Moscow and Petrograd soviets and participated in the October revolution. He became commissar for internal affairs in the first Bolshevik government, but resigned because of his support for a coalition government. In April 1918, however, he accepted the post of chairperson of the Supreme Council of the National Economy, and in February 1921 he became deputy chairman of Sovnarkom. After Lenin’s death in January 1924 he became chairman. He was also a member of the Politburo from 1922 until 1930.
Rykov was a leading supporter of the New Economic Policy, and allied with Stalin in his struggle with Leon Davidovich Trotsky, Grigory Yevseye-vich Zinoviev, and Lev Borisovich Kamenev, which lasted from 1926 to 1928. When Stalin lashed out against the Right Opposition, of which Rykov was one of the leaders, he was defeated, discredited, and ultimately dismissed from his senior positions by 1930. Rykov was arrested in February 1937. With Nikolai Alexandrovich Bukharin and Genrikh Grig-orevich Yagoda, Rykov was one of the leading defendants at the third show trial, and was executed in March 1938. See also: BOLSHEVISM; FEBRUARY REVOLUTION; MENSHE- VIKS; NEW ECONOMIC POLICY; OCTOBER REVOLUTION; POLITBURO; RIGHT OPPOSITION; SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC WORKERS PARTY; SOVNARKOM
DEREK WATSON
(1881-1938), Russian revolutionary and Soviet politician, one of the leaders of the Right opposition.
Born in Saratov province, the son of a tradesman, Alexei Rykov joined the Social Democratic Party in 1898 and supported the Bolsheviks after their split with the Mensheviks. He played an active part in the 1905 revolution. In 1907, however, he began to work for reconciliation between the two wings of the party. In exile in Paris for two years, he returned to Russia in 1911 but was soon arrested and exiled to Siberia.
Returning to Moscow after the revolution of February 1917, Rykov became a member of the
(1795-1826), a poet who played a leading role in organizing the mutiny of the military units in St. Petersburg that occurred on December 14, 1825 (the so-called Decembrist Uprising).
Born into the family of an army officer, Kon-draty Fyodorovich Ryleyev also became an officer and served in units stationed in West Europe after the defeat of Napoleon’s armies. He saw the general backwardness of Russian society sharply contrasted with the capitalist countries of Western Europe. Upon returning to St. Petersburg, Ryleyev became active in a variety of social and political circles. In 1823 he joined the secret Northern Society. Situated in St. Petersburg and headed by Nikita Muraviev and Sergei Trubetskoi, it consisted of moderate reformists who leaned toward establishment of a constitutional monarchy, modeled after
1339
the English version. By contrast, the Southern Society, created by Pavel Pestel in Tulchin, gathered together more radical members of the movement, and demanded complete eradication of the extant tsarist autocracy and the establishment of a democratic republic based upon on universal suffrage.
With the exception of his earliest works, Ryleyev’s poems are romantic in style. Their themes reflect patriotic sentiments and concern with the course of Russian history. His verses ushered in ideas about the duty to sacrifice one’s artistic calling in service to the downtrodden masses well before Nikolay Nekrasov preached them in his own poetry. Tragically, Ryleyev was not able fully to develop his poetic talents, and his celebrity is mainly due to the martyrdom he underwent in the cause of freedom. He was one of the five rebels who were executed, along with Pestel, Kakhovskoi, Mu-raviev-Apostol, and Bestuzhev-Riumin, for their roles in the Decembrist Uprising. His sarcastic wit has also become legend. Apparently, just as Ryleyev was about to be hanged, the rope broke and he fell to the ground. Bruised and battered, he got up, and said, “In Russia they do not know how to do anything properly, not even how to make a rope.” An accident of this sort usually resulted in a pardon, so a messenger was sent to Tsar Nicholas to know his pleasure. The tsar asked, “What did he say?” “Sire, he said that in Russia they do not even know how to make a rope properly.” “Well, let the contrary be proved,” said Nicholas. See also: DECEMBRIST MOVEMENT AND REBELLION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Obolonskii, A. V., and Ostrom, Vincent. (2003). The Drama of Russian Political History: System Against Individuality. College Station: Texas A amp;M University Press.
(1890-1937), leader of an anti-Stalin opposition group that emerged within the Russian Communist Party in the 1930s.
Martemyan Ryutin was born on February 26, 1890, the son of a Siberian peasant from the Irkutsk province. He joined the Bolshevik party in 1914. During the civil war, he fought against Alexander Vasilievich Kolchak’s forces in Siberia, and in the early 1920s he held party posts in Irkutsk and Dagestan. In 1925, Ryutin became party secretary in the Krasnaya Presnia district of Moscow, and in 1927 he was elected a non-voting member of the party Central Committee. In the following year he incurred Stalin’s wrath for his conciliatory attitude towards Bukharin and his followers.
Experience of the collectivization drive convinced Ryutin of the ruinous nature of Stalin’s economic policies, and the criticisms he voiced led, at the end of 1930, to his expulsion from the party and a brief spell of imprisonment. In 1932, Ryutin and some associates circulated a manifesto, “To All Members of the Russian Communist Party,” which condemned the Stalin regime and demanded Stalin’s removal from power. Ryutin also composed a more detailed analysis of Stalin’s dictatorship and economic policies in the essay “Stalin and the Crisis of the Proletarian Dictatorship” (first published in 1990). He was arrested, along with his group, in September 1932. Although Stalin wanted the death penalty, the Politburo, at the insistance of Sergei Mironovich Kirov, rejected the demand, and Ryutin was sentenced to ten years imprisonment. Ryutin, however, was re-arrested in 1936 on a trumped-up charge of terrorism, and was executed on January 10, 1937. See also: KIROV, SERGEI MIRONOVICH; KOLCHAK, ALEXANDER VASILIEVICH; PURGES, THE GREAT; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Conquest, Robert. (1990). The Great Terror: A Reassessment. New York: Oxford University Press. Getty, J. Arch, and Naumov, Oleg V. (1999). The Road to Terror : Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932- 1939: Annals of Communism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Medvedev, Roy Aleksandrovich, and Shriver, George. (1989). Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism. New York: Columbia University Press. Tucker, Robert C. (1990). Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928-1941. New York: Norton.
(b. 1929), USSR prime minister under Gorbachev and a leading figure in economic reform.
1340
Born in Donetsk Oblast, Nikolai Ryzhkov joined the Party in 1956 and graduated from the Ural Polytechnical Institute in Sverdlovsk in 1959. He spent his early career as an engineer at the Or-dzhonikidze Heavy Machine- Building Institute and was named director in 1970. Following his successes in the Urals, Ryzhkov became involved in all-union economic matters.
Ryzhkov served as a deputy in the USSR Council of the Union (1974-1979) and a deputy in the USSR Council of Nationalities (1974-1984). Ryzhkov was first deputy chair of the USSR Ministry of Heavy and Transport Machine- Building (1975-1979) and later first deputy chair of the USSR State Planning Commission (Gosplan) (1979-1982). He became a full member of the CPSU Central Committee in 1981, chairing the Diplomatic Department (1982-1985) and later the USSR Council of Ministers (September 1985-December 1990), making him the de facto Soviet prime minister. Ryzhkov was the chief administrator of the Soviet economy in the last half of the 1980s. He became a full Politburo member in April 1985 and chaired the Central Committee Commission that assisted victims of the 1988 Armenian earthquake. As the economy stalled, protests grew, and the Kremlin debated the Five-Hundred-Day Plan, Ryzh-kov suffered a heart attack on December 25, 1990. He subsequently resigned, and Gorbachev replaced him
