The ebb tide of reaction was reached by the end of 1927. The outlook of the international proletariat was turning towards the Left. Early in 1928 the “ bloodless Kulak uprising “ disturbed the Russian workers and pressed the party leadership towards the Left. Stalin felt the time had come to sacrifice the Right Wing.

He made cautious attacks upon obscure representatives and so undermined the authority of his intended victim, but he did not make his frontal attack upon the Right Wing leadership until 1929–30. He then attacked Rykov, Bucharin and Tomsky, and presented these three leaders to the workers as the banner-bearers of the capitalist restoration. Zinoviev’s successor, the head of the Communist International, the head of the Soviet Government, and the leader of the Soviet Trade Unions, the man who had been so prominent in the Anglo-Russian Committee, were denounced by Stalin as the agents of the Thermidorian counter-revolution.

For six years Stalin had been in indissoluble alliance with this trio and their indictment was an indictment of himself, and his centrist faction. He borrowed the arguments of Trotskyism and was accused in reply of being a Trotskyist. Trotsky foretold this development in 1926.

The entire 15^th Party Congress condemned the Opposition panic-mongers. Molotov, Stalin’s intimate, impatiently defended Rykov in December, 1927, with the declaration that the Kulak was nothing new, adding : “ It exists, and there is no need to speak about it.” A month later witnessed the “ bloodless uprising.”

Feeling that they were defended by Bucharin, Stalin, Molotov and Rykov, the leaders of the Soviet Government and the leaders of the Comintern, the Kulaks refused to turn over their hoarded stocks of grain unless the Soviets yielded to their price demands. They proclaimed a general strike and declared their intention of starving the cities, the proletarian centers, into submission. The Soviet Government thereupon determined to requisition grain from the villages by armed force. The frightened bureaucrats took flight from the rank opportunism of their Kulak flirtation to sheer adventurism. Bucharin, Rykov and Tomsky had to go the way of Zinoviev, Kamenev and Trotsky.