Right Opposition
He changes his theory according to whom he needs to get rid of.” The struggle for power in the Soviet Union after the death of Vladimir Lenin saw the development of three major tendencies within the Communist Party.
The tendency led by Joseph Stalin was described as being in the centre, based on the state and party bureaucracy, tending to shift alliances between the left and the right.
[2] Robert J. Alexander has questioned whether the various Right Oppositions could be described as a single international tendency, since they were usually concerned only with the issues relevant for their own countries and their own communist parties.
Bukharin and the Right Opposition were, in their turn, sidelined and removed from important positions within the Communist Party and the Soviet government from 1928 to 1930, with Stalin ending the NEP and beginning the first five-year plan.
[3][page needed] Later, some rightists joined a secret bloc with Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenev in order to oppose Stalin.
[4] Bukharin was isolated from his allies abroad, and, in the face of increasing Stalinist repression, was unable to mount a sustained struggle against Stalin.
In the United States, Jay Lovestone, Bertram Wolfe, and their supporters founded the Communist Party (Opposition) and published the newspaper Workers Age.
In Catalonia, Spain, the ICO-affiliated Bloc Obrer i Camperol (BOC), led by Joaquín Maurín, was for a time larger and more important than the official Spanish Communist Party.
The Norwegian and Swedish groups left later that year to join the new "centrist" International Buro for Revolutionary Socialist Unity (or London Bureau) established in Paris that August.
The Czechoslovak affiliate was weakened by the defection of its Czech members in December, making the party a largely Sudeten German group at a time when that community was becoming increasingly attracted to the Nazis.
Furthermore, the suppression of POUM in May 1937 and the execution of Bukharin and other "rights" in the Soviet Union had convinced many that the Communist International could not be reformed and the idea of being an "opposition" within it was untenable.
Jay Lovestone happened to be in Austria at the time of the anchluss in early March 1938 at the invitation of a group called Der Funke and was able to arrange eight fake passports for eight leaders of the Austrian opposition.
[13] While never a formal organization, there was a tendency within the Polish Communist Party usually known as the "three Ws" after the leaders: Adolf Warski, Henryk Walecki, and Maria Koszutska (pseudonym Wera Kostrzewa).
As the Party was already underground in Poland, and the communists already weak the group decided not to create a formal organization, though they were often depicted as followers of Brandler and Thalheimer by the leadership.
[8] In Switzerland, the official Communist Party's leader, Jules Humbert-Droz, was sympathetic to the Right Opposition, and because of that lost his powerful position in the Comintern.
At first the two Italian ECCI members, Palmiro Togliatti and Angelo Tasca, opposed the Comintern's actions with regard to the German party.
Later, at a May 1930 plenum of the Party, Politburo members Pasquini and Santini were removed for opposing the Third Period and "organizational measures" were taken against lower cadres.
[17] In France the initial purge of the Communist Party in 1929 took mayors or city councilors from Clichy, Auffay, Saint-Denis, Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, Villetaneuse and Paris.
The small national Opposition group joined the expelled Seine Federation of the SFIO in 1938 to form the Workers and Peasants' Socialist Party.
The Alsatian KPO was led by Charles Hueber (mayor of Strasbourg, 1929–1935) and Jean-Pierre Mourer (member of the French National Assembly).
By 1938 the line of the ICO had turned towards the "centrist" position of the ILP leadership under Fenner Brockway and the work of independent factions within the party became less tenable.
While never an official member of the ICO, a Right Oppositionist group led by José Penelon split from the Communist Party of Argentina in 1928.
