David Riazanov

Russian Soviet political revolutionary, Marxist theoretician, and archivist

David Riazanov (Дави́д Ряза́нов), born David Borisovich Goldendakh (Дави́д Бори́сович Гольдендах; 10 March 1870 – 21 January 1938), was a Russian revolutionary, historian, bibliographer and archivist. Riazanov founded the Marx–Engels Institute and edited the first large scale effort to publish the collected works of these two founders of the modern socialist movement. Riazanov was a prominent victim of the Great Terror of the late 1930s.

David Borisovich Goldendakh was born 10 March 1870 to a Jewish father and a Russian mother in Odesa, Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire. At the age of 15, the future David Riazanov joined the ranks of the Narodnik revolutionaries attempting to overthrow the autocracy of the Russian Tsar. Riazanov attended secondary school in Odesa but was expelled in 1886, not for revolutionary activity or insubordination, but rather due to "hopeless inability." Riazanov spent 15 months in prison awaiting trial, at which he was convicted and sentenced to an additional four years of katorga (exile and hard labor).

In 1900, Riazanov went into exile. The next year in Berlin Riazanov and his co thinkers established a small Marxist group called "Borba" (Struggle), which attempted to unite the émigré Russian Marxists. With the party divided between Bolshevik and Menshevik wings in the aftermath of this landmark convention, Riazanov and his co thinkers pointedly declined to join either faction.

Shortly after his 1907 conviction, Riazanov emigrated to the West. During this second interlude abroad, Riazanov dedicated himself to historical scholarship, studying the history of the International Workingmen's Association in the archives of the German Social Democratic Party and in the British Museum in London. This journalism of Marx and Engels which Riazanov so painstakingly gathered was eventually published in book form in 1917, a publication which cemented Riazanov's reputation as one of the world's leading experts in the literary output of these two leading lights of modern socialism. Riazanov was also a participant in the 1915 Zimmerwald Conference of the Second International. Riazanov rejected both the social patriotic support of World War I advanced by many Western European socialists as well as the revolutionary defeatism advanced by the Bolsheviks.

In December 1930, Isaak Rubin, a research assistant at the Marx Engels Institute since 1926, was arrested by the Soviet secret police and charged with participation in a plot to establish an underground organization called the "Union Bureau of Mensheviks." As a lawyer, Rubin initially managed to avoid succumbing to false charges made by the interrogator, but he was nonetheless kept in custody and transferred to Suzdal. With his health starting to fail, Rubin was eventually compelled to give false written testimony against David Riazanov to secret police des. Rubin claimed that he had kept an envelope containing secret documents of the mythical "Menshevik Center" in his office at the Marx Engels Institute before discreetly passing them along to David Riazanov. Following a show trial conducted by prosecutor Nikolai Krylenko, Rubin was found guilty of participation in the plot and sentenced to a 5 year term of imprisonment. With his name under a cloud of suspicion and with a show trial of the purported "Union Bureau of Mensheviks" in the offing, Riazanov was dismissed as director of the Marx Engels Institute in February 1931. Riazanov was expelled from the Communist Party and arrested by the secret police, ostensibly "for helping Menshevik counter revolutionary activity." In Saratov, Riazanov worked for the next six years in the Saratov University library. Riazanov's Marx Engels Institute was consolidated with the Lenin Institute later in 1931 to form the Marx–Engels–Lenin Institute, under the direction of Vladimir Adoratsky. Included among these were the works The German Ideology, sections of Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right and Dialectics of Nature.

Anglo russkia otnosheniia v otsenke K. Marksa: Istoriko kriticheskii etiud. (Ango Russian Relations in the Estimation of K. Marx: A Historico Critical Study.) Petrograd: Izdanie Petrogradskago Soveta rabochikh i krasnoarmeiskikh deputatov, 1918. G. V. Plekhanov i gruppa "Osvobozhdenie truda". (G. V. Plekhanov and the "Emancipation of Labor" Group.) Moscow: Otdel pechati Moskovskogo Soveta rabochikh i krasnoarmeiskikh deputatov, 1919. Международный пролетариат и война. Сборник статей 1914 1916 г. (The International Proletariat and the War: Collection of Articles, 1914–1916.) Institut K. Marksa i F. Engelʹsa pri V. Ts. I. K. (The Institute of K. Marx and F. Engels of the All Russian Central Executive Committee.) Moscow: Moskovskii Rabochii, 1923. Zadachi profsoiuzov do i v epokhu diktatury proletariata. (The Tasks of the Unions preceding and during the Epoch of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.) Kharkov: Proletarii, 1923. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Joshua Kunitz, trans. New York: International Publishers, 1927. Karl Marx: Man, Thinker, and Revolutionist. A Symposium. (Editor.) London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1927. Vzgliady Marksa i Engel'sa na brak i semiu. (The Views of Marx and Engels on Marriage and the Family.) Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1927. —Reissued in translation as Communism and Marriage.