The International Communist Current traces its origins to the unyielding struggle, against terrible odds and hardship, of the Left Communist groups who refused to accept both the outright counter-revolution of Stalinism, and the inadequate resistance to Stalinism undertaken by Trotsky and the Left Opposition. The long night of the counter-revolution that followed the defeat of the proletarian power in Russia during the 1920s, meant that the Left Communists were reduced to small groups without any influence in the mass of the working class. But their efforts to understand the conditions of both the victory of the revolution in 1917, and its later defeat, are the only foundations on which a new, world wide political organisation of the working class can be built.

It is a fundamental duty of the new generation of revolutionaries to reclaim the work of their ‘forgotten’ ancestors, not only to demonstrate the continuity of their political traditions, but also because without a thorough assimilation of the work and concrete experience of the left fractions, it would be impossible for the new groups to develop the theoretical and organisational solidity they need if they themselves are to survive and grow. The ICC, which has always seen itself as the product of a synthesis of the clearest positions and analyses of the left fractions, has devoted a considerable amount of time and energy to this work. We are continuing this task today with the publication of a new book on the Russian Communist Left, which includes a number of almost unobtainable texts, some of these are translated into English for the first time.

The Left Communist currents in Russia bear comparison to the groups of the communist left in Germany and Italy, even if the speed and brutality of the Stalinist counter-revolution succeeded in burying the Russian left communists earlier and more thoroughly than their European counter-parts. For example, the Workers’ Group around Miasnikov and others, formed in 1923, formulated a critique of the Communist International’s opportunist tactic of the United Front and the Workers’ Government in terms very similar to those elaborated by Bordiga in the same period; and its understanding of the tasks of revolutionaries faced with the degeneration of the proletarian party are certainly on the same wavelength as the conception of the left fraction which was developed most coherently by Bilan in the 1930s. Other groups, such as the Democratic Centralists, had important insights into the process of the degeneration of the Bolshevik party and the Soviet state.