Home > Alexei Ivanovich Rykov

Born to a peasant family, Rykov joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1900 and supported the Bolshevik faction when it split with the Mensheviks in 1903. As a Bolshevik, Rykov was active in the 1905 Revolution.

He broke with Bolsheviks in 1910 over the faction's rejection of a proposal to reunite the RDSPL but remained active in the Moscow Soviet and called for the creation of a left wing coaltion.

In September 1917, Rykov joined the Petrograd Soviet and the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks. In October he was appointed to the Military Revolutionary Committee that planned the October Revolution.

In the new Boshevik government he became People's Commissar of the Interior until 1918 but broke with the Bolsheviks when the call for a coalition government was rejected. He soon returned took on economic portfolios. He also served on the Revolutionary Military Council during the Russian Civil War. He succeeded Lenin as premier in 1924 and supported Stalin and Bukharin against Leon TrotskyLeon Davidovich Trotsky ( Russian: ; also transliterated Trotskii Trotski Trotzky ( October 26 ( O. November 7 ( N. 1879 August 21, 1940), born Lev Davidovich Bronstein , was a Bolshevik revolutionary and Marxist intellectual. He was an influential politi. Rykov was on the "right" of the party and a supporter of the New Economic PolicyThe New Economic Policy or NEP was a system of economic reforms, partly market-oriented, that Vladimir Lenin instituted in the Soviet Union in 1921. The emergency policy of War communism, intoduced during the Russian Civil War, was terminated, and the NEP. When Stalin broke with Bukharin and the right Rykov was removed from his positions.

He fell into obsurity until 1938 when, as part of the Great PurgeThe Great Purge is the name given to the campaigns of repression in the Soviet Union during the late 1930s which included a purge of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The purge was motivated by the desire on the part of the leadership to remove dis he was put on trial with Bukharin, Yagoda , Rakovsky and Krestinsky for allegedly plotting with Trotsky against Stalin. He was found guilty in a show trialThe Moscow Trials were a series of trials of political opponents of Joseph Stalin during the Great Purge. They are widely considered to have been show trials in which the verdicts were predetermined. The defendants were accused of conspiring with the west and executed on March 15, 1938.