Gavril Myasnikov Executed (1945)

Fri Nov 16, 1945

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Gavril Ilyich Myasnikov was a Russian Bolshevik revolutionary and later left communist dissident who was executed by the USSR on this day in 1945. Myansikov participated in the Revolution of 1905 and became an underground Bolshevik activist in 1906. He was arrested by Tsarist police and spent over seven years at hard labor in Siberia.

In 1922, along with former members of the Workers’ Opposition (a dissident group with the Bolsheviks), Myasnikov signed the “Letter of the Twenty-Two”, sent to the Comintern in 1922, protesting the Russian Communist Party leaders’ suppression of dissent among proletarian members of the Communist Party. Shortly thereafter, Myasnikov was expelled from the Russian Communist Party, and he formed an opposition faction called “Workers Group of the Russian Communist Party” that opposed the New Economic Policy (NEP).

Myasnikov was arrested by the Soviet state in 1923, and served several years in prison before being exiled to Armenia, where he fled the country. In 1944, he accepted an invitation by the Soviet embassy in France to return to the USSR. Upon his arrival, he was arrested by the Soviet secret police and later executed on November 16th, 1945.