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Left Communists, in Soviet history, group within the Communist Party whose extreme idealism led them during the first half of 1918 to oppose Lenin’s practical policies for preserving Soviet rule in Russia. Led by Nikolay I. Bukharin, the group developed during the party’s debate over Lenin’s proposals to make peace with Germany and withdraw from World War I and to restore labour discipline in industrial enterprises.
Rather than make peace, the Left Communists favoured waging a revolutionary war. They contended that it was impossible for Soviet Russia, an economically underdeveloped country, to build Socialism until other Socialist revolutions succeeded in western Europe. A revolutionary war, they insisted, would probably spark such revolutions and lead to the establishment of Socialism throughout Europe, including Russia. A con-clusion of peace, on the other hand, they said, would decrease the chances for European revolutions and thus preclude the development of Socialism in Russia.
On the industrial issue, the Left Communists insisted that the proletariat should run the economy and that the workers’ control of industrial enterprises that had developed during 1917 was a step toward this goal and should not be sacrificed for short-range, opportunistic purposes.
The Left Communists initially had substantial support within the party.
They dominated the Supreme Council of National Economy, an institution created in December 1917 to supervise the economy; in January 1918 there were more votes in the Central Committee favouring a revolutionary war than a peace treaty. The Left Communists gained control of the party’s Moscow and Urals regional bureaus and published a factional newspaper, Kommunist, in Petrograd (now Leningrad) in March 1918. But in that same month they were defeated at the 7th Party Congress, which approved the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty; they also lost their positions on the Supreme Council of National Economy and shortly afterward lost their control of the Moscow and Urals regional organizations.
Although they published two issues of another opposition journal, also called Kommunist (April—May 1918), in June their measures for instituting workers’ control were defeated at a congress of regional economic councils. When the Soviet government nationalized all large industrial enterprises in late June, many Left Communists considered this to be a correct economic policy and shifted their support back to Lenin. By the end of the summer the Left Communists no longer existed as a distinct opposition group.
