Ryutin affair

Ryutin and his supporters were defeated by a hardline Stalinist faction in the Central Control Commission, arrested by the OGPU as counterrevolutionaries, and later executed in the Great Purge.

[7] In these documents, Ryutin called for an end to forced collectivization ("peace with the peasants"), a slowing down of the industrialization programme in the Soviet Union, the reinstatement of all previously expelled Party members on the left and on the right (including Leon Trotsky), and a "fresh start".

Twenty-four members attended, including Yan Rudzutak, Yemelyan Yaroslavsky, Avel Yenukidze, Aaron Soltz, and Lenin's sister, Maria Ilyinichna Ulyanova.

They authorized the OGPU "to uncover the still undetected members of Ryutin's counterrevolutionary group" and to acquaint "these white guard criminals...with the entire strictness of revolutionary law".

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".

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 hardliners.

[1] 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.

[2] Former United Opposition leaders Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, who had read the Platform, were also expelled from the CPSU in October 1932 and exiled to the Urals region for failure to report the incident to the secret police.

[10] Ryutin was eventually executed on 10 January 1937, during the Great Purge, which also claimed the lives of Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Kosior, Rudzutak, Uglanov, Yenukidze, Rykov and most of the rest of the Old Bolsheviks.