Vladimir Nevsky

[5] He returned to Moscow, but was arrested again in 1901, held in prison for eight months, then exiled to Voronezh, where he helped set up a distribution network for Iskra, the newspaper founded abroad by Vladimir Lenin and others.

He admitted, years later, that the St Petersburg Bolshevik committee was so engrossed in the dispute with the Mensheviks that they did not know about the strikes that marked the beginning of the 1905 revolution until they read about them in foreign newspapers.

At the time of the February Revolution in 1917, Nevsky was in exile in Yekaterinburg, but he moved to Petrograd (St Petersburg) where, as a member of the military organisation of the Bolshevik party, he became known as the "idol of the soldiers" because of his popularity with troops based in the capital.

[2] At the start of the disturbances known as the July Days, when it was not official party policy to attempt to overthrow the Provisional Government, Nevsky addressed a machine gun regiment who were thinking of mutinying to avoid being sent to the front to fight the Germans.

[3] From 1920, after the end of the Russian Civil War, Nevsky specialised in academic and educational work, and established himself as the leading historian of the Bolshevik party.

In 1923, when Lenin was terminally ill and Joseph Stalin was emerging as the strong man in the party leadership, Nevsky was accused of being secretly linked to the opposition, and was removed from his position in Istpart.

In January 1924, the head of Istpart, Mikhail Olminsky refused to publish an article Nevsky had written on events in Baku in 1904.

When the first volume of Nevsky's essays on party history appeared, in March 1924, Olminsky publicly objected to its having Istpart's imprint on it.

It was at a time when the history of the founding of the Bolshevik organisation in Baku and Georgia was being rewritten to create a false narrative that glorified the part played by Joseph Stalin.