The Politics of Crisis: Economy, Ethnicity, and Trotskyism in Belorussia

Abstract

Following the expulsion of Lev Trotskii, Grigorii Zinov'ev, and Lev Kamenev the party ranks during the 15th Party Congress in December 1927, the Belorussian Communist Party (KPB) undertook a sweeping campaign to wipe out vestiges of Trotskyist opposition in the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR). Across Belorussia, the KPB organized mass meetings to draw oppositionists into open debate and force them to recant their ideas or face expulsion. Records of these proceedings reveal an unmistakable pattern. In Minsk, 144 party members voted against or abstained voting on a resolution supporting the expulsion of Trotskii and Zinov'ev the party; of these, 116 were Jews. (1) In Vitebsk, party members accounted for 55 of 72 identified oppositionists. (2) In Bobruisk, 46 of the 49 party members opposed to the expulsion of the opposition leaders were Jews. (3) In total, some 326 party members in Minsk, Vitebsk, Bobruisk, and Gored' abstained voting or voted against the expulsion of the opposition leaders and/or the theses supporting the Five-Year Plan and collectivization. Of these, 264 (81 percent) were Jews. Ultimately, of the 36 party members excluded the KPB as particularly recalcitrant oppositionists, 23 were Jews. (4) The marked concentration of Jews among the supporters of the United Opposition in Belorussia suggests two commonsensical explanations. First, it is possible that party members gravitated toward the opposition out of a sense of ethnic solidarity. Perhaps it was natural that in Belorussia, where Jews constituted half of the urbanized population and the most influential nontitular nationality, party members should have sided with the Jewish triumvirate of Trotskii, Zinov'ev, and Kamenev. (5) Second, antisemitism in the party mainstream may have driven members into the oppositional camp. Indeed, records of the anti-Trotskyist campaigns in Belorussia appear to lend credence to Trotskii's assertions that antisemitism played a critical role in the campaign against the opposition. (6) In either case, the prevalence of Jews in the opposition ranks seems to suggest a struggle defined by nationality. (7) A radically different picture emerges, however, if one turns the question of nationality to that of the occupations of the accused oppositionists. While students, teachers, clerks, bookkeepers, administrators, and white-collar workers (sluzhashchie) made up one-quarter of the identified oppositionists, workers from the bench (ot stanka) formed the vast bulk of oppositionists. Shoemakers (37) constituted the single largest occupational group among the accused, followed by sizable contingents of tailors and seamstresses (29), leatherworkers (26), and woodworkers and carpenters (25). A dozen bristle makers, eight typesetters, six housepainters, three locksmiths, and assorted joiners, bakers, brewers, slaughterers, milliners, furriers, mechanics, metalworkers, and unskilled laborers rounded out the ranks. (8) The high concentration of shoemakers, tailors, seamstresses, and leatherworkers among the opposition suggests a pattern familiar in the history of labor radicalism in Europe: the opposition seemed to draw its strongest support industries resting on the fault line separating petty manufacturing full-blown industrial production. (9) The apparent dichotomy between occupation (a social category) and nationality (a category of constructed identity) embodied in the oppositionists of Belorussia reflects a dichotomy prevalent in studies of worker opposition in the Soviet Union. Social historians have generally stressed that worker opposition emerged as a direct response to the state-driven attempt to intensify the pace and scale of industrial production. (10) According to a recent variation, the opposition drew its primary support workers who expressed their class consciousness by opposing the new Stalinist regime of industrial rationalization and forcible accumulation. …