'The countryside is against us': the deputy finance commissar who said it to the Politburo
'The countryside, except for a small section of the poor peasants, is against us.' One sentence from Deputy Finance Commissar Frumkin's letter to the Politburo, 15 June 1928. It became the starting pistol for the crackdown on the Right Opposition.
An Old Bolshevik who joined the Bund in 1898 before entering the RSDLP, Frumkin served in the Food Commissariat during the Civil War and as deputy commissar for foreign trade and finance under NEP. In June 1928, at the height of the grain-procurement crisis, he sent a letter to the Politburo declaring that 'the countryside, except for a small section of the poor peasants, is against us': a direct indictment of Stalin's forced-requisition policy and its destruction of the smychka, the worker-peasant alliance. That single letter made him the first man formally accused of the 'Right Deviation,' the opening salvo of Stalin's liquidation of the NEP coalition. Arrested in October 1937, he was shot in July 1938 and rehabilitated in 1956.
Career Timeline
- 1898Joins the Bund, then the RSDLP
- 1909–1911Chairman, Central Bureau of Trade Unions, Moscow
- 1911–1917Exiled to Yenisei Governorate
- 1918–1922Collegium member, then Deputy Commissar of Food
- 1922–1928Deputy Commissar of Foreign Trade
- 1928–1929Deputy Commissar of Finance
- 1928–1930Identified as 'Right Deviation'; first official target of the anti-Right campaign
- 1932–1935Deputy Commissar of Foreign Trade (reinstated)
- 1935–1937Manager, Soyuzplastmass Trust, Moscow