Alexander Shliapnikov
By age fifteen, Shliapnikov had been blacklisted and could no longer find work at the major factories in St. Petersburg, and was forced to return to Sormovo, where he once again found himself unemployable due to his suspected radicalism.
Shliapnikov managed to convince the prosecutor that he had been entrapped by police provocateurs, and thus won his freedom, but also attracted the attention of the local Black Hundreds, who brutally assaulted him on his way home.
Freed on bail, he vanished into the underground, finding work in the Electrical Station of 1886 in St. Petersburg, where he met fellow metalworker Sergei Medvedev, establishing what would become a decades long friendship.
[10] By the spring of 1914, Shliapnikov found himself unable to obtain industrial work, and as such resolved to return to Russia, which he did in April 1914, and due to his distrust of police informant Roman Malinovsky and habit of avoiding group meetings, managed to evade the wave of arrests which befell so many Bolsheviks in the summer of 1914.
[11] The outbreak of World War I forced Shliapnikov to leave Russia, as the French government recalled its citizens and thereby destroyed his cover, and in September 1914, the Petersburg Committee sent him to Scandinavia.
[12] Kollontai, who was also living in Sweden, assisted him in these ventures, but was arrested for her anti-war activities and deported to Copenhagen, and Swedish socialists encouraged Shliapnikov to leave voluntarily so he could re-enter the country at a later date.
Traveling to London in April 1915, he almost immediately found work as a turner at the Fiat automobile plant in Wembley, and while there joined the Amalgamated Society of Engineers and participated in their activities.
According to instructions from Lenin and Grigory Zinoviev, he was to set up a small bureau of the Central Committee in Russia, and recruit members only from workers, such as Vasily Schmidt, and to produce a resolution on the war.
To ensure he had sufficient authority to conduct his tasks, Lenin and Zinoviev co-opted Shliapnikov onto the Central Committee, and he successfully arrived in Petrograd in October 1915.
Nevertheless, despite police efforts and a lack of funds, Shliapnikov succeeded in setting up a functional Bolshevik center linked to the Central Committee with the assistance of fellow worker-Bolsheviks like Yury Lutovinov and Lenin's sisters.
[16] While in Scandinavia, Shliapnikov became embroiled in a spat between Lenin, Bukharin, Bosch, and Pyatakov over the proper attitude towards nationalism, which halted production of the journal Kommunist and disrupted the flow of literature and communication to Russia.
Frustrated and angered by the disruption of practical work for the sake of factionalism, he accused Lenin of nepartiinost, castigated Bukharin, Bosch, and Pyatakov for being incompetent organizers, and during the Summer of 1916, set off for America with the goal of raising funds.
[17] At the same time, Kollontai decided to end her relationship with Shliapnikov, and chose to leave a letter indicating as such for him to read upon his return, and he would not see her again until March 1917 in Petrograd, when he harshly rebuked her for having broken up with him in such a "rude" and "hurtful" fashion.
[19] The arrival of more prominent Bolsheviks like Lev Kamenev and Joseph Stalin from Siberian exile brought on a struggle over leadership and the correct stance towards the war.
The "moderates" under Kamenev successfully outmaneuvered the Russian Bureau, seizing control of the party newspaper Pravda, and refusing to publish Vladimir Lenin's "Letters from Afar" urging opposition to the provisional government.
[20] The arrival of Vladimir Lenin in Petrograd during April seriously challenged the dominant "moderate" line and brought about a shift in the party's positions, but Shliapnikov, hospitalized for weeks due to an automobile accident, did not play a major role in this affair.
Over the next month, delegates from across Russia formed the first All-Russian Metalworkers' Union, and Shliapnikov found himself elected to its central committee alongside three other Bolsheviks, Volkov and three other Mensheviks, and Gastev.
The Party Central Control Commission investigated him and Sergei Medvedev in 1926 and in 1930 for alleged factionalism in connection with the formation of oppositionist groups among workers in Baku[31] and Omsk.
