Martemyan Ryutin

Martemyan Nikitich Ryutin (Russian: Мартемья́н Ники́тич Рю́тин) (1890–1937) was a Russian Marxist revolutionary, and a political functionary of the Russian Communist Party. Ryutin is best remembered as the leader of a pro-peasant political faction organized against Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in the early 1930s and as the primary author of a 200-page oppositional platform. Ryutin was arrested by the Soviet secret police, along with his co-thinkers, in what has come to be known as the Ryutin Affair. He was executed in January 1937 as part of the Yezhovshchina (Great Purge) conducted against political oppositionists and suspected economic "wreckers" and spies.

During the final years of the Soviet Union, Ryutin was politically rehabilitated, and his lengthy critique of Stalin and his policies was published for the first time. The document saw its first edition in English translation in 2010.

Martemyan Nikitich Ryutin was born on February 13 [O.S. February 1] 1890 to a poor peasant family in Verkhne-Ryutino, a village in Irkutsk oblast in Siberia, then part of the Russian empire. He was descended from Estonian rebels exiled to Siberia early in the 19th century. He graduated from the Irkutsk Teachers' Seminary, and worked as a teacher and journalist.

Politically radical from his early years, Ryutin joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) in 1914.

Ryutin was a participant in both the February Revolution which overthrew Tsar Nikolai II in 1917 and the Bolshevik Revolution in November of that same year. In 1917 he headed the local soviet in Harbin, a city which is today part of China.

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