Alexander Gavrilovich Shliapnikov (; August 30, 1885 – September 2, 1937) was a Russian
communist
Communism () is a sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology within the socialist movement, whose goal is the creation of a communist society, a socioeconomic order centered on common ownership of the means of production, di ...
revolutionary, metalworker, and trade union leader. He is best remembered as a memoirist of the
October Revolution
The October Revolution, also known as the Great October Socialist Revolution (in Historiography in the Soviet Union, Soviet historiography), October coup, Bolshevik coup, or Bolshevik revolution, was the second of Russian Revolution, two r ...
of 1917 and as the leader of the
Workers' Opposition, one of the primary opposition movements inside the
Russian Communist Party during the 1920s.
Biography
Early years
Alexander Shliapnikov was born August 30, 1885, in
Murom
Murom (, ) is a historical types of inhabited localities in Russia, city in Vladimir Oblast, Russia, which sprawls along the west bank of the Oka River. It borders Nizhny Novgorod Oblast and is situated from the administrative center Vladimir, ...
,
Russian Empire
The Russian Empire was an empire that spanned most of northern Eurasia from its establishment in November 1721 until the proclamation of the Russian Republic in September 1917. At its height in the late 19th century, it covered about , roughl ...
to a poor family of
Russian
Russian(s) may refer to:
*Russians (), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries
*A citizen of Russia
*Russian language, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages
*''The Russians'', a b ...
ethnicity and of the
Old Believer religion. His father died when he was a small child. In 1898, at the age of 13, Shliapnikov began factory work at the Kondratov factory in
Vacha, and one year later began working in
Sormovo factories in
Nizhny Novgorod
Nizhny Novgorod ( ; rus, links=no, Нижний Новгород, a=Ru-Nizhny Novgorod.ogg, p=ˈnʲiʐnʲɪj ˈnovɡərət, t=Lower Newtown; colloquially shortened to Nizhny) is a city and the administrative centre of Nizhny Novgorod Oblast an ...
, where he had his first encounter with Marxist literature. At the invitation of his older brother Peter, Shliapnikov moved to
St. Petersburg in late 1900, beginning work alongside his brother at the Semyannikov (also known as Nevsky) factory, and rapidly became involved in labor unrest there. By age fifteen, Shliapnikov had been blacklisted and could no longer find work at the major factories in St. Petersburg, and was forced to return to Sormovo, where he once again found himself unemployable due to his suspected radicalism. While in Sormovo, he was entrusted with illegal literature to distribute back in Murom, which he later designated as his initiation into the
Russian Social Democratic Labour Party
The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), also known as the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party (RSDWP) or the Russian Social Democratic Party (RSDP), was a socialist political party founded in 1898 in Minsk, Russian Empire. The ...
.
Pre-Revolution Activities
1905 and Emigration from Russia
According to Shliapnikov himself, he joined the
Bolsheviks
The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, were a radical Faction (political), faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) which split with the Mensheviks at the 2nd Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, ...
in 1903, the year of their split with the
Mensheviks
The Mensheviks ('the Minority') were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) which split with Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903. Mensheviks held more moderate and reformist ...
.
He continued to work as a factory worker in
Murom
Murom (, ) is a historical types of inhabited localities in Russia, city in Vladimir Oblast, Russia, which sprawls along the west bank of the Oka River. It borders Nizhny Novgorod Oblast and is situated from the administrative center Vladimir, ...
even as he deepened his involvement in political activism, and in 1904 he was arrested for distribution of illegal literature. Shliapnikov managed to convince the prosecutor that he had been entrapped by police provocateurs, and thus won his freedom, but also attracted the attention of the local Black Hundreds, who brutally assaulted him on his way home. Undeterred, Shliapnikov continued his revolutionary activities, and during the
1905 revolution
The Russian Revolution of 1905, also known as the First Russian Revolution, was a revolution in the Russian Empire which began on 22 January 1905 and led to the establishment of a constitutional monarchy under the Russian Constitution of 1906, t ...
, he led an armed demonstration of workers in Murom, helping to take the local police chief hostage and force the police to retreat, resulting in another arrest. Even after being freed by the general amnesty issued in October, his continued militancy and intransigence saw him jailed for a third time, in a prison stint which would last until January 1907. Almost immediately after his release, Shliapnikov was drafted into the army, and after refusing to take an oath of loyalty to the Tsar, the police once again arrested him. Freed on bail, he vanished into the underground, finding work in the Electrical Station of 1886 in
St. Petersburg, where he met fellow metalworker
Sergei Medvedev, establishing what would become a decades long friendship. Later in 1907, the now 22-year-old Shliapnikov became a member of the Petersburg Committee of the RSDRP(b), and due to his growing prominence, at the end of 1907 his friends advised him to emigrate from Russia. Entrusted with letters for Bolshevik leader
Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov ( 187021 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician and political theorist. He was the first head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 until Death and state funeral of ...
, he left Russia in January 1908, and after arriving in Switzerland, where he had a brief meeting with Lenin, continued onward to Paris, and within two months Shliapnikov found work in an automobile factory in the suburb of
Asnières.
In Exile
Shliapnikov acclimated well to life in Paris, improving his French language skills, giving speeches, writing articles, and participating in both Russian émigré politics and French trade unionism, all while continuing to work as a metalworker. He joined a regional committee of the
SFIO
The C programming language provides many standard library functions for file input and output. These functions make up the bulk of the C standard library header . The functionality descends from a "portable I/O package" written by Mike Lesk at ...
and became a leader in the Parisian Mechanics’ Trade Union, putting him into contact with a diverse collection of French, German, Swedish, and Norwegian metalworkers and trade unionists. Shliapnikov also became romantically involved with
Alexandra Kollontai in 1911, who at that time was still a
Menshevik
The Mensheviks ('the Minority') were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) which split with Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903. Mensheviks held more moderate and reformist ...
, and with her travelled to Germany in January 1912, but he did not adjust well to life there, and within a few months returned to France, although he continued to visit Kollontai in Germany. During this time period, Shliapnikov began to write more frequently, and became involved in French trade union debates, arguing against both "non-political" unionists, whose efforts he perceived as only weakening unions, and anarcho-syndicalists, who he accused of condescension towards the masses and an unwillingness to draw them into revolutionary work.
World War I
By the spring of 1914, Shliapnikov found himself unable to obtain industrial work, and as such resolved to return to Russia, which he did in April 1914, and due to his distrust of police informant
Roman Malinovsky and habit of avoiding group meetings, managed to evade the wave of arrests which befell so many Bolsheviks in the summer of 1914. Refusing a position in the central Bolshevik party organization, he found employment as a metalworker, pretending to be a French worker to evade the authorities, while continuing to participate in the Bolshevik underground. The outbreak of
World War I
World War I or the First World War (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918), also known as the Great War, was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War I, Allies (or Entente) and the Central Powers. Fighting to ...
forced Shliapnikov to leave Russia, as the French government recalled its citizens and thereby destroyed his cover, and in September 1914, the Petersburg Committee sent him to Scandinavia. Due to the outbreak of war, Sweden, which had remained neutral, became one of the only routes by which Bolshevik emigres could communicate with Russian Bolsheviks, but despite successfully organizing a route into Russia using Swedish transport workers, Shliapnikov found himself unable to obtain either industrial work in Sweden or funding from Russian party organizations. Forced to take out loans from Swedish socialists, he sent several packages of material to Russia, proposing potential smuggling routes, but received no response, and his smuggling network lost too many links to continue operating. Kollontai, who was also living in Sweden, assisted him in these ventures, but was arrested for her anti-war activities and deported to Copenhagen, and Swedish socialists encouraged Shliapnikov to leave voluntarily so he could re-enter the country at a later date. Traveling to London in April 1915, he almost immediately found work as a turner at the Fiat automobile plant in
Wembley
Wembley () is a large suburbIn British English, "suburb" often refers to the secondary urban centres of a city. Wembley is not a suburb in the American sense, i.e. a single-family residential area outside of the city itself. in the London Borou ...
, and while there joined the
Amalgamated Society of Engineers and participated in their activities.
By August 1915, Shliapnikov had collected enough money to re-establish the Bolshevik smuggling network in Scandinavia, but he quickly became convinced that he needed to return to Russia to set up operations from that end, and left Scandinavian operations in the hands of
Nikolai Bukharin
Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin (; rus, Николай Иванович Бухарин, p=nʲɪkɐˈlaj ɪˈvanəvʲɪdʑ bʊˈxarʲɪn; – 15 March 1938) was a Russian revolutionary, Soviet politician, and Marxist theorist. A prominent Bolshevik ...
,
Yevgenia Bosch, and
Georgy Pyatakov. According to instructions from Lenin and
Grigory Zinoviev
Grigory Yevseyevich Zinoviev (born Ovsei-Gershon Aronovich Radomyslsky; – 25 August 1936) was a Russian revolutionary and Soviet politician. A prominent Old Bolsheviks, Old Bolshevik, Zinoviev was a close associate of Vladimir Lenin prior to ...
, he was to set up a small bureau of the Central Committee in Russia, and recruit members only from workers, such as
Vasily Schmidt, and to produce a resolution on the war. To ensure he had sufficient authority to conduct his tasks, Lenin and Zinoviev co-opted Shliapnikov onto the Central Committee, and he successfully arrived in Petrograd in October 1915. Despite Shliapnikov's efforts, the
Okhrana
The Department for the Protection of Public Safety and Order (), usually called the Guard Department () and commonly abbreviated in modern English sources as the Okhrana ( rus , Охрана, p=ɐˈxranə, a=Ru-охрана.ogg, t= The Guard) w ...
rapidly arrested the majority of the newly formed Russian Bureau after he left Russia in February 1916, and when he returned to Scandinavia, he had to re-establish the smuggling network due to arrests by Swedish police.
While in Scandinavia, Shliapnikov became embroiled in a spat between Lenin, Bukharin, Bosch, and Pyatakov over the proper attitude towards nationalism, which halted production of the journal ''Kommunist'' and disrupted the flow of literature and communication to Russia. Frustrated and angered by the disruption of practical work for the sake of factionalism, he accused Lenin of ''nepartiinost'', castigated Bukharin, Bosch, and Pyatakov for being incompetent organizers, and during the Summer of 1916, set off for America with the goal of raising funds. At the same time, Kollontai decided to end her relationship with Shliapnikov, and chose to leave a letter indicating as such for him to read upon his return, and he would not see her again until March 1917 in Petrograd, when he harshly rebuked her for having broken up with him in such a "rude" and "hurtful" fashion. Shliapnikov had little success fundraising in America, but upon returning to Scandinavia in September 1916, he recommended that Bukharin travel to America to provide an articulate Bolshevik voice in the pages of the socialist magazine
Novy Mir
''Novy Mir'' (, ) is a Russian-language monthly literary magazine.
History
''Novy Mir'' has been published in Moscow since January 1925. It was supposed to be modelled on the popular pre-Soviet literary magazine ''Mir Bozhy'' ("God's World"), w ...
.
1917
Shliapnikov eagerly returned to Russia in October 1916. To help him rebuild the Russian Bureau, he recruited
Vyacheslav Molotov
Vyacheslav Mikhaylovich Molotov (; – 8 November 1986) was a Soviet politician, diplomat, and revolutionary who was a leading figure in the government of the Soviet Union from the 1920s to the 1950s, as one of Joseph Stalin's closest allies. ...
and
Petr Zalutskii, and they were the senior Bolsheviks in
Petrograd
Saint Petersburg, formerly known as Petrograd and later Leningrad, is the second-largest city in Russia after Moscow. It is situated on the River Neva, at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea. The city had a population of 5,601, ...
during the
February Revolution
The February Revolution (), known in Soviet historiography as the February Bourgeois Democratic Revolution and sometimes as the March Revolution or February Coup was the first of Russian Revolution, two revolutions which took place in Russia ...
in 1917. Under Shliapnikov, the Russian Bureau took a stance of opposition towards the provisional government, and called for the Petrograd Soviet to form a revolutionary government. The arrival of more prominent Bolsheviks like
Lev Kamenev
Lev Borisovich Kamenev. ( Rozenfeld; – 25 August 1936) was a Russian revolutionary and Soviet politician. A prominent Old Bolsheviks, Old Bolshevik, Kamenev was a leading figure in the early Soviet government and served as a Deputy Premier ...
and
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Dzhugashvili; 5 March 1953) was a Soviet politician and revolutionary who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until Death and state funeral of Joseph Stalin, his death in 1953. He held power as General Secret ...
from Siberian exile brought on a struggle over leadership and the correct stance towards the war. The "moderates" under Kamenev successfully outmaneuvered the Russian Bureau, seizing control of the party newspaper
Pravda
''Pravda'' ( rus, Правда, p=ˈpravdə, a=Ru-правда.ogg, 'Truth') is a Russian broadsheet newspaper, and was the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, when it was one of the most in ...
, and refusing to publish
Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov ( 187021 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician and political theorist. He was the first head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 until Death and state funeral of ...
's "Letters from Afar" urging opposition to the provisional government. On March 15, Kamenev published an editorial supporting the war effort, and by March 18 had persuaded the Petersburg committee to provide "conditional support" to the provisional government.
The arrival of
Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov ( 187021 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician and political theorist. He was the first head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 until Death and state funeral of ...
in Petrograd during April seriously challenged the dominant "moderate" line and brought about a shift in the party's positions, but Shliapnikov, hospitalized for weeks due to an automobile accident, did not play a major role in this affair. Instead, Shliapnikov and
Konstantin Eremeev played a leading role in organizing a
"Workers' Guard" among radical workers in the
Vyborg district of Petrograd, and in August 1917, Shliapnikov joined the newly formed general staff of the Red Guard. On May 7, Shliapnikov was elected to the central board of the Petrograd Metalworkers' Union alongside the unaligned socialist
Aleksei Gastev and the Menshevik I.G. Volkov, and once he recovered from his automobile accident, he chaired the first Central Committee of the Petrograd Metalworkers' Union on May 27. By June 11, the Union had established a system of supporting unemployed workers, set up the journal "Metallist", begun to mediate conflicts between workers and industrialists. Over the next month, delegates from across Russia formed the first All-Russian Metalworkers' Union, and Shliapnikov found himself elected to its central committee alongside three other Bolsheviks, Volkov and three other Mensheviks, and Gastev. Due to Gastev's support, he was elected as chairman of the Central Committee during its first meeting on June 29. He led negotiations of a wage agreement between Petrograd metalworkers and factory owners in 1917.
[
]
After the revolution
Following the October Revolution
The October Revolution, also known as the Great October Socialist Revolution (in Historiography in the Soviet Union, Soviet historiography), October coup, Bolshevik coup, or Bolshevik revolution, was the second of Russian Revolution, two r ...
and the Bolshevik seizure of power, Shliapnikov was appointed Commissar of Labor. Shliapnikov supported a coalition government composed of left socialist parties, and signed Zinoviev's and Kamenev's statement supporting a socialist coalition government, but unlike other "moderates" refused to resign from his post. The coalition agreement reached with the Left-SRs mollified most of the "moderate" Bolsheviks, and Shliapnikov would later claim that he only supported an alliance with the Left-SRs. In contrast to his "moderate" position in regards to coalitions with other socialist parties, Shliapnikov held a decisively "radical" stance towards the Constituent Assembly
A constituent assembly (also known as a constitutional convention, constitutional congress, or constitutional assembly) is a body assembled for the purpose of drafting or revising a constitution. Members of a constituent assembly may be elected b ...
. The Bolshevik CC assigned him to take control of Bolshevik preparations for the Constituent Assembly, countering Zinoviev's and Kamenev's efforts to install a "moderate" provisional bureau which would support their stances, and Shliapnikov wholeheartedly supported the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly over the course of January 18 and 19.
Shliapnikov played an important role in evacuating industry from Petrograd, as the Germans approached in 1918. As Commissar of Labor, he helped draft important directives on workers' control of industry and nationalization of industry and he staffed government bureaucracies with staff from trade unions. In the summer of 1918, he went to the south of Russia on a mission to gather food for the population of the Bolshevik-controlled cities of Northern Russia.
In October 1918 Shliapnikov was replaced as Commissar of Labor by Vasili Schmidt and then initially served as a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Southern Front, chaired by Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Dzhugashvili; 5 March 1953) was a Soviet politician and revolutionary who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until Death and state funeral of Joseph Stalin, his death in 1953. He held power as General Secret ...
in Tsaritsyn, and shortly after as Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Caspian-Caucasian Front, based in Astrakhan
Astrakhan (, ) is the largest city and administrative centre of Astrakhan Oblast in southern Russia. The city lies on two banks of the Volga, in the upper part of the Volga Delta, on eleven islands of the Caspian Depression, from the Caspian Se ...
, which he had proposed to create. During the Civil War
A civil war is a war between organized groups within the same Sovereign state, state (or country). The aim of one side may be to take control of the country or a region, to achieve independence for a region, or to change government policies.J ...
, Shliapnikov began to criticize the increasing tendency of the Russian Communist Party and Soviet government to rely on authoritarian measures to enforce policies towards industry and industrial workers. To Shliapnikov, denial of workers' right to participate in economic decision-making was a step away from the goals of the 1917 revolution.
Opposition leader
Shliapnikov became leader of the Workers' Opposition movement inside the Russian Communist Party. Alexandra Kollontai was a mentor and advocate of the group, which was composed of leaders of trade unions and industry who were all former industrial workers, usually metalworkers. This movement advocated the role of workers, organized in trade unions, in managing the economy and the political party. The Russian Communist Party leaders succeeded in suppressing the Workers' Opposition and in 1921–22 finally subordinated trade union leadership to the Party. In 1921, Shliapnikov was forced out of his elected post as chairman of the Metalworkers' Union.
In 1922, Shliapnikov and some other trade-unionists from within and outside the Workers' Opposition, supported by Alexandra Kollontai, presented an appeal, called the Letter of the Twenty Two, to the Communist International
The Communist International, abbreviated as Comintern and also known as the Third International, was a political international which existed from 1919 to 1943 and advocated world communism. Emerging from the collapse of the Second Internationa ...
Executive, requesting that the Comintern help heal a "rift" within the Russian Communist Party between Party leaders and workers. Party leaders and Party-controlled media condemned the appeal. Two of the signatories of the appeal were expelled from the Party, but Shliapnikov, Kollontai, and Sergei Medvedev narrowly escaped expulsion.
Shliapnikov turned to writing his memoirs and held jobs in metals import and economic planning institutions. The Party Central Control Commission investigated him and Sergei Medvedev in 1926 and in 1930 for alleged factionalism in connection with the formation of oppositionist groups among workers in Baku and Omsk. In 1932, the Party Politburo ordered Shliapnikov to publish a public confession of "political errors" in writing his memoirs of the revolution, under pain of being purged from the party. He "acknowledged mistakes in his memoirs of 1917, but in language that made his errors appear less grievous ..Nevertheless, the 'confession' as it appeared in ''Pravda'' on 9 March changed his claim of having been misunderstood to a cruder and more thorough repentance. Kaganovich may have dictated this 'confession'. Secondary and tertiary literature has gone so far as to interpret the March 1932 statement as a repudiation of all his former oppositional stances in party discussions. In fact, the original statement Shliapnikov wrote and signed was not even a complete repudiation of his memoirs".
Death and legacy
Shliapnikov was expelled from the Communist Party in 1933 and imprisoned in 1935 for alleged political crimes. Charged under Article 58 of the RSFSR Criminal Code, he did not confess guilt or implicate others. Nevertheless, he was found guilty, based on others' testimony, and was executed on September 2, 1937.
His wife was also arrested and sentenced to eight years in prison, while their three children were dispatched to separate orphanages, being only later permitted to reunite. In 1948–1951 all three children, who were not older than 20, and their mother were arrested during a new wave of terror and sentenced to prison camp in Siberia, the only female child, Irina, getting her sentence immediately changed to internal exile in Krasnoyarsk. They were all released in the mid-1950s. Shliapnikov was posthumously rehabilitated in 1963 and restored to membership in the Communist Party in 1988.
In an address delivered in 1975 at an AFL–CIO
The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) is a national trade union center that is the largest federation of unions in the United States. It is made up of 61 national and international unions, together r ...
meeting in Washington, DC, Nobel laureate, Russian dissident, and famed author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn. (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Soviet and Russian author and Soviet dissidents, dissident who helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union, especially the Gulag pris ...
asserted that "before the Revolution the head of the Communist Party of Russia was Shliapnikov – not Lenin" and that Shliapnikov's name was unknown because he represented the true interests of the workers, in contrast to the émigré intellectuals who dominated the upper ranks of the party.
Works
* .
* .
References
Sources
*
*
*
Further reading
* Barbara C. Allen, "Alexander G Sljapnikov in der Verbannung und in Havt 1934 bis 1937", in: Jahrbuch für Forschungen zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung, Heft III/2015.
* Robert V. Daniels, ''The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia''. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960.
* Michael Futrell, ''Northern Underground: Episodes of Russian Revolutionary Transport and Communications through Scandinavia and Finland, 1863–1917.'' New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1963.
* Larry E. Holmes, ''For the Revolution Redeemed: The Workers Opposition in the Bolshevik Party, 1919–1921.'' The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, no. 802 (1990).
* Larry E. Holmes, "Soviet Rewriting of 1917: The Case of A. G. Shliapnikov." ''Slavic Review
The ''Slavic Review'' is a major peer-reviewed academic journal publishing scholarly studies, book and film reviews, and review essays in all disciplines concerned with "Eastern Europe, Russia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, past and present". ...
'' vol. 38, no. 2 (June 1979), pp. 224–242.
* Jay B. Sorenson,''The Life and Death of Soviet Trade Unionism: 1917–1928.'' New York: Atherton Press, 1969.
*''The Workers' Opposition in the Russian Communist Party: Documents, 1919–30''. Edited and translated by Barbara C. Allen. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2021.*
External links
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* .
{{DEFAULTSORT:Shlyapnikov, Alexander
1885 births
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People from Murom
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Russian Social Democratic Labour Party members
Old Bolsheviks
Members of the Central Committee of the 6th Conference of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks)
Candidates of the Central Committee of the 7th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)
Members of the Central Committee of the 10th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)
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