David Riazanov

David Riazanov (Russian: Дави́д Ряза́нов), born David Borisovich Goldendakh (Russian: Дави́д Бори́сович Гольдендах; 10 March 1870 – 21 January 1938), was a political revolutionary, Marxist theoretician, and archivist. Riazanov is best remembered as the founder of the Marx-Engels Institute and editor of the first large-scale effort to publish the collected works of these two founders of the modern socialist movement. Riazanov is also remembered as 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, Ukraine, then part of the Russian empire. At the age of 15, the future David Riazanov joined the ranks of the Narodnik revolutionaries attempting to overthrow the 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).

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