Shlyapnikov and his supporters also conducted discussions with Gavril Myasnikov's Workers Group, but unlike Myasnikov, were determined not to leave the ranks of the Communist Party. At the beginning of 1922, former expodinents 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", appealing to the 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 Trotsky and Zinoviev from speaking before the Comintern Executive on behalf of the views expressed in the appeal. Shlyapnikov, Kollontai, and Sergei Medvedev narrowly escaped expulsion from the Russian Communist Party at the party's subsequent Eleventh Congress in 1922, while two other signatories of the appeal, F. Mitin (b. 1882) and N. Kuznetsov (1898-1935), were expelled. Kollontai later became an important diplomat and Shlyapnikov wrote memoirs.