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.
Read more about this topic: Ryutin Affair
Famous quotes containing the words historical and/or analysis:
“Culture is the name for what people are interested in, their thoughts, their models, the books they read and the speeches they hear, their table-talk, gossip, controversies, historical sense and scientific training, the values they appreciate, the quality of life they admire. All communities have a culture. It is the climate of their civilization.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“The spider-mind acquires a faculty of memory, and, with it, a singular skill of analysis and synthesis, taking apart and putting together in different relations the meshes of its trap. Man had in the beginning no power of analysis or synthesis approaching that of the spider, or even of the honey-bee; but he had acute sensibility to the higher forces.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)