Alexander Slepkov
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Alexander Nikolaevich Slepkov (Russian: Александр Николаевич Слепков; 20 August 1899 – 26 May 1937) was a Soviet journalist, historian and Communist Party functionary, executed for his opposition to the forced collectivization of agriculture.
Alexander Slepkov was born in Ryazan province, in Russia, one of six children. His father, Nikolai, was a peasant's son, who completed high school and became a teacher, and later a beekeeper.[1] In his teens, he may have been a supporter of the Kadets, a liberal pro-monarchist party,[2] before he, and his father, joined the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in the town of Ludza, in Latvia, where Nikolai was elected the town's first Commissar for Education, and Alexander was elected the first Commissar for Justice.[1] When the German army occupied Latvia, both were arrested and sentenced to death, but they were released by local population when the Germans withdrew.[1]
Alexander Slepkov graduated from Sverdlov University in 1921, and from the Institute of Red Professors in 1924. While at the Institute, he became a leading member of the 'Bukharin School' - a group of young party intellectuals who looked to Nikolai Bukharin, rather than Joseph Stalin, as their mentor.[2] In September 1924 he was appointed an editor of the authoritative journal Bolshevik, and later also an editor of Pravda. He was also recruited by Bukharin to work for the political secretariat of Comintern. In 1925-28, he was chief editor of Komsomolskaya Pravda. A prolific writer, he wrote numerous pieces attacking the Left Opposition, led by Leon Trotsky, but from about May 1928, he followed Bukharin in opposing the methods used to force peasants to hand over grain to the state, and the drive towards rapid industrialisation. In June, he was embroiled in a public argument over an article published in Bolshevik with Stalin's right hand man, Vyacheslav Molotov, who accused Slepkov of lying.[3] In June 1928, Bukharin sent him to Leningrad to help organise the opposition there.[4]
In August or September 1928, he was dismissed from the staff of Pravda and Bolshevik[5] and posted to Samara, as head of Agitprop for the Central Volga regional communist party. In 1932, he was transferred to an academic post in Rostov-on-Don.[6]
The Ryutin affair
Around 1932, Slepkov and Martemyan Ryutin formed a conspiratorial group who called themselves the 'Union of Marxist-Leninists', but was known in the Stalinist press as the 'Ryutin-Slepkov Group',[7] who distributed an almost book-length manifesto, written by Ryutin, attacking Stalin over the brutal treatment of the USSR's rural population. After the group was betrayed to the OGPU, Slepkov was arrested on 26 September, and sentenced to three years exile in Tara, in Siberia.[8] He was arrested again in April 1933, accused of being leader of the "anti-party counter-revolutionary group of the right-wing Slepkov and others". On 16 April, he was sentenced to five years in prison, which he served in Verkhneuralsk, in Chelyabinsk region.[9] Thirty three members of this supposed organisation were sentenced to prison terms on the same day.[10]
Death
Slepkov was brought back to Moscow for interrogation after the assassination of Sergei Kirov in December 1936. On 15 May 1937, his name was included on a death list signed by Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich and Yezhov.[11] He was executed after a closed trial on 26 May 1937.[12] His name was mentioned repeatedly during the last of the Moscow Show Trials, in March 1938, at which Bukharin, the main defendant, 'confessed' that he had dispatched Slepkov to the Kuban in 1932 "to prepare a kulak revolt.".[13]
Bukharin's widow said, in her memoirs, that she was "surprised by Bukharin's forced admission that he had sent his former protégé Alexandr Slepkov to the North Caucasus to organise a kulak uprising there. On the contrary, I knew very well that Nikolai Ivanovich's protégés, Slepkov among them, had been sent by Stalin to the provinces in order to isolate him, which made him very sad."[14] Slepkov was rehabilitated in June 1988.[15] His party membership was posthumously restored in 1989.
