Overview for 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.
Pranab Ghosh (Translator)
Pranab Ghosh, a distinguished man of letters, was an acclaimed specialist in translation of Russian historical texts. Susmita Bhattacharya, Research Fellow, Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies (Government of India), is a professional translator of documents and materials in Russian.
Susmita Bhattacharya (Translator)
Susmita Bhattaharya is a Research Fellow in the Russian Language Programme of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies, Kolkata.
Sobhanlal Datta Gupta (Editor)
Sobhanlal Datta Gupta, formerly Surendra Nath Banerjee Professor of Political Science, University of Calcutta, is the author of, among others, Comintern and the Destiny of Communism in India 1919-1943: Dialectics of Real and a Possible History (Kolkata: Seribaan, 2006). His forthcoming title The Socialist Vision and the Silenced Voices of Democracy: New Perspectives on Rosa Luxemburg, Nikolai Bukharin and Georg Lukacs (Kolkata: Seribaan), is expected to be published shortly.
Bagchee
