Alexander
Shlyapnikov was born in Murom, Russia, in
1885. His father died in 1888 and his mother was forced to support
the family by taking in washing. Shlyapnikov received three years
of schooling before finding work as a labourer. At the age of thirteen
he became a factory apprentice in Murom.
Shlyapnikov
moved to St. Petersburg where he became a mechanic. He joined the
Bolsheviks and in 1905 organized a
protest meeting about Bloody Sunday. This
resulted in him being arrested and he was sent to Vladimir Central
Hard Labour Prison. Released in October, Shlyapnikov took part in
the 1905 Revolution. He was once again arrested
and sentenced to two years' imprisonment.
On
his release in 1908 Shlyapnikov left Russia and over the next six
years worked in factories in Germany, France, England and Sweden.
While in exile Shlyapnikov met Vladimir Lenin
and Alexandra Kollantai as well as
a large number of European socialists.
Shlyapnikov
returned to Russia in 1916 and soon became the leader of the union
of metal-workers in Petrograd. In 1917 he helped organize the Petrograd
Soviet of Workers' Deputies and was a member of its executive committee.
Working closely with Vyacheslav Molotov,
Shlyapnikov helped organize the strikes that undermined the Russian
government. However, he did not support the immediate violent overthrow
of the Provisional Government during
the summer of 1917.
In
July, 1917, Shlyapnikov became President of the All-Russian Metalworkers
Union and soon afterwards became a member of the Bolshevik Central
Committee. After the October Revolution
he was appointed Commissar of Labour. Already concerned by the dictatorial
powers being assumed by Vladimir Lenin,
Shlyapnikov argued for the formation of a government that included
Mensheviks and Socialist
Revolutionaries.
Shlyapnikov
became increasingly critical of the way the Communist Party controlled
the trade union movement. At the 1920 Communist
Party Congress Shlyapnikov argued that trade unionists should
play a more active role in running factories and warned against the
dangers of a state controlled economy. Shlyapnikov and Alexandra
Kollantai (Commissar for Welfare) were now seen as leaders of
what Vladimir Lenin now called the Workers'
Opposition.
In 1921
Alexandra
Kollantai
published a pamphlet The Workers'
Opposition, where she called for members of the party to be
allowed to discuss policy issues and for more political freedom for
trade
unionists.
She also advocated that before the government attempts to "rid
Soviet institutions of the bureaucracy that lurks within them, the
Party must first rid itself of its own bureaucracy."
At the
Tenth Party Congress in 1922, Vladimir Lenin
proposed a resolution that would ban all factions within the party.
He argued that factions within the party were "harmful"
and encouraged rebellions such as the Kronstadt
Rising. The Party Congress agreed with Lenin and the Workers'
Opposition was dissolved.
Lenin also demanded that Shlyapnikov be expelled from the Central
Committee. It refused and Shylapnikov returned to the attack describing
the government's New Economic Policy as being
"anti-working class".
When Joseph
Stalin gained power he dealt with Shlyapnikov
and Alexandra
Kollantai
by sending them abroad as diplomats. Shlyapnikov
went to France whereas Kollantai was sent to Norway.
In
1930 Joseph Stalin forced Shlyapnikov
to publish a public confession of his "political errors".
Described as a "political degenerate" Shlyapnikov was expelled
from the Communist Party in 1933 and two years
later he was imprisoned. After a secret trial Alexander Shlyapnikov
was executed on 2nd September, 1937.
(1) The
Granat Encyclopaedia of the Russian Revolution was published by
the Soviet government in 1924. The encyclopaedia included a collection
of autobiographies and biographies of over two hundred people involved
in the Russian Revolution. Alexander Shlyapnikov was
one of those invited to write her autobiography.
My father
was drowned when I was two, leaving my mother with four small children,
the youngest of whom was only a few months old. It was a hard life
to be a widow without income or means of support. All the members
of the family learnt to do some kind of work from their earliest years
so as to be useful and help mother in her struggle to scrape a living.
At the
age of eight I entered primary school. I left three years later, having
learnt to read and write. School was no mother to me, and it was not
the teachers who educated me. The teachers often meted out justice
to their young charges with their fists. Even during these years,
life taught me there is no justice in this world.
(2)
Alexander
Shlyapnikov was only sixteen years old when he took part in a strike
at the Semyannikov plant in 1901.
I was very
active for my age in the strike, inciting apprentices from all the
workshops, shipbuilding as well as joinery, to drive out workers who
did not want to join us. We stuffed our pockets with screws and all
sorts of scraps of iron, and made for the docks and workshops. Those
who went against the general strike decision was pelted with iron
fragments, nuts and bolts, and were forced into line. Policemen on
foot and horseback threatened us with their whips, but this only strengthened
our youthful readiness to fight. For such active participation in
the strike, I was dismissed from Semyannikov's and blacklisted.
All my
attempts to find work at another factory ended in failure. With the
help of some workers, I was given a job at the Obukhov works, but
was dismissed as a striker after a couple of weeks. Other attempts
had the same result. The impossibility of finding a job in a large
factory turned me to work in small workshops. The pay was so paltry
that it did not even cover the rent.
(3)
Alexander
Shlyapnikov, On
the Relations between the Russian Communist Party, the Soviets, and
Production Unions (March, 1920)
1. The three-year experience
of the Russian Revolution shows that the single force consciously
fighting for the organization of society on communist foundations
is the Proletariat.
2. The rural commodity
producer, likewise the poor peasants and middle peasants, and also
the urban artisan have supported the proletariat in its struggle against
the landowner and the large capitalist, but since according to their
position they are property owners their support has been found, and
is found now in a state of constant fluctuation. Only the direct threat
of a relapse to the past has restrained and is restraining these masses
from direct betrayal of the cause of the Proletarian Revolution.
3. As a privileged estate
in Russia in relation to the repressed worker and peasant masses,
the intelligentsia, throughout imbued with the ideas and system of
the ruling exploiter class, has met the emancipatory struggle of the
Proletariat in an openly hostile manner, has refused any cooperation
with it and in a significant part went over to the side of the counterrevolution.
Only thanks to long and tenacious struggle has the Proletariat succeeded
in attracting part of it to participation in construction.
4. In the process of armed
struggle and creative construction the Working class has been defined
as the only class, capable of managing industry and the state, and
likewise to defend its homeland in an organized manner from class
enemies.
(4)
Alexander
Shlyapnikov, Tasks
of Trade Unions, Pravda (25th
January, 1921)
1. The role and tasks of
trade unions in the transitional period have been precisely and clearly
defined by recommendations of the All-Russian congresses of trade
unions. The first All-Russian congress of trade unions in January
1918 defined the tasks of trade unions thus: “the center of gravity
of unions’ work at the present time must be in the area of economic
organization. Trade unions must assume the main work of the organization
of production and reformation of the undermined productive forces
of the country.
The second congress in
February 1919: “... trade unions have passed from control over
production to the organization of it, participating in the administration
of separate enterprises, as in the entire economic life of the country.
...trade unions must prepare their organizations as well as the broad
working masses not only for management of production, but also of
the entire state apparatus.”
The third congress, April
1920: confirmed the basic decisions of the earlier two.
The eighth congress of
the Russian Communist Party in March 1919 decided: the apparatus of
socialized industry must rest upon the trade unions first of all.
2. the transition from
military tasks to economic construction and from militarized methods
of work to democratic methods, revealed a crisis in professional workers
organizations, expressing itself in the inconsistency of the content
of their everyday work with those tasks, which were defined in the
congress resolutions and reinforced in the party program. The practices
of party congresses and state organs for the past two years have systematically
narrowed the scope of the work of trade unions and brought almost
to zero the influence of workers’ unions in the Soviet government.
The role of trade unions in the organization and administration of
production in fact has been reduced to the role of an office of inquiry
and recommendation, placing staff in administrative posts, between
state organs and unions there is no agreement and conflicts overload
party organizations. The unions still have neither a printing press
nor paper. Journals of even the largest unions come out with a delay
of several months. The state printing press gives lowest priority
to work on behalf of unions.
3. This decline of the
role and significance of the trade unions occurs at a time, when the
experience of three years of the Russian revolution shows, that the
unions wholly and faithfully carried out a communist line, led behind
them wide circles of nonparty working masses; when to all and each
it is clear that the realization of the RKP program in our country,
where the majority of the population is petty commodity producers,
demands a strong authoritative mass worker organization, accessible
to the broad masses of the peasantry. The belittling of the significance
and actual role of the trade unions in Soviet Russia signifies the
manifestation of bourgeois, class hostility toward the proletariat
and must be quickly overcome.
(5)
Trade Unionists supporting the Workers'
Opposition published a proclamation on 27th February, 1921.
A complete change is necessary in the policies of the
government. First of all, the workers and peasants need freedom. They
don't want to live by the decrees of the Bolsheviks; they want to
control their own destinies. Comrades, preserve revolutionary order!
Determinedly and in an organized manner demand: liberation of all
arrested Socialists and non-partisan working-men; abolition of martial
law; freedom of speech, press and assembly for all who labour.
(6)
Alexandra
Kollontai, The Workers' Opposition (1921)
The workers ask - who are we? Are we really the prop of
the class dictatorship, or are we just an obedient flock that serves
as a support for those who, having severed all ties with the masses,
carry out their own policy and build up industry without any regard
to our opinions and creative abilities under the reliable cover of
the party label.
(7)
Victor Serge,
Memoirs of a Revolutionary (1963)
The Workers Opposition, led by Shliapnikov, Alexandra
Kollontai, and Medvedev, believed that the revolution was doomed if
the Party failed to introduce radical changes in the organization
of work, restore freedom and authority to the trade unions, and make
an immediate turn towards establishing a true Soviet democracy. I
had long discussions on this question with Shliapnikov. A former metalworker,
he kept about him, even when in power, the mentality, the prejudices,
and even the old clothes he had possessed as a worker. He distrusted
the officials ("that multitude of scavengers") and was sceptical
about the Comintern, seeing too many parasites in it who were only
hungry for money.
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