The Workers’ Opposition and the Specialists

While Vladimir Lenin found it necessary to depend upon and support technical and managerial specialists who had been trained in pre-revolutionary educational institutions, the Bolsheviks were never comfortable with this dependency. Under Iosif Stalin, the specialists were vilified, persecuted, marginalized, and eventually replaced by highly specialized technical personnel trained in Soviet educational institutions. This article examines the attitudes toward specialists held by leading members of the Workers’ Opposition, a group of communist trade union leaders who promoted the economic management role of workers through their trade unions. In Western secondary literature, the stance of the Workers’ Opposition toward specialists is sometimes misunderstood or oversimplified. In correcting such errors, I will show that Stalin’s motivations for repression directed against engineers and technicians during the First Five-Year Plan should be sought elsewhere than in the attempt to expand the role and prominence of workers in the party bureaucracy and industrial administration of the new Soviet state.