Timofei Sapronov

Timofei Vladimirovich Sapronov (Russian: Тимофе́й Влади́мирович Сапро́нов; 1887 – September 28, 1937) was a Russian revolutionary, Old Bolshevik and socialist militant.

Sapronov was born in Mostaushka, Tula Governorate in a family of Russian ethnicity. Whilst working as a house painter Sapronov joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1912. He was active during the Russian Revolution and Russian Civil War in the Moscow Provincial Soviet. Sapronov was a left communist of the Bukharin group in 1918. Shortly afterwards, with other Moscow Communist Party left-wingers Vladimir Smirnov and Valerian Obolensky-Ossinsky, he initiated the inner-party grouping known as the Group of Democratic Centralism which presented its case at the Eighth Party Congress in 1919 that 'the party should not impose its will on the soviets’. However it obtained only a derisory number of votes and was denounced as semi-syndicalist by Vladimir Lenin.

The Democratic Centralists continued to campaign against the bureaucratic methods of the party throughout the early twenties as part of the so-called 1923 opposition. Despite this Sapronov remained a leading party figure and chairman of the Public Works Committee, a member of the Central Executive Committee and was a pall-bearer at Lenin's funeral. He, along with Osinsky, Smirnov and Drobnis, signed The Declaration of 46 and later adhered to the Left Opposition, albeit as a separate grouping considered ultra-left within it. Sapronov helped lay the groundwork for the United Opposition of the Trotskyist and Zinovite factions in 1926, but he and the former Democratic Centralists remained ultra-left, declaring in the statement of the Group of 15 that the Soviet Union was no longer a workers' state and that capitalism had been restored. They also ‘denied the necessity for the defense of the Soviet Union’ according to Leon Trotsky addressing the Dewey Commission.

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