280. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 296. Getty and Naumov, Road to Terror, 53. Besides Ryutin, Ivanov, and the two Kayurovs, the attendees were Natalia Kayurova (wife of Vasilii Kayurov), Vasily Demidov, Professor Pavel Fyodorov, Pavel Galkin, Viktor Gorelov, Nikolai Kolokolov, Boris Ptashny, Grigory Rokhkin, Semyon V. Tokarev, Nikolai Vasileyev, Pyotr Zamyatin. The home was Pyotr Silchenko’s. He was absent.
281. Getty and Naumov, Road to Terror, 54–8. In 1932, Stalin learned from Anna Ulyanova, Lenin’s sister, that their mother was the daughter of a baptized Jew, Alexander Blank, born Srul Moissevich Blank, who had become a landowner and physician. Ulyanova stressed how beneficial it would be to reveal Lenin’s one-quarter Jewish ancestry. Stalin made it a state secret. Volkogonov, Lenin, 9. Lenin had Russian, Qalmyk, German, and Swedish along with Jewish ancestry.
282. “Platforma ‘Soiuza Marksistov-Lenintsev’ (‘Gruppa Riutina’): ‘Stalin i krzis proletarskoi diktatury’,” (1990, no. 12), 198–9.
283. “Platforma ‘Soiuza marksistov-lenintsev’ (‘Gruppa Riutina’): ‘Stalin i krzis proletarskoi diktatury’,” (1990, no. 11), 162–3, (no. 12), 190, (no. 8), 201.
284. “Platforma ‘Soiuza Marksistov-Lenintsev’ (‘Gruppa Riutina’): ‘Stalin i krzis proletarskoi diktatury’” (1990, no. 12), 193; Starkov, Martem’ian Riutin, 237–8.
285. Ryutin proposed no alternative leader (he had in mind a collective leadership). Starkov, “Trotsky and Ryutin,” 73. On Oct. 15, 1932, OGPU raided Silchenko’s home, where they found the original 167-page handwritten “Stalin and the Crisis of Proletarian Dictatorship,” which they then typed up, the only extant copy.
286. Notwithstanding Ryutin’s bravery, the only way out was not to seize the party but to dissolve it, deliberately or accidentally, by introducing democracy—competitive elections, secret ballot, alternative parties, private property, market relations. There was no salvation from tyranny in Bolshevism.
287. “O dele tak nazyvaemogo ‘Soiuza Marksistov-Lenintsev,’” 106 (N. K. Kuz’min and N. A. Storozhenko, who claimed to have received the appeal from Alexander Kayurov).
288. Getty and Naumov, Road to Terror, 54. According to a Molotov speech that was published, Zinoviev in testimony had stated “as far as I can judge, recently a fairly significant section of party members have been seized by the idea of a retreat, that it is necessary to retreat somewhere. This conception comes from my impressions, what I read and hear.” Pravda, Jan. 12, 1933.
289. Biulleten’ oppozitsii, 29–30 (Sept. 1932): 1–5. Davies, Crisis and Progress, 298–9.
290. Biulleten’ oppozitsii, 31 (Nov. 1932): 18–20. Trotsky’s prescriptions, dated Oct. 22, 1932, presaged Soviet policy in 1933: lowering capital investment and concentrating resources on bringing existing construction to completion. Davies, Crisis and Progress, 298–9.
291. Trotsky received the letter on Oct. 4, 1932: Trotsky archive, Harvard, T 4782; Davies, Crisis and Progress, 246–7, citing conversations with Pierre Broué, editor of Trotsky’s notebooks in French. In late Sept. 1932, the well-informed Menshevik émigré paper Socialist Herald carried word from Moscow of a “letter of the eighteen Bolsheviks” who united “former right and left oppositionists” around the imperative “to remove Stalin.” Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, Sept. 26, 1932 (report dated Sept. 7). In the Bulletin, Trotsky elaborated: “If the bureaucratic equilibrium in the USSR were to be upset at present, this would almost certainly benefit the forces of counterrevolution.” Deutscher, Prophet Outcast, 175.
292. Davies and Wheatcroft, Years of Hunger, 167–8 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 900, l. 33–4; op. 162, d. 13, l. 99–100); Khaustov et al., Lubianka: Stalin i VChK, 319 (APRF, f. 3, op. 57, d. 60, l. 10), 321–4 (l. 13–9). See also Solomon, Soviet Criminal Justice, 463. Stalin’s first meeting back in Moscow was on Aug. 27, 1932. Na prieme, 70. Insider theft would remain an obsession for Stalin. On Nov. 15, 1932, he sent politburo members the interrogation record of a collective farm bookkeeper, with a cover letter deeming it “one of many documents demonstrating the organized embezzlement of collective farm property.” Khaustov et al., Lubianka: Stalin i VChK, 336–7 (APRF, f. 3, op. 57, d. 60, l. 29–34).
