The Great Terror

In June 1932, Ryutin and a group of minor officials wrote an “Appeal to All Members of the All-Union Communist Party (bolshevik)” in the name of an “All Union Conference of the Union of Marxist-Leninists.” This much shorter document has lately been printed in Moscow, where Ryutin is now regarded as a model figure in the struggle against Stalinism. It speaks even more urgently of the destruction of the countryside, the collapse of genuine planning, the imposition of lawlessness and terror on Party and country alike under “dishonest, cunning, unprincipled people ready on the leadership’s orders to change their opinions ten times, careerists, flatterers and lackeys.” The arts had been crushed, the press reduced “in the hands of Stalin and his clique to a monstrous factory of lies.” Above all, it stated, “Stalin and his clique will not and cannot voluntarily give up their positions, so they must be removed by force.” It added that this should be done “as soon as possible.”⁸

The Appeal was first shown to Slepkov and the rest of the former “young Bukharinite” group, one of whom, Yan Sten, showed it to Zinoviev and Kamenev. And other ex-oppositionists like Ter-Vaganyan, Mrachkovsky, and Uglanov also saw it.

Stalin interpreted the Appeal as a call for his assassination. In the BukharinRykov Trial in 1938, it was to be spoken of at length as “registering the transition to the tactics of overthrowing the Soviet power by force; the essential points of the Ryutin platform were a palace coup, terrorism….”⁹ We may take it that such a remark, put into the mouth of the accused by the authorities, shows Stalin’s attitudes to the Ryutin case—that he regarded it as the occasion for starting to accuse the opposition of capital crimes.

On 23 September 1932, Ryutin was again expelled from the Party and arrested. Stalin seems to have hoped that the OGPU might shoot Ryutin without involving the political authorities. But it referred the question to the Politburo. There Kirov is said to have spoken “with particular force against recourse to the death penalty. Moreover, he succeeded in winning over the Politburo in this view.”¹⁰ Another account says that in addition to Kirov, Ordzhonikidze, Kuibyshev, Kossior, Kalinin, and Rudzutak spoke against Stalin, who was only supported by Kaganovich. Even Molotov and Andreyev seem to have wavered.¹¹

Such a division of views was first officially confirmed (in connection with a lesser figure who happened to have been rehabilitated) by a Soviet article of the IChrushchev period. It represents Stalin attempting at this time to purge the Armenian Communist Nazaretyan, but being unable to do so because Ordzhonikidze defended him and Stalin knew that “Kirov and Kuibyshev would also speak out in the Politburo on the same lines.”¹² For the first time, in fact, Stalin was faced with powerful opposition from his own allies.

Like so much of the history of the period, this definite identification of a bloc of “moderate” Stalinists thwarting the leader’s will was thus first reported by credible and respectable unofficial sources as long ago as the late 1930s, was substantially confirmed in the 1960s, and was rejected by some Western writers on the subject until the late 1980s! It has now been clearly and fully stated in the Soviet press of the glasnost period.¹³

Ryutin’s would have been the first such execution within the ranks of the old Party.fn1 It was particularly unacceptable, in any case, to start applying such measures (even though the OGPU is said to have already concocted a story about a plot at the Military Academy to go with the Platform).¹⁴ The old Party loyalty, whatever its bad side, not merely had involved the submission of intra-Party oppositions to the will of the majority, but also had defended at least the skins of the oppressed Party minorities. Lenin could work amicably with Zinoviev and Kamenev, although he had for a time denounced them as traitors when they attacked the plan for the armed uprising in October 1917. Bukharin could later admit his talk in 1918 of arresting Lenin and changing the Government, without thereby forfeiting Party esteem. Now it emerged that Stalin’s new Stalinist Politburo would not automatically accept his decisions when they contradicated such deep-set Party traditions.

It is certain that the defeat rankled. In each of the Great Trials of 1936, 1937, and 1938, the accused confessed to complicity in the Ryutin plot, which marked, they said, the first coming together of all the oppositions on a terrorist basis. It was precisely four years after the exposure of Ryutin that Stalin significantly remarked that “the OGPU is four years behind” in unmasking Trotskyites. The four years from September 1932 to September 1936 were, in fact, for him a period in which he set himself the task of breaking resistance to the physical destruction of his Party enemies.