Timofei Sapronov

According to an autobiographical essay he wrote in the 1920s for the Great Soviet Encyclopedia his family lived a hut with a roof that leaked, and when he started school, aged seven, his clothes were so ragged that the other children nicknamed him "the beggar".

During the Russian Revolution, Sapronov was based in Moscow, where he was a member of the military committee of the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP, a delegate to the short-lived Constituent Assembly, and chairman of the provincial executive from October 1917 to December 1919, after which he was transferred to Kharkiv, after the Red Army had driven the White Army of General Denikin out of the city, to take over as chairman of the executive committee.

"[5] The Democratic Centralists continued to campaign against the bureaucratic methods of the party throughout the early twenties as part of the so-called 1923 opposition.

He, along with Osinsky, Smirnov and Drobnis, signed The Declaration of 46 and later adhered to the Left Opposition, albeit as a separate grouping considered ultra-left within it.

Sapronov helped lay the groundwork for the United Opposition of the Trotskyist and Zinovite factions in 1926, but he and the former Democratic Centralists remained ultra-left, declaring in the statement of the Group of 15 that the Soviet Union was no longer a workers' state and that capitalism had been restored.

Our work of late has been to defend within the party our views set out in the Platform of the 15..."[6] In December 1931, Sapronov wrote an 11-page essay, entitled The Agony of the Petty-Bourgeois Dictatorship in which he said that 'police methods' had been used to force the peasants onto collective farms, creating "a kind if ugly state capitalism" and that "to call such an economy socialist means committing a crime against the working class.

After her release, she was deported to the Alma Ata (Almaty) region of Kazakhstan, where she was arrested again, in August 1948, and sentenced to another 10 years in labour camps.