Opposition at the Local Level: A Case Study of the Hammer and Sickle Factory

Abstract

THE STUDY OF OPPOSITION GROUPS and tendencies has long fascinated scholars, and for good reason. Whether or not ordinary citizens responded to their calls for change, and how authorities treated organised dissidents, say much about early Soviet society and the legitimacy of the Bolsheviks' claim to speak for the working class and a proletarian state. Source problems have, until recently, limited the investigation of opposition groups, however. Scholars of the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks have had to rely on problematic emigre sources or official Soviet press accounts, while studies on the Workers' Opposition, Trotskyists and Bukharinists have focused on individual leaders and emphasised political manoeuvring within the upper echelons of the Communist Party. Even the classic works by Carr, Cohen, Daniels and Deutscher deal only superficially with discussions and activity at the grassroots level.' Many scholarly studies have focused on the Trotskyist resistance to Stalinism, but before 1991 the dearth of new primary sources meant that advances in the historiography of rank-and-file Opposition activity were meager. The most notable exceptions are Michal Reiman's The Birth of Stalinism, based largely on dispatches from Russia to Soviet representatives in Berlin, and Isabelle Longuet's thorough examination of the Trotsky Archive. Official Soviet publications did not provide adequate primary materials for reconstructing a view from below, and historians could therefore add little to Trotsky's writings and the memoirs of the few United Opposition survivors of the terror: Victor Serge, Ante Ciliga, Michael Baitalsky and Nadezhda Joffe.2 The opening of the archives of the former Soviet Union offers unprecedented opportunities for new insights and perspectives on the main Bolshevik political currents to challenge Stalinism: the 1923-24 Trotskyist Opposition and the 1926-27 United Opposition. Vadim Rogovin's series has reintroduced Trotskyism to Russian historians with a focus on demonstrating that there was an alternative to Stalinism. Michael David-Fox's study of Soviet higher education in the 1920s shows that majority support for the Trotskyist Opposition in many universities led to profound changes and financial cuts in the Soviet education system. Jeffrey Rossman's recent work on resistance to Stalinism in Ivanovo tangentially illustrates worker identification with Trotskyism well into the first five-year plan.3 An examination of oppositionists within a single, strategically important factory offers a new window on worker-state relations. The Hammer and Sickle Factory was the largest metalworking factory in the Soviet capital and Central Committee