Martemyan Ryutin
Encyclopedia
Martemyan Nikitich Ryutin (1890–1937) was a Russian
Marxist revolutionary and a political functionary of the Russian Communist Party. Ryutin is best remembered as the leader of a pro-peasant political faction organized against Soviet leader Joseph Stalin
in the early 1930s and as the primary author of a 200 page oppositional platform. Ryutin was arrested by the Soviet secret police along with his co-thinkers, in what has come to be known as the Ryutin Affair
. Ryutin was ultimately executed in January 1937 as part of the Yezhovshchina (Great Purge) conducted against political oppositionists and suspected economic "wreckers
" and spies.
During the final years of the Soviet Union
, Ryutin was politically rehabilitated and his lengthy critique of Stalin and his policies was published for the first time. The document saw its first edition in English translation in 2010.
in Siberia
, then part of the Russian empire
.
Politically radical from his early years, Ryutin joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) in 1914.
Ryutin was a participant in both the February Revolution
which overthrew Tsar Nikolai II in 1917 and the Bolshevik Revolution in November of that same year. In 1917 he headed the local soviet
in Harbin
, a city which is today part of China
.
During the Russian Civil War
which followed the 1917 revolution, Ryutin commanded a military group in the Irkutsk region.
Oblast Committee of the party, a position which he retained through 1924, when he was transferred to Moscow.
In the capital, Ryutin was first named the head of the Zamoskvoreche Raion Committee of the Communist Party. He was promoted to head of the more important Krasnaya Presnya Raion Committee in 1927.
Ryutin was elected as a delegate to the 14th Congress (December 1925) and 15th Congress (December 1927) of what was by then known as the All-Union Communist Party (bolsheviks), the VKP(b). The latter elected him a candidate (non-voting) member of the Central Committee
of the VKP(b).
Ryutin was a supporter of the moderate agrarian policies of the New Economic Policy
and held views closely associated with such "moderate" party leaders as Nikolai Bukharin
, Nikolai Uglanov
, and Alexei Rykov
.
With a new wave of grain procurement difficulties emerging in the fall of 1928, the Communist Party, headed by Joseph Stalin
, took a radical turn towards forcing the sales of grain at below-market prices by the peasantry. This action drew the opposition of moderate Bolsheviks like Bukharin and Ryutin, who opposed the use of force and coercion against the peasantry as the manifestation of the failed agrarian policies of War Communism
.
The radical Stalin faction worked to capture key positions in the party to assure the implementation of the policies which they favored. At the September 24 and October 8 sessions of the Krasnopresnenskii raikom — gatherings in which Stalin himself participated — Ryutin came under fire for his alleged support of a "Right Opposition" led by Bukharin and Uglanov. Ryutin garnered no favor by remarking at one session that Stalin had is faults, "which Lenin had talked about" — a pointed reference to Lenin's so-called "last will" which even drew criticism from his factional ally Uglanov. By the end of the month, Ryutin had been removed from his position as Secretary of the city party committee.
Ryutin was transferred to the position of Deputy Editor of Red Star, the official organ of the Red Army
. He retained his seat as a candidate member of the Central Committee of the VKP(b) at this time, however.
In 1929, faced with bitter peasant opposition to forced requisitioning, the Stalin faction moved towards a radical restructuring of Soviet agriculture through a drive for collectivization. The Central Committee determined to send Ryutin back to his native village in Siberia to report on the progress of collectivization in the grain-producing areas of Siberia.
As a child of a peasant family, Ryutin understood full well the unpopularity of the collectivization idea with the peasantry as a whole, and the potential for economic catastrophe represented by the program. Upon his return to Moscow, Ryutin sharply criticized the collectivization program in a report to the Politburo
. This report drew Stalin's ire, but he nevertheless made use of Ryutin's analysis as part of his seminal article, "Dizzy with Success."
In January 1930, Ryutin published an article in Red Star which again publicly challenged the implementation of the collectivization program. Shortly thereafter, Ryutin was cashiered once again, moved this time to a less sensitive position as Chairman of the Photo-Film Industry. On March 1 of that same year, Ryutin was made a member of the Presidium of the Supreme Council of National Economy (VSNKh), one of the leading state economic planning
organizations of the period.
Unlike Bukharin and other leading members of the so-called "Right" in the Communist Party, Ryutin refused to recant his views and endorse the policies of Stalin and his associates. The Stalin faction launched an effort to eliminate Ryutin from the Communist Party in the fall of 1930. Ryutin was accused of "propagandizing right-opportunist views" and the move was made not just from the Central Committee of the VKP(b), but to expel him from the VKP(b) completely.
Despite having made an aggressive defense of his position before the Central Control Commission, the Communist Party's disciplinary body, Ryutin's expulsion was ultimately confirmed by the Politburo on October 5, 1930.
Now outside the party, Ryutin no longer had protection against the secret police (OGPU). On November 13, 1930, Ryutin was arrested by the OGPU, charged with having engaged in counterrevolutionary agitation. Ryutin was held in jail for investigation but was ultimately released on January 17, 1931, for lack of sufficient evidence. Upon his release, Ryutin was assigned work in as an economist for an electrical production unit.
In the interim, the Soviet economy had gone from bad to worse. The grain shortage of 1928 had given way to complete disorganization of agriculture by the ill-conceived collectivization campaign of 1929-30, which — exacerbated by drought — had ultimately resulted in a massive famine in the Ukraine
, Kazakhstan
and parts of southern Russia in 1932 and 1933. The entire Soviet economy was in a state of crisis.
In March 1932 Ryutin was the principal writer of a 200-page document titled "Stalin and the Crisis of the Proletarian Dictatorship," the so-called "Ryutin Platform," which was self-prepared
and secretly circulated from hand-to-hand among party members.
The so-called Ryutin Platform attacked the "adventurist
" tempos of industrialization that were part of the First Five-Year Plan, charging that they had brought about a massive fall in the real income of the working class, high taxation, and a inflationary fall in the value of the currency. In the countryside, Ryutin declared, expropriation
through the exertion of brute force had created "appalling impoverishment of the masses and famine" and the flight of "all the young and healthy people" from the countryside. Millions of surplus people cluttered the cities of the nation while the countryside starved, Ryutin charged.
A second document, "Appeal to All Members of the VKP(b)," was also prepared and circulated on behalf of a faction called the Union of Marxists-Leninists. In this document, Ryutin placed the blame for the Soviet Union's catastrophic economic situation on the doorstep of General Secretary of the Communist Party Joseph Stalin, writing:
It is unclear how many individuals read the so-called Ryutin Platform or even how many knew of its existence. According to Russian historian Roy Medvedev
, the opposition was organized by Ryutin with his friend P.A. Galkin and included a membership of "fifteen at most." Outside of this small group, it seems that only a handful of party leaders were familiar with the content of the document, including most notably Nikolai Uglanov, According to his widow, Nikolai Bukharin was not aware of the document or its content.
What is clear is that when the secret police discovered the existence of the document, they took its appeal to "destroy Stalin's dictatorship" as a call for armed revolution. On September 22, 1932, Ryutin was arrested and held for investigation. At his first interrogation, held September 24, Ryutin confirmed that he had been politically opposed to Stalin and his policies since 1928. On September 27, the Central Control Commission decided to expel 14 members of the party due to their alleged connection with Ryutin's factional group.
At a second investigative hearing, conducted September 28, Ryutin acknowledged authorship of the two key factional documents mentioned above and sought to take full responsibility for them, attempting to absolve his comrades from blame. Investigations continued, however, and on October 9, 1932, the Politburo of the Communist Party voted to expel another 24 individuals from the party in light of their alleged connections to Ryutin and his group.
On October 11, 1932, Pravda
published a list of names of those expelled for participation in the Ryutin group. The expulsions meted were for a period of one year.
The Ryutin Platform was different from previous communist oppositional documents in that it was almost completely suppressed. As historian Catherine Merridale notes
A three person Collegium of the OGPU — consisting of GPU chairman Vyacheslav Menzhinsky
, his successor Genrikh Yagoda
, and future People's Commissar of Internal Affairs V. A. Balitsky — formally decided the charges against Ryutin. While Stalin reportedly advocated a death sentence for Ryutin during Politburo deliberations, ultimately a 10 year sentence in prison resulted from his pro forma trial. Ryutin was sent first to the Ural region
before being returned to Suzdal
, northeast of Moscow near the city of Vladimir
.
Late in 1932, a number of prominent leaders of opposition movements within the Communist Party, including Grigory Zinoviev
, Lev Kamenev
, and Karl Radek
, were called before the Central Control Committee and interrogated about whether they were aware of or had read the so-called Ryutin Platform. Even knowing of the document and failing to report that knowledge was considered a crime. Zinoviev and Kamenev were again expelled from the party for their failure to report the existence of the document.
sentenced him to death. He was executed that same day.
The rest of Ryutin's family also suffered brutal repression at the hands of the state, with his younger son Vissarion (born 1913) similarly retried and executed in a camp in Central Asia
in 1937 and his older son Vassily (born 1910) shot to death in Lefortovo prison
in that same year. His widow was sent to a camp of the Gulag
located in Karaganda
, where she also perished. Only a daughter, Lyubov Ryutina, survived the terror.
At the 20th Congress of the CPSU
, Ryutin's daughter proposed the posthumous rehabilitation of her father and two brothers. This effort failed.
On June 13, 1988, as a byproduct of the glasnost
campaign of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev
, the Supreme Court of the USSR formally rehabilitated Martemyan Ryutin.
The so-called Ryutin Platform, long locked in the archives of the KGB, was published for the first time in 1990, serialized in five parts in the official journal of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Izvestiya TsK KPSS (News of the CC of the CPSU). The source of this publication was an official typescript of the original handwritten document; the original, if it still exists in the archives, remains to be located.
The Ryutin Platform was published in English translation for the first time in 2010.
Russians
The Russian people are an East Slavic ethnic group native to Russia, speaking the Russian language and primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries....
Marxist revolutionary and a political functionary of the Russian Communist Party. Ryutin is best remembered as the leader of a pro-peasant political faction organized against Soviet leader Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
in the early 1930s and as the primary author of a 200 page oppositional platform. Ryutin was arrested by the Soviet secret police along with his co-thinkers, in what has come to be known as the Ryutin Affair
Ryutin Affair
The Ryutin Affair was one of the last attempts to oppose the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin within the Soviet Communist Party.Martemyan Ryutin was an Old Bolshevik and a secretary of the Moscow City Communist Party Committee in the 1920s...
. Ryutin was ultimately executed in January 1937 as part of the Yezhovshchina (Great Purge) conducted against political oppositionists and suspected economic "wreckers
Wrecking (Soviet crime)
Wrecking , was a crime specified in the criminal code of the Soviet Union in the Stalin era. It is often translated as "sabotage"; however "wrecking" and "diversionist acts" and "counter-revolutionary sabotage" were distinct sub-articles of Article 58 , and the meaning of "wrecking" is closer to...
" and spies.
During the final years of the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
, Ryutin was politically rehabilitated and his lengthy critique of Stalin and his policies was published for the first time. The document saw its first edition in English translation in 2010.
Early years
Martemyan Nikitich Ryutin was born to a poor peasant family in a village in Irkutsk oblastIrkutsk
Irkutsk is a city and the administrative center of Irkutsk Oblast, Russia, one of the largest cities in Siberia. Population: .-History:In 1652, Ivan Pokhabov built a zimovye near the site of Irkutsk for gold trading and for the collection of fur taxes from the Buryats. In 1661, Yakov Pokhabov...
in Siberia
Siberia
Siberia is an extensive region constituting almost all of Northern Asia. Comprising the central and eastern portion of the Russian Federation, it was part of the Soviet Union from its beginning, as its predecessor states, the Tsardom of Russia and the Russian Empire, conquered it during the 16th...
, then part of the Russian empire
Russian Empire
The Russian Empire was a state that existed from 1721 until the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was the successor to the Tsardom of Russia and the predecessor of the Soviet Union...
.
Politically radical from his early years, Ryutin joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) in 1914.
Ryutin was a participant in both the February Revolution
February Revolution
The February Revolution of 1917 was the first of two revolutions in Russia in 1917. Centered around the then capital Petrograd in March . Its immediate result was the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, the end of the Romanov dynasty, and the end of the Russian Empire...
which overthrew Tsar Nikolai II in 1917 and the Bolshevik Revolution in November of that same year. In 1917 he headed the local soviet
Soviet (council)
Soviet was a name used for several Russian political organizations. Examples include the Czar's Council of Ministers, which was called the “Soviet of Ministers”; a workers' local council in late Imperial Russia; and the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union....
in Harbin
Harbin
Harbin ; Manchu language: , Harbin; Russian: Харби́н Kharbin ), is the capital and largest city of Heilongjiang Province in Northeast China, lying on the southern bank of the Songhua River...
, a city which is today part of China
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
.
During the Russian Civil War
Russian Civil War
The Russian Civil War was a multi-party war that occurred within the former Russian Empire after the Russian provisional government collapsed to the Soviets, under the domination of the Bolshevik party. Soviet forces first assumed power in Petrograd The Russian Civil War (1917–1923) was a...
which followed the 1917 revolution, Ryutin commanded a military group in the Irkutsk region.
Political career
Following his time in the military, Ryutin became a full-time political functionary of the Russian Communist Party (bolsheviks), the RKP(b). From 1920 to 1921 he was the head of the Irkutsk Guberniya Committee of the RKP(b). In 1922 he was made Secretary of the DagestanDagestan
The Republic of Dagestan is a federal subject of Russia, located in the North Caucasus region. Its capital and the largest city is Makhachkala, located at the center of Dagestan on the Caspian Sea...
Oblast Committee of the party, a position which he retained through 1924, when he was transferred to Moscow.
In the capital, Ryutin was first named the head of the Zamoskvoreche Raion Committee of the Communist Party. He was promoted to head of the more important Krasnaya Presnya Raion Committee in 1927.
Ryutin was elected as a delegate to the 14th Congress (December 1925) and 15th Congress (December 1927) of what was by then known as the All-Union Communist Party (bolsheviks), the VKP(b). The latter elected him a candidate (non-voting) member of the Central Committee
Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union , abbreviated in Russian as ЦК, "Tse-ka", earlier was also called as the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party ...
of the VKP(b).
Ryutin was a supporter of the moderate agrarian policies of the New Economic Policy
New Economic Policy
The New Economic Policy was an economic policy proposed by Vladimir Lenin, who called it state capitalism. Allowing some private ventures, the NEP allowed small animal businesses or smoke shops, for instance, to reopen for private profit while the state continued to control banks, foreign trade,...
and held views closely associated with such "moderate" party leaders as Nikolai Bukharin
Nikolai Bukharin
Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin , was a Russian Marxist, Bolshevik revolutionary, and Soviet politician. He was a member of the Politburo and Central Committee , chairman of the Communist International , and the editor in chief of Pravda , the journal Bolshevik , Izvestia , and the Great Soviet...
, Nikolai Uglanov
Nikolai Uglanov
Nikolai Aleksandrovich Uglanov was a Russian Bolshevik politician, who played an important role in the government of the Soviet Union.* 20 August 1924 - November 27, 1928, First Secretary of the Moscow Communist Party...
, and Alexei Rykov
Alexei Rykov
Aleksei Ivanovich Rykov was a Russian Bolshevik revolutionary and a Soviet politician most prominent as Premier of Russia and the Soviet Union from 1924–29 and 1924–30 respectively....
.
With a new wave of grain procurement difficulties emerging in the fall of 1928, the Communist Party, headed by Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
, took a radical turn towards forcing the sales of grain at below-market prices by the peasantry. This action drew the opposition of moderate Bolsheviks like Bukharin and Ryutin, who opposed the use of force and coercion against the peasantry as the manifestation of the failed agrarian policies of War Communism
War communism
War communism or military communism was the economic and political system that existed in Soviet Russia during the Russian Civil War, from 1918 to 1921...
.
The radical Stalin faction worked to capture key positions in the party to assure the implementation of the policies which they favored. At the September 24 and October 8 sessions of the Krasnopresnenskii raikom — gatherings in which Stalin himself participated — Ryutin came under fire for his alleged support of a "Right Opposition" led by Bukharin and Uglanov. Ryutin garnered no favor by remarking at one session that Stalin had is faults, "which Lenin had talked about" — a pointed reference to Lenin's so-called "last will" which even drew criticism from his factional ally Uglanov. By the end of the month, Ryutin had been removed from his position as Secretary of the city party committee.
Ryutin was transferred to the position of Deputy Editor of Red Star, the official organ of the Red Army
Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army started out as the Soviet Union's revolutionary communist combat groups during the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922. It grew into the national army of the Soviet Union. By the 1930s the Red Army was among the largest armies in history.The "Red Army" name refers to...
. He retained his seat as a candidate member of the Central Committee of the VKP(b) at this time, however.
In 1929, faced with bitter peasant opposition to forced requisitioning, the Stalin faction moved towards a radical restructuring of Soviet agriculture through a drive for collectivization. The Central Committee determined to send Ryutin back to his native village in Siberia to report on the progress of collectivization in the grain-producing areas of Siberia.
As a child of a peasant family, Ryutin understood full well the unpopularity of the collectivization idea with the peasantry as a whole, and the potential for economic catastrophe represented by the program. Upon his return to Moscow, Ryutin sharply criticized the collectivization program in a report to the Politburo
Politburo
Politburo , literally "Political Bureau [of the Central Committee]," is the executive committee for a number of communist political parties.-Marxist-Leninist states:...
. This report drew Stalin's ire, but he nevertheless made use of Ryutin's analysis as part of his seminal article, "Dizzy with Success."
In January 1930, Ryutin published an article in Red Star which again publicly challenged the implementation of the collectivization program. Shortly thereafter, Ryutin was cashiered once again, moved this time to a less sensitive position as Chairman of the Photo-Film Industry. On March 1 of that same year, Ryutin was made a member of the Presidium of the Supreme Council of National Economy (VSNKh), one of the leading state economic planning
Economic planning
Economic planning refers to any directing or planning of economic activity outside the mechanisisms of the market, in an attempt to achieve specific economic or social outcomes. Planning is an economic mechanism for resource allocation and decision-making in contrast with the market mechanism...
organizations of the period.
Unlike Bukharin and other leading members of the so-called "Right" in the Communist Party, Ryutin refused to recant his views and endorse the policies of Stalin and his associates. The Stalin faction launched an effort to eliminate Ryutin from the Communist Party in the fall of 1930. Ryutin was accused of "propagandizing right-opportunist views" and the move was made not just from the Central Committee of the VKP(b), but to expel him from the VKP(b) completely.
Despite having made an aggressive defense of his position before the Central Control Commission, the Communist Party's disciplinary body, Ryutin's expulsion was ultimately confirmed by the Politburo on October 5, 1930.
The Ryutin Affair
- Main article: The Ryutin AffairRyutin AffairThe Ryutin Affair was one of the last attempts to oppose the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin within the Soviet Communist Party.Martemyan Ryutin was an Old Bolshevik and a secretary of the Moscow City Communist Party Committee in the 1920s...
.
Now outside the party, Ryutin no longer had protection against the secret police (OGPU). On November 13, 1930, Ryutin was arrested by the OGPU, charged with having engaged in counterrevolutionary agitation. Ryutin was held in jail for investigation but was ultimately released on January 17, 1931, for lack of sufficient evidence. Upon his release, Ryutin was assigned work in as an economist for an electrical production unit.
In the interim, the Soviet economy had gone from bad to worse. The grain shortage of 1928 had given way to complete disorganization of agriculture by the ill-conceived collectivization campaign of 1929-30, which — exacerbated by drought — had ultimately resulted in a massive famine in the Ukraine
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
, Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan , officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a transcontinental country in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Ranked as the ninth largest country in the world, it is also the world's largest landlocked country; its territory of is greater than Western Europe...
and parts of southern Russia in 1932 and 1933. The entire Soviet economy was in a state of crisis.
In March 1932 Ryutin was the principal writer of a 200-page document titled "Stalin and the Crisis of the Proletarian Dictatorship," the so-called "Ryutin Platform," which was self-prepared
Samizdat
Samizdat was a key form of dissident activity across the Soviet bloc in which individuals reproduced censored publications by hand and passed the documents from reader to reader...
and secretly circulated from hand-to-hand among party members.
The so-called Ryutin Platform attacked the "adventurist
Adventurism
Adventurism is a criticism levelled at governments which pursue reckless policies, seemly for the sake of excitement. Countries pusuing foreign wars of dubious merit or which have little chance of success have often been accused of adventurism by opponenets....
" tempos of industrialization that were part of the First Five-Year Plan, charging that they had brought about a massive fall in the real income of the working class, high taxation, and a inflationary fall in the value of the currency. In the countryside, Ryutin declared, expropriation
Expropriation
Expropriation is the politically motivated and forceful confiscation and redistribution of private property outside the common law. Unlike eminent domain or laws regulating the foreign investment, expropriation takes place outside the common law and may be used to denote an armed robbery by...
through the exertion of brute force had created "appalling impoverishment of the masses and famine" and the flight of "all the young and healthy people" from the countryside. Millions of surplus people cluttered the cities of the nation while the countryside starved, Ryutin charged.
A second document, "Appeal to All Members of the VKP(b)," was also prepared and circulated on behalf of a faction called the Union of Marxists-Leninists. In this document, Ryutin placed the blame for the Soviet Union's catastrophic economic situation on the doorstep of General Secretary of the Communist Party Joseph Stalin, writing:
"The party and the dictatorship of the proletariatDictatorship of the proletariatIn Marxist socio-political thought, the dictatorship of the proletariat refers to a socialist state in which the proletariat, or the working class, have control of political power. The term, coined by Joseph Weydemeyer, was adopted by the founders of Marxism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in the...
have been led into an unknown blind alley by Stalin and his retinue and are now living through a mortally dangerous crisis. With the help of deception and slander, with the help of unbelievable pressures and terror, Stalin in the last five years has sifted out and removed from the leadership all the best, genuinely Bolshevik party cadres, has established in the VKP(b) and in the whole country his personal dictatorshipDictatorshipA dictatorship is defined as an autocratic form of government in which the government is ruled by an individual, the dictator. It has three possible meanings:...
, has broken with LeninismLeninismIn Marxist philosophy, Leninism is the body of political theory for the democratic organisation of a revolutionary vanguard party, and the achievement of a direct-democracy dictatorship of the proletariat, as political prelude to the establishment of socialism...
, has embarked on a path of the most ungovernable adventurism and wild personal arbitrariness."
It is unclear how many individuals read the so-called Ryutin Platform or even how many knew of its existence. According to Russian historian Roy Medvedev
Roy Medvedev
Roy Aleksandrovich Medvedev |Georgia]]) is a Russian historian renowned as the author of the dissident history of Stalinism, Let History Judge , first published in English in 1972...
, the opposition was organized by Ryutin with his friend P.A. Galkin and included a membership of "fifteen at most." Outside of this small group, it seems that only a handful of party leaders were familiar with the content of the document, including most notably Nikolai Uglanov, According to his widow, Nikolai Bukharin was not aware of the document or its content.
What is clear is that when the secret police discovered the existence of the document, they took its appeal to "destroy Stalin's dictatorship" as a call for armed revolution. On September 22, 1932, Ryutin was arrested and held for investigation. At his first interrogation, held September 24, Ryutin confirmed that he had been politically opposed to Stalin and his policies since 1928. On September 27, the Central Control Commission decided to expel 14 members of the party due to their alleged connection with Ryutin's factional group.
At a second investigative hearing, conducted September 28, Ryutin acknowledged authorship of the two key factional documents mentioned above and sought to take full responsibility for them, attempting to absolve his comrades from blame. Investigations continued, however, and on October 9, 1932, the Politburo of the Communist Party voted to expel another 24 individuals from the party in light of their alleged connections to Ryutin and his group.
On October 11, 1932, Pravda
Pravda
Pravda was a leading newspaper of the Soviet Union and an official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party between 1912 and 1991....
published a list of names of those expelled for participation in the Ryutin group. The expulsions meted were for a period of one year.
The Ryutin Platform was different from previous communist oppositional documents in that it was almost completely suppressed. As historian Catherine Merridale notes
"The official attitude towards the 1932 crisis was to pretend all was well; the press was full of accounts of successes and improvements. To have the truth so bluntly stated would have been very damaging. By 1932 it was possible to silence a critic like Ryutin. Opposition groups could no longer form easily, and they had no access to the media. So from the time of its appearance until 1988, little was known about the 'Ryutin Platform's' contents. No copy of it was available and scarcely any evidence for the existence of a 'Ryutin group' could be found. Stalin's policy in this case was 'not only to downgrade, crush, annihilate, but also to eliminate from memory, erase all evidence of the existence of the objectionable person.'"
A three person Collegium of the OGPU — consisting of GPU chairman Vyacheslav Menzhinsky
Vyacheslav Menzhinsky
Vyacheslav Rudolfovich Menzhinsky was a Polish-Russian revolutionary, a Soviet statesman and Party official who served as chairman of the OGPU from 1926 to 1934...
, his successor Genrikh Yagoda
Genrikh Yagoda
Genrikh Grigoryevich Yagoda , born Enokh Gershevich Ieguda , was a Soviet state security official who served as director of the NKVD, the Soviet Union's Stalin-era security and intelligence agency, from 1934 to 1936...
, and future People's Commissar of Internal Affairs V. A. Balitsky — formally decided the charges against Ryutin. While Stalin reportedly advocated a death sentence for Ryutin during Politburo deliberations, ultimately a 10 year sentence in prison resulted from his pro forma trial. Ryutin was sent first to the Ural region
Ural (region)
Ural is a geographical region located around the Ural Mountains, between the East European and West Siberian plains. It extends approximately from north to south, from the Arctic Ocean to the bend of Ural River near Orsk city. The boundary between Europe and Asia runs along the eastern side of...
before being returned to Suzdal
Suzdal
Suzdal is a town in Vladimir Oblast, Russia, situated northeast of Moscow, from the city of Vladimir, on the Kamenka River. Population: -History:...
, northeast of Moscow near the city of Vladimir
Vladimir
Vladimir is a city and the administrative center of Vladimir Oblast, Russia, located on the Klyazma River, to the east of Moscow along the M7 motorway. Population:...
.
Late in 1932, a number of prominent leaders of opposition movements within the Communist Party, including Grigory Zinoviev
Grigory Zinoviev
Grigory Yevseevich Zinoviev , born Ovsei-Gershon Aronovich Radomyslsky Apfelbaum , was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a Soviet Communist politician...
, Lev Kamenev
Lev Kamenev
Lev Borisovich Kamenev , born Rozenfeld , was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a prominent Soviet politician. He was briefly head of state of the new republic in 1917, and from 1923-24 the acting Premier in the last year of Lenin's life....
, and Karl Radek
Karl Radek
Karl Bernhardovic Radek was a socialist active in the Polish and German movements before World War I and an international Communist leader after the Russian Revolution....
, were called before the Central Control Committee and interrogated about whether they were aware of or had read the so-called Ryutin Platform. Even knowing of the document and failing to report that knowledge was considered a crime. Zinoviev and Kamenev were again expelled from the party for their failure to report the existence of the document.
Death and legacy
During the period of political paranoia and spy mania remembered to history as the Yezhovshchina of 1937-38, Ryutin was retried. On January 10, 1937 the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSRSupreme Court of the USSR
The Supreme Court of the USSR was the supreme court of the Soviet Union during its existence. The Supreme Court of the USSR included the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR and other elements which were not typical of Supreme Courts found in other countries, then or now.-See also:*...
sentenced him to death. He was executed that same day.
The rest of Ryutin's family also suffered brutal repression at the hands of the state, with his younger son Vissarion (born 1913) similarly retried and executed in a camp in Central Asia
Soviet Central Asia
Soviet Central Asia refers to the section of Central Asia formerly controlled by the Soviet Union, as well as the time period of Soviet administration . In terms of area, it is nearly synonymous with Russian Turkestan, the name for the region during the Russian Empire...
in 1937 and his older son Vassily (born 1910) shot to death in Lefortovo prison
Lefortovo prison
Lefortovo prison is a prison in Moscow, Russia, which, since 2005, has been under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation. It was built in 1881...
in that same year. His widow was sent to a camp of the Gulag
Gulag
The Gulag was the government agency that administered the main Soviet forced labor camp systems. While the camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners, large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas and other instruments of...
located in Karaganda
Karaganda
Karagandy , more commonly known by its Russian name Karaganda, , is the capital of Karagandy Province in Kazakhstan. It is the fourth most populous city in Kazakhstan, behind Almaty , Astana and Shymkent, with a population of 471,800 . In the 1940s up to 70% of the city's inhabitants were ethnic...
, where she also perished. Only a daughter, Lyubov Ryutina, survived the terror.
At the 20th Congress of the CPSU
20th Congress of the CPSU
The 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was held during 14– 25 February 1956. It is known especially for Nikita Khrushchev's "Secret Speech", which denounced the personality cult and dictatorship of Joseph Stalin....
, Ryutin's daughter proposed the posthumous rehabilitation of her father and two brothers. This effort failed.
On June 13, 1988, as a byproduct of the glasnost
Glasnost
Glasnost was the policy of maximal publicity, openness, and transparency in the activities of all government institutions in the Soviet Union, together with freedom of information, introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev in the second half of the 1980s...
campaign of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev is a former Soviet statesman, having served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991, and as the last head of state of the USSR, having served from 1988 until its dissolution in 1991...
, the Supreme Court of the USSR formally rehabilitated Martemyan Ryutin.
The so-called Ryutin Platform, long locked in the archives of the KGB, was published for the first time in 1990, serialized in five parts in the official journal of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Izvestiya TsK KPSS (News of the CC of the CPSU). The source of this publication was an official typescript of the original handwritten document; the original, if it still exists in the archives, remains to be located.
The Ryutin Platform was published in English translation for the first time in 2010.
Further reading
- Sobhanial Datta Gupta (ed.), The Ryutin Platform: Stalin and the Crisis of Proletarian Dictatorship: Platform of the "Union of Marxists-Leninists." Pranab Ghosh and Susmita Bhattacharya, translators. Parganas, India: Seribaan, 2010. —Includes full text of the Ryutin Platform.
- Boris A. Starkov, Martem'ian Riutin: Na koleni ne vstanu. Moscow: Politizdat, 1992.
- I. Anfertev, Martem'ian Riutin. Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1990.