Worker, trade unionist, revolutionary: A political biography of Alexander Shliapnikov, 1905--1922 (Russia).

摘要

Alexander Shliapnikov (1885–1937), one of the few true workers at the top of the Russian Communist party (Bolshevik) leadership, was one of the party's most fervent advocates of worker power. As leader of the Workers' Opposition (1919 to 1921), Shliapnikov presented a program to realize his ideal of a worker-run state, advocating trade union control of all levels of the Soviet economy. Although his program failed to win the Communist party's endorsement and his faction was banned, Shliapnikov retained most of his basic beliefs until his death (he was executed in 1937, during Stalin's terror). Shliapnikov's conviction that workers' active role in building a socialist society was both possible and necessary grew out of his past as a worker-revolutionary. However, the need to maintain unity and act conspiratorially to preserve the Bolshevik party organization forged in him a strong devotion to party discipline. This devotion restrained him from entering into political struggle outside of the Bolshevik party, even before it became the only legal political party in Soviet Russia.; This dissertation, which studies Shliapnikov from his earliest years to his decisive defeat at the Eleventh Communist Party Congress in 1922, explores how Shliapnikov's character and unique experiences influenced the development of his political views and principles. The newly available archival sources on which the dissertation is based provide material for a more comprehensive analysis than was possible before of what drove Shliapnikov to seek worker empowerment, what this term meant to him, and why he undermined work toward his goal with his devotion to party discipline. Analysis of these questions may contribute to a fuller understanding of a fascinating but little-studied figure in early Soviet history, Shliapnikov, and of one of the first and more significant of the intraparty oppositions, the Workers' Opposition. Equally importantly, the use of newly available archival data provides a fuller picture, with nuances, of early Soviet political life and of its evolution.