Ryutin affair

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The Ryutin affair was an attempt led by Martemyan Ryutin to remove Joseph Stalin as General Secretary of the All-Union Communist Party (b) (CPSU) in 1932. Ryutin wrote two publications that were highly critical of Stalin, his authoritarianism, and his first five-year plan. Ryutin established a Right Opposition faction within the CPSU known as the Union of Marxist-Leninists which opposed Stalin's rule and Stalinism in favour of a moderate form of Leninism. Ryutin and his supporters were defeated by a hardline Stalinist faction in the Central Control Commission, arrested by the OGPU as counterrevolutionaries, and later executed in the Great Purge. Ryutin's movement was one of the last attempts to oppose Stalin from within the CPSU and marked a general decline of the Right Opposition.

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