Path to opposition: the motives of the student protest in Leningrad in the 1920-ies

Abstract

Students have traditionally been a breeding ground for political protest. This tradition was formed back in the pre-revolutionary period, when students of universities and institutes were active participants in both the work of political parties of various persuasions and the all-university struggle for expanding the autonomy of higher education. In the first period after the revolution, the students continued to be one of the most active protest groups, which was most clearly manifested during the intra-party struggle of the 1920-ies. Continuing the theme of the student movement in the early USSR, which we touched upon in previous publications, in this article we turned to the problem of motivating opposition university students. To do this, we used materials from the Control Commissions of the CPSU (b) and personal party files, which make it possible to compensate for the small number of sources of personal origin related to the history of the Left Opposition. Despite the great growth of interest in the topic of the anti-Stalinist alternative in the CPSU(b), this valuable range of sources was not included in the existing studies. The article provides a grouping of the main motives and reasons for involvement in opposition work, as well as an assessment of how they coincided with the content of program documents prepared by the leaders of the movement. Among the main reasons that we have identified are: disagreements with the Central Committee on the peasant and Chinese issues, suppression of inner-party democracy, the search for thrills, the protection of the authority of the Bolshevik leaders (G.E. Zinoviev, L.D. Trotsky), etc. We will also describe the path of involvement of students in the opposition struggle, and the role of informal and family ties in this process will be determined as well