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reluctant to give up the idea of a grave and a worthy monument. Fortunately, there
were enough comrades who insisted that his will be complied with. His body was
burned, and the urn with the ashes was let down into the sea.
Both friends have left behind them a monument stronger than any granite,
more eloquent than any epitaph. They have left us a method of scientific research,
rules of revolutionary strategy and tactics. They have left an inexhaustible treasure of
knowledge which is still serving as a fathomless source for the study and the
comprehension of surrounding reality.
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David
RIAZANOV
Born: 1870
Died: 1938
David Borisovich Goldendach. Born in Odessa, Ukraine, March 10. At 15,
joined Narodnik revolutionaries. Arrested by Tsarist police, spent five years in
prison. At age 19, made first trip to Russia Marxist circles abroad. When returning
from second such trip in 1891, was again arrested at the border. After 15 months
awaiting trial, was sentenced to four years solitary confinement and hard labor.
With the February Revolution of 1917, Riazanov returned to Russia.
In August, he joined the Bolsheviks. In 1918, he began organizing
Marxist archives. In 1920, Riazanov was made director of the new
Marx-Engels Institute (which became the Marx-Engels-Lenin
Institute in 1931). Soon, Riazanov's emissaries were out buying up
whatever copies of Marx / Engels works and letters they could find.
As Dirk Struik noted in a brief 1973 introduction to Riazanov:
“By 1930, [the Institute] possessed hundreds of original documents,
55,000 pages of photostats, 32,000 pamphlets, and a library of 450,000 books
and bound periodicals. Apart from the administrative offices, the archive, and
the library, it had working rooms, a museum, and a publishing department.”
A contemporary of that time described Riazanov:
"The impression he left was one of immense, almost volcanic
energy –his powerful build added to this impression–and tireless
in collecting every scrap about, or pertaining to, Marx and
Engels. His speeches at Party congresses, marked by great wit,
often carried him in sheer enthusiasm beyond the bounds of
logic. He did not hesitate to cross swords with anyone, not even
with Lenin. He was treated for this reason with rather an amused
respect, as a kind of caged lion, but one whose bark or growl
usually had a grain of two of truth worth listening to.”
Riazanov's Menshevik sympathies finally caught up with him in 1930, when he was relieved of duties
and spent more time in prison. Kirov granted him permission to return to Leningrad, but after Kirov's
assassination, Riazanov had to return to Saratov, where he died in 1938.
171
D. B. Riazonov
by Boris Souvarine
(Translated from La Critique sociale, no.2, July 1931, pp.49-50.)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
D. B. Riazonov, "the most renowned and the most important of the Marxist
scholars of our time", as said by the official organ of the Communist International
(Inprecorr, no.26, 19th March 1930), "the most eminent marxologist of our time"
(Izvestia, 10th March, 1930), "a world scientific personality" who had given "over
forty years of active life to the cause of the working class" (Pravda, 10th March,
1930), was arrested and imprisoned in Moscow last February, deported to a camp in
Suzdal, and then to Saratov for an unspecified term, without trial, and without any
opportunity of proving his innocence, or of defending himself, by a simple
governmental police measure.
Riazonov began his political life at the age of seventeen by organising a
socialist circle in Odessa. One of the very first, it was connected with Plekhanov's
League for the Emancipation of Labour, the seedbed of Russian Social Democracy,
and undertook to publish the principal works of Marxism in the Russian language.
Arrested in 1891, he suffered five years of prison and forced labour, and then a long
deportation.
He went abroad in 1900 and collaborated with the Iskra and Zarya of
Plekhanov, Lenin and Martov and with the German social democratic press, creating
the Borba group that kept itself apart from the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks,
devoting itself mainly to marxist publishing. The revolution of 1905 brought him
back to Russia, where he took an active part in the struggle against czarism and in
the newborn trade union movement : he is noteworthy for being one of the founders
of the railwaymen's clerical union. Arrested and sentenced to deportation once again
in 1907, he succeeded in getting abroad.
There he carried on an intense activity as a writer, historian, lecturer and
teacher in the "party schools" (notably Lenin's at Longjumeau), and as a militant of
every sort. His works on Marx and Engels' ideas as regards Russia mark an epoch in
the study of the question. He published Anglo-Russian Relations in the View of Karl
Marx, then Karl Marx and the Russians in the 1840s, began a history of the First
172
International, and was entrusted by the German Social Democracy with editing part
of the "literary legacy" of Marx and Engels by publishing two volumes with Dietz (a
publication that was interrupted by the war). In the meantime he contributed to
Lenin's papers and magazines.
The first volume of his history of the International, where he set right the
deformations and falsifications of the Anarchist historians with a wealth of
documentation produced by by an immense labour, was composed in 1914, but the
war prevented it from coming out. Riazonov took part in the Zimmerwald
Conference during the war, came back to Russia after the March revolution, joined
the Bolshevik Party at the time of its defeat (the July Days), and took part in the
October revolution by working mainly on the military side of things.
Successively Peoples' Commissar for Communications in Odessa, Odessa's
representative in the Constituent Assembly and a member of the Executive of the
Railwaymen's Union, he created the Archive Centre in 1918, became a professor at
Sverdlov University, took part in founding the Socialist Academy (later renamed
Communist), and in 1921 "organised a scientific institute that was the pride of our
revolutionary science", as Pravda said on 10th March 1930, the Marx-Engels
Institute[1].
This Institute, Pravda went on, "under Riazonov's direct scientific and
administrative leadership, accomplished impressive work" (on this subject. c.f. the
later article by L.B.). Riazonov, said Pravda, whose jargon we excuse ourselves for
quoting, is "in the front rank of those who are struggling for the triumph of the
revolutionary theory of the proletariat", as much by "his considerable scientific and
investigative activity in the sphere of marxology" (we are risking this neologism as
the only possible translation of the Russian term) as by his activity "in the world
trade union movement" (really in the Russian trade unions).
Riazonov has published several collections of marxist articles and studies
since the revolution : The International Proletariat and the War, George Plekhanov
and the League 'For the Emancipation of Labour', Sketches in the History of
Marxism, The Tasks of the Trade Unions Before and During the Dictatorship of the
Proletariat, and Marx and Engels (conferences). But his principal written work is
scattered among numerous prefaces, introductions, footnotes in the works edited by
him, studies, summaries, and critical, historical or documentary notes in the
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