Gavril Myasnikov

Defunct Gavril Ilyich Myasnikov (Russian: Гавриил Ильич Мясников; February 25, 1889, Chistopol, Kazan Governorate – November 16, 1945, Moscow), also transliterated as Gavriil Il'ich Miasnikov, was a Russian communist revolutionary, a metalworker from the Urals, and one of the first Bolsheviks to oppose and criticise the communist government.

Born in to a working-class family, Gabriel Myasnikov left school at the age of 11, to start work as a mechanic in the Motovilikha arms factory, in the Perm region.

During the 1905 Revolution, he joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party and was involved in expropriating weapons, and ran combat unit.

He was released during the February Revolution and returned to Motovilikha, where he was elected chairman of the local soviet of workers' and peasant's deputies.

[1] Myasnikov supervised the execution of Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich of Russia, younger brother of the deposed Tsar Nicholas II (1918).

[2] Despite these efforts, Beloborodov ultimately lost his family a week later when his wife and three children drowned when a crowded ferry they had boarded to cross the River Vychegda capsized.

Towards the end of the civil war, he emerged as one of the most outspoken critics of the communist state, and the only prominent Bolshevik to be expelled from the party and arrested during the lifetime of Vladimir Lenin.

He called for freedom of the press to be restored, which the Central Committee condemned as "incompatible with the interests of the party.

[9] Leaders of the Workers Opposition Alexander Shlyapnikov and Sergei Medvedev feared that Myasnikov's proposals would give too much power to peasants.

In exile, he wrote a long essay denouncing the communist system in the Soviet Union as 'state capitalism', and calling for it to be destroyed and replaced by a workers' democracy.