Polish spies were infiltrating the USSR, and being caught.270 At the same time, the Polish government had just signed the three-year bilateral nonaggression pact with Stalin, easing the pressure.271 Perhaps he was using the threat to sustain Kaganovich’s severity or just could not let go of his fixation on an imperialist intervention provoked by internal difficulties. In the same note, Stalin informed Kaganovich that he had decided to appoint Balytsky as OGPU plenipotentiary in Ukraine and had already spoken with Mężyński. On the sacking of Kosior and Chubar, however, the crafty Kaganovich pushed back, ever so gently—“It is harder for me to judge than you”—and Stalin relented.272 Belatedly, the dictator also accepted land commissar Yakovlev’s critique of excessive expansion of sown area, which disrupted crop rotation, and he reluctantly allowed a slowing to enable crop rotation to be reintroduced.273 But when, on August 20, 1932, Boris Sheboldayev, party boss in the North Caucasus, telegrammed to report that the harvest had turned out even lower, and farmers were in revolt, Stalin answered, with a copy to Kaganovich: “Either the local party committee is being diplomatic toward the population or it is leading the Central Committee by the nose.”274
Nadya had again accompanied him to Sochi, with the children, Vasily (then ten) and Svetlana (five), but she again returned to Moscow before he did. “We have built a marvelous little house,” Stalin wrote of a new Sochi dacha, to the man in Moscow responsible for such properties down south, Yenukidze, just as his holiday was coming to a close.275
“GRAVEDIGGER OF THE REVOLUTION AND OF RUSSIA”
Stalin had made the USSR more vulnerable to its enemies, especially Japan. Collectivization-dekulakization was his policy, which all party officials knew, having been bombarded by extremist directives in his name. They also knew that the right deviation had predicted calamity. Individual efforts to get Stalin to ease up provoked his rage. Officials’ ability to act collectively was limited to Central Committee plenums, but those took place under the watchful eye of his hard-line loyalists, the secret police, and the stool pigeons who chauffeured vehicles and staffed hotels. Conspiratorially, late one night in August 1932, a few veterans of the revolution and the civil war gathered in a private apartment near Moscow’s Belorussia train station that belonged to Martemyan Ryutin (b. 1890), an editor at Red Star, the army newspaper, to discuss the crisis.276 Stalin had promoted the peasant-born Siberian to candidate membership in the Central Committee—the top elite (then 121 people)—but then in 1928 had sacked him for a “conciliatory attitude toward the right opposition.” Not long thereafter, he had Ryutin expelled from the party.277 Now, Ryutin and the party members Vasily Kayurov, a department chief in the state archives, Mikhail Ivanov, an employee of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) workers’ and peasants’ inspectorate, and Kayurov’s son Alexander, a senior inspector in the USSR supply commissariat, had channeled their worries into a seven-page “Appeal to All Members of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks),” which labeled Stalin an “unprincipled intriguer,” “a sophist, a political trickster, and actor,” “theoretically worthless,” “a dictator” like “Mussolini, Napoleon, Piłsudski, Horthy, Primo de Rivera, Chiang Kai-shek,” and “the gravedigger of the revolution in Russia.”278
“Gravedigger” was the epithet that Trotsky had once hurled at Stalin. Ryutin, infamously, had been a Trotsky scourge.279
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