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These translations by Barbara C. Allen of Alexander Shlyapnikov’s memoirs of his childhood and youth and of his history of the 1905 Revolution in Russia illuminate how a working-class provincial youth from a religious dissenter family became a Marxist revolutionary. The book comprises a brief published autobiography, an unpublished memoir of Shlyapnikov’s childhood, a short fictional piece based on his early experience of factory work, a published historical survey of the 1905 Revolution in Russia, and three article-length published memoir-histories about his early activities in the revolutionary underground and his leadership of a revolutionary organisation in the town of Murom.
Price: $174.00
Pages: 496
Publisher: Brill
Imprint: Brill
Series: Historical Materialism Book Series
Publication Date:
13 November 2025
ISBN: 9789004747272
Format: Hardcover
"With impeccable scholarship and deep knowledge of the subject, Barbara Allen's book restores the words and experience of an heroic and tragic revolutionary, Alexander Shlyapnikov, who in his commitment to workers offered an alternative to the hyperstatist turn of the Bolsheviks to top-down control of the very people who had made the revolution of 1917. The arch of the revolution from mass support for democracy and socialism descended rapidly into one-party rule dismissive of initiatives by workers. Shlyapnikov's vision was grounded in faith in ordinary people learning to govern, but the harsh environment of war, famine, foreign intervention, and choices made by those in power crippled the Workers' Opposition to the road taken by the Communist Party that soon led to the despotism of Stalin. The lessons learned from reading these early writings by a faithful son of the working class belie the easy conclusion that revolutions must lead away from their emancipatory aspirations of the many to the tyranny of a few." — Ronald Grigor Suny is the author of Stalin: Passage to Revolution and the William H. Sewell, Jr. Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of History, Emeritus Professor of Political Science at The University of Michigan and Emeritus Professor of Political Science and History at The University of Chicago.
Barbara C. Allen, Ph.D. (2001), Indiana University Bloomington, is Professor of Russian & Soviet History at La Salle University. She is author of Alexander Shlyapnikov, 1885–1937: Life of an Old Bolshevik (Brill 2015), and the editor/translator of other works.