Gavriil Ilyich Myasnikov
Gawriil Ilyich Mjasnikow ( Russian: Гаврии́л Ильи́ч Мяснико́в ; * 1889 in Chistopol ( Kazan Governorate ); † November 16, 1945 in Moscow ) was a Russian metal worker, professional revolutionary, Bolshevik and later dissident in the Soviet Union. On the night of June 12th to 13th, 1918, he organized the assassination of Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich Romanov .
biography
From 1900 Mjasnikow attended the four-class craft school in Perm . After his exam in 1905, he worked as a mechanic in the Motovilichinskije zavody arms factory . In the course of the bourgeois-democratic revolution that was taking place at the same time , he began to get involved politically. He joined the Social Revolutionary Party in May 1905 and left it in September of the same year. He stole large quantities of weapons and ammunition from the factory and was the leader of a troop of insurgent workers equipped with them until the uprisings were crushed at the end of the year. He kept his job in the arms factory.
Professional revolutionary
In early 1906 he joined the Bolsheviks . He was arrested at the factory on June 10 of the same year when Bolshevik leaflets were found on him during a search. As a member of the Bolsheviks' Perm Committee, Myasnikov was sentenced to two years and eight months in prison. This sentence was converted into exile in Siberia. In June 1908 he fled from exile and lived from then on in illegality.
In 1909 he was arrested and imprisoned again in Tyumen under the false name Agapit Matschikow. In prison he met Yevgeny Alexeyevich Preobrazhensky . In 1910 he was able to break out of prison. In December 1910 he was arrested again in the Lena gold mines under the false name Nestor Popov and imprisoned in Bodaibo prison . In June 1911 he was able to flee again. In 1913, the Russian state police arrested Myasnikov in Baku . In Tbilisi he was sentenced to 6 years in katorga . Of this, three years had to be served under difficult conditions because of his repeated outbreaks. Myasnikov remained imprisoned in the Oryol Central Prison until the beginning of 1917 .
Revolutionary year 1917 and Russian Civil War
He was released from prison in early March 1917 as a result of the events of the February Revolution . He returned to his previous job as an official of the Bolsheviks and was chairman of the Council of Workers' Deputies, a member of the Central Executive Committee and chairman of the Bolshevik Party Committee in Kazan Governorate.
On the night of June 12 to June 13, 1918, he organized the assassination of Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich Romanov in Perm in order to prevent him from being liberated by Kolchak's white troops . After the capture of Perm by Kolchak's troops in December 1918, Myasnikov was division commander in the Red Army in 1919 .
Opposition
In 1920 Myasnikov became the president of the Bolsheviks' Perm Party Committee. He married Daria G. Myasnikova. The marriage resulted in his son Yuri a year later.
At that time, differences of opinion between Myasnikov and the Soviet leadership became apparent. Myasnikov argued that workers were de facto deprived of all rights and that real power was in the hands of the Bolshevik party bureaucracy. This nomenclature became more and more privileged. Myasnikov wanted the program outlined by Lenin in State and Revolution to be carried out. After the end of the civil war in 1921, he called for the reintroduction of freedom of the press and freedom of expression and a democratization of the political system in Soviet Russia and, from 1922, the Soviet Union. Myasnikov was close to the workers' opposition. There was an argument with Grigory Zinoviev . Lenin began public correspondence with Myasnikov in 1921, for example rejecting the demand for freedom of the press:
"Свобода печати в РСФСР, окружённой врагами всего мира, есть свобода политической РСФСР, окружённой врагами всего мира, есть свобода политической колитической организ кружеской организ свекой организ крагами урганиз - шек организ кружеской. Это факт неопровержимый. Буржуазия (во всём мире) ещё сильнее нас и во много раз. Дать ей ещё такое оружие, как свобода политической организации (свободу печати, ибо печать есть центр и основа политической организации) значит облегчать дело врагу, помогать классовому врагу. Мы самоубийством кончать: не желаем и потому этого не сделаем. "
“The freedom of the press in the RSFSR, surrounded by enemies from all over the world, is the freedom of political organization for the bourgeoisie and their most loyal servants - the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries . That is an irrefutable fact. The middle class (in the whole world) is many times stronger than us. To give the bourgeoisie weapons like a liberalization of the political system (freedom of the press is a center and a basis of political organization) means to facilitate the activities of the enemy, to help the class enemy. We'd commit suicide. We don't want that and that's why we won't do it. "
On February 20, 1922, Myasnikov was expelled from the Bolshevik party. Two days later, he and other opposition members signed the letter of 22 and was appointed deputy director of the Motowilicha rifle factory. On the same day, Myasnikov was arrested by the GPU . He was taken to the GPU prison and tried to be murdered. A little later, Myasnikov went on a hunger strike. He was then transferred to Moscow.
In March 1922, Myasnikov was released by the GPU in Moscow, but was not allowed to leave the city. During this time he received news of the birth of his sons Dmitri and Boris. In February 1923, Myasnikov wrote the manifesto of the Workers' Group of the Russian Communist Party (b) , which was published in April 1923 shortly after the XII. Party conference of the KPR (B) was publicly distributed. In May 1923, Myasnikov was arrested again. As an opposition leader, he was secretly expatriated from the Soviet Union and transported to Berlin by plane. There he worked with left-wing politicians. In November 1923, Myasnikov returned to Moscow without the consent of the Soviet leadership and was arrested again. After his arrest, he went on a hunger strike again and attempted suicide. He was later sentenced to three years in prison. Until 1927, Myasnikov was incarcerated in prisons in Moscow, Tomsk and Vyatka. He spent most of his time in solitary confinement. During this time he wrote a book called Critique of the Theory and Practice of the CPSU (B) and the Comintern .
In the spring of 1927, Myasnikov was released from prison. He was exiled to Yerevan , where he wrote the pamphlet What kind of workers' state is this? .
emigration
On November 7, 1928, Myasnikov fled the Soviet Union to Iran . In April 1929 he was deported to Turkey. There he met with Leon Trotsky . In the Soviet Union, the GPU feverishly searched for copies of Myasnikov's manuscripts, which were secretly distributed there. Myasnikov stayed in contact with Trotsky until October 1933.
In April 1930, Myasnikov left Turkey for France. He arrived in the port city of Marseille on May 8th and traveled on to Paris. There he tried to publish articles in the magazine "Возрождение" (Wosroschdenie, rebirth ). The handwritten manuscripts, however, were stolen from the editorial staff of the magazine by GPU agents. Nonetheless, he published another manuscript in Paris entitled “The Next Prank” . In the following years he built up a group of Russian oppositionists and published the newspaper "Oppositionelle Pravda ".
From 1934 to 1936 Myasnikov worked at the clinic of Dr. Ran Arbelt in Coulommiers . Here he wrote his own account of the assassination of the Russian Grand Duke in 1918 with the text “The Philosophy of Murder or Why and How I Killed Mikhail Romanov” . In 1936, Myasnikov returned to Paris and worked there on the book “Victory and Defeat of the Working Class in the USSR or Who betrayed October - Lenin? Trotsky? Stalin? ” During this time he also tried to return to the USSR. Myasnikov later wrote the book “Chronicle of the Labor Movement in Motovilicha” . Until 1941, Myasnikov held various activities, working as a tanner and later as a mechanic at Métro Paris .
Persecution by the Nazi regime
On June 23, 1941, shortly after the outbreak of the German-Soviet War, Myasnikov was arrested by the Gestapo at the Soviet embassy in Paris. In 1942 he managed to escape to Toulouse in the still unoccupied Vichy France . He was arrested again in Vichy . He sent a call for help to the US consul to grant him asylum , which was not granted. Myasnikov was taken to an internment camp near Toulouse. There he managed to escape again in August 1943. He subsequently went into hiding in Paris with false papers until the city was liberated by the Allies on August 25, 1944.
Return to the Soviet Union and execution
After the liberation of Paris, Myasnikov received an offer from the Soviet embassy to return to the Soviet Union. He accepted this. His conspiratorial return journey began on December 18, 1944 and lasted until January 1945. On January 17, 1945, he was arrested in Moscow by the NKVD . During the interrogation that followed, he was tortured so badly that he was sent to the prison hospital. On October 24, Myasnikov was sentenced to death by the Military College of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union under Article 58.1 of the Soviet Criminal Code . The execution Mjasnikows took place on 16 November 1945th
On August 16, 2004, Myasnikov was posthumously rehabilitated.
Publications
- Манифест рабочей группы ВКП (б) (Manifesto of the Workers' Group of the Communist Party of Russia (b)) (Moscow, February 1923) ( online )
- Критика теории и практики ВКП (б) и Коминтерна (Critique of Theory and Practice of the CPSU (b) and the Comintern) (1927)
- Что такое рабочее государство (What kind of workers' state is this) (Yerevan, 1928)
- Очередной обман (The Next Prank) (1930)
- Философия убийства, или Почему и как я убил Михаила Романова (Philosophy of Murder or Why and How I Killed Mikhail Romanov) (Coulommiers, 1935) ( online , Russian)
- Победа и поражение рабочего класса в СССР или кто предал Октябрь - Ленин? Троцкий? Сталин? (Victory and Defeat of the Working Class in the USSR or Who betrayed October - Lenin? Trotsky? Stalin?) (1937)
- Хроника рабочего движения в Мотовилихе (Chronicle of the Labor Movement in the Motowilicha) (1941)
literature
- Paul Avrich : Bolshevik Opposition to Lenin: G. Miasnikov and the Workers' Group ; Russian Review , Vol. 43, No. 1, pp. 1-29, January 1984 ( online )
- Philippe Bourrinet: MIASNIKOV, Gavril Il'itch (1889-1945), dit "Gan'ka" , 2002 ( online (PDF; 74 kB) French, accessed October 6, 2010)
- Н. А. Аликина (NA Alikina): Дон Кихот пролетарской революции (Don Quixote of the Proletarian Revolution); Perm «Пушка» (Pushka) 2006
- Татьяна Анатольевна Санду (Tatjana Anatolewna Sandu): "РАБОЧАЯ ОППОЗИЦИЯ" В РКП (б) (1919-1923 гг.) ( "Workers' Opposition" in the CPSU (b) (1919-1923)), Tyumen, 2006 ( online (PDF; 321 kB), Russian, accessed October 7, 2010)
Web links
- Short biography (Russian, main source of the article)
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Myasnikov: Autobiography ( online , accessed October 7, 2010)
- ↑ a b Archivists rehabilitate Myasnikov (accessed October 6, 2010)
- ↑ 1922-1923: The Communist Party's Struggle Against the Counterrevolution (accessed October 7, 2010)
- ↑ a b Bourrinet: MIASNIKOV, Gavril Il'itch (1889-1945), dit "Gan'ka" , p. 7.
Remarks
- ↑ For Lenin, the press was not a simple medium for transmitting information from 1897 to 1900, but a central component in the creation of “a revolutionary organization of the proletariat”, that is, a propaganda instrument for gaining a large number of followers and guiding them.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Myasnikov, Gavriil Ilyich |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Мясников, Гавриил Ильич (Russian spelling) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Russian revolutionary |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1889 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Chistopol |
| DATE OF DEATH | November 16, 1945 |
| Place of death | Moscow |