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A new English edition of Alexander Shlyapnikov’s memoirs, showing how a working-class provincial youth from a religious dissenter family became a Marxist revolutionary.
These translations by Barbara C. Allen include Shlyapnikov’s memoirs about his childhood and youth, as well as his reflections on the history of the 1905 Revolution in Russia. The book comprises a brief published autobiography, an unpublished memoir of Shlyapnikov’s childhood, a short fictional piece based on his early experience of factory work, a published historical survey of the 1905 Revolution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.
“Thanks to Allen’s superb translations, we hear Shlyapnikov—metalworker, underground organizer, future leader of the Workers’ Opposition—in his own, often wry voice, evoking the working-class world that formed his lifelong militancy and his vision of socialism grounded in workers’ capacity to organize and govern for themselves. [...] Victor Serge recognized Shlyapnikov and his comrades as an honorable current of the defeated revolution, one that had not gone morally or politically bankrupt. With exceptional scholarship and care, Allen restores that lost revolutionary tradition to us.”
—Suzi Weissman, author of Victor Serge: A Political Biography
Alexander Shlyapnikov was a leading member of the Workers’ Opposition (1919-21) in the Russian Communist Party.
Barbara C. Allen is Professor of Russian & Soviet History at La Salle University. She is author of Alexander Shlyapnikov, 1885–1937: Life of an Old Bolshevik (2015), and the editor/translator of several other works.
List of Figures
Abbreviations and Acronyms
Introduction
1 Autobiography
2 Memoir of Childhood
1 In Doschatoye
2 In Murom
3 Summer in Doschatoye
4 To School
5 In School, on the Street, and at Home
6 Winter
7 Spring
8 Summer
9 In Second Class
10 Our Street
11 Summer Holidays
12 In Third Grade
13 Trip to Nizhny [Novgorod] and Sormovo
3 To the Factory (a Short Story)
4 The Revolution of 1905
1 Struggle for Land and Freedom
2 Economic Development after the Emancipation of the Peasants
3 Workers’ Situation and Strike Actions
4 The Revolutionary Movement and the War with Japan
5 The Government’s ‘Spring’ and the Liberals
6 9 (22) January
7 From the January Days to the RSDRP Third Congress
8 The Peasant Movement
9 From the Strikes of 1 May to a General Strike
10 Revolutionary Movement in October according to Police Reports
11 From October Strike to December Uprising
12 Counterrevolution’s Crusade
13 Revolution’s Lessons and Perspectives
5 Underground Work in Murom District, 1902–04
6 The Year 1905 in Murom
7 Red Days in the Hinterland (Murom in 1905)
8 Epilogue
Appendix A: Book Review by Alexander Shlyapnikov
Appendix B: Reviews of Alexander Shlyapnikov’s Works
Appendix C: Excerpts from Alexander Shlyapnikov’s Testimony at His 1933 Purge
Bibliography
Index