In 1870, David Riazanov, one of the most committed, humane, and relevant figures of Marxism, was born in Odessa, the great cosmopolitan Ukrainian city, into a well-to-do Jewish family. The city was home to a large Jewish community — 37 percent in 1897 — that bore the brunt of tsarist pogroms. Riazanov was a nom de guerre he adopted in place of his original surname, Goldendach, as he became a dedicated activist in the revolutionary movement fighting to overthrow the absolutist regime.

Riazanov was an eccentric scholar, volatile and romantic, with an unlimited capacity for work. Leon Trotsky defined him as being “organically incapable of cowardice, or of platitudes,” adding that “any showy ostentation of loyalty disgusted him.” For Anatoly Lunacharsky, he was “indisputably the most learned man in our party.” John Reed, author of Ten Days That Shook the World, described him “as a bitterly objecting minority of one.”

After the October Revolution, Riazanov was publicly critical of many actions taken by the Soviet government, from the enforcement of the death penalty to the consolidation of a one-party system. In spite of these criticisms, he remained a member of the ruling Bolshevik Party and built up a state-sponsored institute to promote rigorous scholarship about the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.