Early years Alexander Shliapnikov was born August 30, 1885, in
Murom,
Russian Empire to a poor family of
Russian ethnicity and of the
Old Believer religion. His father died when he was a small child. In 1898, at the age of 13, Shliapnikov began factory work at the Kondratov factory in
Vacha, and one year later began working in
Sormovo factories in
Nizhny Novgorod, where he had his first encounter with Marxist literature. At the invitation of his older brother Peter, Shliapnikov moved to
St. Petersburg in late 1900, beginning work alongside his brother at the Semyannikov (also known as Nevsky) factory, and rapidly became involved in labor unrest there. By age fifteen, Shliapnikov had been blacklisted and could no longer find work at the major factories in St. Petersburg, and was forced to return to Sormovo, where he once again found himself unemployable due to his suspected radicalism. While in Sormovo, he was entrusted with illegal literature to distribute back in Murom, which he later designated as his initiation into the
Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.
Pre-Revolution Activities 1905 and Emigration from Russia According to Shliapnikov himself, he joined the
Bolsheviks in 1903, the year of their split with the
Mensheviks. ==Works==