Russia

The occupation began on March 26th, with the workers producing a list of 11 demands including a 50% wage increase, and the restoration of previously suspended parts of the workers welfare packages.

Nikolai Ignatievich Rogdaev (Muzil) aka Uncle Vanya 188?-1932

Grigorii Gorelik, usually known as Anatolii Gorelik was born into a Jewish family in 1889. He became an anarchist in 1904, at the age of fourteen. He was active in the Ukraine, and was arrested several times by the Tsarist police.

Yarchuk, Efim Zakharovich aka Khaim Zakharev - Also rendered as Yarchook, Yartchuk, Iarchuk etc.

“a man who enjoyed exceptional influence among the sailors and workers and whose idealism and devotion are matters of historic record” - My Disillusionment in Russia. Emma Goldman

Afanasy Nikolaevich Matiushenko
Also spelled Afanasiy Matyushenko, born 1879 - Kharkov, Russia, died 20 October 1907 - Sevastopol, Russia

The Potemkin mutineer
Afanasy Matiushenko was the son of peasants from Kharkov province in the Ukraine. He was born in 1879, in the village of Dergachi. His father had to give up the unrewarding work of farming to become a shoemaker.

[b]Published during World War II, it illustrates how Russian political intervention in China and Europe served Russian foreign policy interests and so worked against the possibilities of proletarian revolution.

The Workers Opposition began to form in 1919, as a result of the policies of War Communism, which set a precedence for the domination of the Communist Party over local party branches and trade unions. During the civil war, the Workers Opposition began agitating against the lack of democracy in the Communist Party as a result of the centralising actions of the party’s bureaucracy.

Situated in the dense forest of south-east Siberia, the massive goldfields that lined the river Lena were, at the turn of the century, amongst the most profitable enterprises in the Russian Empire. The Lena Gold Mining Joint Stock Company (Lenzoloto), the principal owner of the majority of goldfields in the region, was running at profits of 7,000,000 roubles a year.

Taken from the Bulletin of the Kate Sharpley Library, No. 14 (March 1998), can also be found on the KSL website here.

Sergei Pavlovich Medvedev was a Russian Bolshevik revolutionary, metalworker, and trade union organizer. Born into a peasant estate, he grew up in the countryside near Moscow and in St. Petersburg. After receiving a primary school education, he began factory work at age thirteen. He first worked at the Obukhov factory in St. Petersburg and participated in the 1901 Obukhov strike.

Alexandra Kollontai was a major figure in the Russian socialist movement from the turn of the century through the revolution and civil war. During periods of exile she was also active as a speaker and writer in Germany, Belgium, France, Britain, Scandinavia and the United States.

The women who took part in the Great October Revolution – who were they? Isolated individuals? No, there were hosts of them; tens, hundreds of thousands of nameless heroines who, marching side by side with the workers and peasants behind the Red Flag and the slogan of the Soviets, passed over the ruins of tsarist theocracy into a new future...

First published in Pravda, January 25, 1921 this text was banned in Soviet Russia in March of 1921, by resolution of the 10th Congress of the Communist Party. It was then printed in the Workers ' Dreadnought (by Sylvia Pankhurst), April 22 - August 19, 1921.

What year could be said to mark the beginning of the working women's movement in Russia?

Alexander Shliapnikov was born in 1885 in Murom, Russia, into a Russian family belonging to the urban estate (meshchanstvo) and professing the Old Belief (a religious sect that split from the Russian Orthodox Church in the seventeenth century). His father died when he was three, leaving his mother to support four children by taking in washing.

Dear comrades!

From our newspapers we have learned that the Executive Committee of the Communist International is discussing the “united workers’ front,” and we consider it our communist duty to inform you that in our country the “united front” is in bad shape not only in the broad sense of this term, but even in its application toward the ranks of our party.

General Tenets

In it he argues for increased democracy within the party and for more control of the economy to be handed over to the unions.

1. The three-year experience of the Russian Revolution shows that the single force consciously fighting for the organization of society on communist foundations is the Proletariat.

This version is taken from: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mhuey/HOME.html Copyright © 1992, 1998 by Scott Zenkatsu Parker.
The author permits the unlimited duplication, transmission, and distribution of this text with the proper citations for academic, educational, and non-commercial use only.