Riazanov began his revolutionary work in 1887 in Odessa and St. Petersburg. For many years he lived abroad. He became a Menshevik after the Second Congress of the RSDLP. From 1905 to 1907 he worked in the Social Democratic fraction of the State Duma and the trade unions. In 1911 he lectured at the Party School in Longjumeau. On the instructions of the German Social Democrats, he worked on the publication of the works of K. Marx and F. Engels (two volumes were published in 1916) and the history of the First International.

After the February Revolution of 1917, Riazanov became a member of the Mezhraionnaia Organization, which subsequently joined the Bolshevik Party. He was active in trade union work. After the October Revolution of 1917 he supported the creation of a coalition government that would also include Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries. In 1918, Riazanov left the Party because of differences over the conclusion of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. In the discussion on trade unions of 1920 and 1921 he came out with an anti-Party platform and was dismissed from trade union work.

Riazanov was director of the Marx-Engels Institute from 1921 to 1931. He was editor of the first editions of the works of K. Marx and F. Engels, G. V. Plekhanov, and G. Hegel. He was a delegate to the Seventh through Sixteenth Congresses of the Party. Riazanov was expelled from the ACP(B) in February 1931 for his ties with the Menshevik center abroad.

The move is not being prepared by the Bolsheviks; the move is being prepared by that policy which in the course of seven months of the revolution had done so much for the bourgeoisie and nothing for the masses.... We don't know the day and hour for the move, but we say to the mass of the people: prepare for the decisive struggle for land and peace, for bread and freedom. If as a result of this policy a government of the worker and peasant masses arises, we will be in the first ranks of the insurgents.

Stalin was not in the least concerned with changing his opponents' minds or drawing them into the common work. He only sought to break them, to bend them to his will; if this failed, he rudely threw them aside. Unlike Lenin, who could perceive the fine distinction between an erring comrade and an enemy, Stalin saw every opponent as his personal enemy, to be dealt with by any methods that could humiliate and degrade him.

A good illustration of this difference is the contrast between the speeches of Lenin and of Stalin to the Communist caucus of the IVth All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions on May 18, 1921. At that meeting D. B. Riazanov sharply criticized the Control Commission (CC) and supported the independence of the trade unions from the Party. He introduced a motion that contradicted the line of the CC, including a demagogic proposal for the payment of wages in goods, which caused great excitement among the delegates. It was attractive because of the sharp drop in the purchasing power of money.

A majority of the Communist caucus unexpectedly voted for Riazanov's motion rather than the resolution prepared by the Party's Central Committee. Stalin, who was present, tried to get the motion repealed. But his speech lacked convincing arguments; he spoke in a harsh, irritated tone, and made personal attacks on M. P. Tomskii, Riazanov, and the whole caucus. He provoked shouts of protest, yells, and general alarm in the hall. When Riazanov had replied, Stalin, instead of criticizing his argument, shouted: "Shut up, you clown!" Riazanov jumped up and answered in the same way. Tension mounted; even delegates who had voted against Riazanov's resolution condemned Stalin's speech.

Lenin was obliged to interfere in the conflict between the Communist delegates and the Central Committee. His speech went to the heart of the issues and it was persuasive. Although the parts directed against Riazanov and Tomskii were sharply polemical and uncompromising, Lenin refrained from making any personal attacks and insults.
Instead, he won by the unshakable force of his logic. The caucus that had just voted against the resolution of the Central Committee by an overwhelming majority now rescinded Riazanov's motion and approved that of the CC. "This speech," writes a witness, "has remained in my memory as a good example of Lenin's ability to talk with people and to persuade them."

I was on very close terms with several of the scientific staff at the Marx-Engels Institute, headed by David Borisovich Riazanov, who had created there a scientific establishment of noteworthy quality. Riazanov, one of the founders of the Russian working-class movement, was, in his sixtieth year, at the peak of a career whose success might appear exceptional in times so cruel. He had devoted a great part of his life to a severely scrupulous inquiry into the biography and works of Marx - and the Revolution heaped honor on him, and in the Party his independence of outlook was respected. Alone, he had never ceased to cry out against the death penalty, even during the Terror, never ceased to demand the strict limitation of the rights of the Cheka and its successor, the GPU. Heretics of all kinds, Menshevik Socialists or Oppositionists of Right or Left, found peace and work in his Institute, provided only that they had a love of knowledge. He was still the man who had told a Conference to its face: "I am not one of those Old Bolsheviks who for twenty years were described by Lenin as old fools..."

I had met him a number of times: stout, strong-featured, beard and mustache thick and white, attentive eyes, Olympian forehead, stormy temperament, ironic utterance... Of course his heretical colleagues were often arrested, and he defended them, with all due discretion. He had access to all quarters and the leaders were a little afraid of his frank way of talking. His reputation had just been officially recognized in a celebration of his sixtieth birthday and his life's work when the arrest of the Menshevik sympathizer Sher, a neurotic intellectual who promptly made all the confessions that anyone pleased to dictate to him, put Riazanov beside himself with rage. Having learnt that a trial of old Socialists was being set in hand, with monstrously ridiculous confessions foisted on them, Riazanov flared up and told member after member of the Politburo that it was a dishonor to the regime, that all this organized frenzy simply did not stand up and that Sher was half-mad anyway.

During the trial of the so-called "Menshevik Center," the defendant Rubin, one of Riazanov's protégé, suddenly brought his name into the case, accusing him of having hidden in the Institute documents of the Socialist International concerned with war against the Soviet Union! Everything that was told to the audience was engineered in advance, so this sensational revelation was inserted to order. Summoned on that very night before the Politburo, Riazanov had a violent exchange with Stalin. "Where are the documents?" shouted the General Secretary. Riazanov replied vehemently, "You won't find them anywhere unless you've put them there yourself!" He was arrested, jailed, and deported to a group of little towns on the Volga, doomed to penury and physical collapse; librarians received the order to purge his writings and his editions of Marx from their stocks. To anybody who knew the policy of the Socialist International and the character of its leaders, Fritz Adler, Vandervelde, Abramovich, Otto Bauer, and Bracke, the fabricated charge was utterly and grotesquely implausible. If it had to be admitted as true, Riazanov deserved to die as a traitor, but they merely exiled him....

Was there then no basis of truth at all in the trial of the "Menshevik Center"? Nikolai Nikolavevich Sukhanov (Himmer), a Menshevik won over to the Party, a member of the Petrograd Soviet from its inception in 1917, who had written ten volumes of valuable notes on the beginnings of the Revolution and worked in the Planning Commissions with his fellow defendants Groman, Ginsberg, and Rubin, did have a kind of salon, in which talk between intimates was very free and the situation in the country as of 1930 was judged to be utterly catastrophic, as it undeniably was. In this circle, escape from the crisis was envisaged in terms of a new Soviet Government, combining the best brains of the Party's Right (Rykov, Tomsky, and Bukharin, perhaps), certain veterans of the Russian revolutionary movement, and the legendary army chief Blucher. It must be emphasized that for practically three years between 1930 and 1934, the new totalitarian regime maintained itself by sheer terror, against all rational expectations and with every appearance, all the time, of imminent collapse.

Endowed with an exceptional memory and a capacity for work, and easily mastering the four main European languages, he acquired an encyclopedic erudition that was highly regarded outside the confines of his own party. He alone could at the same time arrange and bring to fruition the Complete Works of Marx and Engels, Plekhanov, Kautsky and Lafargue, decipher the mass of unedited materials left behind by Marx and Engels, uncover the bulk of their correspondence, repair the alterations and fill up the gaps in all previous publications, and edit the Marxist Library, then the Library of Materialism (Gassendi, Hobbes, La Mettrie, Helvetius, d'Holbach, Diderot, J. Toland, Priestley and Feuerbach) and Hegel's philosophical works, etc., whilst directing the Institute, filling up libraries, and organising exhibitions.

He was at the same time working conscientiously as a member of the Executive Committee of the Soviets on that body's budgetary commission. He was the first communist elected to the Academy of Sciences. He unceasingly participated in the life of the party and trade unions as a conscious marxist, a democratic communist, in other words, opposed to any dictatorship over the proletariat. When the All-Russian Trades Union Congress of 1921 had at his instigation adopted a resolution that did not conform to the so-called conceptions of "Bolshevism", according to which the trade unions are a passive instrument of the party, whereas Riazonov's resolution allowed them to consider the Central Committee's trade union policy, it took measures to restore order: Tomsky, the Congress chairman, was sent to Turkestan, and Riazonov was forbidden access by the party to his trade union, such as taking the floor during any meeting, or to run a course on it at the university.

He then devoted himself entirely to historical work and marxist culture, outside of the factions and groupings, maintaining his critical spirit and his faculties of judgement intact, preserving the Institute from passing fads, and maintaining the best traditions of scientific, qualified, honest and conscientious work there, a happy contrast with the proceedings of institutions entrusted to servile functionaries....

On the occasion of Riazanov's sixtieth birthday last year the Soviet press showered praises and flowers on this old man, "who works not as a man sixty years old, but like three young men of twenty". The Executive Committee of the Soviets conferred upon him the ridiculous order of the Red Banner of Labour. All the official organisations, the Executive of the Communist International, the Central Committee of the the Party, the Lenin Institute, the Communist Academy, the Academy of Sciences, the state publishers, etc., offered him their warm and hypocritical congratulations. They can be read in the Pravda and Izvestia of the 10th March, and in an extensive collection: Na boiévom postou (Moscow, 1930), followed by eulogistic letters from Kalinin, Rykov and Clara Zetkin, lyrical articles by Deborin, Lunacharsky, Steklov, Lozovsky and Milyutin, and speeches by Pokrovsky, Bukharin and others.

One year later, and Riazanov was arrested, imprisoned and deported without any form of trial, the work of the Institute was suspended, and almost all of his collaborators were recalled. An omnipotent and autocratic power had condemned him without trial, and without even allowing him to be heard. The last refuge of social science and marxist culture in Russia had ceased to exist.

With this barbarous exploit, the dictatorship of the secretariat has perhaps delivered a mortal blow at a great and disinterested servant of the proletariat and of communism. It has surely lost a precious source of knowledge, and destroyed a study centre unique in the world. But it may at least at the same time have dispelled the last mirage capable of creating illusions abroad, and by revealing its real nature, proved the absolute incompatibility between post-Leninist Bolshevism and marxism.

Rubin's position was tragic. He had to confess to what had never existed, and nothing had: neither his former views; nor his connections with the other defendants, most of whom he didn't even know, while others he knew only by chance; nor any documents that had supposedly been entrusted to his safekeeping; nor that sealed package of documents which he was supposed to have handed over to Riazanov.

In the course of the interrogation and negotiations with the investigator, it became clear to Rubin that the name of Riazanov would figure in the whole affair, if not in Rubin's testimony, then in the testimony of someone else. And Rubin agreed to tell the whole story about the mythical package. My brother told me that speaking against Riazanov was just like speaking against his own father. That was the hardest part for him, and he decided to make it look as if he had fooled Riazanov, who had trusted him implicitly. My brother stubbornly kept to this position in all his depositions: Riazanov had trusted him personally and he, Rubin, had fooled trustful Riazanov. No one and nothing could shake him from this position. His deposition of February 21 concerning this matter was printed in the indictment and signed by Krylenko on February 23, 1931. The deposition said that Rubin handed Riazanov the documents in a sealed envelope, and asked him to keep them for a while at the Institute. My brother stressed this position in all his statements before and during the trial. At the trial he gave a number of examples which were supposed to explain why Riazanov trusted him so much...

Putting the problem in such a way ruined the prosecutor's plan. He asked Rubin point-blank: "Didn't you establish any organizational connection?" Rubin replied, "No, there was no organizational connection, there was only his great personal trust in me." Then Krylenko asked for a recess. When he and the other defendants got to another room, Krylenko said to Rubin: "You did not say what you should have said. After the recess I will call you back to the stand, and you will correct your reply." Rubin answered sharply: "Do not call me any more. I will again repeat what I said." The result of this conflict was that, instead of the agreed three years in prison, Rubin was given five, and in his concluding speech Krylenko gave a devastating characterization of Rubin like that of no one else. Everyone interested in the case could not understand why there was so much spite and venom in this characterization.

Rubin set himself the goal of doing everything in his power to "shield" Riazanov.... At the trial the possibility of defining in this way his position with respect to Riazanov gave Rubin a certain moral satisfaction. But these legal subtleties made little sense to anyone else. Politically Riazanov was compromised, and Rubin was stricken from the list of people who have the right to a life worthy of man. Rubin himself, in his own consciousness, struck himself from the list of such people as soon as he began to give his "testimony." It is interesting what my brother felt when they took him back to Moscow from Suzdal. When, sick and tortured, he was put into the sleigh, he remembered, in his words, how self-assured and internally strong he had been when he came to Suzdal, and how he was leaving morally broken, destroyed, degraded to a state of complete hopelessness. Rubin understood perfectly well that by his "confession" he had put an end to his life as an honorable, uncorrupted worker and achiever in his chosen field of scholarship.

But that was not the main thing; the main thing was that he was destroyed as a man. Rubin understood perfectly well what repercussions his confession would have. Why had Rubin borne false witness against himself? Why had he also named Riazanov? Why had he violated the most elementary, most primitive concepts of human behavior? Everyone knew with what mutual respect these two men were connected, Rubin and Riazanov. Riazanov who was considerably older than Rubin, saw in him a talented Marxist scholar who had devoted his life to the study and popularization of Marxism. Riazanov had trusted him unreservedly; he himself was bewildered by what had happened. Here I want to recount an episode, a very painful one, the confrontation between Rubin and Riazanov. The confrontation took place in the presence of an investigator. Rubin, pale and tormented, turned to Riazanov, saying, "David Borisovich, you remember I handed you a package." Whether Riazanov said anything, and precisely what, I don't remember for sure. My brother right then was taken to his cell; in his cell he began to beat his head against the wall. Anyone who knew how calm and self-controlled Rubin was can understand what a state he had been brought to. According to rumors, Riazanov used to say that he could not understand what had happened to Isaac Il'ich.

The defendants in the case of the "Union Bureau" were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment, and all fourteen men were transferred to the political prison in the town of Verkhneural'sk. Rubin, sentenced to five years, was subjected to solitary confinement. The others, who received terms of ten, eight, and five years, were placed several men to a cell. Rubin remained in solitary confinement throughout his imprisonment. During his confinement he continued his scholarly work. Rubin became sick in prison, and lip cancer was suspected. In connection with this sickness, in January, 1933, he was taken to Moscow, to the hospital in Butyrskaia Prison. While in the hospital Rubin was visited twice by GPU officials who offered to make his situation easier, to free him, to enable him to do research. But both times Rubin refused, understanding the price that is paid for such favors. After spending six to eight weeks in the prison hospital, he was taken back to the political prison in Verkhneural'sk. . . . A year later, in 1934, Rubin was released on a commuted sentence, and exiled to the town of Turgai, then an almost unpopulated settlement in the desert. Aside from Rubin there were no other exiles there.

After several months at Turgai, Rubin was permitted to settle in the town of Aktiubinsk.... He got work in a consumer cooperative, as a plan economist. In addition he continued to do his own scholarly work. In the summer of 1935, his wife became seriously sick. My brother sent a telegram asking me to come. I went right away to Aktiubinsk; my brother's wife lay in the hospital, and he himself was in a very bad condition. A month later, when his wife had recovered, I went home to Moscow.... My brother told me that he did not want to return to Moscow, he did not want to meet his former circle of acquaintances. That showed how deeply he was spiritually shaken by all that he had been through. Only his great optimism that was characteristic of him and his deep scholarly interests gave him the strength to live.

In the fall of 1937, during the mass arrests of that time, my brother was again arrested. The prison in Aktiubinsk was overcrowded, the living conditions of the prisoners were terrifying. After a short stay in the prison, he was transferred somewhere outside of Aktiubinsk. We could find out nothing more about him.