Ryutin Affair - The Union of Marxist-Leninist

The Union of Marxist-Leninist

With Stalin now firmly in control of the Communist Party and all dissent punishable by immediate expulsion and exile, Ryutin decided to act in secret. In June 1932, he wrote a pamphlet entitled "Appeal to All Members of the All-Union Communist Party (bolsheviks)" and a nearly 200-page document entitled "Stalin and the Crisis of the Proletarian Dictatorship," which is more commonly known as Ryutin's Platform. In these documents Ryutin called for an end to forced collectivization ("peace with the peasants"), slowing down of the industrialization, a reinstatement of all previously expelled Party members on the left and on the right (including Leon Trotsky), and a "fresh start". Four of the Platform's thirteen chapters were devoted to examining the character of Stalin, whom Ryutin called "the gravedigger of the Revolution" and "the evil genius of the Party and the revolution". "Appeal" 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 of Leninism for the liquidation of the Stalin leadership."

Ryutin gathered around him a group of like-minded friends who called themselves "The Union of Marxist-Leninists" and they began to distribute "Appeal" to workers and to members of the opposition in the summer and early autumn of 1932. Nikolai Bukharin's former comrades, the "Red Professors" Alexander Slepkov, Dmitri Maretsky, and Yan Sten, helped to distribute the manifestos. Sten gave copies to Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, while Slepkov provided the documents to a group of Trotskyists in Kharkov. Nearly all of the former leaders of the "Right Opposition," Mikhail Tomsky, Nikolai Uglanov, and Alexei Rykov, saw the "Appeal". Benyamin Kayurov also aligned himself with the group. An informer soon betrayed the "Union" to the OGPU secret police and to Stalin. On September 23, 1932, Ryutin was arrested along with other suspects.

On September 27 a hastily assembled Presidium of the Central Control Commission was convened to investigate and deal with the Ryutin group. There were twenty-four members present, including Yan Rudzutak, Yemelyan Yaroslavsky, Avel Yenukidze, Aaron Soltz, and Lenin's sister, Maria Ulyanova. They authorized the OGPU “to uncover the still undetected members of Ryutin's counterrevolutionary group," and acquaint "these white guard criminals...with the entire strictness of revolutionary law.” The final report of the Presidium, released on October 9, expelled twenty-four people from the party and banished them from Moscow for varying lengths of time. The members of the "Union" were characterized as "degenerate elements who have become the enemies of communism and of Soviet power, as traitors to the party and the working class, who have tried to form an underground 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.