its newspaper the Commune even publishing letters from anarchists reporting that revolutionaries were suffering political persecution, despite Aldred's own skepticism of such reports. Aldred was criticised for this by Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman in their correspondence with the paper, to which Aldred responded by fiercely denouncing them. In May 1925 the APCF re-affirmed its defense of the Soviet Union, but also called on the Comintern to "abandon its opposition to left communism" so that the APCF could unite alongside it. But as more evidence of state repression accumulated over time, Aldred and the APCF were no longer able to continue ignoring or disputing reports of persecution and finally started to denounce the Bolsheviks. By November 1925, the APCF had denounced the October Revolution as a "counter-revolution" and finally began to display solidarity with its "comrades rotting in Soviet prisons", taking up the defense of Gavril Myasnikov, whose Workers Group had formed a left-communist opposition to the New Economic Policy. Aldred later apologised for his earlier unwillingness to believe the allegations and admitted that his skepticism was "most unjust to the imprisoned and persecuted comrades in Soviet Russia". In the Commune of that month, the APCF denounced the pro-Soviet CPGB as standing for "bureaucracy, capitalism and militarism" and claimed that it had "nothing in common with Communism or the working-class struggle". Adopting the critical line that had previously been taken up by the Communist Workers' Party (CWP), the APCF held that the Soviet Union was not in fact communist but a state capitalist system, where "The State [...] owns the means of production in opposition to the workers themselves." The APCF argued that with the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP) "peasant-bourgeois" interests had triumphed over "proletarian-communism", due to a compromise between the two that had been sought by Vladimir Lenin, and concluded that "the interests of the peasants cannot be reconciled with those of the industrial proletariat". When the activities of Leon Trotsky's Left Opposition came to its attention, the APCF disregarded it as being one faction in a power struggle for control over the state capitalist machinery, and noted the irony that Trotsky was being persecuted by the repressive apparatus he had himself developed, although later attempts were made to foster co-operation between anti-parliamentarists and Trotskyists. References Bibliography 1921 establishments in the United Kingdom 1945 disestablishments in the United Kingdom Anarchist political parties Defunct communist parties in