Alexander Gavrilovich Shlyapnikov
Александр Гаврилович Шляпников
Leader of the Workers' Opposition, defeated by Lenin, devoured by the Purge
At his closed Military Collegium trial on 2 September 1937 he pleaded not guilty, refusing to confess to the terrorist conspiracy or to implicate others. He maintained that the programme of the Workers' Opposition had been right.
A skilled metal turner born into a poor Old Believer family in Murom, he joined the RSDLP in 1901 and sided with the Bolsheviks after the 1903 split. Working in French, German and British factories, he absorbed the European labor movement firsthand and ran the party's clandestine Scandinavian courier network during the war. In February 1917 he was the most senior Bolshevik in the capital, active in the Russian Bureau of the CC and the Petrograd Soviet's executive committee. After October he became the first People's Commissar of Labor, laying the foundations of the eight-hour day; at the end of the Civil War he and Kollontai led the Workers' Opposition, which Lenin defeated at the Tenth Congress in 1921. Sidelined into diplomacy, expelled in 1933 and imprisoned in 1935, he was executed on 2 September 1937 on fabricated charges. Rehabilitated in 1963 and restored to the party in 1988.
Career timeline
- 1901Joined the RSDLP; aligned with the Bolsheviks after the 1903 split
- 1917Member, Russian Bureau of the CC RSDLP
- 1917–1918First People's Commissar of Labor, RSFSR
- 1918–1919RMC member, Southern & Caspian-Caucasian fronts
- 1920–1922Led the Workers' Opposition; CC member
- 1923Signed the 'Declaration of 46'
- 1924–1925Trade Representative in France
- 1933Expelled from the party, administratively exiled