Ryutin Affair
Encyclopedia
The Ryutin Affair was one of the last attempts to oppose the 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...

 within the Soviet Communist Party.

Martemyan Ryutin
Martemyan Ryutin
Martemyan Nikitich Ryutin 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...

 was an Old Bolshevik
Old Bolshevik
Old Bolshevik , also Old Bolshevik Guard or Old Party Guard, was an unofficial designation for those who were members of the Bolshevik party before the Russian Revolution of 1917, many of whom were either tried and executed by the NKVD during Stalin era purges or died under suspicious...

 and a secretary of the Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...

 City Communist Party Committee in the 1920s. In December 1927–September 1930, he was a candidate (non-voting) member of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party
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 ...

 and a supporter of the moderate ("Rightist") wing within the Party led by the Communist theoretician 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...

 and prime minister 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....

. When the latter were defeated and demoted by Stalin in 1928–1930, Ryutin was demoted as well. In September 1930 he was expelled from the Communist Party; six weeks later, he was arrested for oppositionist views. He was released on January 17, 1931, and allowed to re-join the party, but remained silently opposed to Stalin's regime.

With Stalin now firmly in control of the Communist Party and all dissent punishable by immediate expulsion and exile, Ryutin decided to act in secret. In June 1932, he wrote a pamphlet entitled "Appeal to All Members of the All-Union Communist Party (bolsheviks)" and a nearly 200-page document entitled "Stalin and the Crisis of the Proletarian Dictatorship," which is more commonly known as Ryutin's Platform. In these documents Ryutin called for an end to forced collectivization ("peace with the peasants"), slowing down of the industrialization, a reinstatement of all previously expelled Party members on the left and on the right (including Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky , born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army....

), and a "fresh start". Four of the Platform's thirteen chapters were devoted to examining the character of Stalin, whom Ryutin called "the gravedigger of the Revolution" and "the evil genius of the Party and the revolution". "Appeal" was even more inflammatory, arguing Stalin "must be removed by force" and urging its readers "to everywhere organize cells of the 'Union' to be joined under the banner of Leninism for the liquidation of the Stalin leadership."

Ryutin gathered around him a group of like-minded friends who called themselves "The Union of Marxist-Leninists" and they began to distribute "Appeal" to workers and to members of the opposition in the summer and early autumn of 1932. 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...

's former comrades, the "Red Professors" Alexander Slepkov, Dmitri Maretsky, and Yan Sten, helped to distribute the manifestos. Sten gave copies to 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 Grigory Zinoviev
Grigory Zinoviev
Grigory Yevseevich Zinoviev , born Ovsei-Gershon Aronovich Radomyslsky Apfelbaum , was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a Soviet Communist politician...

, while Slepkov provided the documents to a group of Trotskyists in Kharkov. Nearly all of the former leaders of the "Right Opposition," Mikhail Tomsky
Mikhail Tomsky
Mikhail Pavlovich Tomsky was a factory worker, trade unionist and Bolshevik leader. He was the Soviet leader of the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions.Tomsky attempted to form a trade union at his factory in St...

, 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....

, saw the "Appeal." An informer soon betrayed the "Union" to the OGPU secret police and to Stalin. On September 23, 1932, Ryutin was arrested along with other suspects.

On September 27 a hastily assembled Presidium of the Central Control Commission was convened to investigate and deal with the Ryutin group. There were twenty-four members present, including Yan Rudzutak
Yan Rudzutak
Jānis Rudzutaks was a Latvian Bolshevik revolutionary and Soviet politician.Rudzutaks was born in the Kuldīga district of the Courland Governorate , into the family of a farm worker. In 1903, he started working in a factory in Riga. Two years later, he joined Latvian Social Democratic Labour Party...

, Yemelyan Yaroslavsky
Yemelyan Yaroslavsky
Yemelyan Mikhailovich Yaroslavsky was a Russian revolutionary, Soviet politician, communist party organizer and activist, journalist, and historian...

, Avel Yenukidze, Aaron Soltz
Aaron Soltz
Aaron Aleksandrovich Soltz was an Old Bolshevik and a Soviet politician and lawyer. He was informally known as the conscience of the Party...

, and Lenin's sister, Maria Ulyanova. They authorized the OGPU “to uncover the still undetected members of Ryutin's counterrevolutionary group," and acquaint "these white guard criminals...with the entire strictness of revolutionary law.” The final report of the Presidium, released on October 9, expelled twenty-four people from the party and banished them from Moscow for varying lengths of time. The members of the "Union" were characterized as "degenerate elements who have become the enemies of communism and of Soviet power, as traitors to the party and the working class, who have tried to form an underground bourgeois-kulak
Kulak
Kulaks were a category of relatively affluent peasants in the later Russian Empire, Soviet Russia, and early Soviet Union...

 organization under a fake 'Marxist-Leninist' banner for the purpose of restoring capitalism in general and kulakdom in particular in the USSR." The OGPU referred the matter of Ryutin's fate to the ruling Politburo
Politburo
Politburo , literally "Political Bureau [of the Central Committee]," is the executive committee for a number of communist political parties.-Marxist-Leninist states:...

.

A stenographic record of this Politburo meeting has not been located. A number of historians, led by Robert Conquest
Robert Conquest
George Robert Ackworth Conquest CMG is a British historian who became a well-known writer and researcher on the Soviet Union with the publication in 1968 of The Great Terror, an account of Stalin's purges of the 1930s...

, have adopted the argument first advanced by Boris Nicolaevsky
Boris Nicolaevsky
Boris Ivanovich Nicolaevsky was a revolutionary Russian Marxist activist, archivist, and historian. Nicolaevsky is best remembered as one of the leading Menshevik public intellectuals of the 20th Century.-Early years:...

 in "The Letter of an Old Bolshevik" (1936), that a division existed in the Politburo between moderates and hard-liners. Stalin argued that Ryutin deserved the death penalty, because his "Appeal" could inspire its readers to acts of terrorism and a palace coup. A moderate bloc of Politburo members opposed Stalin, because they were unwilling to violate Lenin's stricture against the spilling of Bolshevik blood. Sergei Kirov supposedly spoke with "particular force against the recourse to the death penalty" and was joined to a greater or lesser extent by Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Valerian Kuibyshev, Stanislav Kosior
Stanislav Kosior
Stanislav Vikentyevich Kosior, sometimes spelled Kossior was one of three Kosior brothers, Polish-born Soviet politicians. He was General Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, deputy prime minister of the USSR, and a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union...

, and Yan Rudzutak, while Stalin's position was supported only by Lazar Kaganovich
Lazar Kaganovich
Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich was a Soviet politician and administrator and one of the main associates of Joseph Stalin.-Early life:Kaganovich was born in 1893 to Jewish parents in the village of Kabany, Radomyshl uyezd, Kiev Governorate, Russian Empire...

. Recent research has not found documentation to confirm or refute this view. It is known that Ryutin received the harshest penalty. He was sentenced to ten years imprisonment. Former United Opposition
United Opposition
The United Opposition was a group formed in the All-Union Communist Party in 1926 by Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev in opposition to Joseph Stalin...

 leaders Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, who had read the Platform, were also expelled from the Communist Party in October 1932 and exiled to the Urals region for failure to report the incident to the secret police.

Ryutin was eventually executed on January 10, 1937, during the Great Purge
Great Purge
The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938...

, which also claimed the lives of Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Kosior, Rudzutak, Ugalanov, Yenukidze, Rykov and most of the rest of the Old Bolsheviks.
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