Nikolai Ivanovich Muralov

Muralov joined the Left Opposition in October 1923 by signing the Declaration of the 46, which criticized the decline of intra-party democracy and the growth of bureaucracy. When comrades urged him to leave the opposition, he replied: "I support the old Bolsheviks, not Trotsky. Stalin does not act like a Leninist." Trotsky recalled him in his memoirs as "a fearless marshal of the revolutionary war… in the most difficult situations he radiated calm, warmth, and confidence."

At the 15th Party Congress in December 1927, Muralov took the floor on behalf of the Left Opposition but was shouted down with cries of "Down with him!" He protested that "measures unheard of in our party" had been taken against dissenters, and that "old, dedicated party members" were being accused of being "agents of Chamberlain." The Congress expelled him from the party. In a joint statement with Christian Rakovsky immediately afterward, he declared that to renounce their views without being convinced of their incorrectness "would really be a renunciation of the most elementary duty to the Party and the working class."

In a June 1928 letter to Trotsky, Muralov wrote: "I would rather be drawn and quartered than write a confession." In 1930, together with Rakovsky, Kasparova, and Kosior, he submitted a statement to the Central Committee criticizing forced collectivization as "the most grotesque deviation from socialism" and a violation of "the most basic principles of Marxism and Lenin's warnings about collectivization, the middle peasants, and the NEP." After years of refusing to renounce his views, Muralov finally submitted a reluctant request for party reinstatement in January 1936; he was arrested three months later.

Muralov was arrested in Novosibirsk in April 1936, while he was working as head of the agricultural department of the supply administration of Kuzbassstroi. The arrest record gives the date as 17 April, though one account states 18 April and itself notes 17 April as a variant. One source describes the arrest as an NKVD operation to prepare him for the Moscow show trial, carried out before the six months formally required to review his request for readmission had elapsed. He was tortured during the investigation and signed a false confession only on 5 December 1936, after his sixteen-year-old son was arrested on 6 November, the coercive sequence of family pressure and confession that brought him before the court.

The indictment cast him, with Boguslavsky and Drobnis, as an organizer of a West Siberian anti-Soviet Trotskyist center in Novosibirsk, accused of directing sabotage, espionage and terror activity. The trial was the Second Moscow Trial, the case of the "Parallel Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Center," held before the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR from 23 to 30 January 1937; all 17 defendants were found guilty and 13, Muralov among them, were sentenced to death. The verdict placed him in the group, with Piatakov, Serebriakov, Drobnis, Livshits and Boguslavsky, who "organized and directly directed" the organization's activity, and the published sentence list placed him third among those condemned to the supreme penalty. He was sentenced on 30 January 1937 and shot on 1 February 1937 together with the other condemned defendants. The four defendants whose lives were spared died in custody between 1939 and 1941.

The record of rehabilitation is split. By the majority account the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the USSR annulled the sentence in April 1986 and rehabilitated him posthumously; one record gives the more precise date of 17 April 1986. A Trotskyist account, by contrast, dates the rehabilitation to the late perestroika years, 1987 on criminal lines and 1990 on party lines, and adds that the rest of his family was rehabilitated after the 20th Party Congress in 1956 under Khrushchev. For the execution and burial, one record states that he was shot in Moscow and buried at the Donskoy cemetery.