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Shlyapnikov’s memoirs open just prior to the St Petersburg barricades of July 1914 and break off on the threshold of the revolution of 1917. His experiences and subsequent researches on this period throw into sharp relief the contradictory effect of World War I upon the development of the Russian revolution. The imperialist conflict delayed yet deepened the crisis of the tsarist political system and the economic life of the country. Shlyapnikov was the key Bolshevik organizer throughout these years, acting as a roving liaison officer and contact man between the Bolsheviks’ exile organizations in Scandinavia (and thence to Lenin and Zinoviev’s Central Committee in Switzerland) and the fragmented and precarious local party organizations, presses and legal groups in Russia itself. The memoirs, being written in a down-to-earth, practical spirit reflecting the personality of the author, are unique in their first-hand portrayal of the complex interplay of the developing revolutionary awareness of the working class and the mounting predicament of the nobility, the bourgeoisie and the tsarist bureaucracy itself, in each case confronted with a political and economic impasse created by the war.
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