Faction members (such as members of "
Workers' Truth") would be expelled from the Party in December 1923. Big opposition factions (such as
Leon Trotsky's '
Left Opposition' and such as oppositionist groups around
Nikolai Bukharin and
Grigory Zinoviev) again appeared after the civil war ended. These factions were tolerated for several years, leading some Marxists to claim that the ban on factions was intended to be temporary. When Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled on November 12, 1927, the ban on factions was however used to justify this. Lenin himself had held the position that a permanent ban on oppositional platforms was impossible to implement, noting that if a question such as the
Brest-Litovsk peace were to come up again, voting based on platforms would be necessary. Regardless, voting upon such oppositional platforms was considered factionalism and thus banned during Stalin's reign. Historians T. H. Rigby and
Sheila Fitzpatrick believe that the autumn purges of 1921 were also connected to the ban on factions. In the process of the purge, every Communist was subpoenaed in front of a purge commission and forced to justify their credentials as a revolutionary; Lenin argued this was necessary as to not cause the direction of the revolution to be deviated from its original aim. Admittedly, the purges were officially not directed against oppositionists, but against careerists and
class enemies. Indeed, the
Central Committee circular on the purge went as far as to explicitly ban its potential use to repress "people with other ideas in the party (such as the Worker's Opposition, for example)". While acknowledging this, Fitzpatrick and Rigby nevertheless consider it "difficult to believe that no Oppositionists were among the almost 25% of party members judged unworthy". Still, such use of that first purge must have been limited, since no prominent members of the opposition factions were purged, and they never complained of such a thing, while still being outspoken about other forms of mistreatment. Critics such as the anarchist
Murray Bookchin, whilst acknowledging that the ban was "temporary," claim that nothing in Lenin's actions or writings indicate that he would repeal the ban. Historian
Vadim Rogovin stated that the banning of factions was not intended to translate into a ban of inner-party discussions and cited a statement from the Tenth Congress of the RKP which stated "wide discussions on all the most important questions, discussions about them with full freedom of inner-party criticism". Rogovin also cited Lenin's concluding speech on party unity in 1921 which spoke out against a proposed amendment that would have forbidden elections to the Congress according to platforms. ==References==