Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

Martemyan Ryutin, a Moscow party boss, was one of them. Ryutin had been evicted from the party in 1930 for “expounding right-opportunist views,” but unlike Bukharin he had refused to recant. Ryutin was arrested and then released. But he kept in touch with other would-be dissidents, and in the spring of 1932 he invited a dozen of them to help him write a statement of opposition. In August the group met in a Moscow suburb to put the finishing touches to a political platform calling for change, as well as a shorter “Appeal to all Party Members.”10 Both documents were copied and circulated, by hand and by post, in Moscow, Kharkiv and other cities. “Ryutin’s Platform,” as it came to be known, denounced Stalin in no uncertain terms. The authors called him an “unscrupulous political intriguer,” mocked him for his pretensions to be Lenin’s successor, and accused him of having terrorized workers and peasants alike. Above all, Ryutin was angered by Stalin’s attack on the Soviet countryside. The policy of “all-out collectivization,” Ryutin declared, had not been voluntary, as the propaganda claimed, and it was not a success. On the contrary: It is founded on direct and indirect forms of the most severe coercion, designed to force the peasants to join the collective farms. It is founded not on an improvement in their condition, but on their direct and indirect expropriation and massive impoverishment…outcries directed by Stalin at the kulaks at the present time are only a method of te...