Ryutin affair
Union of Marxist-Leninists Союз марксистов-ленинцев | |
|---|---|
| Leader | Martemyan Ryutin |
| Founded | March 1932 |
| Dissolved | October 1932 |
| Split from | Right Opposition |
| Merged into | Bloc of Soviet Oppositions |
| Ideology | Leninism Agrarian socialism Anti-collectivization |
| Political position | Left wing to far-left |
| National affiliation | Communist Party of the Soviet Union |
The Ryutin affair was an attempt led by Martemyan Ryutin to remove Joseph Stalin as General Secretary of the All-Union Communist Party (b) (CPSU) in 1932.
Ryutin wrote two
counterrevolutionaries, and later executed in the Great Purge
.
Ryutin's movement was one of the last attempts to oppose Stalin from within the CPSU and marked a general decline of the Right Opposition.
Background
moderate ("Rightist") wing within the party led by the communist theoretician Nikolai Bukharin and Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars Alexei Rykov.[1][2] The Rightists were opposed to the dominant Stalinist wing of the CPSU led by General Secretary Joseph Stalin. Bukharin and Rykov were defeated and demoted by Stalin from 1928 to 1930, leading to Ryutin being demoted as well. In September 1930, he was expelled from the CPSU, then six weeks later he was arrested for oppositionist views. On 17 January 1931, he was released and allowed to re-join the party, but remained silently opposed to regime of Stalin.[3][4]
By the beginning of the 1930s, Stalin was firmly in control of the CPSU and all dissent was punishable by immediate expulsion and
Left-Right bloc" formed by Sergey Syrtsov and Vissarion Lominadze, and another formed by Aleksandr Petrovich Smirnov, Nikolai Borisovich Eismont and Vladimir Tolmachyov.[5][6]
The Union of Marxist-Leninists
In June 1932, Ryutin wrote a
industrialization programme in the Soviet Union, the reinstatement of all previously expelled Party members on the left and on the right (including Leon Trotsky), and a "fresh start".[8]
Four of the Platform's thirteen chapters examined the character of Stalin, whom Ryutin called "the gravedigger of the
OGPU (the Soviet secret police
) and to Stalin. On 23 September 1932, Ryutin was arrested along with other suspects.
On 27 September, the Presidium of the
bourgeois-kulak 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
.
Historical analysis
A
Stanislav Kosior, and Yan Rudzutak, while Stalin's position was supported only by Lazar Kaganovich. According to historian J. Arch Getty, Nicolaevsky's story is a "persistent myth." He points to an incident from eighteen months before when the Politburo voted for a very harsh penalty for the opposition and Stalin moderated the punishment. It is known that Ryutin received the harshest penalty. He was sentenced to ten years imprisonment.[2]
Former
Urals region for failure to report the incident to the secret police. Pierre Broué theorized that the Ryutin group was part of a larger anti-Stalin bloc formed in 1932, which Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Smirnov were all members. Some of Trotsky's letters mention that some "rightists" were members of the bloc, none of which were named. As Ryutin and his allies were the only rightist group opposing Stalin at the time, they are the most likely to be those who Trotsky was mentioning. The bloc most likely dissolved in early 1933, when Ryutin and Smirnov were arrested.[10]
Ryutin was eventually executed on 10 January 1937, during the Great Purge, which also claimed the lives of Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Kosior, Rudzutak, Uglanov, Yenukidze, Rykov and most of the rest of the Old Bolsheviks.
References
- ISBN 0-19-507132-8.
- ^ Getty, J. Arch; Naumov, Oleg (2010). The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939. Yale University Press. p. 34.
- ISBN 0-19-507132-8.
- ^ Getty, J. Arch; Naumov, Oleg (2010). The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939. Yale University Press. p. 34.
- ^ Vadim Rogovin. Power and opposition.
- ^ Isaac Deutscher (1991). Trotsky in exile. pp. 231–232.
- ISBN 0-19-816006-2.
- ISBN 1-85984-987-3.
- ISBN 1-85984-987-3.
- ^ a b Broué, Pierre (January 1980). "The "Bloc" of the Oppositions against Stalin in the USSR in 1932". Revolutionary History. 9 (4). Translated by John Archer: 161–192.
- Nikolaevsky, Boris I. (1965). "Letter of an Old Bolshevik". Power and the Soviet Elite: "The letter of an old Bolshevik" and other essays by Boris I. Nikolaevsky. Praeger.