Martemyan Nikitich Ryutin (; 13 February 1890 – 10 January 1937) was a Russian Marxist activist, Bolshevik 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, in September 1932. He was later executed in January 1937 as part of the “Yezhovshchina" 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.
Biography
Early years
Martemyan Nikitich Ryutin was born on to a peasant family in Verkhne-Ryutino, a village in Irkutsk oblast in Siberia, then part of the Russian Empire.Sobhanlal Datta Gupta (ed.), The Ryutin Platform: Stalin and the Crisis of Proletarian Dictatorship: Platform of the "Union of Marxists–Leninists." Parganas, India: Seribaan, 2010; pg. xvi. He was descended from an Estonian rebel who was exiled to Siberia in 1830. He worked in a factory from the age of 13, but later graduated from the Irkutsk Teachers' Seminary, and worked as a teacher and journalist. In October 1914, he joined the Menshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party Drafted into the Russian Army in June 1915, he reached the rank of ensign in a Siberian reserve regiment, and was transferred to Harbin, in China, where he was elected chairman of the Harbin garrison Soviet during the February Revolution, and joined the Bolsheviks in summer 1917, around the time that he was elected chairman of Harbin Soviet,V.A. Torchinov and A.M. Leontiuk, Vokrug Stalina: Istoriko-biografiicheskii spravochnik (Stalin's Circle: Historical-Biographical Handbook). St. Petersburg: Philosophical Department of St. Petersburg State University, 2000; pp. 419–420. but in December was forced to return to Irkutsk after the Chinese had threatened military action against radicalised Russian units in Harbin. During the Russian Civil War 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 Dagestan 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.Catherine Merridale, Moscow Politics and the Rise of Stalin: The Communist Party in the Capital, 1925–32. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990; pg. 52. 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. During the period when the 'moderates' were on the same side as Joseph Stalin against Leon Trotsky and the left, Ryutin held hard line views on party discipline. In 1923, he declared:
During 1927, Ryutin was the main organiser of the strong arm squads known as 'Uglanov's hooligans', who used intimidation to break up opposition meetings in the Krasnaya Presnya district. In November 1927, he and others forced their way into a locked building where Ivar Smilga and Yevgeni Preobrazhensky were holding an opposition meeting, and began assaulting them. He also disrupted the last public demonstration by the left, when Trotsky and others spoke at the funeral of Adolph Joffe, who had committed suicide in protest at the state of the Communist party. Ryutin spoke on behalf of the leadership in such a confrontational style that Trotsky had to intervene to dissuade the crowd from attacking him.
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 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 his 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.Merridale, Moscow Politics and the Rise of Stalin, pg. 58 and footnote 66 on pg. 266. 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.Gupta (ed.), The Ryutin Platform, pg. xvii. 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.
In February 1930, the Soviet government created a new body, the All-Union Cinema Industry Combine or Soyuzkino, to plan and regulate the cinema industry across the whole of the USSR. As this body's first chairman, Ryutin defended the right of cinema organisations to take independent initiative, and persuaded the Politburo to delay bringing cinema industries in the various republics under central control. On 1 March 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.R.W. Davies, M.J. Ilič, H. P. Jenkins, C. Merridale, and S.G. Wheatcroft (eds.), Soviet Government Officials, 1922–41: A Handlist. Birmingham: Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham, 1989; pg. 369.
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.J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999; pg. 52. 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. Sovietologist Robert W. Thurston writes that Soviet leaders mischaracterized his pro-peasant attitude as rightist zeal.
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
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.Gupta (ed.), The Ryutin Platform, pg. xviii. 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 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 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.Gupta, The Ryutin Platform, pg. xix.
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 an inflationary fall in the value of the currency.Merridale, Moscow Politics and the Rise of Stalin, pg. 85. 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:
"The party and the dictatorship of the proletariat 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 dictatorship, has broken with Leninism, has embarked on a path of the most ungovernable adventurism and wild personal arbitrariness."Merridale, Moscow Politics and the Rise of Stalin, pg. 85, reprinting an excerpt published in Arkadii Vaksberg, "Kak zhivoi c zhivymi," Literaturnaia gazeta, June 29, 1988, pg. 13.