky, Georgy Pyatakov, Yevgeni Preobrazhensky, Karl Radek, and Vladimir Smirnov.
They abandoned their advocacy of "revolutionary war", but in their journal Kommunist[4] (published in four issues in Moscow in April–June 1918) criticized the "pragmatism" and "conservatism" of Lenin and his allies, urging immediate nationalization of industry, workers' control, and no compromise with capitalist forces, domestic or foreign.
Left Communists were dominant in VSNKh from 1917 to 1918, when they were replaced by moderates such as Alexei Rykov, Vladimir Milyutin, and Yuri Larin.