Workers Group of the Russian Communist Party

Its main activists were arrested in September 1923, and the group's activity was largely suppressed thereafter, although it continued to exist until the 1930s, inside prisons and possibly also underground.

[5] In 1921, he published a manifesto critical of the party line, advocating an end to the death penalty, the management of industry by workers' councils, and unrestricted freedom of the press ("from monarchists to anarchists").

[10] Before the 12th Congress, an anonymous document (most likely authored by Miasnikov) circulated calling for the party to adopt the ideas of the Workers Group manifesto, and for Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and Joseph Stalin to be excluded from the Central Committee; however, at the congress the Group's ideas were violently attacked by leading Bolshevik figures such as Leon Trotsky, Karl Radek and Grigory Zinoviev himself (at that time Lenin was already incapacitated for health reasons), with Miasnikov being arrested shortly thereafter and, in effect, exiled to Germany, where he contacted the Communist Workers' Party of Germany (KAPD), who helped him disseminate the Workers Group manifesto.

[14] In August and September there was a wave of strikes in Moscow and other cities, apparently spontaneous and without links with opposition groups;[15] the Workers Group planned to seize the occasion and call a general strike and a workers' demonstration (which would be led by a portrait of Lenin), but in September it was the target of widespread repression by the party leadership and the secret police (OGPU), with its leaders having been imprisoned, their literature confiscated and their workplaces closed.

[26] References that the group presented the NEP as a "new exploitation" seem to have had their origin in the book Rabochaia gruppa ("Miasnikovshchina"), by Vladimir Gordeevich Sorin, published in 1924 and representing the official position of the Communist Party on the faction.

[14][20] In the 1930s, in the Vorkuta labor camp, it was constituted a "Federation of Left Communists" bringing together prisoners from the Workers' Group, Democratic Centralists and some Trotskyists.

[14][32] Already in exile, Miasnikov established links with Trotsky (who had attacked him in the early 1920s, but who in the meantime came to defend very similar positions regarding internal party democracy and the strategy of the Communist International, albeit in disagreement with regard to the nature of the Soviet Union, which for Trotsky continued to be a "workers' state", while Miasnikov considered it to be "State Capitalist").