Ryutin Affair

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The Ryutin Affair (1932) was one of the last attempts to oppose the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin within the Soviet Communist Party.

Martemyan Ryutin (1890-1937, Рютин Мартемьян Никитич) was an Old Bolshevik and a secretary of the Moscow 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 and a supporter of the moderate ("Rightist") wing within the Party led by the Communist theoretician Nikolai Bukharin and prime minister Alexei Rykov. 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 and six weeks later 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.^[1]

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 an "Appeal to All Members of the All-Union Communist Party (bolsheviks)" and then a nearly 200 page document known as the "Ryutin Platform".^[2] In these documents he 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, and a "fresh start". One of the chapters of the Platform was dedicated to Stalin personally, whom Ryutin called "the gravedigger of the Revolution" and "the evil genius of the Party and the revolution".^[3]. According to the recollection of Bukharin, Ryutin argued that "without the elimination of Stalin, it is impossible to restore the health of either the Party or the country."

The Ryutin Platform was distributed among Ryutin's friends and former oppositionist leaders in Moscow in the summer and early fall of 1932. It was soon reported to the OGPU secret police and to Stalin. On September 23, 1932 Ryutin was identified as its author and arrested. On October 2, a group of people close to Ryutin, dubbed the "Ryutin group," were expelled from the Communist Party, and the document itself was completely suppressed. (Contemporary knowledge of the Ryutin Platform's contents derives from a single typescript copy in the secret police archive.) The OGPU referred the matter of Ryutin's fate to the ruling Politburo.

No record of this Politburo meeting exists. A number of historians, led by Robert Conquest, have adopted the argument first advanced by Boris Nikolaevsky in "The Letter of an Old Bolshevik" (1936), which was based on his conversations with Bukharin earlier in the year. According to this version, a division existed in the Politburo between moderates and hard-liners. Stalin argued that Ryutin deserved the death penalty because his "Platform" could inspire its readers to acts of terrorism and assassination. A moderate bloc of Politburo members opposed Stalin because they were unwilling to violate Lenin's stricture against the spilling of Bolshevik blood. Supposedly, Sergei Kirov 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, and Yan Rudzutak while Stalin's position was supported only by Lazar Kaganovich. Recent research has not found documentation to support this view. It is known that Ryutin was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment and twenty-nine others received prison terms of varying years.

Former United Opposition 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 in 1937 during the Great Purge, which also claimed the lives of Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Kosior, Rudzutak and most of the rest of the Old Bolsheviks.

[edit] Notes

• ^  See Robert Conquest. The Great Terror: A Reassessment, Oxford University Press, 1990, ISBN 0-19-507132-8 p.24
• ^  See Gerald Stanton Smith. D. S. Mirsky: A Russian-English Life, 1890-1939, Oxford University Press, 2000, ISBN 0-19-816006-2 p. 231
• ^  See Susan Weissman. Victor Serge: The Course is Set on Hope, New York - London, Version, 2001, ISBN 1-85984-987-3 p.136
• See "Letter of an Old Bolshevik," in Boris Nikolaevsky, Power and the Soviet Elite, Farrar, 1965.