Matvei Konstantinovich Muranov (; 29 November 1873 – 9 December 1959) was a Ukrainian Bolshevik revolutionary, Soviet politician and statesman. Revolutionary beginnings Born in a peasant family in Rybtsy (now part of Poltava in Ukraine), Muranov moved to Kharkiv in 1900 and worked as a railroad worker. He joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) in 1904 and became a member of the local party committee in 1907. In 1912 Muranov was elected to the 4th State Duma from the city of Kharkiv and became one of 6 Bolshevik deputies there. Muranov was the only Bolshevik deputy (the other one, Roman Malinovsky, was later exposed as a secret police agent) who voted to break away from the rival Menshevik faction of the RSDLP on 15 December 1912. After the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Muranov and other Bolshevik deputies followed the lead of the exiled Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, denouncing the war and calling on Russian soldiers to turn their weapons against their own government. Bolshevik deputies traveled around the country using their parliamentary immunity to foster revolutionary activities. They were arrested in November 1914, expelled from the Duma and put on trial on 10 February 1915 on charges of high treason. Facing the death penalty, some Bolshevik deputies and Lev Kamenev, who had been sent to Russia to direct their work in January 1914, wavered and moderated their position. Muranov, however, took an uncompromising approach, which enhanced his reputation within the Bolshevik party. In the end, the Tsarist government dropped most of the charges against the accused, who were skillfully defended by the future head of the Russian Provisional Government Alexander Kerensky and other lawyers. Muranov and other Duma deputies were exiled to the remote Turukhansk region of Siberia for life. The 1917 Revolution After the overthrow of the Romanov dynasty by the February Revolution of 1917, Muranov returned to the capital, Petrograd, with other Bolshevik exiles including Lev Kamenev and Joseph Stalin. On 12 March, he joined the Russian Bureau of the Bolshevik Central Committee and on 16 March he joined the editorial board of the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda. Muranov and Stalin were also made members of the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet. Muranov used his political capital within the Bolshevik party, which he had earned with his behavior at the 1915 trial, to provide political cover for Kamenev,