The 1905 Russian Revolution

These translations by Barbara C. Allen of Alexander Shlyapnikov’s memoirs of his childhood and youth and of his history of the 1905 Revolution in Russia illuminate how a working-class provincial youth from a religious dissenter family became a Marxist revolutionary. The book comprises a brief published autobiography, an unpublished memoir of Shlyapnikov’s childhood, a short fictional piece based on his early experience of factory work, a published historical survey of the 1905 Revolution in Russia, and three article-length published memoir-histories about his early activities in the revolutionary underground and his leadership of a revolutionary organisation in the town of Murom.