Stalin’s Consolidation of Power: the Ryutin Affair, ‘the original conspiracy’

By 1929 Stalin had seen off his rivals from both the Left and the Right of the Party. He was the leading member of Sovnarkom, the Central Committee, the Politburo and Ogburo, and as General Secretary, headed the Party’s Secretariat. But it wasn’t enough, he wanted to command the Party, dominate it. He wanted to command and direct the Revolution too.

Yet Stalin wasn’t in full control. The process of collectivisation had led to so many riots and demonstrations from peasants that Stalin was obliged to announce a pause, blaming activists in the countryside for being ‘dizzy with success’. His rivals were still around too, the Sixteenth Party Congress meeting June-July, 1930, had re-elected Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky to the Central Committee, and even Trotsky could plausibly still be a threat. Collectivisation and rapid industrialisation had faced criticism at the Sixteenth Party Congress, and there were expulsions from the Central Committee in December, 1930, after criticisms had been made concerning the excesses that had been committed in the process of collectivisation. Workers in the cities were also disgruntled with the long hours, poor conditions, low wages and lack of goods. There was anger at the high handedness of the GPU, the secret police, too.

In June, 1932, with massive famine (between 4-5 million deaths) now a consequence of collectivisation and the backlash from the peasantry, Stalin faced a head-on challenge to his authority when Ryutin, on the Right of the Party, wrote an “Appeal” to all members of the Party and a two-hundred page document, ‘Stalin and the Crisis of the Proletarian Revolution’. It was revised by some ten-to-twelve other prominent communists before being circulated amongst fellow-communists that were thought would be sympathetic (including Kamenev and Zinoviev). Whilst the “Appeal” called for Stalin’s removal by force, the document called for the end of forced collectivisation and reduced investment in industry, as well as the rehabilitation of the defeated United Opposition (including Trotsky). Picking up the baton from Lenin’s Testament, it described Stalin as ‘the evil genius of the Russian Revolution, who, motivated by a personal desire for power and revenge, has brought the revolution to the verge of ruin’¹ It was a damming criticism of Stalin, his policies and the manner in which they were being executed (no pun intended), as well as his pursuit of dictatorial power which had been allowed to get out of control. It pictured him as ‘the evil genius of the Revolution.’ This was the ‘Ryutin Affair’, and its implications were to drag on throughout Stalin’s purges, consistently cited as ‘the original conspiracy’.

In 1932 though, it was a serious indication of the extent of opposition to Stalin. Senior members of the Party began to discuss moderating and slowing down the pace of both collectivisation and industrialisation. The GPU claimed that Ryutin had a group of supporters (a faction) and they were trying to stir up trouble among students and workers, and in Komsomol, the youth movement, too. They recommended the death penalty and when Ryutin, Kamenev Zinoviev, and seventeen others were put on trial (clearly it was enough for Kamenev and Zinoviev to have read Ryutin’s pieces to be guilty), Stalin backed the GPUs recommendation. However, a majority in the Politburo, it is thought led by Kirov, voted against it, and Ryutin got ten years in the Gulag for his pains (he in fact wouldn’t serve the full sentence – he was executed at the beginning of 1937 as the Great Purge raged). The others were expelled from the Party. But clearly, in 1932, Stalin did not yet have the complete control he so desired, and the orchestrated actions he took to secure his grip on power show that he felt so too.

This would only cause him later to push harder for total control and in the next two years nearly one million people were expelled from the Party for being ‘Ryutinites’. This meant that they were denied voting rights and also the privileges that went with Party membership: preferential treatment with regard to employment, housing and food rations. Others went missing (most probably executed), again for being ‘Ryutinites’. Dedicated members of the ‘Old Guard’ weren’t safe either – all eventually confessing to ‘crimes against the state’ after unlimited torture and public humiliation.

The Ryutin Affair is significant for three reasons: It was the last real conspiracy to overthrow Stalin, It was also the beginning of Stalin’s repression of all opposition, real or imagined. And it served to show that in 1932 Stalin was right to feel worried that he hadn’t yet got full control of “his” party.

1 Quoted in Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives, p. 320 + Geoffrey Hosking, A History of the Soviet Union, p. 184