Александр Шляпников: Лидер Рабочей Оппозиции

Russian leader of the Workers' Opposition in the USSR

Alexander Gavrilovich Shliapnikov (Алекса́ндр Гаври́лович Шля́пников) (August 30, 1885 – September 2, 1937) was a Russian communist revolutionary, metalworker, and trade union leader. He is best remembered as a memoirist of the October Revolution of 1917 and as the leader of the Workers' Opposition, one of the primary opposition movements inside the Russian Communist Party during the 1920s.

Alexander Shliapnikov was born August 30, 1885, in Murom, Russian Empire to a poor family of Russian 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, 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.

According to Shliapnikov himself, he joined the Bolsheviks in 1903, the year of their split with the Mensheviks.

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