Leader of the Workers' Opposition, defeated by Lenin, devoured by the Purge
At his Military Collegium trial on 2 September 1937, he refused to confess to terrorist conspiracy charges. Given the last word, he declared he was 'not hostile towards Soviet power' — the only guilt he admitted was 'a liberal attitude towards those around him.' He was shot the same day.
A skilled metal turner from a poor Old Believer family in Murom, he began factory work at age ten and joined the Bolsheviks in 1903. As an émigré worker in French, German and British factories, he absorbed the European labor movement firsthand. 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, arguing that trade unions, not the party, should control the economy; Lenin defeated the platform in 1921. Sidelined into diplomacy, expelled in 1933, he was executed in 1937 on fabricated charges of plotting to kill Stalin. Rehabilitated in 1963, restored to the party in 1988.
Career Timeline
- 1903Joined the RSDLP, sided with the Bolshevik faction
- 1917Member, Russian Bureau of the CC RSDLP
- 1917–18First People's Commissar of Labor, RSFSR
- 1918–19RMC member, Southern & Caspian-Caucasian fronts
- 1920–22Led the Workers' Opposition; CC member
- 1923Signed the 'Declaration of 46'
- 1924–25Trade Representative in France
- 1933Expelled from the party, administratively exiled
Related historical events
- 1917.02–07The February RevolutionBolshevik leader in FebruaryHe led the party's Russian Bureau in Petrograd during the February days, working at the heart of the strikes and the garrison mutiny.
- 1917.10–1918.01The October RevolutionCommissar of LabourAs the first Commissar of Labour he was responsible for the early labor legislation, including the eight-hour day.
- 1918–1922The Civil War and Foreign InterventionMember of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Southern Front
- 1921–1928The New Economic Policy (NEP)leader of the Workers' Opposition who opposed market policies from the beginning of NEP
- 1937–1938The Great Purgearrested and executed in 1937
February 1917, the Metalworker Who Led the Party in the Capital
Alexander Shlyapnikov was born into a poor Old Believer family in Murom and went to work as a metal turner while still a boy. A skilled craftsman, he learned the European labor movement from inside its factories in France, Germany and England, and during the war he ran the party's clandestine courier network through Scandinavia.
When the February Revolution broke out in March 1917 (February Old Style), he was the most senior Bolshevik in Petrograd. With Molotov and Zalutsky he led the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee through the days of the rising and sat as a Bolshevik representative on the executive committee of the Petrograd Soviet. After October he became the first People's Commissar of Labor, laying the foundations of the eight-hour-day decree and the social insurance system. From the lathe to the Council of People's Commissars, his biography was the workers' revolution in miniature.
The Workers' Opposition, a Refusal to Confess
At the end of the Civil War Shlyapnikov led the Workers' Opposition together with Kollontai and Medvedev. Their platform, which demanded that the management of production pass to the trade unions and a "congress of producers", was an attempt to defend the revolution's working-class origins against the bureaucratization of party and state. The Tenth Congress rejected the platform in 1921 and banned factions, but Shlyapnikov stayed in the party and went on speaking for the metalworkers.
His memoirs, On the Eve of 1917 and The Year 1917, were first-rate sources on the February Revolution, and they were attacked precisely because they recorded Stalin's actual conduct in 1917. Expelled in 1933 and arrested in 1935, he refused to the end to confess to terrorism and was shot on 2 September 1937. As Barbara Allen's biography has reconstructed, he was one of the rare Old Bolsheviks who told his interrogators that the program of the Workers' Opposition had been right. He was judicially rehabilitated in 1963.