Manifesto of the Workers' Group of the Russian Communist Party 1923
The achievement of the united front tactic was especially difficult because of the national and cultural variety of peoples in the USSR.
The pernicious influence of the leading group of the RCP (B) is particularly revealed on the level of the national question. To any criticism and all protests: endless proscriptions ("systematic division of the workers' party"); nominations which sometimes have an autocratic character (unpopular people who don't have the confidence of local party comrades); orders given to the republics (to peoples who for decades and centuries have lived under the uninterrupted yoke of the Romanovs, personifying the domination of the Great Russian Nation), giving new vigour to chauvinist tendencies within the working masses, even penetrating into the national organisations of the Communist Party.
In these Russian republics the Russian revolution was indubitably accomplished by the local proletariat with the active support of the peasants. And if such and such national communist party developed an important and necessary work, this consisted primarily of supporting local organisations of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and its local supporters. But once the revolution was accomplished, the praxis of the party, of the leading group of the RCP (B), inspired by defiance towards local demands, ignored local experiences and imposed on the national communist parties various controllers, often of different nationalities, which exasperates chauvinist tendencies and gives the impression to the working masses that these territories are submitting to a regime of occupation. The realisation of the principles of proletarian democracy, with the institution of local state organisations and the party, will eliminate the roots of differences between workers and peasants in all nationalities. To effect this "united front" in the republics which have accomplished the social revolution, to effect proletarian democracy, means the institution of a national organisation within the International with communist parties having the same rights as the RCP (B) and constituting a particular section of the International. But since all the socialist republics have certain common tasks and that the communist party on the whole develops a leading role, one must convoke - for discussion and decisions on the common problems of all the nationalities of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics - periodic general conferences of the party which elect, with a view to stable activity, an executive of the communist parties of the USSR. Such an organisational structure of the communist parties of the USSR can uproot, and without doubt will uproot, the distrust within the proletariat and it will moreover lend enormous importance to the agitation of the communist movement in every country.