Alexander Gavrilovich Shlyapnikov

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.

He became People's Commissar of Labour in the first Council of People's Commissars on 8 November (26 October) 1917. The official list of People's Commissars gives his tenure as 8 November 1917 to 8 October 1918, when Vasili Schmidt succeeded him; the infobox of the Russian Wikipedia article on Shlyapnikov instead gives the end date as 8 December 1918. Both are set out here.

In November 1917 he backed a "homogeneous socialist government" of all parties represented in the VTsIK and signed the People's Commissars' statement of 4 November protesting the breaking-off of coalition talks, yet wrote that laying down his responsibility and duties was inadmissible and stayed at his post, adding the duties of Commissar of Trade and Industry. The end date of that concurrent post is also disputed: hrono gives 15 January 1918, while the Russian Wikipedia infobox gives 2 December 1917 to 27 January 1918.

As Commissar of Labour he helped draft the important directives on workers' control of industry and the nationalisation of industry and staffed government bureaucracies with trade-union personnel, fighting officialdom's sabotage and strike. In January 1918 he took part in creating the Council of Workers' Control and in transforming it into the Supreme Council of the National Economy (VSNKh). On the Constituent Assembly he parted with the conciliators: the Bolshevik CC assigned him to take control of Bolshevik preparations, countering efforts to install a "moderate" provisional bureau, and he wholeheartedly supported the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly over 18-19 January 1918. He organised the evacuation of industry from Petrograd as the Germans advanced in 1918 and, after the failure of the Brest negotiations, chaired the Central Collegium for the evacuation and unloading of Petrograd.

In March 1918 the Seventh (Emergency) Party Congress elected him a candidate member of the Central Committee. In late May 1918 he was sent to the south of Russia with Stalin and extraordinary powers, in Lenin's words to "help pump grain out of there", and served on the Revolutionary Military Council of the Southern Front, of the Caspian-Caucasian Front and of the 16th Army of the Western Front. In 1920 he was recalled to work in the VTsSPS.

This is where his criticism first became systematic. During the Civil War he began to criticise the party's and Soviet government's growing reliance on authoritarian measures to enforce policy towards industry and industrial workers, holding that denying workers the right to participate in economic decision-making was a step away from the goals of the 1917 revolution. That critique carried into the Workers' Opposition of 1920.

The contradiction of the phase is preserved rather than smoothed over. As Commissar of Labour he faced workers pursuing their own immediate interests rather than their class's, and with his acquiescence boards including union representatives were replaced by one-man management. The same man who would later lead the demand for union control of production had, in the Commissariat, accepted one-man management under the pressure of civil war and collapse. Of the 16 members of the founding SNK, only he and Nogin were workers by social origin, and the same account links that composition to the later emergence of the Workers' Opposition, which voiced resentment that intellectuals ruled in the workers' name. He stood at the centre of the unresolved question of the division of power between party, soviets, factory committees and trade unions.

Sukhanov judged him "an experienced conspirator, an excellent technician-organiser and a good practitioner of the trade-union movement" but "not a politician at all".

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.