The Declaration of Repentance signed last year by Trotky, Zinovieff
and their friends of the Opposition meant so little that (as the Riga correspondent of the Times says) the Opposition is now stronger than ever, Stalin, Bukharin, Rykoff and the other leaders of the Central Committee have the air of outlawing their critics, but they cannot prevent the quarrel going on which is changing the face of Communism. So far as our sympathy can be with any Bolshevist, we sympathize with Stalin and his friends, who seem to have more sense and a greater power of realism than the ,Opposition. The Opposition itself is by no means a unity. There is a small left wing which hotly attacks the Central rulers for having sacrificed the interests of the workers to the new bourgeoisie, and for having dropped the pro- letarian system and erected in its place a kind of privileged bureaucracy. The larger group of the Opposi- tion (to which Trotsky and Zinovieff belong) attacks the Central Committee mainly on account of its failures in foreign policy. Trotsky and Zinovieff say that Stalin, instead of setting up Soviets at once in China, com- promised with bourgeois elements in the Kuomintang and as a result experienced an utter failure. As regards Stalin's policy in Great Britain; they say that the importance of the General Council of the Trades Union Congress was exaggerated and that Stalin's negotiations with the " traitors " of this body ended, as they were bound to end, in lowering the revolutionary reputation of' the Soviet, and in precipitating the rupture with the British Government.
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