Stalin

Secretly, at a hut in a village about forty miles outside Moscow, on August 21, 1932, Ryutin presented the “Appeal to All Members” as well as a much longer document, “Stalin and the Crisis of the Proletarian Dictatorship,” to perhaps fifteen middling officials in various bureaucratic entities.²⁸⁰ They constituted themselves as the Union of Marxist-Leninists and held elections to leadership posts. One of them hosted a follow-up meeting in his apartment, where it was decided that the documents should be circulated hand to hand. Jānis Stens, an ethnic Latvian professor at the Institute of Red Professors, passed copies to Kamenev and Zinoviev at the dacha they shared outside Moscow. Another conspirator passed copies to Trotskyites in Kharkov. A copy got to the disgraced former Moscow party boss Nikolai Uglanov (Ryutin’s former patron), who was close to Bukharin. (Bukharin would later deny that he had received a copy or knew of the Ryutin group.)

Ryutin’s nearly 200-page “Stalin and the Crisis of the Proletarian Dictatorship” was a marvel. It condemned the “adventuristic rate of industrialization” and “adventuristic collectivization with the aid of unbelievable acts of violence and terror,” defended Trotsky as a genuine revolutionary despite his shortcomings, and excoriated the rightists for capitulation, yet underscored how “the right wing has proved correct in the economic field.” Ryutin brimmed with rage at Stalin’s muzzling of party members, and with idealism about Marx and Lenin. (“To place the name of Lenin alongside the name of Stalin is like placing Mount Elbrus alongside a heap of dung.”)²⁸¹ He proposed twenty-five concrete measures, from new elections to party organs on the basis of intraparty democracy to a mass purge of the OGPU, from dispersal of coercively formed collective farms and loss-making state farms to ending dekulakization, state procurements of grain and livestock, and agricultural exports.

²⁸² Ryutin’s prerequisite for these proposals was fulfilling Lenin’s Testament. He concluded that “putting an end to Stalin the dictator and his clique” was “the primary duty of every honest Bolshevik.”²⁸³

There it was again

. Remove Stalin. Lenin’s Testament. The subject of endless party discussions that had prompted Stalin to offer to resign at least six times between 1923 and December 1927.

Ryutin acknowledged that “the removal of Stalin and his clique via the normal democratic means guaranteed by the rules of the party and the Soviet Constitution is completely impossible” and explained that “the party has two choices: to continue meekly to endure the mockery of Leninism and the terror, and wait calmly for the final collapse of the proletarian dictatorship; or to remove this clique by force and save the cause of Communism.”²⁸⁴ But his text, even in the version of the document typed up by the OGPU, made no direct call for assassination. And he undertook no such preparations.²⁸⁵ Instead, having diagnosed the party as the instrument of oppression, he imagined it as the instrument of liberation.

²⁸⁶ Two party members with knowledge of Ryutin’s texts sent a written denunciation to the apparatus on September 14, 1932.²⁸⁷ Stalin was informed the next day. Arrests followed. Ryutin was hauled in on September 22. That same day, Kamenev and Zinoviev were summoned to explain why, having read the Ryutin documents, they had failed to report them, a party crime.²⁸⁸

Ryutin was not alone. In its September 1932 issue, Trotsky’s Bulletin published a “draft platform” (missing the first page) attributed to unnamed members of a “left opposition” underground in the USSR. It declared a “crisis of the Soviet economy” and called for fixing (in Marxist terms) the imbalance between industry and agriculture by reducing expenditures on industry to ease inflation, dispersing nonviable collective farms, ceasing the coerced liquidation of kulaks, and attracting foreign capital through the old practice of leases (or foreign concessions). Quixotically, the authors even offered to cooperate with “the faction that is ruling at present,” as part of a shift from “the current obviously unhealthy and obviously nonviable regime to a regime of party democracy.”²⁸⁹ That same month, a traveling Soviet official passed a second text, by Ivan Smirnov, a onetime Trotsky supporter who worked as deputy head for transport equipment in the state planning commission, to Trotsky’s son Lev Sedov, in Berlin, who amplified it and published it in the Bulletin. It consisted of selected material from an internal state planning commission report on the first six months of 1932. “In view of the inability of the present leadership to extricate itself from the economic and political blind alley,” the published article concluded, “the conviction is growing in the party that it is necessary to replace the leadership.”²⁹⁰