Ryutin Affair - Historical Analysis

Historical Analysis

A stenographic record of this Politburo meeting has not been located. A number of historians, led by Robert Conquest, have adopted the argument first advanced by Boris Nicolaevsky 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, and Yan Rudzutak, while Stalin's position was supported only by Lazar Kaganovich. According to historian 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. 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 on January 10, 1937, during the Great Purge, which also claimed the lives of Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Kosior, Rudzutak, Ugalanov, Yenukidze, Rykov and most of the rest of the Old Bolsheviks.