Union of Marxist-Leninists Союз марксистов-ленинцев | |
|---|---|
| Leader | Martemyan Ryutin |
| Founded | March 1932 (1932-03) |
| Dissolved | October 1932 (1932-10) |
| Split from | Right Opposition |
| Merged into | Bloc of Soviet Oppositions |
| Ideology | Leninism Agrarian socialism Anti-collectivization |
| Political position | Left wing tofar-left |
| National affiliation | Communist Party of the Soviet Union |
TheRyutin affair was an attempt led byMartemyan Ryutin to removeJoseph Stalin asGeneral Secretary of theAll-Union Communist Party (b) (CPSU) in 1932.
Ryutin wrote twopublications that were highly critical of Stalin, hisauthoritarianism, and hisfirst five-year plan. Ryutin established aRight Opposition faction within the CPSU known as the Union of Marxist-Leninists which opposed Stalin's rule andStalinism in favour of amoderate form ofLeninism. Ryutin and his supporters were defeated by ahardline Stalinist faction in theCentral Control Commission, arrested by theOGPU ascounterrevolutionaries, and later executed in theGreat 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.
Martemyan Ryutin was anOld Bolshevik and a secretary of theMoscow branch of theAll-Union Communist Party (CPSU) in the 1920s. From December 1927 to September 1930, Ryutin was a candidate (non-voting) member of theCentral Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and a supporter of themoderate ("Rightist") wing within the party led by the communist theoreticianNikolai Bukharin and Chairman of the Council of People's CommissarsAlexei Rykov.[1][2] The Rightists were opposed to the dominantStalinist wing of the CPSU led by General SecretaryJoseph 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 andexile. Opposition to the Stalinist course strengthened within the CPSU against the backdrop offorced collectivization, theSoviet famine of 1932–33, andmass deportations. These events led to anti-Stalin opposition to reappear, such as the underground organization ofIvan Smirnov and a group formed byGeorgy Safarov andNikolai Uglanov. Even new illegal entities started appearing, such as the "Left-Right bloc" formed bySergey Syrtsov andVissarion Lominadze, and another formed byAleksandr Petrovich Smirnov,Nikolai Borisovich Eismont [ru] andVladimir Tolmachyov.[5][6]
In June 1932, Ryutin wrote apamphlet entitledAppeal to All Members of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and a nearly 200-page document entitledStalin and the Crisis of theProletarian Dictatorship (more commonly known as "Ryutin's Platform").[7] In these documents, Ryutin called for an end to forced collectivization ("peace with thepeasants"), a slowing down of theindustrialization programme in the Soviet Union, the reinstatement of all previously expelled Party members on the left and on the right (includingLeon Trotsky), and a "fresh start".[8]
Four of the Platform's thirteen chapters examined the character of Stalin, whom Ryutin called "the gravedigger of theRevolution" and "the evil genius of the Party and the revolution".[9] Ryutin'sAppeal 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 ofLeninism for the liquidation of the Stalin dictatorship." Ryutin gathered around him a group of like-minded friends who called themselves "The Union ofMarxist-Leninists". They began to distribute theAppeal to workers and to members of the opposition in the summer and early autumn of 1932. Bukharin's former comrades, the"Red Professors" -Alexander Slepkov,[10]Dmitri Maretsky [ru], andJan Sten - helped to distribute the manifestos. Sten gave copies toLev Kamenev and toGrigory Zinoviev, while Slepkov provided the documents to a group ofTrotskyists inKharkov. Nearly all of the former leaders of the "Right Opposition" -Mikhail Tomsky,Nikolai Uglanov, and Rykov - saw theAppeal.Benyamin Kayurov also aligned himself with the group. An informer soon betrayed the Union to theOGPU (the Sovietsecret police) and to Stalin. On 23 September 1932, Ryutin was arrested along with other suspects.
On 27 September, the Presidium of theCentral Control Commission hastily convened to investigate and deal with the Ryutin group. Twenty-four members attended, includingYan Rudzutak,Yemelyan Yaroslavsky,Avel Yenukidze,Aaron Soltz, and Lenin's sister,Maria Ilyinichna Ulyanova. They authorized the OGPU "to uncover the still undetected members of Ryutin'scounterrevolutionary group" and to acquaint "thesewhite guard criminals...with the entire strictness of revolutionary law". The final report of the Presidium, released on 9 October, expelled twenty-four people from the CPSU and banished them from Moscow for varying lengths of time. The members of the Union were characterized[by whom?] as "degenerate elements who have become the enemies ofcommunism and of Soviet power, as traitors to the party and theworking class, who have tried to form an undergroundbourgeois-kulak organization under a fake 'Marxist-Leninist' banner for the purpose of restoringcapitalism in general and kulakdom in particular in the USSR". The OGPU referred the matter of Ryutin's fate to the rulingPolitburo.
Astenographic record of this Politburo meeting has not been located. A number of historians, led byRobert Conquest, have adopted the argument first advanced byBoris Nicolaevsky in "The Letter of an Old Bolshevik" (1936), that a division existed in the Politburo between moderates andhardliners. Stalin argued that Ryutin deserved thedeath penalty, because hisAppeal could inspire its readers to acts ofterrorism and apalace coup. A moderate bloc of Politburo members opposed Stalin, because they were unwilling to violate Lenin's stricture against the spilling of Bolshevik blood.[1]Sergei Kirov supposedly spoke with "particular force against the recourse to the death penalty" and was joined to a greater or lesser extent bySergo Ordzhonikidze,Valerian Kuibyshev,Stanislav Kosior, and Yan Rudzutak, while Stalin's position was supported only byLazar Kaganovich. According to historianJ. 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]
FormerUnited Opposition leaders Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, who had read thePlatform, were also expelled from the CPSU in October 1932 and exiled to theUrals region for failure to report the incident to the secret police.Pierre Broué theorized that the Ryutin group was part of a largeranti-Stalin bloc formed in 1932, of which Trotsky and Smirnov were members and which was potentially in contact with Zinoviev and Kamenev around the time of their 1932 expulsion. 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 theGreat Purge, which also claimed the lives of Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Kosior, Rudzutak, Uglanov, Yenukidze, Rykov and most of the rest of the Old Bolsheviks.