Founder of the Marx-Engels Institute and independent Marxist who never stopped disagreeing
«Stop it, Koba, don't make a fool of yourself. Everybody knows theory is not exactly your field.» — to Stalin at a party meeting.
A Jewish-Russian Marxist from Odessa who joined the revolutionary movement at 17. In 1921 he founded the Marx-Engels Institute (IME), assembling the world's finest collection of Marxist documents and personally recovering, editing and first publishing Marx and Engels' unpublished manuscripts, including the first chapter of The German Ideology and Dialectics of Nature. A full member of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1929) and the foremost Marx scholar of his generation, his independence (public opposition to the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the Brest peace, and the suppression of dissent within the party) led to his arrest in 1931 and execution in Saratov in 1938.
Career Timeline
- 1887–1889Organised workers' circles in Odessa as an early Marxist; first Paris sojourn, met Plekhanov and Lavrov
- 1891–1899Arrested, held 18 months then 4 years' hard labour; exiled to Kishinev; spent 5 years in Kresty Prison
- 1901–1905Led the Borba group and attended the 2nd RSDLP Congress; openly criticised Lenin's party centralism and factionalism
- 1905–1907Returned to Russia; helped organise the first trade unions in Petersburg; worked in the SD faction of the 2nd Duma
- 1907–1917Exile abroad; researched in the German SPD archives, served as Kautsky's academic secretary; recovered and published many unpublished Marx-Engels manuscripts
- 1917–1918Returned, joined the Mezhraiontsy and merged with Bolsheviks; elected to Constituent Assembly; opposed armed uprising, dissolution of the Assembly and press suppression
- 1918–1920Briefly left the party over Brest peace, then reinstated; headed Glavarkhiv (Main Archive Administration) and the Science Directorate
- 1921–1931Founded and directed the Marx-Engels Institute (IME); first published The German Ideology ch. 1 (1924) and Dialectics of Nature (1925)
- 1929Elected full member of the USSR Academy of Sciences (history, 27 of 30 votes); awarded Order of the Red Banner of Labour
- 1931–1938Arrested on charges of Menshevik ties, expelled from Academy and party, exiled to Saratov; re-arrested 1937, shot 21 January 1938
Related historical events
- 1917.10–1918.01The October RevolutionCritical participant from the MezhraiontsyHe helped organise Petrograd trade unions and was elected to the Constituent Assembly from the Romanian Front, but openly opposed the armed insurrection plan, the dissolution of the Assembly, and press suppression, arguing for a multi-party government.
- 1937–1938The Great PurgeTargetThe scholar who founded the Marx-Engels Institute, exiled and then executed in 1938.
The Marx-Engels Institute and MEGA
The Marx-Engels Institute (IME), founded by Riazanov in 1921, was his life's greatest achievement. The Central Committee initially proposed a "Museum of Marxism," but Riazanov insisted on a full scientific institute combining research with publication, and prevailed.
The foundation was the vast collection Riazanov personally assembled across Europe. In 1921 he purchased the library of Viennese lawyers Theodor Mautner and Wilhelm Pappenheim, over 20,000 volumes on socialism and anarchism amassed over 40 years, along with the 10,000-volume collection of Austrian Marxist historian Karl Grünberg. "If we buy these libraries, we will have the best library on socialism in the world, in Moscow," he wrote. To this he added systematic photographic copies of the Marx-Engels manuscripts held in the German SPD archives. In 1925 he discovered and purchased 300 unpublished holograph manuscripts of Gracchus Babeuf in France, and acquired rare collections such as the Helfert collection (5,000 volumes on the 1848 revolutions). By 1931 the Institute held over 400,000 volumes.
Riazanov's most ambitious undertaking was the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA¹), the world's first complete scholarly edition of Marx and Engels in their original languages, planned for 42 volumes. Its first volume appeared in 1927. Before that, in 1924, Riazanov travelled to Berlin and recovered the full manuscript of The German Ideology, which Eduard Bernstein had kept hidden and partially destroyed; Riazanov published its first chapter that same year. In 1925 he edited and published Engels' Dialectics of Nature, previously known only in fragments. Both were landmark achievements in Marxist philology. From 1928 he also launched the first Russian-language collected works (Sochineniya¹) in 28 volumes.
Riazanov's editorial principle was absolute fidelity to the original. He sharply criticized the practice of Bebel and Bernstein, who had cut and altered letters to avoid offending living figures, and insisted that his Institute publish every text without alteration. The Institute was organized into specialised "cabinets" (German, French, English, Philosophy, Political Economy, Sociology), each with dedicated researchers who collected, catalogued, and studied materials simultaneously. By the late 1920s the Institute was recognised as the world centre of Marx scholarship, and collaborated closely with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. After Riazanov's arrest in 1931, the Institute was forcibly merged with the Lenin Institute into IMEL, and MEGA¹ was abandoned in 1935.