 Ryutin was a supporter of the moderate agrarian policies of the New Economic Policy and held views closely associated with such "moderate" party leaders as Nikolai Bukharin, Nikolai Uglanov, and Alexei Rykov.With a new wave of grain procurement difficulties emerging in the fall of 1928, the Communist Party, headed by Joseph Stalin, took a radical turn towards forcing the sales of grain at below-market prices by the peasantry.This action drew the opposition of moderate Bolsheviks like Bukharin and Ryutin, who opposed the use of force and coercion against the peasantry as the manifestation of the failed agrarian policies of War Communism.