Editing Workers' Opposition (section)

===End of the movement===
[[File:Aleksandra_Kollontai.jpg|thumb|right|[[Alexandra Kollontai]] one of the most prominent spokespersons for the Workers' Opposition.]]
Members of the former Workers' Opposition continued to advocate their views during the period of the [[New Economic Policy]] but increasingly became politically [[wiktionary:marginalized|marginalized]]. Nonetheless, on 5 July 1921 Kollontai took the floor before the [[Communist International#Third World Congress|Third Congress of the Comintern]], bitterly attacking the policies of the Soviet government and warning that NEP 'threatened to disillusion workers, to strengthen the peasantry and petty bourgeoisie, and to facilitate the rebirth of capitalism'.<ref>Allen (''A Proletarian From a Novel''), pp. 183–184.</ref>

Shlyapnikov and his supporters also conducted discussions with [[Gavril Myasnikov]]'s [[Workers Group of the Russian Communist Party|Workers Group]], but unlike Myasnikov, were determined not to leave the ranks of the Communist Party. At the beginning of 1922, former exponents of the Workers' Opposition, such as Shlyapnikov and Medvedev, and other members of the party of working class origins signed the so-called ''[[Letter of the Twenty Two]]'',<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/archive/shliapnikov/1922/appeal.htm|title=Shliapnikov: Appeal of the 22. 1922|last=Shliapnikov|website=www.marxists.org}}</ref> appealing to the [[Executive Committee of the Communist International|Comintern Executive]] against suppression of dissent within the Russian party and bourgeois infiltrations into the Soviet state and the party itself. Kollontai co-signed the letter, with her best friend [[Zoya Shadurskaia]], as intellectuals of non-working-class extraction, but in February 1922 she was restrained by [[Leon Trotsky|Trotsky]] and [[Grigory Zinoviev|Zinoviev]] from speaking before the Comintern Executive on behalf of the views expressed in the appeal.<ref>Allen (''Early dissent''), p. 31.</ref> Shlyapnikov, Kollontai, and Sergei Medvedev narrowly escaped expulsion from the Russian Communist Party at the party's subsequent [[11th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)|Eleventh Congress]] in 1922, while two other signatories of the appeal, Flor Anisimovich Mitin (1882–1937) and Nikolái Vladimirovich Kuznetsov (1898–1937), were expelled.<ref>Allen (''Early dissent''), p. 52</ref> Kollontai later became an important diplomat and Shlyapnikov wrote memoirs.

In the latter half of the 1930s, Shlyapnikov and his closest comrades (Kollontai was not among them) were charged with involvement in a counterrevolutionary group called "Workers' Opposition" and with having linked up with the "counterrevolutionary Trotskyist–Zinovievist terrorist bloc". Despite their proclaiming themselves innocent, both Shlyapnikov and Medvedev, along with many others, were condemned to death and executed in September 1937.<ref>Allen (''Alexander Shlyapnikov''), pp. 362–363. Tolokontsev, Kutuzov Kiselyov and Bruno were also put to death at the same time. Chelyshev "died of a heart attack while under NKVD interrogation rather than confess to outlandish charges" (''ibidem'', p. 333). Lutovinov had already committed suicide in 1924.</ref> In her biography of Shlyapnikov Barbara Allen concludes the last chapter before epilogue, with these words:
{{blockquote|There was no 'show trial' of the Workers' Opposition, either because it did not fit the narrative of oppositionism Stalin desired to construct or because Shlyapnikov and his closest comrades did not succumb to pressure to debase themselves and slander others in the service of the 'party'. For them, the party was not Stalin and his band, but a revolutionary political institution organised by workers in order to achieve a better life for the oppressed. This firm conviction helped them resist Stalin's rhetoric and narrative of the party's past and to imagine an alternative to his vision of socialism.|Barbara C. Allen, ''Alexander Shlyapnikov, 1885–1937: Life of an Old Bolshevik'', pp. 364-365}}

After the end of Stalinism, Shlyapnikov was rehabilitated in 1963, Medvedev in 1977. The decision annulling the latter's case for lack of evidence emphasized that "None of those judged on the Workers' Opposition case confessed guilt".<ref>Allen (''Alexander Shlyapnikov''), p. 367. A few minor figures, however, may have confessed.</ref>