85 years ago, the main news of Ogonyok was the “turning point” XV Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). This event went down in history due to the fact that it was in 1927 that the Bolsheviks decided to measure life in five-year terms - at the congress, directives for drawing up the first five-year plan were adopted and the course for the collectivization of agriculture was approved. However, the political content of the XV Congress was no less significant - it was then that the victory of the “Stalinists” over the “Trotskyists” was consolidated. Leon Trotsky himself was no longer allowed into the Kremlin - just on the eve of the congress, he and Zinoviev were expelled from the party. Other prominent oppositionists - Kamenev, Smilga, Evdokimov, Rakovsky, Pyatakov, Muralov - were removed from the Central Committee. Their beating continued at the congress - there was not a delegate who would not call for crushing the “vermin of “Trotskyism”.” Particularly memorable was the speech of the Chairman of the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions, Mikhail Tomsky: “The opposition is very widely spreading rumors about repressions, about expected prisons, about Solovki, etc. To this we will say to nervous people: “If you don’t calm down now that we have taken you out of the party, then now we will simply politely ask you to sit down..." For, comrades, in a situation of the dictatorship of the proletariat there can be two or four parties, but only under one condition: one party will be in power, and all the rest will be in prison." True, in those still relatively “vegetarian” times, Stalin did not dare to openly destroy Trotsky, but ordered the exile of the opposition leader to Alma-Ata. And right on the opening day of the congress, GPU officers broke down the doors of the apartment where the “demon of the revolution” was hiding and dragged Lev Davidovich to the station - Trotsky himself refused to submit to arbitrariness. After this, one of the most prominent Trotskyists - diplomat Adolf Joffe, former ambassador to Vienna, China, founder of the Main Concession Committee of the USSR - shot himself in protest, and Stalin had to make great efforts to hush up the international scandal. Soon, Joffe’s wife will be exiled after Trotsky to Central Asia, and after another 10 years, almost every one of the fifteen hundred delegates to this congress will be shot.

Magazine "Ogonyok" No. 47 dated November 26, 2012, p. 53

Dates – Ogonyok No. 47 (5254) from 11/26/2012