Between “proper combinators” and the “great combinator”. From the history of Soviet political terminology of the 1920s

Abstract

The article analyzes the Soviet political terminology of the 1920s. At that time, L. Trotsky and the “left opposition” were fighting the party leadership, which was headed by I. Stalin. The specific political situation demanded from the oppositionists an intellectual understanding of the issue of the hardware form of struggle, which Marxist theory had not previously encountered. Trotsky used a number of new political terms for the new theory. In particular, the terms “combination”, “combinatorship”, and “combinator” denoted those who were fighting not for class interests, but for hardware power. The article also raises the question of the connection of those terms with the “great combinator” – the protagonist of the novels by I. Ilf and E. Petrov.