in an effort to establish a broad coalition government. In the same vein, Riazanov stood as an opponent of the Bolshevik decision to dissolve the elected Constituent Assembly in January 1918. In March 1918, the decision of the Bolsheviks to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk prompted Riazanov to resign from the Bolshevik Party — a temporary move which was shortly reversed with a reapplication for membership and readmission. In 1918, Riazanov helped to establish the Socialist Academy of Social Sciences, an institute later known as the Communist Academy. In 1920 Riazanov attended the 2nd World Congress of the Communist International as a member of the Russian delegation. Riazanov was an unorthodox member of the Russian Communist Party (bolsheviks) [RKP(b)]. He attended the 4th All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions in May 1921, at which he spoke in favor of the independence of the unions from the Communist Party. Working with Communist trade union leader Mikhail Tomsky, Riazanov also authored a resolution calling for wages to be paid with physical commodities rather than the devalued currency of the day — an action which put the duo at odds with Lenin, Stalin, and the Central Committee of the RKP(b). Radical French writer Boris Souvarine later lauded Riazanov's activity in this period as that of "a conscious marxist, a democratic communist, in other words, opposed to any dictatorship over the proletariat." Riazanov's defense of trade union autonomy against the will of the party came at price, however, as Riazanov was effectively excluded from any active political responsibility after May 1921. Thereafter he assumed the role of Marxist academic. In 1921 Riazanov established the Marx-Engels Institute, which became one of the main institutions of Soviet philosophy and history. Riazanov dedicated himself especially to the compilation and publication of the collected writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. In this context, as early as 1926, the publication of a multi-volume series called the Marx-Engels Archive, collecting scholarship on the biography and writings of the founders of Marxism, began under Riazanov's supervision. In 1927 the first volume of the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA1) was published by the Marx-Engels Institute, a complete edition of the works of Marx and Engels in their original languages, which was to comprise 42 volumes. Under Riazanov's editorship, five volumes of this edition were issued until 1931 (later seven more were published until the project was abandoned in the mid 1930s). Moreover, starting in 1928,