The Ryutin Platform: Stalin and the Crisis of Proletarian Dictatorship: Platform of the Union of Marxists-Leninists

This is the first English translation of a historic document, secretly prepared in 1932 by M.N. Ryutin (1890-1937), a veteran Bolshevik, and his colleagues, under the aegis of the Union of Marxists-Leninists, an “Organization for the Defence of Marxism-Leninism.”  The document, which is a devastating critique of the Stalinist model of Soviet socialism and highlights the importance of restoration of Leninist norms in Soviet political life, is believed to have been clandestinely circulated inside the Bolshevik Party as an alternative understanding of the problems of socialism in the USSR.  With the arrest and subsequent execution of Ryutin in 1937, the document went into oblivion, as it was confiscated by the Soviet authorities.  After lying hidden in the Soviet archives for decades it was in 1990 that the full text of this document was published for the first time in Izvestiya TsK KPSS (Nos. 8-12) under the authority of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.