David Riazanov

David Riazanov or Ryazanov , born David Borisovich Goldendakh (; 10 March 1870 – 21 January 1938), was a Russian revolutionary, historian, bibliographer, Marxologist and archivist. He had been an old associate of Leon Trotsky. Riazanov founded the Marx–Engels Institute and edited the first large-scale effort to publish the collected works of these two founders of the modern socialist movement. Riazanov was a prominent victim of the Great Terror of the late 1930s.

Early years David Borisovich Goldendakh was born 10 March 1870 to a Jewish father and a Russian mother in Odessa, Russian Empire (now Ukraine). At the age of 15, David Riazanov joined the ranks of the Narodnik revolutionaries attempting to overthrow the autocracy of the Russian tsar. Riazanov attended secondary school in Odessa but was expelled in 1886, not for revolutionary activity or insubordination, but rather due to "hopeless inability." Riazanov spent 15 months in prison awaiting trial, at which he was convicted and sentenced to an additional four years of katorga (exile and hard labor).

First period of exile In 1900, Riazanov went into exile. The next year in Berlin Riazanov and his co-thinkers established a small Marxist group called "Borba" (Struggle), which attempted to unite the émigré Russian Marxists. With the party divided between Bolshevik and Menshevik wings in the aftermath of this landmark convention, Riazanov and his co-thinkers pointedly declined to join either faction.

Second period of exile Shortly after his 1907 conviction, Riazanov emigrated to the West. During this second interlude abroad, Riazanov dedicated himself to historical scholarship, studying the history of the International Workingmen's Association in the archives of the German Social-Democratic Party and in the British Museum in London. This journalism of Marx and Engels which Riazanov so painstakingly gathered was eventually published in book form in 1917, a publication which cemented Riazanov's reputation as one of the world's leading experts in the literary output of these two leading lights of modern socialism.

Riazanov was also a participant in the 1915 Zimmerwald Conference of the Second International. Riazanov rejected both the social-patriotic support of World War I advanced by many Western European socialists as well as the revolutionary defeatism advanced by the Bolsheviks.

After the 1917 revolution

Riazanov returned to Russia following the February Revolution in 1917. There he was active in the growing trade union movement, helping to form the Russian Railway Union.

Together with the rest of the Mezhraiontsy, Riazanov joined the Bolshevik Party headed by Vladimir Lenin in August 1917. Working with Communist trade union leader Mikhail Tomsky, Riazanov also authored a resolution calling for wages to be paid with physical commodities rather than the devalued currency of the day — an action which put the duo at odds with Lenin, Stalin, and the party's Central Committee. In 1927 the first volume of the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA1) was published by the Marx-Engels Institute, a complete edition of the works of Marx and Engels in their original languages, which was to comprise 42 volumes. Under Riazanov's editorship, five volumes of this edition were issued until 1931 (later seven more were published until the project was abandoned in the mid-1930s). Moreover, starting in 1928, a first Russian edition of the collected works of Marx and Engels in 28 volumes (Sochineniya1) began being published, of which ten volumes were issued under Riazanov's direction until 1931 (vol. I–III, V–VIII, XXI–XXIII; the edition was largely completed in 1947).

Riazanov also edited the works of other authors including Diderot, Feuerbach, and Hegel. He was a member of the Commission for the Study of the October Revolution and of the Russian Communist Party, commonly known as Istpart.

He undoubtedly had a "frank way of talking." The US journalist, William Reswick, heard a rumor in Moscow - which may be apocryphal - that Riazanov once told Stalin to his face: "You recite passages from Marx like a dull schoolboy without knowing what they mean." Even if it was untrue, the fact that the story was being repeated shows that he had a reputation for having a sharp tongue. Historian Isaac Deutscher recounted another episode at a party meeting in which he derided Stalin with the words "Stop it Koba, don't make a fool of yourself. Everybody knows that theory is not exactly your field".

In the same vein, György Lukács mentioned how Riazanov said to him, commenting on Lukács's falling-out with the Comintern in the late 1920s: "Ah-ha, you have been Cominterned."

Addressing the Eleventh Party Congress in March 1922, after he had effectively been banned from political activity, Riazonov claimed:

Persecution, death, and legacy In December 1930, Isaak Rubin, a research assistant at the Marx-Engels Institute since 1926, was arrested and charged with participation in a plot to establish an underground organization called the "Union Bureau of Mensheviks." As a lawyer, Rubin initially managed to avoid succumbing to the charges made by the interrogator, but he was nonetheless kept in custody and transferred to Suzdal. Following a trial conducted by prosecutor Nikolai Krylenko, Rubin was found guilty of participation in the plot and sentenced to a 5-year term of imprisonment.

Under suspicion following the trial regarding the Union Bureau, Riazanov was dismissed as director of the Marx-Engels Institute in February 1931. Riazanov was expelled from the Communist Party and arrested "for helping Menshevik counter-revolutionary activity." In Saratov, Riazanov worked for the next six years in the Saratov University library. Riazanov's Marx-Engels Institute was consolidated with the Lenin Institute later in 1931 to form the Marx–Engels–Lenin Institute, under the direction of Vladimir Adoratsky. Included among these were the works The German Ideology, sections of Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right and Dialectics of Nature.

Works Anglo-russkia otnosheniia v otsenke K. Marksa: Istoriko-kriticheskii etiud. (Ango-Russian Relations in the Estimation of K. Marx: A Historico-Critical Study.) Petrograd: Izdanie Petrogradskago Soveta rabochikh i krasnoarmeiskikh deputatov, 1918. G.V. Plekhanov i gruppa "Osvobozhdenie truda". (G.V. Plekhanov and the "Emancipation of Labor" Group.) Moscow: Otdel pechati Moskovskogo Soveta rabochikh i krasnoarmeiskikh deputatov, 1919. Международный пролетариат и война. Сборник статей 1914-1916 г. (The International Proletariat and the War: Collection of Articles, 1914–1916.) Institut K. Marksa i F. Engelʹsa pri V.Ts.I.K. (The Institute of K. Marx and F. Engels of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.) Moscow: Moskovskii Rabochii, 1923. Zadachi profsoiuzov do i v epokhu diktatury proletariata. (The Tasks of the Unions preceding and during the Epoch of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.) Kharkov: Proletarii, 1923. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Joshua Kunitz, trans. New York: International Publishers, 1927. Karl Marx: Man, Thinker, and Revolutionist. A Symposium. (Editor.) London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1927. Vzgliady Marksa i Engel'sa na brak i semiu. (The Views of Marx and Engels on Marriage and the Family.) Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1927. —Reissued in translation as Communism and Marriage.