Yuri Larin

[2] Larin returned to Russia early in the 1905 Revolution, and was arrested, but escaped to Ukraine, where he tried to reunite the two halves of the RSDLP.

In 1910, Larin wrote a series of articles arguing that Russia was progressing towards becoming a capitalist society in which an elected Duma would become increasingly powerful, and that it would not be necessary to repeat the revolutionary violence of 1905.

This was angrily refuted by Vladimir Lenin the Bolshevik leader, who described Larin as the "enfant terrible of opportunism.

He was also the author of imaginative schemes for opening trade relations with the US, electrification of Petrograd's factories, developing the Kuznetsk coal industry and irrigating Turkestan to grow cotton.

During the split in the communist party that followed Lenin's death, Larin was an outspoken critic of Leon Trotsky and the left opposition, who, he claimed, had little or no support from industrial workers.

[10][11] As head of OZET, the Society for Settling Toiling Jews on the Land, he supported the creation of Jewish agricultural settlements in Crimea, which were tolerated in the 1920s but later suppressed.

In 1931, he criticised the decision to create the Jewish autonomous area of Birobidzhan as unrealistic for which he was severely censored.

Arthur Ransome, working as a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, met Larin in 1920, and was impressed by his "obstinacy, his hatred of compromise, and a sort if mixed originality and perverseness ... (and) the real heroism with which he conquered physical handicaps.

"[15] The Menshevik Simon Liberman described Larin as: He was a very tall man, with regular features, large black eyes, and a little pointed beard.

He had been crippled by infantile paralysis, now had difficulty in moving his legs and left arm, and his chest was sunken in and his shoulders protruded sharply forward; I could feel tension in every step he took ... Larin flourished in 1918 and 1919, during the era of passionate enthusiasm for a complete overhauling of Russian economy ...

[17] His widow Lena Larina was arrested during the Great Purge, in January 1938, and spent 17 years in prison and exile.