The Left Route to Catastrophe

Abstract

The moderate policy reached its culmination in the offer of 9 October 1927 to tolerate an SPD government in the city of Hamburg. Elections to the local council had proved successful for both left-wing parties. The SPD and KPD together had a majority of 20 over the others. It followed that, if not a coalition government, at least a KPD-tolerated SPD government could be set up. Nothing came of this as the SPD refused the offer.1 A similar experiment was tried in Brunswick in December. But the ‘course to the right’ was not to last long, and as long as Thälmann rather than Meyer was in control of the party there was reason to doubt the genuineness of the KPD’s conversion to collaboration with the SPD for positive work in a regional framework. The first signs of a change, not just in the KPD but in the whole of the Comintern, emerged in December 1927 at the Fifteenth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. Bukharin, in his capacity of chairman of the ECCI, was forced by Stalin to deliver a report calling for a ‘shift of the accent in united front and trade union policy’. Lominadze and Shatskin called for ‘a fight against the right’ on the same occasion.2