The emergence of the Workers' Group did not pass unnoticed. It figured prominently at the Twelfth Party Congressi held in April 1923, which convened in the absence of Lenin, who had suffered a series of strokes that left him paralyzed and deprived of speech, On the eve of the congress, an "anonymous platform" was circulated which called on "all honest proletarian elements," both inside and outside the party, to unite on the basis of the manifesto of the Workers' Group.(72) The authorship of this document, which denounced the triumvirate of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin and demanded their removal from the Central Committee, apparently rested with the Workers' Group, and perhaps with Miasnikov himself.(73)

In Lenin's absence, the task of anathematizing the Workers' Group fell to Trotsky, Radek, and Zinoviev. Trotsky, denouncing Miasnikov's manifesto, recalled "the old theory of the now forgotten Machajski" that "under socialism the state will be the apparatus for the exploitation for the working class." Radek poured contempt on Miasnikov's "high-flown formula" of freedom of the press. Zinoviev declared that "every criticism of the party line, even a so-called left criticism, is now objectively a Menshevik criticism." Miasnikov, he added, maintains that "the worker is against us and we are against him." Such a notion is "rubbish ." "I was personally bothered by him for almost a year. Vladimir ll'ich occupied himself with Miasnikov, wrote to him, reasoned with him." A special commission, of which Bukharin was a member, sought to bring him around. To no avail. Miasnikov "has betrayed our party." Whatever its mistakes, insisted Zinoviev, the party had driven the old ruling elite from its entrenched power. The "hegemony of the proletariat has survived under the most difficult circumstances, and will continue to survive, I hope, to the end (applause)." (74) .

Miasnikov had become an intolerable thorn in the leadership's flesh. On May 25, 1923, a month after the Twelfth Party Congress, he was arrested by the GPU. Subjected to interrogation, he repeated his criticisms of the bureaucracy as cynical, ruthless, and self-serving.(75)

Surprisingly, Miasnikov was released from custody and permitted to leave the country. He boarded a train for Germany, possibly as a member of a Soviet trade mission, a device not infrequently used by the authorities to rid themselves of dissenters. But Miasnikov did not abandon his protests. In Berlin he formed ties with the ulim-radical German Communist Workers' Party (KAPD) and with the left wing of the German Communist Party (KPD), headed by Arkady Maslow and Ruth Fischer; to them he gave, as Fischer recalls, "a very discouraging picture of the state of the Russian working class.(76)

With the aid of these groups, Miasnikov was able to publish, in booklet form, the manifesto of the Workers' Group,(77) prefaced by an appeal, drafted by his associates in Moscow, "to Communist comrades of all lands." The appeal, in brief compass, recapitulated the main points of the manifesto. Quoting Marx's inaugural address to the First International ("the liberation of the workers must be the task of the, workers themselves") and the second stanza of the "Internationale," it concluded with a set of slogans proclaiming the aims of the Workers' Group: "The strength of the working class lies in its solidarity. Long live freedom of speech and press for the proletarians! Long live Soviet Power! Long live Proletarian Democracy! Long live Communism!"(78)

During Miasnikov's absence in Germany, the Workers' Group, under Kuznetsov and Moiseev, went on propagating his views. Moiseev soon withdrew from the Provisional Central Organizational Bureau, but his place was taken by Makh. On June 5, 1923, the group held a conference in Moscow and elected a Moscow Bureau, consisting of either four or eight members (the sources conflict on this point). According to Kuznetsov, a six-man Provisional Komsomol Bureau was also established, and Makh, a member of both the Moscow and the Central Bureaus, relates that the group planned to publish a journal when circumstances should permit.(79)

On a small scale, therefore, the group was assuming the appearance of a separate party. While it professed loyalty to the Communist Party program and pledged to resist "all attempts to overthrow the Soviet power," it established ties with discontented workers in several cities, began negotiations with leaders of the now defunct Workers' Opposition (including Kollontai, Shliapnikov, and Medvedev), and tried to form a Foreign Bureau into which it hoped to draw both Kollontai, with her international contacts and knowledge of languages, and Maslow of the KPD. (80) Nothing came of these efforts. According to one report, however, the group won support within the Red Army garrison quartered in the Kremlin, a company of which had to be transferred to Smolensk. (81)

An unexpected opportunity for the group to extend its influence came in August and September 1923, when a wave of strikes, recalling that of February 1921, swept Russia's industrial centers. An economic crisis-the so-called scissors' crisis-had been deepening since the beginning of the year, bringing cuts in wages and the dismissal of large numbers of workers. The resulting strikes, which broke out in Moscow and other cities, were a Spontaneous and unorganized phenomenon, sparked by worsening conditions. There is no evidence to connect them with any oppositionist faction. The Workers' Group, however, sought to take advantage of the unrest to oppose the party leadership. Stepping up its agitation, it considered calling a one-day general strike and organizing a mass demonstration of workers, on the lines of Bloody Sunday 1905, with a portrait of Lenin at the lead.(82)

The authorities became alarmed. As Bukharin later acknowledged, the strikes, combined with the activities of dissident groups, drew attention to "the necessity of lowering prices, the necessity of paying more heed to wages, the necessity of raising the level of political activity by members of our party organization." (81) At the same time, the Central Committee branded the Workers' Group as "anti-Communist and anti-Soviet" and ordered the GPU to suppress it. By the end of September its meeting places had been raided, literature seized, and leaders arrested. Twelve members were expelled from the party, among them Moiseev, Tiunov, Berzina, Demidov, Kotov, and Shokhanov, and fourteen others received reprimands. (84)

What of Miasnikov himself? In Germany since June, he had not been involved in the strike agitation. Nonetheless he was considered dangerous. In the fall of 1923, therefore, he was lured back to Russia on assurances from Zinoviev and Krestinsky, the Soviet ambassador in Berlin, that he would not be molested. Once on native soil, he was immediately placed behind bars. The arrest was carried out by Dzerzhinsky himself, a token of the gravity with which the government viewed the case. In January 1924, Lenin died. By then the Workers' Group had been silenced. It was the last dissident movement within the party to be liquidated while Lenin was still alive. It was also the last rank-and-file group to be smashed with the blessing of all the top Soviet leaders, who now began their struggle for Lenin's mantle.(85)

Miasnikov spent the next three and a half years in prison, first in Moscow, then in Tomsk and Viatka. He continued his protests, writing to Stalin and Zinoviev, to Bukharin and Rykov. In Tomsk he declared a hunger strike, his second while in Bolshevik custody. Its aim, he explained in a letter smuggled to the West, was "to force a formal indictment and open court proceedings against me, or to secure my liberation."(86) It succeeded in accomplishing neither. On the tenth day of the strike he was subjected to forcible feeding. Miasnikov resisted. On the thirteenth day his warders, reinforced by the, local GPU, dragged him out of his cell and put him in an insane asylum, an act, Miasnikov complained, which "sets a fine example for the Fascisti of the whole world." Indeed, he added, not even the fascists employed such methods. "They have not gone that far yet, but here the motto is: Whoever protests is crazy and belongs (among) the insane! Particularly when he is of the working class and has been a Communist for twenty years." (87) Returned to his cell, Miasnikov was kept in isolation. No one was permitted to speak to him, neither the guards nor his fellow inmates. His wife, Daia Grigor'evna, and their three small sons were meanwhile sent into exile.(88)

In 1927, Miasnikov himself was banished to the Armenian capital of Erevan'.89 He was kept under police surveillance. Nevertheless on November 7, 1928, the eleventh anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, he took part in an anti-government demonstration. Fearing arrest, he decided to flee abroad. He cut'his hair, shaved off his beard, and, stuffing his briefcase with manuscripts and notes, boarded a train for Dzhul'fa, a town on the Persian border. Nearing Dzhul'fa, he leaped from the train and crossed the Araks River into Persia, only to be immediately arrested. After six months in prison, he was expelled, without passport or visa, to Turkey, where he was continually harassed by the police, In a letter to the Russian section of the Industrial Workers of the World in Chicago, written from Constantinople on November 27, 1929, he described his unending persecution: "From 1922 up to the present time I have never been free from kind attentions, sometimes of the GPU, at other times of the Intelligence Departments of various governments." (90) So hard was his lot that he approached the Soviet consul at Trebizond about conditions for returning to Russia, but no agreement could be reached.(91) During the spring of 1929, Miasnikov entered into correspondence with Trotsky, who himself had been exiled to Turkey that year. That Miasnikov should have done this may seem surprizing, as it was Trotsky, a few years before, who had led the offensive against the oppositionists. By now, however, Trotsky, like Miasnikov, had been expelled from the party and driven from the country. He, too, however belatedly, had raised the banner of party democracy against the dictatorship of the Bolshevik machine. And though he denied that this meant a "justification of Miasnikov and his partisans," (92) the two men had enough in common to engage in friendly discussion. Both cleaved to a left-wing anti-Stalinist policy, in foreign and in domestic affairs. With regard to China, for example, their positions were virtually identical.(93)

On some matters, however, agreement proved impossible, above all on Miasnikov's contention that Russia was no longer a "workers' state." This idea Miasnikov advanced in a manuscript that he sent to Trotsky in August 1929, asking him to contribute a preface.(94) Trotsky refused, clinging to the belief that, for all its bureaucratic deformities, Russia remained a proletarian dictatorship. Miasnikov's manuscript, the last known work to issue from his pen, developed the main ideas of his earlier writings. The bureaucracy, he declared, echoing Machajski, was "completing its triumphal procession." It had become a new exploiting class, with its own interests and aspirations that diverged sharply from those of the workers. Soviet Russia, as a result, had ceased to be a workers' state. It was a system of state capitalism, ruled by a bureaucratic elite. (95)

Insofar as state capitalism organized the economy more efficiently than private capitalism had done, Miasnikov considered it historically progressive. (96) All the same, the workers had been cheated of the fruits of the revolution and reduced to a "subject class." For Miasnikov, the sole remedy remained a revival of workers' democracy. This would entail, as he put it, "a multiparty form of government, securing all rights and freedoms, de facto as well as de jure, to proletarians, peasants, and intellectuals." Miasnikov's hostility towards intellectuals had softened since the time of the Workers' Group manifesto. He now distinguished between bureaucrats and bosses, on the one hand, and "honest, proletarian-minded intellectuals," on the other. The latter, joining forces with the workers and peasants, must endeavor to overthrow the parasitic bureaucracy. Partial measures were useless, Miasnikov insisted. Only the destruction of state capitalism and one party rule could eliminate the "bureaucratic evil." (97)

Thus Miasnikov, having begun in 1920 by trying to reform the Communist Party, ended by rejecting it as beyond redemption. Its place was to be taken by the "Workers' Communist Parties of the USSR"-parties he emphasized, in the plural, as opposed to the existing single-party rule. Yet a number of questions remained unanswered. By what process had the goals of Bolshevism become perverted? How did it happen that a revolution that was to lead towards the liberation of humanity, towards a classless and stateless society in which oppression would have ceased to exist, should have sunk into the mire of bureaucratism and repression? To what extent was the degeneration due to conditions beyond anyone's control-to the isolation of the revolution in a backward and impoverished country, the devastation caused by the Civil War, the difficulties of administering a diverse and far-flung population in the midst of revolutionary turmoil and civil strife? Surely these factors were important. Degeneration could not be attributed to "bureaucracy" alone, still less to the machinations of the Bolshevik leadership. Besides, why should revolutionaries who hated autocratic tyranny have built an oppressive bureaucracy of their own? Had not a similar fate overtaken previous revolutions? Do all revolutions degenerate when ideals clash with political, economic, and cultural realities?

On such questions Miasnikov shed little light. Nor, it must be added, was he himself immune from criticism. Idealizing the proletariat, from whose ranks he had emerged, he displayed a fierce intolerance of the middle classes, an intolerance that would have doomed his own version of socialism had it ever been put into practice. For all Lenin's authoritarianism and ethical blindness, was it not to his credit that he had sought to reach an accommodation with technical specialists and other nonproletarians and to enlist them in the task of economic reconstruction? What, in any case, is a "workers' state," and whom would it benefit? Surely it is a free society where individuals of different backgrounds and interests can live together as diverse human beings instead of as units of a party or class.

For the rest of his life the cult of the proletariat dominated Miasnikov's thinking. Neither his disillusioning experience in Russia nor the bitterness of emigre life could shatter his high hopes and fervent faith in the ultimate triumph of the workers. Following Trotsky's rebuff, however, he became an isolated figure. From Constantinople he received permission to go to Paris, where he settled in October 1930, finding work at his old trade in a metals factory. In 1931, he published his manuscript on the Soviet bureaucracy under the title of Ocherednoi obman (The Current Deception). Two years later, when the French Marxist Lucien Laurat issued a similar treatise, Trotsky was quick to note the parallel. Laurat, he wrote, was "obviously unaware that his entire theory had been formulated, only with much more fire and splendor, over thirty years ago by the Russo-Polish revolutionist Machajski," and that, only recently, the same idea had been put forward by Miasnikov, who maintained that "the dictatorship of the proletariat in Soviet Russia has been supplanted by the hegemony of a new class, the social bureaucracy."(98)

In Paris Miasnikov found it hard to adjust. Gradually, however, matters improved. He learned to speak French and took a French wife (though Daia Grigor'evna was still alive). He met two left-oppositionist acquaintances, Ruth Fischer and Victor Serge, who mention him in their memoirs.99 By 1939, when Fischer last saw him, he seemed reasonably content. At the outbreak of World War 2, Fischer tells us, he took a refresher course and graduated as an engineer (100) He was then fifty years old.

Miasnikov remained in France throughout the war. Then in1946, he disappeared. His friends in Paris, seeking to find out what had become of him, learned that he had been taken to Russia in a Soviet plane. Whether he returned of his own will or was kidnapped by the MVD had not been conclusively established. The most reliable account, provided by Roy Medvedev, goes as follows. At the end of the war a representative of the Soviet government came to see Miasnikov and tried to persuade him to return. Miasnikov at first refused, perhaps recalling his experience in 1923, when he was lured back from Germany by false promises. He was assured, however, that there was nothing to fear, that the past had been forgotten, and that permission to live freely in Moscow had been granted by the "highest authority," meaning Stalin himself. Miasnikov, despite his misgivings, finally agreed to go. When he landed in Moscow he was arrested at the airport and taken to the Butyrki prison. (101)

Tragedy had meanwhile befallen Miasnikov's wife and children. During the war against Hitler, all three of his sons had joined the Red Army and perished at the front. As a result, Daia Grigor'evna had suffered a nervous breakdown and been placed in a psychiatric hospital. Released after a year, she never completely recovered. In 1946 came the final shock. Visited by the police, she was informed that her husband, whom she had not seen in twenty years, was in the Butyrki prison, and that she would be allowed to visit him. Bewildered by the news, she sought advice from friends. Finally, after a week's delay, she went to the Butyrki. She had come too late. Miasnikov, she was told, had been shot. On hearing this, Daia Grigor'evna suffered another mental collapse and was taken back to the hospital, where she died not long after. (102)

Such was the fate of Miasnikov and his family. For his ideals he paid the ultimate price. Yet he has not been erased from historical memory. Whatever his faults, and they were many, his heroic career, his refusal to compromise his principles under both tsarism and Bolshevism, are sufficient proof of his revolutionary integrity. Such men are seldom forgotten. The historian of Russia, exploring the years after 1917, is driven again and again to oppositionists of Miasnikov's stamp, to their criticisms of official policy and their alternative proposal of the construction of a socialist society, Miasnikov's central vision-the vision of workers' participation in management, of proletarian and party democracy, of freedom of discussion and debate-has survived in recent Soviet dissent, and the day may yet come when his ideas, voiced with such persistence and self-sacrifice, will influence the shaping of Communist policy to the benefit of the Russian people.

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