David Riazanov or Ryazanov (Russian: Давид Рязанов), born David Borisovich Goldendakh (Russian: Дави́д Бори́сович Гольдендах; 10 March 1870 – 21 January 1938), was a Russian revolutionary, historian, bibliographer, Marxologist and archivist. He had been an old associate of Leon Trotsky. Riazanov founded the Marx–Engels Institute and edited the first large-scale effort to publish the collected works of these two founders of the modern socialist movement. Riazanov was a prominent victim of the Great Terror of the late 1930s.
David Borisovich Goldendakh was born 10 March 1870 to a Jewish father and a Russian mother in Odessa, Russian Empire (now Ukraine). At the age of 15, David Riazanov joined the ranks of the Narodnik revolutionaries attempting to overthrow the autocracy of the Russian tsar. Riazanov attended secondary school in Odessa but was expelled in 1886, not for revolutionary activity or insubordination, but rather due to "hopeless inability."
Riazanov traveled abroad in 1889 and 1891 where he met various Russian Marxists who were building their revolutionary organizations there. Following his second trip, Riazanov was arrested in October 1891 at the Austrian-Russian border by the Okhrana, the tsarist secret police, who had long suspected his revolutionary activity. Riazanov spent 15 months in prison awaiting trial, at which he was convicted and sentenced to an additional four years of katorga (exile and hard labor). Following completion of his term, Riazanov was subject to 3 years of administrative exile under police supervision in the city of Kishinev, Bessarabia (today part of Moldova).
In 1900, Riazanov went into exile. The next year in Berlin Riazanov and his co-thinkers established a small Marxist group called "Borba" (Struggle), which attempted to unite the émigré Russian Marxists. Riazanov's group was excluded from the 2nd Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party that was held in London and Brussels in the summer of 1903. With the party divided between Bolshevik and Menshevik wings in the aftermath of this landmark convention, Riazanov and his co-thinkers pointedly declined to join either faction.
In 1903, Riazanov became the first writer to introduce the concept of permanent revolution to the political literature of Russian Marxism when he published three studies in Geneva under the title Materials on the Program of the Workers' Party. Riazanov argued, in opposition to the views of Georgi Plekhanov, that the rise of capitalism in Russia represented a fundamental departure from the pattern seen elsewhere in Europe. The large size and centralization of Russian industrial firms suggested to Riazanov a relative weakness of Russian middle-classes and a significant possibility that there would be forces of the Russian Marxist movement which would lead the revolution against Tsarist autocracy and thenceforth immediately towards socialism.
Riazanov returned to Russia shortly after the start of the 1905 Russian Revolution, going to work in the trade union movement in the capital city of Saint Petersburg. The uprising ended in failure by the revolutionaries, however, and Riazanov was arrested and sentenced to deportation once again in 1907.
Shortly after his 1907 conviction, Riazanov emigrated to the West. During this second interlude abroad, Riazanov dedicated himself to historical scholarship, studying the history of the International Workingmen's Association in the archives of the German Social-Democratic Party and in the British Museum in London.
While in London, Riazanov read extensively from the files of the New-York Tribune and other newspapers, collecting material written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels for the periodical press. This journalism of Marx and Engels which Riazanov so painstakingly gathered was eventually published in book form in 1917, a publication which cemented Riazanov's reputation as one of the world's leading experts in the literary output of these two leading lights of modern socialism.
During Riazanov's second period of exile he became a close political associate of Leon Trotsky, contributing regularly to the latter's Vienna newspaper, Pravda. Riazanov actively supported Trotsky's Interdistrict Committee (the Mezhraionka), a group which shared the internationalist views of the Bolsheviks on the question of the war but which disagreed with them on organizational matters, seeking unity with revolutionary elements in the Menshevik camp.
Riazanov was also a participant in the 1915 Zimmerwald Conference of the Second International. Riazanov rejected both the social-patriotic support of World War I advanced by many Western European socialists as well as the revolutionary defeatism advanced by the Bolsheviks.
During the war, Riazanov lived in Paris, where he was a frequent contributor to the Russian-language socialist newspapers Golos (The Voice) and Nashe Slovo (Our Word).
Riazanov returned to Russia following the February Revolution in 1917. There he was active in the growing trade union movement, helping to form the Russian Railway Union.
Together with the rest of the Mezhraiontsy, Riazanov joined the Bolshevik Party headed by Vladimir Lenin in August 1917. Riazanov was opposed to the October Revolution, however, and was instead involved in an effort to establish a broad coalition government. In the same vein, Riazanov stood as an opponent of the Bolshevik decision to dissolve the elected Constituent Assembly in January 1918.
In March 1918, the decision of the Bolsheviks to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk prompted Riazanov to resign from the Bolshevik Party — a temporary move which was shortly reversed with a reapplication for membership and readmission.
In 1918, Riazanov helped to establish the Socialist Academy of Social Sciences, an institute later known as the Communist Academy.
In 1920 Riazanov attended the 2nd World Congress of the Communist International as a member of the Russian delegation.
Riazanov was an unorthodox member of the Bolshevik Party. He attended the 4th All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions in May 1921, at which he spoke in favor of the independence of the unions from the Communist Party. Working with Communist trade union leader Mikhail Tomsky, Riazanov also authored a resolution calling for wages to be paid with physical commodities rather than the devalued currency of the day — an action which put the duo at odds with Lenin, Stalin, and the party's Central Committee.
Radical French writer Boris Souvarine later lauded Riazanov's activity in this period as that of "a conscious marxist, a democratic communist, in other words, opposed to any dictatorship over the proletariat." Riazanov's defense of trade union autonomy against the will of the party came at price, however, as Riazanov was effectively excluded from any active political responsibility after May 1921. Thereafter he assumed the role of Marxist academic.