Notes

Preface: On Forgetting to Read Solzhenitsyn

1. Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History, xv.
2. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1:x.
3. The word zakliuchennyi means prisoner or detainee, and during the construction of the White Sea Canal in the 1930s, the forced labourers who worked (and died) in their thousands on the project were euphemistically labelled zakliuchennyi kanaloarmeets—canal army prisoners. Official records often abbreviated this as ZK or z/k, and prisoners who saw these abbreviations turned the abbreviations into a slang word, zek or zeka. The former, zek, has entered into common use and is now, effectively, a synonym for prisoner. See Lilia Pal’veleva, “Arestantskie slova” [Convict terms].
4. Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago, 1:x.
5. Michael E. Allen, The Gulag Study, 26.
6. Alan Barenberg, Gulag Town, Company Town: Forced Labor and Its Legacy in Vorkuta, 3. The river camp (Rechnoi lager’) was established on 27 August 1948. See Allen, The Gulag Study, 26. Throughout this book, “Vorkuta” will be used frequently as a shorthand to refer to the entire camp complex.
7. Barenberg, Gulag Town, 7.
8. Ibid. Barenberg’s reference is to Lynne Viola’s introduction (subtitled “The Other Archipelago”) in The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements.
9. Barenberg, Gulag Town, 9. Barenberg cites Sheila Fitzpatrick, “War and Society in Soviet Context,” 41–47; Donald Filtzer, “From Mobilized to Free Labour,” 158; as well as Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism, 39–40.
10. Viola, Unknown Gulag, 32.
11. Suzanne Rosenberg, A Soviet Odyssey, 191–90.
12. Applebaum, Gulag, 580–81.
13. See the discussion in ibid., 581–83.
14. Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago, 3:445.
15. Ibid., 1:19 and 1:134.
16. Ibid., 1:134.
17. Ibid., 3:421.
18. Ibid., 3:526.
19. Ibid., 1:xi.
20. See Ian D. Thatcher, “The St Petersburg/Petrograd Mezhraionka, 1913–1917: The Rise and Fall of a Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party Unity Faction.” Some commentators use RSDLP (based on the English translation) rather than RSDRP.
21. Only from 2009 available in complete form, retitled as In the First Circle.
22. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction: An Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880. See in particular, chapter I, “The Black Worker” and chapter IV, “The General Strike.” Thanks to Dr. Anthony Bogues, director of the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University, for drawing this to my attention.
23. These memoirs and accounts include those by Paul Barton, Mikhail Baitalsky, Edward Buca, Brigitte Gerland, Maria Joffe, Nadezhda Joffe, Hryhory Kostiuk, Suzanne Rosenberg, Joseph Scholmer, and Danylo Shumak, as well as the collections gathered together in George Saunders, ed., Samizdat: Voices of the Soviet Opposition; Pierre Frank, ed., Renaissance du bolchévisme en U.R.S.S: mémoires d’un bolchévik-léniniste; Commission internationale contre le régime concentrationnaire, Livre blanc: Sur les camps de concentration soviétiques; and David Rousset, Gérard Rosenthal, and Théo Bernard, Pour la vérité sur les camps concentrationnaires (Un procès antistalinien à Paris). The memoirs by both Maria and Nadezda Joffe are available in their original Russian, part of a collection of more than 2,500 maintained by the Sakharov Center (see https://www.sakharov-center.ru/asfcd/auth/?t=list).
24. Elsewhere, the numbered pits are sometimes described as numbered Camps.
25. Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago, 3:283. This strike will be described in greater detail in chapter 2.
26. Shumuk, Life Sentence: Memoirs of a Ukrainian Political Prisoner, 239 and 242.
27. Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago, 3:258.
28. Ibid.
29. Mikhail Baitalsky, Notebooks for the Grandchildren: Recollections of a Trotskyist Who Survived the Stalin Terror, 15–21.
30. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 2:232.
31. Baitalsky, Notebooks for the Grandchildren, 19–20. In referring to “camp criminals,” Baitalsky alludes to a division in the camps between “political” prisoners (of whom he was one) and “criminal” prisoners. His evident antipathy for the latter reflects a legacy of bitterness over the abuse that political prisoners often suffered at the hands of the “criminals,” violence sometimes encouraged by the camp authorities themselves.
32. Leon Trotsky, “Stalinism and Bolshevism: Concerning the Historical and Theoretical Roots of the Fourth International” [1937], 423.
33. Victor Serge, “A Letter and Some Notes” [1939], 54.
34. See, for example, Slavoj Žižek, “Afterword: Lenin’s Choice.” For a critique of Žižek’s approach, see Paul Kellogg, “The Only Hope of the Revolution Is the Crowd: The Limits of Žižek’s Leninism.”
35. V. I. Lenin, “Five Years of the Russian Revolution and the Prospects of the World Revolution,” report to the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, 13 November 1922, Lenin: Collected Works [hereafter LCW], 33:430, 431. Lenin’s address was published in Pravda two days later.
36. The Economist, “Northern Lights-Out: Russia.”
37. Leon Trotsky, Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence, ed. and trans. Alan Woods, 689. The translation by Charles Malamuth omits the word “far.” Leon Trotsky, Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence, ed. and trans. Charles Malamuth, 383.
38. I sketched out early versions of some of the points raised in chapters 6 and 7 in review articles of To the Masses and Toward the United Front: Paul Kellogg, “Grappling with Our History: The March Action, the Russo-Polish War, and the United Front” and “Coalition Building, Capitalism and War: Review Article of John Riddell, To the Masses: Proceedings of the Third Congress of the Communist International, 1921.” To the Masses and Toward the United Front have been the subject of numerous discussions and debates around the world, some of which have been filmed during meetings in Toronto, New York, and London. For Toronto, see Socialist Project’s Book Launch: Toward the United Front and Luxemburg, Lenin, Levi: Rethinking Revolutionary History, and Taghabon, Book Launch—To the Masses: Proceedings of the 3rd Congress of the Communist International (1 of 6); for New York, see GC–ISO, The Comintern Debate on Workers’ Unity: NYC Book Launch for John Riddell’s “To the Masses”; for London, see SocResVideo, John Riddell—United Fronts in the 20th and 21st Centuries.
39. Marshall McLuhan, The Medium Is the Message, 74–75.
40. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, preface to Philosophy of Right.
41. Rosa Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution” [1918], 305.
42. Maria Joffe, One Long Night, 40–41. For the Russian original, see Joffe, Odna noch’: Povest’ o pravde, 24.
43. Applebaum, Gulag, 311.
44. Edward Buca, Vorkuta, 143–44.
45. The complete text of this note can be found in his daughter’s memoirs: Nadezhda Joffe, Vremia nazad: Moia zhizn’, moia sud’ba, moia epokha [Back in time: My life, my fate, my epoch], 62–72; translated in Nadezhda Joffe, Back in Time: My Life, My Fate, My Epoch—The Memoirs of Nadezhda A. Joffe, 55–63.

Introduction: Hope and Horror

1. Karl Marx, “Provisional Rules of the Association” [1864], 14.
2. Leon Trotsky, Our Political Tasks [1904], 72. Compare with Trotsky, Nashi politicheskie zadachi (takticheskie i organizatsionnye voprosy) [Our political tasks (tactical and organizational questions)], 50.
3. Until February 1918, Russia used the Julian calendar, whose dates were thirteen days behind the Gregorian. According to the Gregorian calendar, what has gone down in history as the “February Revolution” actually began on 8 March, while the “October Revolution” began on 7 November. In this book, dates refer to the Gregorian calendar, although, for reasons of context, I will occasionally provide both, putting the Julian date first, followed by the Gregorian in parentheses.
4. Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924, 308.
5. Ibid., 310.
6. Ibid.
7. Georgakas, “October Song.” Paul Le Blanc, in homage to Georgakas, gave the same title to his centenary history of the revolution. Paul Le Blanc, October Song.
8. Raphael R. Abramovitch, The Soviet Revolution: 1917–1939, 7–34.
9. Isaac Nachman Steinberg, In the Workshop of the Revolution, 44.
10. P. Iu. Savel’ev and S. V. Tiutiukin, “Iulii Osipovich Martov (1873–1923): The Man and the Politician,” 67. See also Israel Getzler, Martov: A Political Biography of a Russian Social Democrat, 1.
11. P. Iu. Savel’ev and S. V. Tiutiukin, “Iulii Osipovich Martov (1873–1923): The Man and the Politician,” 67.
12. Haimson, The Making of Three Russian Revolutionaries: Voices from the Menshevik Past, 19.
13. These three terms—“revoliutsiia” [revolution], “perevorot” [overthrow] and “vosstanie” [uprising]—are used differently today than they were in Martov’s time. “Many of the distinctions” between these three words “typical of modern usage, turn out to be uncharacteristic for the use of these words at the beginning of the 20^th century … there have been significant shifts in their meaning over the last hundred years.” Dobrovol’skii and Peppel’, 99.
14. Martov, “Deklaratsiia fraktsii men’shevikov-internatsionalistov i evreiskoi sotsialisticheskoi rabochei partii poalei-tsion, zachitannaia Iu. O. Martovym” [Declaration of the Menshevik-Internationalist and Jewish Socialist Labour Party (Paole-Tsion) fractions, read out by Iu. O. Martov, 1917]. Compare with Leopold Haimson, Russia’s Revolutionary Experience, 1905-1917: Two Essays, 101.
15. Martov, “Mirovoi bol’shevizm” [World Bolshevism], 413. Portions of the latter book were published in the journal Mysl [Thought] in 1919. Four years later, a complete version was published posthumously in Berlin, but it was never available inside Russia. See Martov, Mirovoi bol’shevizm [World Bolshevism]. Only in 2000 was a Russian-language excerpt legally published in Russia. Translations from World Bolshevism are those of Mariya Melentyeva and Paul Kellogg, and the page numbers are from the 2000 version.
16. Malcolm E. Falkus, The Industrialisation of Russia, 17.
17. Edward Hallett Carr, “The Russian Revolution and the Peasant,” 69.
18. Ibid., 70.
19. Gorky, “On the Russian Peasantry,” 21.
20. Figes, People’s Tragedy, 232–33.
21. Matteo Ermacora, “Rural Society.” Raphael Abramovitch indicates that the number of peasant lads mobilized might have been as high as fifteen million. Abramovitch, Soviet Revolution, 20.
22. Roger Pethybridge, The Social Prelude to Stalinism, 81.
23. This is a rough estimate based on the assumption that peasants comprised 80 percent of the population and applying to all of the Russian empire at the time of the war, an age-distribution survey from a nineteenth-century village in rural, post-emancipation Russia. Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 492; Herdis Kolle, “The Russian Post-Emancipation Household: Two Villages in the Moscow Area.”
24. Boris Souvarine, Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism, 143.
25. Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 236.
26. My calculations are based on Souvarine, Stalin, 313, and the editors of the English-language edition of V. I. Lenin, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, 1899, in LCW, 3:71n1.
27. Pipes, Russian Revolution, 245.
28. Marcel Liebman, The Russian Revolution: The Origins, Phases and Meaning of the Bolshevik Victory, 100.
29. Pipes, Russian Revolution, 244.
30. George Tokmakoff, “Stolypin’s Agrarian Reform: An Appraisal,” 128.
31. Steinberg, In the Workshop of the Revolution, cover copy.
32. Ibid., 31. I have chosen to follow Steinberg (and some others) in preferring “Social-Revolutionaries” to “Socialist-Revolutionaries”—and not solely because Steinberg was, himself, a leading member of the Left Social-Revolutionaries. Using the term “socialist” tends to blur the distinction between this unique section of the Russian Left and the sections that came to dominate the revolution. There was a strong ethical component to the politics of the Social-Revolutionaries, which, according to Steinberg, included ideals such as “the liberation of mankind” and “love for the neighbor.” The goal, he says, was “not only to gain freedom from something, but also to gain freedom for something. And that something is always more than personal, civil or political freedom.” As with French workers in 1848, Steinberg’s party “demanded the social Republic”—that is, “far-reaching changes in the structure of society, changes that would alter the relationship between man and man spiritually and morally as well as governmentally and economically.” See Steinberg, In the Workshop of the Revolution, 11–12. Given this, I think “Social-Revolutionaries” is the most accurate English rendition for the name of this interesting and important section of the Russian Left.
33. Ibid., 32.
34. Ibid., 33.
35. Ibid., 34.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., 38–39.
38. Pethybridge, The Social Prelude to Stalinism, 81.
39. Souvarine, Stalin, 159.
40. Pipes, Russian Revolution, 127.
41. In this text and elsewhere, by convention, the years 1918 to 1921 are often characterized in the singular as “the Civil War.” However, there were in fact multiple civil wars, most importantly that between the Bolshevik-controlled cities and the non-Bolshevik countryside, as well as the more well-known war of Bolshevik (Red) armies versus counter-revolutionary (White) armies. See Geoffrey Swain, The Origins of the Russian Civil War.
42. Steinberg, In the Workshop of the Revolution, 296.
43. Raphael Abramovistch [Abramovitch], Vassily Suchomlin, and Irakli Zeretelli [Tsereteli], Der Terror gegen die Sozialistischen Parteien in Russland und Georgien [The Terror against Socialist Parties in Russia and Georgia], 49.
44. Steinberg, In the Workshop of the Revolution, 296, 300.
45. Trotsky, Stalin, ed. and trans. Charles Malamuth, 408. In his translation, Alan Woods uses “bureaucracy” instead of “substratum.” See Trotsky, Stalin, ed. and trans. Alan Woods, 717.
46. Abramovitch, Soviet Revolution, 337.
47. Lynne Viola, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements, 6.
48. Donald W. Treadgold, “Was Stolypin in Favor of Kulaks?” 11n24, citing a report in the London Times. The report, written by a Times correspondent, quotes a speech delivered by Josip Broz Tito, the long-serving communist leader of post-World War II Yugoslavia. In that speech, delivered following a visit to the Macedonian People’s Republic, Tito notes that even a man owning a mere twelve hectares of land might well be considered a kulak. See “Marshal Tito’s Land Policy,” The Times (London), 9 August 1944. The threshold of twelve hectares (just under thirty acres) was, to say the least, a very low bar, not exactly meriting the terms rich, capitalist, bourgeois, nor any other of the many descriptors often attached to the word kulak.
49. Souvarine, Stalin, 552.
50. Ibid., 670.
51. “About Us: History,” Forward, n.d., https://forward.com/about-us/history/.
52. Vera Broido indicates that the “correct name” for the delegation “was the Delegation of the RSDRP Abroad—Zagranichnaia delegatsia RSDRP.” The writings of two of these three, Abramovitch and Martov, figure prominently in this book. The third, Eva L’vovna Broido, is one of the unsung heroes of the Russian Revolution. In 1920, she was one of the first to enter exile in Europe (because of her health), and in 1927 was one of the last to clandestinely return to the Soviet Union to help organize the dwindling band of socialist oppositionists to totalitarian rule. After six months of work in the socialist underground, she was arrested and imprisoned. From 1936 on, her family received no word from her. It was only with the collapse of the Stalinist state, and the opening of the archives, that her daughter Vera learned that “Mother had been tried by a military tribunal in 1940 and sentenced to death … She was shot on 14 September 1941.” Like many tens of thousands of political prisoners from that era, Eva Broido was posthumously rehabilitated. See Vera Broido, Lenin and the Mensheviks, 121, and Vera Broido, Daughter of Revolution, 184 and 208–11.
53. Sidney Hook, “Introduction” to Abramovitch, Soviet Revolution, ix.
54. Associated Press, “Moscow Denies Famine Deaths.”
55. Weekly People, “The World News in Brief.”
56. Jay Lovestone, “The Meaning of the Soviet Purges,” 304.
57. Walter Duranty, “Russians Hungry, but Not Starving,” quoting “a British source.”
58. Ibid.
59. H. R. Knickerbocker, “Famine Grips Russia Millions Dying, Idle on Rise, Says Briton.”
60. Quoted in ibid.
61. Quoted in ibid.
62. Muggeridge, “The Soviet’s War on the Peasants,” 564. While Muggeridge would go on to fame and some notoriety, living into his eighties, Jones would die young. While on assignment for the Manchester Guardian in China in 1935, he was kidnapped by bandits and executed. For unknown reasons, German newspaper correspondent Herbert Mueller, kidnapped along with Jones, was released unharmed. There has been much speculation in the years since that Mueller was a Stalinist agent working with the bandits and that the kidnapping was staged—its whole purpose being to eliminate a key eyewitness to the famine. Ray Gamache, Gareth Jones: Eyewitness to the Holodomor, 3, citing Margaret Siriol Colley, Gareth Jones: A Manchukuo Incident.
63. R. J. Rummel, Lethal Politics, 107n46.
64. Mark B. Tauger, “The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933,” 89.
65. Quoted in Gareth Jones, “Russia—Land of Starvation.”
66. Gareth Jones, “Fate of Thrifty in U.S.S.R.”
67. Gareth Jones, “Soviet Collective Farm Move Caused Famine in Russia, Says Gareth Jones.”
68. Rummel, Lethal Politics, 104.
69. N. M. Dronin and E. G. Bellinger, Climate Dependence and Food Problems in Russia, 1900–1990: The Interaction of Climate and Agricultural Policy and Their Effect on Food Problems, 152.
70. Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888–1938, 317, quoting Nikolai Bukharin from sources listed on 455n200.
71. Ibid., 330.
72. Ibid., 331.
73. Alec Nove, An Economic History of the U.S.S.R., 169.
74. Joseph Stalin, “Dizzy with Success: Concerning Questions of the Collective-Farm Movement” [1930].
75. Nove, Economic History of the U.S.S.R., 171.
76. Ibid., 172.
77. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution, 339.
78. Quoted in N. I. Nemakov, Kommunisticheskaya partiya—organizator massovogo kolkhoznogo dvizheniya (1929–1932 gg.) [Communist party—organizer of the mass collective farm movement (1929–1932)], 259. Little known today, Rudzutak was once a prominent person in the Soviet Union. In 1924, for instance, he, along with Stalin and six others, was a pallbearer at Lenin’s funeral. However, just three years after delivering the report quoted here, he became one of the many thousands arrested and shot for allegedly being a “counter-revolutionary.” Years later, again like many of these thousands of unfortunates, he was posthumously rehabilitated. See Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography, 219; Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, 180, 193.
79. Nove, Economic History of the U.S.S.R., 173.
80. Ibid., 178.
81. Ibid., 179, quoting Iu. A. Moshkov, Zernovaia problema v gody sploshnoi kollektivizatsii [The grain problem in the years of complete collectivization] (Moscow: Moscow University, 1966), 217.
82. Ibid., 399n46, quoting Moshkov. See also Bojko et al., Holodomor: The Great Famine in Ukraine 1932–1933, 301.
83. Ibid., 180.
84. Stanisław Swianiewicz, Forced Labour and Economic Development: An Enquiry into the Experience of Soviet Industrialization, 98.
85. Ibid., 114.
86. Ibid., 116–17.
87. Ukrainian National Association, “30 U.N. Member-States Sign Joint Declaration on Great Famine,” 20.
88. Joseph Stalin was not alone in pursuing policies that manufactured famine. In the decade that followed the Holodomor, the Bengal region of the Indian subcontinent was the epicentre of an equally horrific famine—the product of a “scorched earth” policy backed by Winston Churchill’s War Cabinet. See Madhusree Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II, 63–67. In this context, if we justifiably cringe when, in a typical mid-twentieth-century article, Stalin is proclaimed the “leader of progressive mankind,” we might wonder at the lack of cringeing when an early twenty-first-century movie portrays Churchill “as the greatest Briton of all time.” G. M. Malenkov, “Comrade Stalin—Leader of Progressive Mankind”; Jonathan Teplitzky, dir., Churchill, 1:33:22.
89. Solomon M. Schwarz, Labor in the Soviet Union, 152.
90. Ibid., 171.
91. Roy A. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 165.
92. Ciliga, The Russian Enigma, 71. In 1924, following Lenin’s death, Petrograd (formerly St. Petersburg) was renamed Leningrad.
93. Souvarine, Stalin, 598.
94. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1:58.
95. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 230.
96. Ibid., 192–235; quotation from 233.
97. Ibid., 234.
98. Suzanne Rosenberg, A Soviet Odyssey, 59.
99. Souvarine, Stalin, 628.
100. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 239.
101. Nadezhda Joffe, Back in Time: My Life, My Fate, My Epoch—The Memoirs of Nadezhda A. Joffe, 210.
102. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 239.
103. J. Arch Getty, Gábor T. Rittersporn, and Viktor N. Zemskov, “Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence,” 1023. Michael Haynes and Rumy Husan accept this figure, as does Steven Rosefielde, who gives annual figures of 353,074 and 321,618 for 1937 and 1938, respectively. See Haynes and Husan, A Century of State Murder? Death and Policy in Twentieth-Century Russia, 70; Rosefielde, Red Holocaust, 58.
104. Souvarine, “Postscript: The Counter-Revolution,” 669.
105. Nove, Economic History of the U.S.S.R., 180.
106. Tatjana Lorkovic, “Microform Collection: The All-Union Population Census, [1937 and] 1939.”

Chapter 1: One Long Night, 1936–38

1. From Anonymous, “Mémoires d’un bolchevik-léniniste,” 152.
2. Anonymous, “Memoirs of a Bolshevik-Leninist,” 165.
3. Hryhory Kostiuk, “The Accursed Years from Lukianivka Prison to the Tragedy at Vorkuta (1935–40),” 169.
4. Anonymous, “Memoirs of a Bolshevik-Leninist,” 165.
5. Kostiuk, “Accursed Years,” 169.
6. Anonymous, “Memoirs of a Bolshevik-Leninist,” 165.
7. George Saunders, foreword to Samizdat: Voices of the Soviet Opposition, 10. There were of course people from many different political stripes interred in the Gulag. Most, certainly, had no party affiliation. But for those who were deemed “political” prisoners, the vast majority were on the left. If from 1917 until 1937 you had been an Anarchist, a Menshevik, a Social-Revolutionary, a follower of Trotsky, or Zinoviev, or Kamenev, and, finally, even if you had been a follower of Stalin, you were likely to end up in the camps, labelled a “counter-revolutionary,” and shot. There were hundreds of thousands of these left-wing political prisoners. There is no good single adjective to describe this collection of prisoners. I have chosen “socialist” as the adjective with the most meaning for a contemporary audience.
8. Vorkuta is situated at a latitude of 67°30’N, at the northeastern tip of what was formerly the Komi Autonomous Republic of the Russian Federation and is today the Komi Republic, one of twenty-two semi-autonomous republics within the Russian state.
9. The Economist, “Northern Lights-Out: Russia.”
10. Tom Balmforth, “Vorkuta: Gulag Is Gone, but a Virtual Prison Has Taken Its Place.”
11. The Economist, “Northern Lights-Out.”
12. Joseph Scholmer, Vorkuta, 55.
13. Ibid., 56. Nicholas I reigned from 1825 to 1855.
14. J. Arch Getty, Gábor T. Rittersporn, and Viktor N. Zemskov, “Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence,” 1022.
15. Alan Barenberg, “From Prison Camp to Mining Town: The Gulag and Its Legacy in Vorkuta, 1938–1965,” 51. The NKVD was one of the many iterations of the Soviet Union’s notorious secret police force. From 1934 to 1946, the NKVD was the commissariat responsible for state security, including the secret police. The original incarnation of the secret police was the “Cheka” about which more will be said below.
16. Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties, 122.
17. Igor’ Petrov, “Nastoiashchee imia respondenta #440” [The real name of respondent #440].
18. M.B. [Ivan Khoroshev], “Trotskyists at Vorkuta (An Eyewitness Report),” 216. M.B.’s account was first published by the Socialist Courier in 1961. Khoroshev’s other most frequently used synonym was Mikhail Nil’skii.
19. Mikhail Baitalsky, Notebooks for the Grandchildren: Recollections of a Trotskyist Who Survived the Stalin Terror, 225.
20. Roland Gaucher, Opposition in the U.S.S.R., 1917–1967, 90–91.
21. Pierre Broué, Communistes contre Staline: Massacre d’une génération, 35.
22. Ibid., 37.
23. Gaucher, Opposition in the U.S.S.R., 105.
24. Boris Souvarine, Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism, 492.
25. Gus Fagan, introduction to Selected Writings on Opposition in the USSR, 1923–30, by Khristian Georgievich Rakovskiĭ, 54.
26. Michal Reiman, The Birth of Stalinism: The USSR on the Eve of the “Second Revolution,” 19.
27. Ibid., 22.
28. Mikhail Nil’skii [Ivan Mitrofanovich Khoroshev], Vorkuta (Samizdat edition, 1986), 74–75.
29. Saunders, “Currents in the Soviet Opposition Movement,” 10.
30. Aleksandra Chumakova, “Memoirs of Aleksandra Chumakova,” 190–91.
31. Joseph Berger, Shipwreck of a Generation: The Memoirs of Joseph Berger, 90.
32. Maria Joffe, One Long Night: A Tale of Truth. I borrowed the title of this gripping memoir when I named this chapter.
33. Ibid., 91.
34. Ibid., 94.
35. Broué, Communistes contre Staline, 257.
36. Berger, Shipwreck of a Generation, 94.
37. Conquest, Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps, 13.
38. M.B. [Ivan Khoroshev], “Trotskisty na Vorkute” [Trotskyists at Vorkuta], 201. George Saunders translates this statement as “the Trotskyists formed a quite disparate group at Vorkuta; one part of them kept its old name of ‘Bolshevik-Leninists.’” M.B., “Trotskyists at Vorkuta,” 206. While I generally quote from Saunders’s translation, the translation here seems to me closer to the spirit of the original.
39. M.B. [Ivan Khoroshev], “Trotskyists at Vorkuta,” 206.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid., 207.
42. Ibid., 210–12.
43. Berger, Shipwreck of a Generation, 97.
44. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 2:319.
45. M.B. [Ivan Khoroshev], “Trotskyists at Vorkuta,” 211. M.B. mentions two further demands, one that women and prisoners who were elderly or ill not be incarcerated in Arctic camps and the other that “affairs relating to political opposition to the regime must not be judged by special NKVD tribunals, but in public judicial assemblies” (211).
46. Ibid., 213.
47. Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago, 2:319.
48. Anonymous, “Memoirs of a Bolshevik-Leninist,” 142.
49. Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago, 2:319.
50. Elinor Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps, 104.
51. Ibid., 106.
52. Ibid., 107. The anonymous memoirist whose samizdat account was first published in 1970 seems to have conflated Kashketin and Garanin. He writes that Kashketin, before he began his work at Vorkuta, “annihilated more than fifteen thousand Communists at Kolyma.” Anonymous, “Memoirs of a Bolshevik-Leninist,” 172.
53. Vadim Z. Rogovin, Stalin’s Terror of 1937–1938: Political Genocide in the USSR, 284.
54. Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago, 2:387.
55. Rossi, The Gulag Handbook: An Encyclopedia Dictionary of Soviet Penitentiary Institutions and Terms Related to the Forced Labor Camps, 488. From 1921 until 1930, such a prison was designated a “special purpose isolator” (izoliator spetsial’nogo naznacheniia, or simply spetsizoliator). From 1930 until 1937 this was changed to “OGPU special detention centre” (izoliator osobogo naznacheniia OGPU). Both are often referred to simply as “political isolator” (politizoliator). See Rossi, The Gulag Handbook, 139–40, 450, and 488.
56. This is translated as “newspapers” in the English translation of Ciliga’s book. However, the Russian original is zhurnala, which means “journal” or “publication.” See Ciliga, The Russian Enigma, 211; Ciliga, “Verkhneural’skii politizoliator” [Verkne-Uralsk political isolator], 362.
57. Ciliga, Russian Enigma, 211 and 199. The first part of Ciliga’s book was originally published in French, in 1938, under the title Au pays du grand mensonge, which translates as “In the country of the great lie,” a phrase picked up in the 1977 French-language edition, Dix ans au pays du mensonge déconcertant. The phrase “great lie” is much more evocative than “enigma,” chosen by the English-language translators, and is, I think, closer to the intent and theme of the Ciliga volume.
58. Ibid., 211.
59. Alexander Fokin, “Tetradi verkhneural’skogo politicheskogo izoliatora: Predstavlenie istochnika i razmyshleniia o ego znachenii [The Notebooks of the Verkhne-Uralsk political isolator: Introduction of a source and reflections on its significance].
60. “Fashistskii perevorot v Germanii” [The Fascist coup in Germany].
61. Ciliga, “Verkhneural’snii politizoliator” [Verkne-Uralsk political isolator], 362.
62. Baitalsky, Notebooks for the Grandchildren, 220.
63. Nil’skii [Khoroshev], Vorkuta, 91. Compare with Nil’skii [Khoroshev] “Vorkutinskaia tragediia” [The Vorkuta tragedy], 296; M.B. [Ivan Khoroshev], “Trotskyists at Vorkuta,” 215–16.
64. Nil’skii [Ivan Khoroshev], “Vorkutinskaia tragediia” [The Vorkuta tragedy], 308.
65. Baitalsky, Notebooks for the Grandchildren, 47, 225.
66. Berger, Shipwreck of a Generation, 96, 98.
67. Broué, Communistes contre Staline, 320.
68. Roy A. Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, 234.
69. Abramowitsch [Abramovitch], Suchomlin, and Zeretelli [Tsereteli], Der Terror Gegen Die Sozialistischen Parteien in Russland Und Georgien [The Terror against Socialist Parties in Russia and Georgia].
70. Broido, Lenin and the Mensheviks, 159–62.
71. Ibid., 164.
72. Ibid., 165.
73. Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko, The Time of Stalin: Portrait of a Tyranny, xv. Antonov-Ovseyenko’s father, Vladimir, held diplomatic posts in Stalin’s government until the fall of 1937, when he was arrested, interrogated, and subsequently executed, in February 1938. His son was also arrested, initially in 1940, and went on to spend a total of nearly thirteen years in Gulag forced labour camps, including Vorkuta.
74. Stephen F. Cohen, “Introduction” to Antonov-Ovseyenko, The Time of Stalin, x.
75. Ibid., 319 and 329. Mikoyan was also the Politburo member who, in a speech delivered at the Twentieth Congress, “rehabilitated” Antonov-Ovseyenko’s father, officially proclaiming him innocent.
76. Ibid., 145–46.
77. Leon Trotsky, “To the Bulgarian Comrades, October 4, 1930,” 53.
78. Ibid., 54.

Chapter 2: Striking Against the Gulag, 1947–53

1. Alan Barenberg, “From Prison Camp to Mining Town: The Gulag and Its Legacy in Vorkuta, 1938–1965,” 20.
2. Anna M. Cienciala, Natalia S. Lebedeva, and Wojciech Materski, eds., Katyn: A Crime Without Punishment, 343.
3. Stanisław Swianiewicz, In the Shadow of Katyn: Stalin’s Terror, 80–83.
4. Benjamin B. Fischer, “The Katyn Controversy: Stalin’s Killing Field.” See also Stanisław Swianiewicz, In the Shadow of Katyn, 80–83, 147–50.
5. Institute of National Remembrance, “Decision to Commence Investigation into Katyn Massacre.”
6. Swianiewicz, In the Shadow of Katyn, 147–50.
7. Ibid., 214–15.
8. Ibid., 215.
9. Ibid., 77.
10. Formally the “Vecheka (Vserossiiskaia Chrezvychainaia Komissiia po borbe s kontrrevoliutsiei i sabotazhem)—All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for combating counter-revolution, speculation and sabotage, colloquially known as Chrezvychaika or Cheka.” See Broido, Lenin and the Mensheviks, 30.
11. Stanisław Swianiewicz, Forced Labour and Economic Development: An Enquiry into the Experience of Soviet Industrialization, 15.
12. Swianiewicz, In the Shadow of Katyn, 131–32.
13. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1:24–92.
14. Swianiewicz, Forced Labour and Economic Development, 114–21; Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History, 45; Lynne Viola, V. P. Danilov, N. A. Ivnitskii, and Denis Kozlov, eds., The War Against the Peasantry, 1927–1930.
15. Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago, 1:24.
16. Ibid., 1:25.
17. Ibid.
18. Roman Serbyn, “The First Man-Made Famine in Soviet Ukraine: 1921–1923,” 5.
19. Ibid., 9.
20. Ibid., 5–12.
21. Swianiewicz, Forced Labour and Economic Development, 113–14.
22. Applebaum, Gulag, 87.
23. David Mandel, Perestroika and the Soviet People: Rebirth of the Labour Movement, 196.
24. Joseph Scholmer, Vorkuta, 212.
25. For the standard English translation as “primitive accumulation,” see Marx, “The So-Called Primitive Accumulation” [1867]. This standard translation is misleading both conceptually and linguistically. Invoking the word “primitive” for a term deployed to describe the transition from pre-capitalist to capitalist social relations might fit well with the stage-ist modernism so widespread in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but it does not fit well with any reasonable translation from German to English. The German original is “Ursprüngliche Akkumulation.” See Marx, “Die Sog. Ursprüngliche Akkumulation” [The so-called primary accumulation]. One might translate this as “original” or “initial” accumulation but only rarely as “primitive” accumulation. Some have suggested the term “originary.” See Rosalind Morris, “Ursprüngliche Akkumulation: The Secret of an Originary Mistranslation.” But this is a little awkward for use in everyday English. “Primary” is, I think, best as it implies any or all of first, foundational, and ongoing.
26. Robert Miles, Capitalism and Unfree Labour: Anomaly or Necessity? 36.
27. Abigail B. Bakan, “Review of Capitalism and Unfree Labour: Anomaly or Necessity? by Robert Miles,” 236.
28. Evgeny Preobrazhensky, The New Economics [1926], 83n1.
29. Ibid., 88.
30. Ibid., 124. The passage is italicized in the original.
31. Stalin, “Industrialisation and the Grain Problem: Speech Delivered on July 9, 1928,” 165–66.
32. Preobrazhensky, New Economics, 5–6 and 124.
33. Stalin, “Industrialisation and the Grain Problem,” 167.
34. Alec Nove, introduction to Preobrazhensky, The New Economics, xiv.
35. Ibid., xv.
36. See Martin McCauley, Stalin and Stalinism, 76–88.
37. Scholmer, Vorkuta, 224.
38. Edward Buca, Vorkuta, 202.
39. Alan Barenberg, Gulag Town, Company Town: Forced Labor and Its Legacy in Vorkuta, 15–16. As the source of Chernov’s reference to “mining engineers of Ukhta,” Barenberg cites Georgii Aleksandrovich Chernov, Iz istorii otkritiia pechorskogo ugol’nogo basseina [From the history of the discovery of the Pechora coal basin], 2nd ed. (Syktyvkar: Komi knizhnoe izd-vo, 1989), 94.
40. P. I. Negretov, “How Vorkuta Began,” 569. Negretov, whose article appeared in 1977, goes on to discuss the use of forced labour at Vorkuta, pointing out that “in the thirties Vorkuta was in the domain of the NKVD (until 1934—OGPU), and its labour force came from the camps” (570). He also notes that, while “the use of convict labour in industry and construction, especially in remote parts of the USSR, was never (except, perhaps, in the forties) a secret” (570), it was rarely mentioned in literature intended for public consumption.
41. Mikhail Mikhailovich Prigorovski, The Coal Resources of the USSR, 4, 7.
42. Ibid., 7.
43. Ibid., 14.
44. Ibid., 15.
45. Maria Joffe, One Long Night: A Tale of Truth, 38.
46. Ibid., 17.
47. Ibid., 17n.
48. Ibid., 38.
49. Globe and Mail, “250,000 Slaves Strike in Red Camp.”
50. Brigitte Gerland, “Student Intellectuals and Religionists Form Backbone of Resistance in Soviet Slave Camps.”
51. In Brigitte Gerland’s “Rare Eyewitness Report of Soviet Labor Camp Given by ‘Graduate,’” the date given for the circulation of the manifesto is 1949.
52. R.M. Tashtemkhanova, Nemetskaia shkola sredneazievedeniia i kazakhstaniki: Uchebnoe posobie dlia studentov istoricheskikh fakul’tetov [The German school of Central Asian and Kazakh studies: A Manual for history students].
53. Brigitte Gerland, “Vorkuta (1950–53): Oppositional Currents and the Mine Strikes,” 222–23.
54. Pierre Broué, Communistes contre Staline: Massacre d’une génération, 178–79.
55. Gerland, “Vorkuta (1950–53),” 222–24.
56. Ibid., 225.
57. Brigitte Gerland, “500,000 Live in Huts Beneath Arctic Snow, Glad of Free Speech.” Given the similarity of the ITL program to the analysis of the Left Opposition in the 1930s, it is hard not to speculate about there being a “physical link” between the two. We do know that some of the children survived the exterminations in Vorkuta (those under the age of twelve), and we can certainly surmise that the hellish conditions of their parents’ deaths would have had a radicalizing effect on them. Evidence for this is the fact, cited above, that some children were involved in the hunger strike in Vorkuta of 1936–37. We also know, as of the 1970s, that some Left Oppositionists survived the purges and lived to publish their experiences in samizdat form. George Saunders speculates along these lines but, given the paucity of the evidence, can say no more than that “many of these young Leninists had been children of ‘enemies of the people,’ i.e., their parents had been prominent in the party, government, and military but had been purged in 1936–38.” See George Saunders, “Introduction: Currents in the Soviet Opposition Movement,” in Saunders, ed., Samizdat: Voices of the Soviet Opposition, 19.
58. Gerland, “Vorkuta (1950–53),” 227.
59. The literal translation of the words suki and blatnoy would be “bitches” and “thieves,” although I think “collaborators” and “irreconcilables” captures their role in the camp system more accurately. The words of Ivan, a member of Vorkuta’s blatnoy, clarify the antagonism between these groups:
The underworld has its own traditions and strict codes. The first rule is that no member of it is ever allowed to co-operate in any way with the authorities. When a criminal is in a prison or camp, he can work with an axe, a pick, a hammer or a spade, but never in administration or the kitchen. Nor must he ever take part in building anything to be used against the prisoners, such as fences, watch-towers or isolation cells. He isn’t allowed to take any part in supervising other prisoners. Those of us who follow these rules are called blatnoy. But there are traitors among us who co-operate with the authorities, and betray their own brothers, and we call them suki—bitches. They’re already dead men, sentenced by the rest of us, and at the first opportunity some blatnoy will kill them. We have our leaders and our courts. Quoted in Buca, Vorkuta, 59–60.
60. Ibid., 175.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid., 178.
63. Dimitri Panin, The Notebooks of Sologdin, 88–90.
64. Saunders, “Introduction: Currents in the Soviet Opposition Movement,” 21. For a report on the Kolyma battle, see Varlam Shalamov, “Major Pugachov’s Last Battle,” 241–56. The Kolyma revolt was more on the scale of a break-out than a collective rebellion.
65. Panin, Notebooks of Sologdin, 319.
66. Gerland, “Vorkuta (1950–53),” 228.
67. Panin, Notebooks of Sologdin, 309–20.
68. Buca, Vorkuta, 80.
69. Gerland, “Vorkuta (1950–53),” 224.
70. Buca, Vorkuta, 198, 199.
71. Ibid., 229.
72. Scholmer, Vorkuta, 187.
73. Beria is a prime example of the personal corruption that accompanies violence and totalitarian rule. Dmitri Volkogonov captures this starkly: “He worshipped only violence. He often gratified his sadistic needs by conducting interrogations himself, many of them ending in tragedy…. Beria’s chief of personal security … would bring him any young girl who took his fancy, and the slightest resistance would bring tragic consequences for both the girl and her family.” After the death of Stalin, Beria’s peers “found the courage and perspicacity to render the monster harmless.” They had him arrested and put on trial. When sentenced to death on 23 December 1953, “he fell to his knees in tears, writhing and begging for mercy.” His peers—including Krushchev—listened to the whole thing “on a specially installed link.” See Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, 333.
74. Scholmer, Vorkuta, 188.
75. Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944–56, 436.
76. Beria quoted in Mark Kramer, “The Early Post-Stalin Succession Struggle and Upheavals in East-Central Europe: Internal-External Linkages in Soviet Policy Making (Part 1),” 23, quoted in ibid., 437.
77. Applebaum, Iron Curtain, 439.
78. Ibid., 442.
79. Scholmer, Vorkuta, 196.
80. Gerland, “Vorkuta (1950–53),” 231.
81. Ibid., 232.
82. Scholmer, Vorkuta, 213, 205. Alan Barenberg reports that, according to an official estimate, 15,604 prisoners—roughly 40 percent of the total camp population—were on strike by 29 July. See Barenberg, Gulag Town, Company Town, 131, 134.
83. Gerland, “Vorkuta (1950–53),” 233.
84. Ibid.
85. Buca, Vorkuta, 255.
86. Ibid., 243–47.
87. Ibid., 247.
88. Scholmer, Vorkuta, 232. In Scholmer’s view, their vulnerability stemmed in part from the fact that the organizers chose to hold their meetings not in the depths of the mines—“the exclusive preserve of the prisoners”—but rather in the camps themselves, where they could be overheard by informers, thereby allowing the NKVD to identify and isolate “the most active elements in the strike” (232).
89. Buca, Vorkuta, 268–70. Solzhenitsyn also provides an account of these events from which I quoted in the preface, but he gives a date of 11 August rather than 1 August (Gulag Archipelago, 3:283).
90. Buca, Vorkuta, 270.
91. Ibid., 271.
92. Ibid., 271–72.
93. Ibid., 272.
94. Scholmer, Vorkuta, 227.
95. Gerland, “Vorkuta (1950–53),” 234.
96. Scholmer, Vorkuta, 228.
97. Ibid.
98. Gerland, “Vorkuta (1950–53),” 234.
99. Shumuk, Life Sentence: Memoirs of a Ukrainian Political Prisoner, 192.
100. Ibid., 209.
101. Ibid., 197.
102. Ibid., 209.
103. Ibid., 212.
104. Robert Conquest, Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps, 100.
105. Ibid., 100. The “old inmate” was Michel Solomon, who later recorded his experiences in Magadan.
106. Scholmer, Vorkuta, 234.
107. Saunders, “Introduction: Currents in the Soviet Opposition Movement,” 22.
108. Frustration with the extent to which this bitter reality remained invisible is commented on by survivors of the Gulag. Henry Wallace, then vice president of the United States, visited Kolyma during the war. Elinor Lipper, a survivor of the prison camps, describes Wallace’s enthusiasm for the 350-kilometre Kolyma Road and then notes: “He does not say—or does not know—that this highway was built entirely by prisoners and that tens of thousands gave their lives in building it.” See Elinor Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps, 111–16. In 1971, then prime minister of Canada Pierre Trudeau visited Noril’sk and “praised the Soviet Union’s ‘achievement’ in constructing such a wonderful city.” See Shumuk, Life Sentence, 389n1.
109. Scholmer, Vorkuta, 234.
110. Buca, Vorkuta, 259.
111. Shumuk, Life Sentence, 217.

Chapter 3: The Vengeance of History, 1989–91

1. David Mandel, Perestroika and the Soviet People: Rebirth of the Labour Movement. Mandel’s outline of the background to this crisis is succinct and compelling (51–78).
2. Leon Trotsky, Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence, ed. and trans. Alan Woods, 689. The translation by Charles Malamuth omits the word “far.” See Leon Trotsky, Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence, ed. and trans. Charles Malamuth, 383.
3. Michael Burawoy, “Reflections on the Class Consciousness of Hungarian Steelworkers,” 26.
4. Theodore Friedgut and Lewis Siegelbaum, “Perestroika from Below: The Soviet Miners’ Strike and Its Aftermath.”
5. Ibid., 17.
6. Quoted in David Mandel, “The Independent Miners’ Union: Three Interviews,” 148.
7. Mandel, Perestroika and the Soviet People, 55.
8. Michael Haynes, Russia: Class and Power, 1917–2000, 187.
9. David Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, 223.
10. Ibid., 224.
11. Mandel, Perestroika and the Soviet People, 52–53.
12. Ibid., 55–56.
13. Ibid., 57.
14. Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb, 223.
15. Mandel, Perestroika and the Soviet People, 56.
16. The Economist, “Northern Lights-Out: Russia.”
17. Esther B. Fein, “Soviet Miners Strike in Defiance of Ban.”
18. Mandel, Perestroika and the Soviet People, 58.
19. Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb, 224–25.
20. Fein, “Soviet Miners Strike in Defiance of Ban.”
21. Michael Dobbs, “Soviet Miners Vote to End 1-Day Strike.”
22. Michael Dobbs, “Miners Strike Is ‘Warning’ in Ukraine.”
23. Vincent J. Schodolski and Thom Shanker, “Soviet Coal Miners Stage Big 1-Day Strike.”
24. Boris Kagarlitsky, “USSR—A Voice of the Socialist Opposition.”
25. Mandel, “The Independent Miners’ Union: Three Interviews,” 141.
26. Kagarlitsky, “USSR—A Voice of the Socialist Opposition.”
27. Serge Schmemann, “Strike by Soviet Miners Spreads in Rising Challenge to Kremlin.”
28. David Remnick, “Striking Soviet Miners Push Radical Demand for Political Change.”
29. Serge Schmemann, “Yeltsin Has an Offer for Striking Miners.”
30. Quoted in ibid.
31. Mandel, Perestroika and the Soviet People, 161.
32. Ibid., 186.
33. Daniel Sneider, “Yeltsin’s Deal with Strikers Tests Pact with Gorbachev.”
34. Mandel, Perestroika and the Soviet People, 187.
35. Ibid., 186.
36. Richard Greeman, “The Death of Communism and the New World Order,” 59–60, quoting Nikolai Preobrazhensky, of the Petersburg Party of Labor.
37. Mandel, “Strike Wave of March–April 1991,” 193.
38. Greeman, “Death of Communism and the New World Order,” 61.
39. CIA, CIA World Factbook 1987, 1989, 1990, and 1991.
40. Ernest Mandel, Beyond Perestroika: The Failure of Gorbachev’s USSR, 5. On several occasions, while presenting aspects of this research, I have been challenged on this point. The deficit in the trade of grain, according to some, was solely a product of the deficit in animal feed, which resulted from the shift to beef consumption in the 1970s and 1980s. This evades the point that other “breadbasket” countries—Canada, for example—were capable of producing sufficient quantities of grain for both human and animal consumption and of being a net exporter of each during this same period of time.
41. Mandel, Perestroika and the Soviet People, 60.
42. Quoted in John Rees, “Gorbachev Defied as Miners Strike Again.”
43. Edward Andrew, “Class in Itself and Class Against Capital: Karl Marx and His Classifiers,” 577.
44. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy [1847], 211; emphasis added.
45. Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach” [1845], 3.
46. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 9.
47. G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World: From the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests, 32.
48. John Gray, “Three Yeltsin Supporters Killed Outside Russian Parliament.”

Chapter 4: The Peasant-in-Uniform

1. Leopold Haimson, The Making of Three Russian Revolutionaries, 482n13.
2. Pavel Axelrod, “Ob’edinenie rossiiskoi sotsial-demokratii i ee zadachi” [The unification of Russian social democracy and its tasks] [15 December 1903 and 15 January 1904]. An abridged version of this article exists in English translation, but does not include the section quoted here. See Abraham Ascher, ed., The Mensheviks in the Russian Revolution, 48–52.
3. Leon Trotsky, Our Political Tasks, 1.
4. Leon Trotsky, Nashi politicheskie zadachi [Our political tasks], 25; compare with Trotsky, Our Political Tasks, 39.
5. Trotsky, Nashi politicheskie zadachi [Our political tasks], 51; compare with Trotsky, Our Political Tasks, 71.
6. Trotsky, Our Political Tasks, 8.
7. Ibid., 68. A slightly edited version of the English-language translation of Trotsky’s book can be found at https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1904/tasks/. The Russian language original—available in only a handful of libraries—formed the core for a widely circulated article by Tony Cliff, written in 1960 and republished in 1973. See Cliff, “The Revolutionary Party and the Class, or Trotsky on Substitutionism” and Cliff, “Trotsky on Substitutionism.”
8. Isaac Nachman Steinberg, In the Workshop of the Revolution, 291, quoting A. S. Pukhov, Kronshtadtskiy myatezh v 1921 godu [The Kronstadt rebellion of 1921] (Leningrad, 1931). Steinberg uses “Pukhoff” instead of the more usual “Pukhov” and uses the initial “N.” rather than “A. S.”
9. Ibid., 293.
10. Ibid., 295.
11. Ibid., 296.
12. Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary [1951], 94
13. Karl Radek, “The Paths of the Russian Revolution” [1922], 70.
14. China Miéville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution, 39.
15. Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd, 274.
16. “Articles of Service of the Workers’ Red Guard in Petrograd, Adopted at a City Conference of the Red Guard on November 4, 1917,” articles 1 and 2, quoted in William Henry Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, 1917–1921, 1:465.
17. Chamberlin, Russian Revolution, 1:307. “Kornilov” is General Kornilov, whose late-August attempt to overthrow the provisional government was mentioned in the introduction.
18. Raphael R. Abramovitch, The Soviet Revolution, 1917–1939, 88.
19. Chamberlin, Russian Revolution, 1:311.
20. For the precise figures, see table 1, in the conclusion. See also the discussion in Oliver Henry Radkey, Russia Goes to the Polls: The Election to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly, 1917, 148–60.
21. Ibid., xvii.
22. V. I. Lenin, “The Trade Unions, the Present Situation and Trotsky’s Mistakes.” Pamphlet, 1920, in Lenin: Collected Works, 32:24; emphasis in the original.
23. Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed [1937], 170.
24. Leonard Schapiro, The Origin of the Communist Autocracy: Political Opposition in the Soviet State, First Phase, 1917–1922, 63. In the Julian calendar, 22 October was 9 October, the date on which the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet first voted to establish the Military Revolutionary Committee.
25. Schapiro, Origin of the Communist Autocracy, 63–64. Schapiro quotes from Nikolai Nikolaevich Sukhanov, Zapiski o revoliutsii [Notes on the revolution] (Berlin, St. Petersburg, and Moscow: Z. I. Grzhebin, 1923), 7:94–97. See also the abridged English translation of Sukhanov’s seven-volume original, The Russian Revolution, 1917: A Personal Record, 587–89. There, the passage reads: “By October 21st [that is, 3 November] the Provisional Government had already been overthrown, and was non-existent in the territory of the capital” (587).
26. Sukhanov, Russian Revolution, 1917, 562.
27. Schapiro, Origin of the Communist Autocracy, 55, quoting Pervyi legal’nyi peterburgskii komitet bol’shevikov v 1917 g. Sbornik materialov v protokolov zasedanii peterburgskogo komiteta RSDRP(b)…. za 1917 g. [The first Petersburg Bolshevik committee of 1917: Collection of materials and minutes of meetings of the Petersburg committee of the RSDRP(b)…. for 1917] (Moscow and Leningrad, 1927), 312–15.
28. Abramovitch, Soviet Revolution, 80.
29. Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks Come to Power, 278.
30. Trotsky, quoted in ibid.
31. Abramovitch, Soviet Revolution, 89.
32. Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924, 325.
33. Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 278.
34. Abramovitch, Soviet Revolution, 1917–1939, 18.
35. Ibid., 20.
36. Ibid., 21.
37. Israel Getzler, Kronstadt, 1917–1921: The Fate of a Soviet Democracy, 10, quoting from A. Drezen, “Baltiiskii flot v gody pod”ema” [The Baltic fleet in its heyday], Krasnaia letopis’ [The Red chronicle] no. 3 (36) (1930): 145, and from K. F. Shatsillo, Russkii imperializm i razvitie flota: Nakanune pervoi mirovoi voiny [Russian imperialism and naval development: On the eve of the first world war] (Moscow: 1968), 77.
38. Iulii Osipovich Martov, “Mirovoi bol’shevizm” [World Bolshevism], 394.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid., 395.
41. Ibid.
42. Abramovitch, Soviet Revolution: 1917–1939, 20.
43. Martov, “Mirovoi bol’shevizm” [World Bolshevism], 396–97.
44. Ibid., 397.
45. Ibid., 396.
46. Antonio Gramsci, “The Modern Prince,” 169–70.
47. George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police—The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-revolution and Sabotage, December 1917 to February 1922, 5, quoting Protokoly zasedanii vserossiiskogo tsentral’nogo ispolnitelnogo komiteta sovetov rabochikh, soldatskikh, krest’ianskikh i kazach’ikh deputatov II sozyva [Minutes of the meetings of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Soviets of Workers, Soldiers, Peasants and Cossack Deputies, 2nd Convocation], Moscow, 1918, 27.
48. Steinberg, In the Workshop of the Revolution, 57.
49. Ibid., 58.
50. Ibid., 59.
51. Ibid., 60; ellipses in the original.

Chapter 5: The Agrarian Question

1. Tamás Krausz, Reconstructing Lenin: An Intellectual Biography, 86.
2. V. I. Lenin, “The Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy,” in LCW, 13:424. As Lenin notes in a postscript to the 1917 edition, his treatise was first published in St. Petersburg in 1908, but the copies were “seized and destroyed by the tsarist censor” (430), with only a single, not-quite-complete copy surviving.
3. Rosa Luxemburg, “Introduction to Political Economy” [1910], 222.
4. Edward Hallett Carr, “The Russian Revolution and the Peasant,” 69.
5. Luxemburg, “Introduction to Political Economy,” 224. A “mark comrade” is another member of the “mark community,” the Markgenossenschaft.
6. Narodism (from the Russian word narod, or “people”) was a populist movement that became influential in the late nineteenth century and in which the Social-Revolutionaries found inspiration. On Lenin’s opposition to Narodism, see Krausz, Reconstructing Lenin, 80–84.
7. Ibid., 89.
8. V. I. Lenin, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, in LCW, 3:339.
9. “Editor’s Note,” in Luxemburg, “Introduction to Political Economy,” 300n185.
10. Krausz, Reconstructing Lenin, 235.
11. Ibid., 510–11n99. Krausz quotes Vladimir Buharayev, “1917—Az obscsina-forradalom pirruszi gyözelme” [1917—The Pyrrhic victory of the obshchina revolution], in 1917 és ami utána következett [1917 and what followed], ed. Tamás Krausz (Budapest: Magyar Ruszisztikai Intézet, 1998), 47–48.
12. Krausz, Reconstructing Lenin, 106, quoting V. I. Lenin, “Old and New,” Zvezda, 10 December 1911, in LCW, 17:390.
13. James White has suggested that Lenin’s approach to the agrarian question, outlined in these writings, might well have been influenced by the ideas of Lenin’s elder brother, Aleksandr, who—before his execution in 1887, at the age of only twenty-one—was deeply immersed in studying the economics of the countryside. See James D. White, Lenin: The Practice and Theory of Revolution, 21–40.
14. “Rossiia—odna iz naibolee melkoburzhuaznykh stran” in V. I. Lenin, “Zaputavshiesia bespartiitsy” [Bewildered non-party people], Za pravdu, 4 October 1913, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [The complete collected works; hereafter PSS], 24:66; “Rossiia iz vsekh kapitalisticheskikh stran odna iz naibolee otstalykh, naibolee melkoburzhuaznykh stran” in “Ideinaia bor’ba v rabochem dvizhenii” [The ideological struggle in the working-class movement], Put’ pravdy, 4 May 1914, in PSS, 25:133; “Rossiia naibolee melkoburzhuaznaia strana iz vsekh evropeiskikh stran” in Zadachi proletariata v nashei revoliutsii [The tasks of the proletariat in our revolution], 28 May 1917, in PSS, 31:156.
15. Bertram D. Wolfe, “Lenin, Stolypin, and the Russian Village,” 52.
16. Ibid., 53.
17. See LCW, 19:436; 20:279; and 24:61.
18. See LCW, 19:436; 20:279; 20:269; and 24:61–62; and PSS, 24:66; 25:122; 25:133; and 31:156.
19. Lenin, Zadachi proletariata v nashei revoliutsii [The tasks of the proletariat in our revolution], 28 May 1917, in PSS, 31:156, “Bol’shei chast’iu melkie khoziaichiki, melkie khoziaichiki, melkie burzhua, liudi, stoiashchie posredine mezhdu kapitalistami i naemnymi rabochimi” in the Russian original. In the standard English translation, the last sentence reads: “For the most part small proprietors, petty bourgeois, people standing midway between the capitalists and the wage-workers.” See LCW, 24:61.
20. Iulii Martov, “O politicheskom polozhenii i zadachakh partii” [On the political situation and tasks of the party] [1917], 355.
21. Karl Radek, “The Paths of the Russian Revolution” [1922], 62.
22. V. I. Lenin, Shag vpered, dva shaga nazad (Krizis v nashei partii) [One step forward, two steps back (The Crisis in our party)] [1904], in PSS, 8:254. Compare with the official English translation in LCW, 7:267: “the petty-bourgeois mode of existence (working in isolation or in very small groups, etc.).”
23. V. I. Lenin, “O ‘levom’ rebiachestve i o melkoburzhuaznosti” [“Left-wing” childishness and the petit-bourgeois mentality], serialized in Pravda, 9–11 May 1918, in PSS, 36:296. Compare with the English translation in LCW, 27:336: “Clearly in a small-peasant country, the petty-bourgeois element predominates and it must predominate, for the great majority of those working the land are small commodity producers.”
24. E. H. Carr, “The Russian Revolution and the Peasant,” 87–88.
25. Ibid., 88n4.
26. Donald W. Treadgold, “Was Stolypin in Favor of Kulaks?” 6; the emphasis is Treadgold’s. He quotes from a letter written by Stolypin to Nicholas II, as quoted in M. N. Pokrovskij, A Brief History of Russia, 2 vols. (London: Martin Lawrence, 1933), 2:291, and from M. P. [Marija Petrovna] Bok, Vospominanija o moem otse P. A. Stolypine [Memories of my father, P. A. Stolypin] (New York: Chekhov Publishers, 1953), 204.
27. George Tokmakoff, “Stolypin’s Agrarian Reform: An Appraisal,” 137.
28. Leonid I. Strakhovsky, “The Statesmanship of Peter Stolypin: A Reappraisal,” 361, quoting Stenograficheskii otchet gosudarstvennogo soveta za 1910 g. [Stenographic report of the state council for 1910] (St. Petersburg, 1911), 1136–45.
29. Ibid., 361–62.
30. Wolfe, “Lenin, Stolypin, and the Russian Village,” 46.
31. Judith Pallot, Land Reform in Russia, 1906–1917: Peasant Responses to Stolypin’s Project of Rural Transformation, 9.
32. Lenin, “Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy,” 424.
33. To describe the mir as “semi-feudal” does not, however, imply that the Russian empire under tsarism somehow existed outside the long reach of global capitalism. Following Jairus Banaji, it is helpful to distinguish between the mode of production understood as the labour process and the mode of production understood as the regime of accumulation. That is, even if the mode of labour in the countryside of the Russian empire retained precapitalist relations and structures, the commune was inserted into a national and world economy whose mode of production was capitalist, driven by the imperious needs of capital accumulation. See Jairus Banaji, Theory and History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation, 45–102.
34. Lenin, “O ‘levom’ rebiachestve i o melkoburzhuaznosti” [“Left-wing” childishness and the petit-bourgeois mentality], in PSS, 36:296.
35. Tokmakoff, “Stolypin’s Agrarian Reform,” 129.
36. Ibid., 130.
37. S. M. Dubrovsky, “Stolypinskaia reforma.” Kapitalizatsiia sel’skogo khoziaistva v ХХ veke [The Stolypin reform: Capitalization of agriculture in the twentieth century], 13, 127. This section is also quoted, with a slightly different translation, in Leonid I. Strakhovsky, “The Statesmanship of Peter Stolypin: A Reappraisal,” 362.
38. S. M. Dubrovsky, “Stolypinskaia reforma.” Kapitalizatsiia sel’skogo khoziaistva v ХХ veke [The Stolypin reform: Capitalization of agriculture in the twentieth century], 13, 127, quoted in Strakhovsky, “The Statesmanship of Peter Stolypin,” 362. The translation here is my own.
39. Strakhovsky, “The Statesmanship of Peter Stolypin,” 362, quoting Nicolas Savickij, “P. A. Stolypine,” Le Monde Slave 12 (1933): 363–64.
40. David Mitrany, Marx Against the Peasant: A Study in Social Dogmatism, 226n7.
41. Krausz, Reconstructing Lenin, 98.
42. V. I. Lenin, “The Fourth Conference of the R.S.D.L.P.,” Proletarii, 19 November 1907, in LCW, 13:142.
43. Lenin, “Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy,” 243.
44. Ibid. I have modified the standard English translation by translating “zamedlennoe” as “sluggish.”
45. Lenin, “Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy,” 239.
46. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, 71.
47. Quoted in ibid., 70.
48. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction: An Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880, 206.
49. Quoted in ibid., 198.
50. Treadgold, “Was Stolypin in Favor of Kulaks?” 11. See also Pallot, Land Reform in Russia, 1906–1917, 10.
51. Alec Nove, Studies in Economics and Russia, 43.
52. Victor Serge, Year One of the Russian Revolution, 359.
53. Ibid., 360; Lev Kritsman develops this concept in chapter 5 of his book, Geroicheskii period velikoi russkoi revoliutsii (Opyt analiza t. n. “voennogo kommunizma”) [The Heroic period of the great Russian revolution (An Attempt to analyze so-called “war communism”)], 100–17. The forward and the introduction of Kritsman’s book have been translated into English; see Kritsman, “Foreword.” Geroicheskii period velikoi russkoi revoliutsii [The Heroic period of the great Russian revolution]; Kritsman, “Introduction.” Geroicheskii period velikoi russkoi revoliutsii [The Heroic period of the great Russian revolution]. Kritsman, a prominent economist in the 1920s, by the 1930s, like so many others, was swept up in the Great Terror, and executed in 1938; see Kowalski, “Geroicheskii period russkoi revoliutsii” [The Heroic period of the Russian revolution].
54. Boris Souvarine, Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism, 274–76.
55. Krausz, Reconstructing Lenin, 321–22.
56. V. I. Lenin, “Speech in the Moscow Soviet,” Izvestiia VtsIK, 24 April 1919, in LCW, 27:232.
57. Isaac Nachman Steinberg, In the Workshop of the Revolution, 254.
58. Ibid., 256.
59. Ibid., 260.
60. Ibid., 264.
61. Ibid., 264–65. By paupers, Steinberg is referring to what were called at the time the “poor peasants”—landless labourers for the most part—who for a few months were organized into committees as an attempt to create a base for the Bolsheviks in the countryside. The policy was not a success and was soon abandoned.
62. V. I. Lenin, “Speech to Propagandists on Their Way to the Provinces, January 23 (February 5) 1918,” Pravda, 6 February 1918, in LCW, 26:514, 515.
63. Ibid., 514–15.
64. Krausz, Reconstructing Lenin, 368.
65. Nove, Studies in Economics and Russia, 59.
66. Roy A. Medvedev, The October Revolution, 123.
67. His Bolshevik career stretched from the 1905 Revolution until 1911, including being elected to the Bolshevik Central Committee in 1907. See Rondan, “Nikolai Aleksandrovich Rozhkov (1868–1927): Historian and Revolutionary,” 4 and 310.
68. N. A. Rozhkov, “Pis’mo N. A. Rozhkova V. I. Leninu. Petrograd, 11 ianvaria” [Letter from N. A. Rozhkov to V. I. Lenin, Petrograd, 11 January 1919], 78.
69. Krausz, Reconstructing Lenin, 228.
70. The exact reference is to armed, punitive, military detachments used on the battlefield to “block” deserters, in this context, used to combat “speculation” (trade) in food.
71. Rozhkov, “Pis’mo N. A. Rozhkova V. I. Leninu [Letter from N. A. Rozhkov to V. I. Lenin],” 78.
72. Ibid., 78–79. Rozhkov is citing a difficult-to-translate proverb, which roughly signifies that, if the conditions exist, shady characters will emerge.
73. Leon Trotsky, “The Fundamental Questions of the Food and Agrarian Policy” [1920], 70.
74. Erik C. Landis, “The Fate of the Soviet Countryside—March 1920,” 220.
75. Leon Trotsky, My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography [1930], 464.
76. Landis, “The Fate of the Soviet Countryside—March 1920,” 231–32.
77. Alec Nove, An Economic History of the U.S.S.R., 61.
78. Leonard Schapiro, The Origin of the Communist Autocracy: Political Opposition in the Soviet State, First Phase, 1917–1922, 214.
79. Nove, Economic History of the U.S.S.R., 62, citing Kritsman, “Geroicheskii period Russkoi revoliutsii” [The Heroic period of the Russian revolution], Vestnik kommunisticheskoi akademii [Bulletin of the communist academy] 19 (1924).
80. Rozhkov, “Pis’mo N. A. Rozhkova V. I. Leninu [Letter from N. A. Rozhkov to V. I. Lenin],” 78.
81. Moshe Lewin, “Who Was the Soviet Kulak?” 189, 191.
82. Cited in Treadgold, “Was Stolypin in Favor of Kulaks?” 11.
83. V. I. Lenin, “Report on Combating the Famine” [Newspaper report, Pravda and Izvestiia VTsIK, 5 June 1918], in LCW, 27:436.
84. Lenin, “Reply to a Peasant’s Question” [Newspaper article, Pravda, 14 February 1919], in LCW, 36:502.
85. Lenin, “Telegram to Yevgenia Bosch – August 9, 1918” [first published 1924], LCW, 36:489.
86. Lenin, “Session of the Petrograd Soviet” [Speech, Severnaia kommuna, 14 March 1919], in LCW, 29:25.
87. Carr, “Russian Revolution and the Peasant,” 81.
88. Ibid., 85.
89. Leon Trotsky, Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence, ed. and trans. Alan Woods, 690; cf. Leon Trotsky, Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence, ed. and trans. Charles Malamuth, 405–6.
90. Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Woods, 584; cf. Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Malamuth, 408.
91. Stanisław Swianiewicz, Forced Labour and Economic Development: An Enquiry into the Experience of Soviet Industrialization, 118, quoting Boris Brutzkus, Der Fünfjahresplan und seine Erfüllung [The Five-year Plan and its Fulfillment] (Leipzig: Deutsche wissenschaftliche Buchhandlung, 1932), 47–49.
92. Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Woods, 581; Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Malamuth, 408.
93. Souvarine, Stalin, 551.
94. Wolfe, “Lenin, Stolypin, and the Russian Village,” 53.

Chapter 6: Poland and Georgia—The Export of Revolution

1. Leon Trotsky, “Declaration of the Bolshevik-Leninist Delegation at the Conference of Left Socialist and Communist Organizations” [1933], 40. The First Congress, held in 1919, while important historically because it was the founding meeting of this new workers’ international, is in quite a different category from the three that followed. The latter were large affairs, drawing hundreds of delegates from parties all around the world—some of these parties with large memberships and considerable influence in their countries. The first, convened in siege conditions in Moscow in March, brought together only fifty-one delegates from working-class organizations that were, for the most part, “still small and inexperienced.” See John Riddell, Founding the Communist International—Proceedings and Documents of the First Congress: March 1919, 1.
2. John Riddell, ed., To the Masses: Proceedings of the Third Congress of the Communist International, 1921, 90n29.
3. Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924, 698.
4. Ibid., 698–99.
5. Ibid., 699.
6. Ibid., 700–703.
7. Lenin, “Politicheskii otchet TSK(b) na IKH vserossiiskoi konferentsii RKP(b) i zakliuchitel’noe slovo po itogam obsuzhdeniia otcheta” [Political report of the Central Committee of the RCP(b) at the ninth all-Russian Conference of the RCP(b) and the final word on the results of the discussion of the report]. [Shorthand report, 22 September 1920]. See also Lenin, “Politicheskii otchet TSK RKP(b) na IKH Vserossiiskoi konferentsii RKP(b) i zakliuchitel’noe slovo po itogam obsuzhdeniia otcheta [Political report of the Central Committee of the RCP(b) at the ninth all-Russian Conference of the RCP(b) and the final word on the results of the discussion of the report],” 373; See also Lenin, “Political Report of the Central Committee [1920], in The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive, ed. Pipes, 97. A second English-language translation of Lenin’s speech is available, in a collection edited by Al Richardson: Lenin, “Political Report of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) to the Ninth Conference of the RCP(B)” [1920], in In Defence of the Russian Revolution: A Selection of Bolshevik Writings, 1917–1923. Throughout, I principally rely on the more readily accessible Pipes translation, but in this case, I have provided my own. Pipes uses the term “great power” to describe Poland. The Russian original will not sustain the notion that Lenin was calling Poland a “great power,” a term exclusively reserved for the economic and military powers of the day (such as Britain, France, and the United States). No one would reasonably place a newly sovereign nation such as Poland into that category.
8. Lenin, “Political Report of the Central Committee,” in Unknown Lenin, ed. Pipes, 98.
9. Ibid. The first square-bracketed insert is from the Pipes edition. The second is my own addition.
10. Tamás Krausz, Reconstructing Lenin: An Intellectual Biography, 296.
11. Lenin, “Political Report of the Central Committee,” in Unknown Lenin, ed. Pipes, 99.
12. Rosa Luxemburg, “What Does the Spartacus League Want?” [1918], 356–57.
13. P. Iu. Savel’ev and S. V. Tiutiukin, “Iulii Osipovich Martov (1873–1923): The Man and the Politician,” 79.
14. Kirsteen Davina Croll, “Soviet-Polish Relations, 1919–1921,” 19–20.
15. Leon Trotsky, My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography, 457.
16. Krausz, Reconstructing Lenin, 295.
17. Pierre Broué, Trotsky, 269.
18. Proceedings of the Second Congress are available in John Riddell, ed., Workers of the World and Oppressed Peoples, Unite! Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress, 1920.
19. Riddell, Workers of the World and Oppressed Peoples, 1:135–39.
20. Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 125.
21. Ibid., 125–26.
22. Lenin, “Political Report of the Central Committee,” in Unknown Lenin, ed. Pipes, 98–99.
23. Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 126.
24. Werner T. Angress, Stillborn Revolution: The Communist Bid for Power in Germany, 1921–1923, 67.
25. Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 126.
26. Ibid., 127.
27. Adam Zamoyski, Warsaw 1920: Lenin’s Failed Conquest of Europe, 69.
28. Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 111.
29. Edgar Vincent D’Abernon, The Eighteenth Decisive Battle of the World: Warsaw, 1920, 107–8.
30. Richard H. Rowland, “Geographical Patterns of the Jewish Population in the Pale of Settlement of Late Nineteenth Century Russia,” 207.
31. Grover C. Furr III, “New Light on Old Stories About Marshal Tukhachevskii,” 297n11.
32. Ibid., 297. Grover Furr III is quoting from a conversation recorded by Pierre Fervacque (the nom de plume of Remy Roure) in Le chef de l’Armée rouge (Paris: Fasquelle, 1928).
33. Orlando Figes, “The Red Army and Mass Mobilization During the Russian Civil War, 1918–1920,” 195–96. Trotsky was born Lev Davydovitch Bronstein. See Trotsky, My Life, 3n1.
34. Zamoyski, Warsaw 1920, 129.
35. V. I. Lenin, “Report on Red Army Pogroms, with Lenin’s Reaction, 17–18 October 1920,” 117.
36. Isaac Babel, “The Red Cavalry Stories” [1926], 279.
37. William Henry Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, 1917–1921, 2:309.
38. Trotsky, My Life, 458–59.
39. Lenin, “Political Report of the Central Committee,” in Unknown Lenin, ed. Pipes,” 106.
40. Zamoyski, Warsaw 1920, 111 and 129.
41. Leon Trotsky, Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence, ed. and trans. Alan Woods, 464; Leon Trotsky, Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence, ed. and trans. Charles Malamuth, 327.
42. Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Woods, 466; Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Malamuth, 328–29.
43. Broué, Trotsky, 269.
44. Chamberlin, Russian Revolution, 2:306, 310.
45. Ibid., 2:306.
46. Broué, Trotsky, 269.
47. Krausz, Reconstructing Lenin, 303, quoting Karl Radek, “Vystuplenie K. Radeka na IKH konferentsii RKP (b) o polozhenii v Pol’she” [Speech by K. Radek at the Ninth conference of the RCP(b) about the situation in Poland] [1920], in Komintern i ideia mirovoi revoliutsii [The Comintern and the idea of world revolution], ed. Y. S. Drabkin, 200–205 (Moscow: Nauka, 1998), 202, 204.
48. Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 126.
49. Radek, “Vystuplenie K. Radeka” [Speech by K. Radek], 203–4.
50. Krausz, Reconstructing Lenin, 303, quoting Lenin, in Drabkin, ed., Komintern i ideia mirovoi revoliutsii [The Comintern and the idea of world revolution], 208.
51. Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Woods, 471; Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Malamuth, 332, quoting from S. E. Rabinovich, Istoriia grazhdanskoi voiny: Chebnoe posobie dlia voennykh shkol RKKA [History of the civil war: A Manual for military schools of the Red Army] (Moscow Party Publishing House, 1933).
52. Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Woods, 471; cf. Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Malamuth, 332.
53. Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Woods, 464–65; Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Malamuth, 327–28.
54. Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Woods, 383; Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Malamuth, 298.
55. Thomas M. Twiss, Trotsky and the Problem of Soviet Bureaucracy, 67, 68, quoting Lenin.
56. V. I. Lenin, “Letter to the Congress: The Question of Nationalities or ‘Autonomisation’ and The Question of Nationalities or ‘Autonomisation’ (Continued),” part of Lenin’s “Testament” [1922], Kommunist, 1956, in LCW, 36:605–11.
57. Edvard Radzinsky, Stalin, 25.
58. Eric Lee, The Experiment: Georgia’s Forgotten Revolution, 1918–1921, 138.
59. Philip Mendes, Jews and the Left: The Rise and Fall of a Political Alliance, 131.
60. Ibid., 7. W. E. B. Du Bois would insist that the experience of Radical Reconstruction in certain of the former confederate states, in the years after the US civil war, should be added to this list. See W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880. Both Radical Reconstruction and the Gurian Republic are rarely mentioned in discussions of self-rule by the oppressed.
61. Lee, Experiment, 12, 14, 9.
62. Ibid., 146.
63. Ibid., 38. Table 1, in the conclusion to this book, gives a slightly different figure for the Mensheviks (roughly 570,000), but the wide gap is still evident.
64. Boris Souvarine, Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism, 300.
65. Lee, Experiment, 218.
66. Ibid., 226.
67. Ibid., 227–28, quoting Donald Rayfield, Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), 342.
68. Jeremy Smith, “The Georgian Affair of 1922: Policy Failure, Personality Clash or Power Struggle?” 524.
69. Leon Trotsky, Between Red and White: A Study of Some Fundamental Questions of Revolution with Particular Reference to Georgia, 10.
70. Brian Pearce, “‘Export of Revolution,’ 1917–1924,” 106.
71. Trotsky, My Life, 482–83; see V. I. Lenin, “To L.D. Trotsky,” dictated by phone, 1923, in LCW, 45:607.
72. Stephen Jones, “The Establishment of Soviet Power in Transcaucasia: The Case of Georgia, 1921–1928,” 616.
73. Mikhail Tukhachevsky, “General Toukhatchevsky’s Narrative,” 166.
74. Ibid., 167.
75. Ibid., 167–68.
76. Stasi is an acronym for the notorious security and intelligence service of the former Stalinist state in East Germany.
77. Leon Trotsky, “Speech at a General Party Membership Meeting of the Moscow Organization, July 1921,” 8.
78. Karl Radek, “Session of the Zentrale with the Representative of the Executive Committee for Germany Friday, January 28, 1921,” 285.
79. D’Abernon, Eighteenth Decisive Battle of the World, 117.
80. Ibid., 118.
81. Ian D. Thatcher, “Trotskii, Lenin and the Bolsheviks, August 1914–February 1917,” 114.
82. V. I. Lenin, “The Break-up of the ‘August’ Bloc,” Put’ pravdy, 15 March 1914, in LCW, 20:160.
83. Robert Service, Trotsky: A Biography, 129, quoting Leon Trotsky, “Trotsky to N.S. Chkheidze, 1 April 1913,” Nicolaevsky Collection, Stanford University: Hoover Institute Archive, box 656, folder 5, 1–2.
84. Leon Trotsky, Nashe slovo, 1916, no. 87, 1, quoted in Thatcher, “Trotskii, Lenin and the Bolsheviks,” 106.
85. Leon Trotsky, Our Political Tasks, 121–28.
86. V. I. Lenin, Shag vpered, dva shaga nazad [One step forward, two steps back], in PSS, 8:370.

Chapter 7: Germany and Hungary—The United Front

1. Ian Birchall, “Grappling with the United Front,” 199.
2. David Morgan, The Socialist Left and the German Revolution: A History of the German Independent Social Democratic Party, 1917–1922, 398–99, quoting Arkadi Maslow, Die Internationale (KPD), 1 June 1921, 254.
3. Pierre Broué, The German Revolution, 1917–1923, 501.
4. John Riddell, ed., To the Masses: Proceedings of the Third Congress of the Communist International, 1921, 20.
5. Ibid.
6. Broué, German Revolution, 506.
7. Werner T. Angress, Stillborn Revolution: The Communist Bid for Power in Germany, 1921–1923, 217n55.
8. Broué, German Revolution, 507–15.
9. John Riddell, introduction to To the Masses, 6–7.
10. Broué, German Revolution, 875.
11. Paul Levi, “Our Path: Against Putschism” [1921].
12. Ian Birchall, “Review of Jean-François Fayet’s Karl Radek (1885–1939),” 266.
13. Riddell, To the Masses, 1090–96.
14. Ibid., 1079–86.
15. Ibid., 1088–90.
16. See Paul Kellogg and John Riddell, Luxemburg, Lenin, Levi: Rethinking Revolutionary History [2/3]; and Paul Kellogg, “Lost in Translation: Explaining the Tragedy of Germany’s 1921 March Action.”
17. Broué, German Revolution, 469.
18. Riddell, To the Masses, 1061n1.
19. Ibid., 1062.
20. Ibid., 15.
21. David Fernbach, introduction to Paul Levi, In the Steps of Rosa Luxemburg: Selected Writings of Paul Levi, 5–6.
22. Riddell, To the Masses, 1080.
23. Ibid., 501.
24. Broué, German Revolution, 471.
25. Ibid., 471–72.
26. Riddell, To the Masses, 1064.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., 1087.
29. Ibid., 571–83.
30. Ibid., 1090–97.
31. Ibid., 305–45.
32. Ibid., 204n42.
33. Ben Lewis, “The Four-Hour Speech and the Significance of Halle,” 22n38.
34. Fernbach, introduction to Levi, In the Steps of Rosa Luxemburg, 10.
35. Ben Lewis, ed., Zinoviev and Martov: Head to Head in Halle.
36. Lewis, “Four-Hour Speech and the Significance of Halle,” 31.
37. Riddell, To the Masses, 276n3.
38. Paul Levi, “The Lessons of the Hungarian Revolution,” 71.
39. Rosa Luxemburg, “What Does the Spartacus League Want?” 356–57.
40. Ferenc Tibor Zsuppán, “The Early Activities of the Hungarian Communist Party, 1918–19,” 320.
41. Béla Menczer, “Béla Kun and the Hungarian Revolution of 1919,” 304–5.
42. Levi, “Lessons of the Hungarian Revolution,” 76, quoting Karl Radek, “Document 3: Karl Radek, ‘The Lessons of the Hungarian Revolution,’” in International Communism in the Era of Lenin: A Documentary History, ed. Helmut Gruber (Greenwich, Conn: Fawcett Publications, 1967), 160. Originally published in Die Internationale II, no. 21 (25 February 1920).
43. Ibid., 77.
44. Chris Harman, The Lost Revolution: Germany, 1918 to 1923, 211.
45. Fernbach, introduction to Levi’s In the Steps of Rosa Luxemburg, 17.
46. Broué, German Revolution, 516.
47. Angress, Stillborn Revolution, 92.
48. Broué, German Revolution, 468–72.
49. Ibid., 449–58, 875–88.
50. Kellogg and Riddell, Luxemburg, Lenin, Levi; Kellogg, “Lost in Translation.”
51. Harman, Lost Revolution, 219.
52. Morgan, Socialist Left and the German Revolution, 45.
53. Ibid., 391.
54. Harman, Lost Revolution, 269, 279.
55. Ian Birchall, “Grappling with the United Front,” 195.
56. Duncan Hallas, The Comintern, 164.
57. Leon Trotsky, “International Pre-conference of the Left Opposition Presents Thesis,” quoted in ibid., 8.
58. Hallas, Comintern, 8–9.
59. Duncan Hallas, “On Building a Socialist Alternative, Part II,” 5.
60. Hallas, Comintern, 164.
61. Hallas, “On Building a Socialist Alternative,” 164.
62. Ian Birchall, Tony Cliff: A Marxist for His Time, 400–401.
63. Tony Cliff, The Bolsheviks and World Revolution, 110.
64. Ibid., 111.
65. Tony Cliff, The Sword of Revolution, 1917–1923, 132.
66. Ibid., 217.
67. Lenin, “Politicheskii otchet TSK” [“Political report of the Central Committee”], 374.
68. Zamoyski, Warsaw 1920, 68; see also V. I. Lenin, “Telegram to Stalin, 23 July 1920,” 90.
69. Mikhail Tukhachevsky, “Revolution from Without” [1920].
70. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879–1921, 1:473.
71. Leon Trotsky, “Opening and Closing Speeches in the Discussion on Military Doctrine,” 306.
72. Tony Cliff, Revolution Besieged, 36.
73. Birchall, “Grappling with the United Front,” 199.
74. John Riddell, ed., Toward the United Front: Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, 1922, 6.
75. Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach” [1845] (original version), 4.
76. Birchall, “Grappling with the United Front,” 197.

Chapter 8: Trotsky on Stalinism—The Surplus and the Machine

1. Charles Malamuth, “Editor’s Note,” in Leon Trotsky, Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence, ed. and trans. Charles Malamuth, ix.
2. Rob Sewell, “Background to Trotsky’s Stalin,” xxxi.
3. Quoted in ibid., xix.
4. Alan Woods, “Editor’s Note,” in Leon Trotsky, Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence, ed. Alan Woods, xxxviii.
5. Ibid.
6. For the two occurrences, see Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Malamuth, 239, 340.
7. Woods, “Editor’s Note,” xxxviii.
8. Nathalie Babel, preface to The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, 24. In fact, it was preceded by an analysis of Stalin’s rise to power written by the Russian-born American journalist Isaac Don Levine, also titled Stalin and published in 1931.
9. Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, 161. Born Boris Lifschitz, Souvarine was still an infant when his family moved to Paris in 1897.
10. Hella Mandt, “The Classical Understanding: Tyranny and Despotism,” 65.
11. Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Woods, 674.
12. Jean Louis Panné, Boris Souvarine, le premier desenchanté du communisme, 131–49.
13. Surya, Georges Bataille, 159.
14. Boris Souvarine, “Postscript: The Counter-Revolution,” 674.
15. Joseph Stalin, “The Right Deviation in the C.P.S.U.(B.): Speech Delivered at the Plenum of the Central Committee and Central Control Commission of the C.P.S.U.(B.) in April 1929. (Verbatim Report),” 55.
16. “Industrialisation and the Grain Problem” was one of many long speeches that Stalin delivered during a nine-day plenum of the Communist Party. Taking up more than thirty typeset pages in the twelfth volume of his collected works, the speech picks up the heretofore ridiculed ideas of Preobrazhensky (outlined in chapter 2) and adopts them in their entirety. See Joseph Stalin, “Industrialisation and the Grain Problem: Speech Delivered on July 9, 1928.” The emotion with which Stalin challenges the label of feudalist exploitation, as he adopts Preobrazhensky’s policies and the need for a “tribute” from the peasantry, will pique the curiosity of any avid researcher.
17. Boris Souvarine, Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism, 564–65.
18. While calling itself a party, the SWP of Trotsky’s time was actually more a political current, with two thousand members across the United States in 1935. Constance Ashton Myers, The Prophet’s Army: Trotskyists in America, 1928–1941, 113.
19. Trotsky, James, and Curtiss, “The Discussions in Coyoacán.”
20. C. L. R. James, “Russia—A Fascist State.”
21. Dunayevskaya was born Raya Shpigel in what is today Ukraine, changing to Rae Spiegel upon emigrating to the United States.
22. “Obituary: Raya Dunayevskaya.”
23. Raya Dunayevskaya, “The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Is a Capitalist Society.”
24. Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Malamuth, 410.
25. Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Woods, 594–95.
26. Alan Woods, bridging passage in Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Woods, 718.
27. Alan Woods, “Editor’s Afterword: Trotsky’s Stalin—a Marxist Masterpiece,” 695.
28. Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Woods, 690; cf. Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Malamuth, 405–6.
29. Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Woods, 690; Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Malamuth, 406.
30. Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Woods, 717; Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Malamuth, 408.
31. Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Woods, 718.
32. Ibid.
33. Souvarine, Stalin, 564. Thanks to Abigail Bakan for suggesting looking for parallels in Souvarine with Trotsky’s notes on surplus product.
34. Souvarine, “Postscript,” 674.
35. Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Woods, 6; Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Malamuth, xv.
36. Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Woods, 43; Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Malamuth, 30. The translation by Woods does not include the bracketed gloss “[political machine].”
37. Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Woods, 61; Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Malamuth, 45.
38. Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Woods, 68; Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Malamuth, 51.
39. Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Woods, 184; Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Malamuth, 143.
40. Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Woods, 82; Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Malamuth, 61.
41. Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Woods, 83; Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Malamuth, 62.
42. Leon Trotsky, Our Political Tasks.
43. Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Woods, 83; Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Malamuth, 62.
44. Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Woods, 675.
45. Ibid., 673.
46. Ibid.
47. Souvarine, Stalin, 129–30. G. V. Plekhanov was labelled “father of Russian Marxism” by many, including by his biographer Samuel Baron. An ally of Lenin in the early years of Iskra, he divided from him definitively in 1914 when Plekhanov came out as an “ardent proponent of the Allied fight against the Central Powers.” See Samuel H. Baron, Plekhanov: The Father of Russian Marxism, 323.
48. Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Woods, 175–76; Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Malamuth, 136–37.
49. Souvarine, Stalin, 64.
50. Quoted in ibid; cf Trotsky, Our Political Tasks, 117.

Chapter 9: A Movement’s Dirty Linen

1. Leon Trotsky, My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography, 142.
2. Ante Ciliga, The Russian Enigma, 274.
3. Leon Trotsky, Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence, ed. Alan Woods, 105–6, 115; Leon Trotsky, Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence, ed. Charles Malamuth, 88.
4. Boris Souvarine, Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism, 88.
5. Ibid. There are clear parallels here to the substitutionist “theory of the offensive” developed by Nikolai Bukharin and Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a theory that led to the catastrophic 1920 invasion of Poland examined in chapter 6 and the equally catastrophic 1921 “March Action” in Germany, examined in chapter 7.
6. Ibid., 89.
7. Quoted in ibid., 90.
8. Ibid., 90.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., 74, quoting Filipp Makharadze, Sketch of the Divergences within the Party (Tiflis: State Georgian Press, 1927).
11. Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Woods, 95; Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Malamuth, 72.
12. Isaac Don Levine, Stalin, 70.
13. Bertram D. Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution: A Biographical History of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, 393. The conversion to US dollars is based on Samuel H. Williamson, “Seven Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a U.S. Dollar Amount—1774 to Present,” and Leonard Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 20n1.
14. Souvarine, Stalin, 94.
15. Robert Service, The Strengths of Contradiction, 185.
16. Schapiro, Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 119.
17. Nikolai Nikolaevich Popov, Outline History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1:247.
18. Ibid., 1:249.
19. Jane Barnes Casey, I, Krupskaya: My Life with Lenin, 270.
20. Robert Chadwell Williams, The Other Bolsheviks: Lenin and His Critics, 1904–1914, 166; Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Woods, 174; Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Malamuth, 135.
21. Popov, Outline History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1:269.
22. James D. White, Lenin: The Practice and Theory of Revolution, 96.
23. Abraham Ascher, ed., The Mensheviks in the Russian Revolution, 23.
24. V. I. Lenin, “The Sixth (Prague) All-Russia Conference of the R.S.D.L.P.” [1912], in LCW, 17:451–86.
25. Ibid., 17:483.
26. Williams, Other Bolsheviks, 167–68, quoting V. I. Lenin, “Pis’mo advokatu zh. Diuko de la Ai [Letter to Attorney M. Ducos de La Haille]” [10 June 1912], in Leninskii sbornik [Lenin miscellany] (Moscow: Publishing House of Political Literature, 1975), 38:62–65.
27. Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Woods, 133; Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Malamuth, 103.
28. Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Woods, 132; Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Malamuth, 101.
29. Iulii Martov, “Spasiteli ili uprazdniteli? (Kto i kak razrushal RSDRP)” [Saviours or destroyers? (Who destroyed the RSDRP and how)] [1911]; available in an abridged English translation by Iulii Martov, “Saviours or Destroyers?”
30. Iulii Martov, “Saviours or Destroyers?” [1911]. 71.
31. Ibid., 73.
32. Quoted in P. Iu. Savel’ev and S. V. Tiutiukin, “Iulii Osipovich Martov (1873–1923): The Man and the Politician,” 36.
33. V. I. Lenin, “The Bourgeois Intelligentsia’s Methods of Struggle Against the Workers” [1914], in LCW, 20:477.
34. Quoted in Israel Getzler, Martov: A Political Biography of a Russian Social Democrat, 134.
35. Lenin, “Bourgeois Intelligentsia’s Methods of Struggle Against the Workers,” 476.
36. R. C. Elwood, “Scoundrel or Saviour? Solzhenitsyn’s View of Roman Malinovskii,” 164–65.
37. Savel’ev and Tiutiukin, “Iulii Osipovich Martov (1873–1923): The Man and the Politician,” 36.
38. Souvarine, Stalin, 124.
39. Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Woods, 142; Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Malamuth, 110.
40. Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Woods, 141; Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Malamuth, 109.
41. Trotsky, My Life, 218–19.
42. Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Woods, 125; Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Malamuth, 96.
43. Souvarine, Stalin, 92.
44. Ibid., 125.
45. Ibid., 126.
46. Ibid., 105.
47. Schapiro, Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 138.
48. Thanks to my friend Charnie Guettel for pointing out the underemphasized importance of the political volunteer.
49. Souvarine, Stalin, 106.
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid., 107.
52. J. L. H. Keep, The Rise of Social Democracy in Russia, 288.
53. Martov, “Spasiteli ili uprazdniteli?” [Saviours or destroyers?], 3, quoted in Keep, Rise of Social Democracy in Russia, 290.
54. Souvarine, Stalin, 107.
55. Iulii Martov, Die Geschichte der Russischen Socialdemokratie [History of Russian Social Democracy] (Berlin: Dietz, 1926), 268, quoted in Ruth Fischer, Stalin and German Communism, 22.
56. Fischer, Stalin and German Communism, 22.
57. Martov, Geschichte, 268, quoted in Fischer, Stalin and German Communism, 22.
58. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology [1846], 52–53.
59. Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach” (original version), 5, 3.
60. Abigail B. Bakan, “Marx and ‘Politics of Difference’? Exploitation, Alienation and Oppression.” 9.
61. Paul Kellogg, “Ruthless Criticism of All That Exists.”
62. V. I. Lenin, “Backward Europe and Advanced Asia,” Pravda, 23 April 1913, in LCW, 19:99–100.
63. Leon Trotsky, 1905 [1907]; Leon Trotsky, “Results and Prospects” [1906]; Leon Trotsky, “The Permanent Revolution” [1930].
64. Edward W. Said, Orientalism.
65. Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Woods, 7; Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Malamuth, 1.
66. Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Woods, 179; Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Malamuth, 140.
67. Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Woods, 8; Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Malamuth, 2.
68. Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Woods, 10; Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Malamuth, 3.
69. Souvarine, Stalin, 115, 203, 487.
70. Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography, 368.
71. Trotsky, 1905, 8, 336.
72. Tamás Krausz, Reconstructing Lenin: An Intellectual Biography, 103.
73. See Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution [1932], 1:3–4, 6, 7, 98, 411, 466.
74. V. I. Lenin, “Two Tactics of Social-Democracy” [1905], in LCW, 9:48.
75. V. I. Lenin, “The Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy,” in LCW, 13:277.
76. Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution, 404.
77. V. I. Lenin, “What the ‘Friends of the People’ Are and How they Fight the Social-Democrats” [1894], in LCW, 1:235.
78. V. I. Lenin, “The Tasks of the Russian Social-Democrats” [1897], in LCW, 2:336.
79. V. I. Lenin, “The Heritage We Renounce” [1897], in LCW, 2:516; “The Workers’ Party and the Peasantry,” Iskra, January 1901, in LCW, 4:423.
80. V. I. Lenin, “Review of Home Affairs,” Zaria, December 1901, in LCW, 5:278.
81. V. I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement [1902], in LCW, 5:373.
82. V. I. Lenin, “Draft Programme of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party,” Iskra, February 1902, in LCW, 6:27; “Material for Working Out the R.S.D.L.P. Programme” [1902], in LCW, 41:46–47.
83. Lenin, “Two Tactics of Social-Democracy,” 54.
84. Ibid., 59.
85. V. I. Lenin, “‘Oneness of the Tsar and the People, And of the People and the Tsar,’” Proletarii, 29 August 1905, in LCW, 9:192.
86. V. I. Lenin, “Pervye itogi politicheskoi gruppirovki” [The First results of the political alignment], Proletarii, 31 October 1905, in PSS, 12:10. Compare with the English-language translation, “our autocracy’s Asiatic savagery,” in LCW, 9:399.
87. V. I. Lenin, “Mezhdu dvukh bitv” [Between two battles], Proletarii, 25 November 1905, in PSS, 12:57. Compare with the English-language translation, “unmitigated Asiatic backwardness,” in LCW, 9:464.
88. V. I. Lenin, “A Revolution of the 1789 or 1848 Type?” [1905], in LCW, 8:258.
89. V. I. Lenin, “Report on the Question of the Participation of the Social-Democrats in a Provisional Revolutionary Government” [1905], in LCW, 8:393.
90. V. I. Lenin, “The Socialist Party and Non-Party Revolutionism,” Novaia zhizn’, November 1905, in LCW, 10:76.
91. V. I. Lenin, “The Dissolution of the Duma and the Tasks of the Proletariat” [1906], in LCW, 11:113.
92. V. I. Lenin, “Pered burei” [Before the storm], Proletarii, 21 August 1906, in PSS, 13:332. The English translation inserts the word “tyranny” after Asiatic, but that word is not in the original (see LCW, 11:136).
93. V. I. Lenin, “Before the Storm,” Proletarii, 21 August 1906, in LCW, 11:139.
94. V. I. Lenin, “An Attempt at a Classification of the Political Parties of Russia,” Proletarii, 30 September 1906, in LCW, 11:229.
95. Lenin, “Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy,” 278, 329; Lenin, “The Lessons of the Revolution,” Rabochaia gazeta, 30 October 1910, in LCW, 16:304.
96. Lenin, “Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy,” 325.
97. V. I. Lenin, “The Agrarian Question in Russia Towards the Close of the Nineteenth Century” [1908], in LCW, 15:139.
98. V. I. Lenin, “Stolypin and the Revolution,” Sotsial-demokrat, 18 October 1911, in LCW, 17:249–50.
99. V. I. Lenin, “Speech Delivered in the Name of the R.S.D.L.P. at the Funeral of Paul and Laura Lafargue,” Sotsial-demokrat, 8 December 1911, in LCW, 17:304–5.
100. V. I. Lenin, “The Development of Revolutionary Strikes and Street Demonstrations,” Sotsial-Democrat, 12 January 1913, in LCW, 18:476.
101. V. I. Lenin, “An Increasing Discrepancy: Notes of a Publicist,” Prosveshchenie, 22 February 1913, in LCW, 18:563.
102. V. I. Lenin, “Notes of a Publicist,” Sotsial-demokrat, 15 June 1913, in LCW, 19:230.
103. V. I. Lenin, “Russian Government and Russian Reforms,” Pravda truda, 26 September 1913, in LCW, 19:393.
104. V. I. Lenin, “Critical Remarks on the National Question,” Prosveshchenie, December 1913, in LCW, 20:51.
105. Lenin, “Bourgeois Intelligentsia’s Methods of Struggle Against the Workers,” 465.
106. V. I. Lenin, “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” Prosveshchenie, June 1914, in LCW, 20:419.
107. Cynthia Ozick, introduction to Isaac Babel, The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, 16.
108. Nathalie Babel, preface to Isaac Babel, The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, 19.
109. Ibid., 27–28.
110. Ibid., 28.
111. Ibid., 25.

Chapter 10: Lenin—Beyond Reverence

1. Paul Le Blanc, “Paul Le Blanc on Tamás Krausz’s Reconstructing Lenin: Sorting Through Lenin’s Legacy.”
2. Paul Buhle, “Lenin for Today.”
3. Ibid.
4. Tamás Krausz, Reconstructing Lenin: An Intellectual Biography, 15, 19.
5. Ibid., 357.
6. Ibid., 12.
7. Ibid., 47, 50, 68, 70, 74.
8. Martin Empson, “Pick of the Year”; Le Blanc, “Paul Le Blanc on Tamás Krausz’s Reconstructing Lenin.”
9. Georgii Nazarovich Golkov, Vladimir Il’ich Lenin: Biograficheskaia khronika, 1870–1924 [Vladimir Il’ich Lenin: Biographical timeline, 1870–1924]. See https://leninism.su/biograficheskie-xroniki-lenina.html.
10. Ibid.
11. Krausz, Reconstructing Lenin, 79.
12. Ibid., 107.
13. Ibid., 67.
14. Ibid., 355.
15. V. I. Lenin, “The Third International and Its Place in History,” The Communist International, 1919, in LCW, 29:310.
16. Krausz, Reconstructing Lenin, 100.
17. Rosa Luxemburg, “The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions.”
18. Leon Trotsky, 1905.
19. Luxemburg, “Mass Strike,” 179.
20. Ibid., 173.
21. Ibid., 175–78.
22. Ibid., 178.
23. Ibid., 179.
24. Trotsky, 1905, xiii.
25. Ibid., 251.
26. Pierre Broué, Le parti bolchévique: Histoire du P.C. de l’U.R.S.S, 72.
27. Ibid., 73–74.
28. Ibid., 72.
29. Israel Getzler, Martov: A Political Biography of a Russian Social Democrat, 104–5.
30. Broué, Le parti bolchévique, 73.
31. Leon Trotsky, My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography, 176.
32. V. I. Lenin, “Our Tasks and the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies,” Novaia zhizn’, November 1905, first published in 1940, in LCW, 10:21.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid., 19.
35. Trotsky, My Life, 176.
36. James D. White, Lenin: The Practice and Theory of Revolution, 74.
37. Broué, Le parti bolchévique, 73.
38. Boris Souvarine, Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism, 79–80.
39. V. I. Lenin, “Lessons of the Moscow Uprising,” Proletarii, 29 August 1906, in LCW, 11:171.
40. V. I. Lenin, “The Lessons of the Revolution,” Rabochaia gazeta, 30 October 1910, in LCW, 16:296–304.
41. Author’s calculations based on textual analysis of LCW, vol. 8.
42. Leon Trotsky, Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence, ed. Woods, 115; Trotsky, Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence, ed. Malamuth, 88. Ellipses in original.
43. Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Woods, 99; Trotsky, Stalin, ed. Malamuth, 75.
44. V. I. Lenin, “Lessons of the Moscow Uprising,” Proletarii, 29 August 1906, in LCW, 11:171.
45. V. I. Lenin, “Lecture on the 1905 Revolution,” 9 January 1917, Pravda, 22 January 1925, in LCW, 23:248.
46. Broué, Le parti bolchévique, 73, quoting Lenin as cited in Hugo Anweiler, Der Rätebewegung in Russland, 1905–1921 [The Council Movement in Russia, 1905–1921] (Leyde: Brill, 1960), 103.
47. V. I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement.
48. Krausz, Reconstructing Lenin, 31.
49. China Miéville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution, 8; see also 305–6.
50. Tariq Ali, The Dilemmas of Lenin: Terrorism, War, Empire, Love, Revolution, 72.
51. Miéville, October, 305. Tariq Ali says that his own “attempts to read Chernyshevsky at the ages of seventeen, thirty-two and seventy-two were miserable failures. The last time I managed to read over a hundred or so pages and could grasp his appeal, which lay in the truths he recounted and elements of utopia he included, rather than the book’s effectiveness as fiction.” See Ali, Dilemmas of Lenin, 258n8.
52. Ali explains the book’s lack of appeal to a contemporary audience, citing Vera Zasulich, who said that the author was “hampered by censorship” and forced to “write in allusions and hieroglphys.” Only those immersed in his milieu and context could decipher the book. Others, said Zasulich, would “find him dull and empty.” Quoted in Ali, Dilemmas of Lenin, 258–59n8.
53. Nathan Haskell Dole and S. S. Skidelsky, preface to Tchernuishevsky [Chernyshevsky], A Vital Question; or, What Is to Be Done? iii.
54. Richard Peace, “Nihilism,” 126.
55. Michael R. Katz and William G. Wagner, “Introduction: Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done? and the Russian Intelligentsia.”
56. Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, 213.
57. Nikolay Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done? 281.
58. Ibid., 280–82.
59. Ibid., 288.
60. Katz and Wagner, “Introduction,” 17.
61. Chris Matthew Sciabarra, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, 27.
62. Editor’s annotation in Nikolai Tchernuishevsky [Chernyshevsky], A Vital Question; or, What Is to Be Done? 233n. Dmitry Karakozov was executed in September 1866 for his attempt on the life of Alexander II. His was the first in a series of attempted assassinations, one of which finally succeeded (in March 1881).
63. Lenin, What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement.
64. V. I. Lenin, “Narodniks on N.K. Mikhailovsky,” Put’ pravdy, 22 February 1914, in LCW, 20:118.
65. V. I. Lenin, “‘The Peasant Reform’ and the Proletarian-Peasant Revolution,” Sotsial-demokrat, 19 March 1911, in LCW, 17:123.
66. Ibid.
67. V. I. Lenin, “Draft for a Speech on the Agrarian Question in the Second State Duma” [1907], in LCW, 12:292. First published in 1925.
68. Buhle, “Lenin for Today,” referencing Georg Lukács, Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought.
69. Krausz, Reconstructing Lenin, 10.
70. Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas, 120, quoting Lukács, Lenin, 9.
71. Ibid., 10.
72. Karl Radek, “Lenin” [1923], 80.
73. Leon Trotsky, “Lenin Is Dead” [1924], 210. The English language translation of Trotsky’s autobiography includes an even more startling example of reverence: “I realized only too well what Lenin meant to the revolution, to history, and to me. He was my master.” A more accurate translation might be “Lenin was my teacher.” Either choice, however, has a reverential “feel.” See Leon Trotsky, My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography, 394; Leon Trotsky, Moia zhizn’: Opyt avtobiografii [My life: An attempt at an autobiography], 2:123.
74. Bertram D. Wolfe, introduction to Trotsky, Lenin: Notes for a Biography, 7.
75. Jay, Marxism and Totality, 120–21, quoting Lukács, Lenin, 66.
76. The idea of a relationship between a contemporary left-wing tendency to inflate the role of individual socialists and the hegemonic framework of liberal individualism was first suggested to me by Abigail Bakan.
77. Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, 1:329.
78. Ibid., 329–30.
79. Ibid., 330.
80. Krausz, Reconstructing Lenin, 357.
81. Ibid., 154–55.
82. Trotsky, My Life, 249–50.
83. Getzler, Martov, 144.
84. Brian Pearce, “Lenin and Trotsky on Pacifism and Defeatism,” 32–33.
85. Ibid., 33.
86. Ibid., 34.
87. Ibid., 33.
88. Ibid., 34.
89. Pierre Broué, Trotsky, 155.
90. White, Lenin, 139–40.
91. Anonymous, “Memoirs of a Bolshevik-Leninist,” 77.
92. Pearce, “Lenin and Trotsky on Pacifism and Defeatism,” 30, quoting V. I. Lenin, “To Inessa Armand” [25 December 1916], in LCW, 35:268.
93. “Reconstructing Lenin: An Intellectual Biography, by Tamás Krausz,” https://monthlyreview.org/product/reconstructing_lenin/.

Chapter 11: Intellectuals and the Working Class

1. Alexander Potresov, “Lenin, Versuch Einer Charakterisierung” [Lenin: An Attempt at a Characterization] [1927], 412.
2. Tamás Krausz, Reconstructing Lenin: An Intellectual Biography, 115.
3. V. I. Lenin, “What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement,” in LCW, 5:375–76.
4. Ibid., 383–84.
5. Iulii Martov, Krasnoe znamia v Rossіi: Ocherk istorіi russkogo rabochego dvizhenіia [Red banner in Russia: An essay on the history of the Russian labour movement] [1900].
6. Savel’ev and Tiutiukin, “Iulii Osipovich Martov (1873–1923): The Man and the Politician,” 15.
7. V. I. Lenin, “A Retrograde Trend in Russian Social-Democracy” [1899], in LCW, 4:258. First published in 1924.
8. Krausz, Reconstructing Lenin, 121.
9. Ibid., 253.
10. V. I. Lenin, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, in LCW, 7:367; V. I. Lenin, Shag vpered, dva shaga nazad [One step forward, two steps back], in PSS, 8:387.
11. V. I. Lenin, Shag vpered, dva shaga nazad [One step forward, two steps back], in PSS, 8:333. Here, more than elsewhere in the book, you will find my own translations from the Russian-language fifth edition of Lenin’s Collected Works, rather than the more accessible English-language translation of the fourth edition. I was taken aback, upon collecting all his writings on intellectuals into one place, by the extent of invective and insult employed. I wanted to be sure that this was not being exaggerated by the manner in which these excerpts had been translated. I did find a few occasions where liberties were taken. For the “Onward!” quotation, the fourth edition translators offer “endless, tedious word-chopping of your intellectuals,” which is colourful but uses a bit too much poetic licence (LCW, 7:345n1). Later, the translators randomly use the modifiers “contemptible little” rather than “petty” before the words “government official” (LCW, 11:461), but such modifiers are completely absent from the original. These choices, while reflecting a certain shared enthusiasm for Lenin’s attack on intellectuals as a group, are distracting and misleading. However, on the whole, I concluded that the fourth edition translation is an accurate reflection of the Russian original.
12. Lenin, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, 385.
13. Lenin, Shag vpered, dva shaga nazad [One step forward, two steps back], 309, 311–12, 314.
14. Ibid., 333.
15. Lenin, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, 355, 361, 384.
16. Ibid., 389.
17. Lenin, Shag vpered, dva shaga nazad [One step forward, two steps back], 381.
18. Lenin, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, 364.
19. Ibid., 355.
20. Ibid., 396.
21. Lenin, Shag vpered, dva shaga nazad [One step forward, two steps back], 390.
22. Ibid., 370.
23. V. I. Lenin, “Chego my dobivaemsia? (k partii)” [What we are working for (to the party)] [1904], in PSS, 9:8. First published in 1923.
24. V. I. Lenin, “Plekhanov i Vasil”ev” [Plekhanov and Vasilyev], Proletarii, 7 January 1907, in PSS, 14:238.
25. V. I. Lenin, “Vybornaia kampaniia sotsial-demokratii v Peterburge” [The Social-democratic election campaign in St. Petersburg], Prostiye rechi, 21 January 1907, in PSS, 14:295.
26. V. I. Lenin, “Vybory po rabochei kurii v Peterburge” [The Elections in the worker curia in St. Petersburg], Prostye rechi, 30 January 1907, in PSS, 14:345.
27. Ibid., 347.
28. V. I. Lenin, “Bor’ba S. D. i S. R. na vborakh v rabochei kurii v S.-Peterburge” [The Struggle between SDs and SRs in the Elections in the Worker Curia in St. Petersburg], Prostye rechi, 30 January 1907, in PSS, 14:352.
29. V. I. Lenin, “Preface to the Russian Translation of Karl Marx’s Letters to Dr. Kugelmann” [1907], in LCW, 12:107.
30. Ibid., 111.
31. V. I. Lenin, “The Second Duma and the Second Revolutionary Wave,” Proletarii, 11 February 1907, in LCW, 12:115.
32. Ibid.
33. V. I. Lenin, “The Election Results in St. Petersburg,” Proletarii, 11 February 1907, in LCW, 12:121.
34. V. I. Lenin, “The Menshevik Tactical Platform,” Questions of Tactics, April 1907, in LCW, 12:261.
35. V. I. Lenin, “Angry Embarrassment: The Question of the Labour Congress,” Questions of Tactics, April 1907, in LCW, 12:328.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., 330.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.
40. V. I. Lenin, “The Fifth Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party” [1907], in LCW, 12:449.
41. V. I. Lenin, “The Attitude Towards Bourgeois Parties” [1907], in LCW, 12:508.
42. V. I. Lenin, “Notes of a Publicist,” Voice of Life, 22 August 1907, in LCW, 13:73.
43. V. I. Lenin, “Revolution and Counter-Revolution,” Proletarii, 20 October 1907, in LCW, 13:115.
44. Ibid., 120.
45. V. I. Lenin, “The Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy,” in LCW, 13:265.
46. Ibid., 426.
47. Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson, “Editors’ Note,” in Rosa Luxemburg, The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, 248.
48. Rosa Luxemburg, “Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy” [1904], 253–54.
49. V. I. Lenin, “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back—Reply by N. Lenin to Rosa Luxemburg” [1904], in LCW, 7:477 and 480.
50. See, in particular, Lars T. Lih, Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? in Context.
51. Theodore Dan, The Origins of Bolshevism [1946], 24.
52. Thanks to Abigail Bakan for suggesting this point.
53. Israel Getzler, Martov: A Political Biography of a Russian Social Democrat, 1–2.
54. Orlando Figes, “‘Down with the Jew Kerensky!’ Judeophobia, Xenophobia and Popular Anti-Semitism in the 1917 Revolution,” 10–11.
55. Abigail Bakan calls antisemitism an “unclear and imperfect term.” She argues that “historic anti-Semitism, as anti-Judaism, was dissimilar from modern anti-Semitism, as anti-Jewish racism; the former allowed for the possibility of conversion, while the latter was considered a feature of biological assignment associated with ‘Jewish blood.’ Jews have historically been the victims of both anti-Judaism and anti-Jewish racism, which tend to be termed, confusingly and without differentiation, ‘anti-Semitism.’” See Abigail B. Bakan, “Race, Class, and Colonialism: Reconsidering the ‘Jewish Question,’” 255.
56. Marc Ferro, October 1917: A Social History of the Russian Revolution, 238.
57. Raphael R. Abramovitch, In tsvey reṿolutsyes, di geshikhṭe fun a dor [In two revolutions, the history of a generation], 2:85. Thanks to Kay Schweigmann-Greve for this reference, and for providing an English language translation of the relevant portion. The two-volume study of the Russian Revolution from which this comes was written by Raphael Abramovitch and published in Yiddish in 1944. It has yet to be translated into English. Kay also introduced me to the importance of Isaac Steinberg’s role in and writing about the revolution.
58. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life, 4, quoting Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “The Highbrow in Politics,” Partisan Review 20 (March–April 1953): 162–65.
59. V. I. Lenin, “What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement,” in LCW, 5:423.
60. V. I. Lenin, “The Convening of the Third Party Congress,” Vpered, 28 February 1905, in LCW, 8:179.
61. Mikhail Baitalsky, Notebooks for the Grandchildren: Recollections of a Trotskyist Who Survived the Stalin Terror, 15–16.
62. Vadim Z. Rogovin, 1937: Stalin’s Year of Terror, 158–59, quoting Y. Larin, Evrei i antisemitizm v SSSR [The Jews and antisemitism in the USSR] (Moscow-Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1929), 241–42.
63. Ibid., 154–55.
64. Leon Trotsky, “Thermidor and Anti-Semitism” [1937], The New International, May 1941, 92. Compare with the translation in Rogovin, 1937: Stalin’s Year of Terror, 157.
65. Trotsky, “Thermidor and Anti-Semitism,” 93. Compare with the translation in Rogovin, 1937: Stalin’s Year of Terror, 160.
66. Suzanne Rosenberg, A Soviet Odyssey, 111.
67. Nadezhda A. Joffe, Back in Time: My Life, My Fate, My Epoch—The Memoirs of Nadezhda A. Joffe, 222.
68. Philip Mendes, Jews and the Left: The Rise and Fall of a Political Alliance, 131.
69. Leonard Schapiro, “The Rôle of the Jews in the Russian Revolutionary Movement,” 156.
70. Ibid., 160.
71. Richard H. Rowland, “Geographical Patterns of the Jewish Population in the Pale of Settlement of Late Nineteenth Century Russia,” 207.
72. Abraham Ascher, ed., The Mensheviks in the Russian Revolution, 12.
73. Schapiro, “Rôle of the Jews in the Russian Revolutionary Movement,” 165.
74. Rowland, “Geographical Patterns of the Jewish Population in the Pale of Settlement of Late Nineteenth Century Russia,” 207.
75. Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography, 91.
76. Joseph Stalin, “The London Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (Notes of a Delegate)” [1907], 52–53.
77. Deutscher, Stalin, 91.
78. Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879–1929: A Study in History and Personality, 140.
79. Jeffrey Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War, 143.
80. V. I. Lenin, “To P. B. Axelrod—February 27, 1901,” in LCW, 35:58.
81. Leon Trotsky, “The Latest Falsification of the Stalinists” [1939], 266.
82. V. I. Lenin, “The Judas Trotsky’s Blush of Shame” [1911], in LCW, 17:45, corrected against the original Russian; V. I. Lenin, “O kraske styda u iudushki Trotskogo” [About little Judas Trotsky’s blush of shame] [Pravda, no. 21, 21 January 1932], in PSS, 20:96.
83. Trotsky, “Latest Falsification of the Stalinists,” 267.
84. Robert Service, Trotsky: A Biography, 409.
85. Adam Bruno Ulam, The Bolsheviks: The Intellectual and Political History of the Triumph of Communism in Russia: With a New Preface, 283.
86. V. I. Lenin, “What the ‘Friends of the People’ Are” [1894], in LCW, 1:291.
87. V. I. Lenin, “Casual Notes,” Zaria, April 1901, in LCW, 4:406.
88. V. I. Lenin, “Fighting the Famine-Stricken,” Iskra, October 1901, in LCW, 5:237–38.
89. V. I. Lenin, “The Victory of the Cadets and the Tasks of the Workers Party,” April 1906, in LCW, 10:215.
90. V. I. Lenin, “Yet Another Anti-Democratic Campaign,” Nevskaia zvezda, 2 and 9 September 1912, in LCW, 18:316.
91. V. I. Lenin, “Review of Home Affairs,” Zaria, December 1901, in LCW, 5:258.
92. V. I. Lenin, “Political Struggle and Political Chicanery,” Iskra, 15 October 1902, in LCW, 6:252.
93. V. I. Lenin, “Banality Triumphant,” Nashe ekho, 3 April 1907, in LCW, 12:342.
94. V. I. Lenin, “A Police-Patriotic Demonstration Made to Order,” Proletarii, 12 March 1908, in LCW, 13:481.
95. V. I. Lenin, “Notes of a Publicist: On Ascending a High Mountain” [unfinished, unpublished article, February 1922]. First published in Pravda, 16 April 1924, in LCW, 33:205.
96. Trotsky, “Latest Falsification of the Stalinists,” 266.
97. I. P. Foote, “M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin: The Golovlyov Family,” 56.
98. David Aberbach, “Hebrew Literature and Jewish Nationalism in the Tsarist Empire, 1881–1917,” 146.
99. Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia, 129.
100. Shmuel Ettinger, “The Modern Period,” 884.
101. N. P. Kolikov, “Ukazatel’ imen” [Index of names], 590.

Conclusion: Ends and Means

1. V. I. Lenin, “‘Left-Wing’ Childishness,” serialized in Pravda, 9–11 May 1918, in LCW, 27:340.
2. Petrograd Committee of the RSDLP (Bolshevik), “The Lost Document” [1917], 111.
3. Isaac Steinberg, In the Workshop of the Revolution, 78.
4. Ibid., 79–80.
5. Ibid., 81–82.
6. Andrej Kalpašnikov, A Prisoner of Trotsky’s, 137.
7. John Spargo, “The Greatest Failure in All History”: A Critical Examination of the Actual Workings of Bolshevism in Russia, 143.
8. Iurii Vladimirovich Got’e, Time of Troubles: The Diary of Iurii Vladimirovich Got’e, 98.
9. China Miéville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution, 316.
10. Elias Heifetz, The Slaughter of the Jews in the Ukraine in 1919.
11. Ibid., 180–81.
12. Ibid., 85.
13. Ibid., 89.
14. Ibid., 85.
15. Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924, 525.
16. Rosa Luxemburg, “What Does the Spartacus League Want?” 352, quoted in Steinberg, In the Workshop of the Revolution, 268–69. Steinberg’s translation is slightly different than the source here cited.
17. Iulii Martov, “Doloi smertnuiu kazn’!” [Down with the death penalty!] [July 1918], 375. For an alternate translation, see https://www.marxists.org/archive/martov/1918/07/death-penalty.htm.
18. Ibid., 379.
19. Leon Trotsky, Lenin: Notes for a Biography [1924], 122.
20. Steinberg, In the Workshop of the Revolution, 145. Trotsky’s account includes a sarcastic put-down of Steinberg: “I do not know what queer wind blew him toward the revolution and into the Council of People’s Commissars.” See Trotsky, Lenin, 123. This sarcasm is unwarranted. The Left Social-Revolutionaries, of which Steinberg was a leading member, had a mass hearing among the peasantry, its main support, according to Steinberg, lying “in the villages.” It would soon become clear, with the results from the elections to the Constituent Assembly, that Bolshevik support in those villages was risible. But, as Steinberg points out, the Left SR was also a significant force in the cities: “Large masses of workers (in Petrograd alone no less than 45,000 workers were members of the Left Social-Revolutionary Party) and soldiers and sailors also supported the party.” See Steinberg, In the Workshop of the Revolution, 49.
21. Quoted in George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police: The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, December 1917 to February 1922, 114, quoting Severnaia kommuna [Northern commune], Petrograd, No. 109, 19 September 1918, 2.
22. V. I. Lenin, “To G.F. Fyodorov” [August 1918], in LCW, 35:349.
23. V. I. Lenin, “Telegram to Yevgenia Bosch—August 9, 1918,” in LCW, 36:489.
24. V. I. Lenin, “To G. Y. Zinoviev” [June 2018], in LCW, 36:336.
25. V. I. Lenin, “A Militant Agreement for the Uprising,” Vpered, 21 February 1905, in LCW, 8:163.
26. V. I. Lenin, “Lessons of the Moscow Uprising,” Proletarii, 29 August 1906, in LCW, 11:177.
27. Nicolas Werth, “A State Against Its People: Violence, Repression, and Terror in the Soviet Union,” 27, quoting L. M. Spirin, Klassy i partii v grazhdanskoi voine v Rossii [Classes and parties in the civil war in Russia] (Moscow: Thought Publishers, 1968), 180.
28. The letter was “signed by the President Committee of the Russian Communist Party, the President of the Nolinsk Extraordinary Staff for Struggle Against Counter-revolution, the Secretary of the Staff, the Nolinsk Military Commissar and Member of the Staff.” See Werth, “A State Against Its People,” 28, quoting L. M. Spirin, Klassy i partii v grazhdanskoi voine v Rossii [Classes and parties in the civil war in Russia], 180.
29. Bulletin of the Cheka, “Why Are You Soft?” [September 1918], 27–28; see also William Henry Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, 1917–1921, 2:70–71.
30. Miéville, October, 312.
31. Steinberg, In the Workshop of the Revolution, 152.
32. Ibid., 153–54.
33. Ibid., 156.
34. Tony Cliff, Revolution Besieged, 15.
35. Steinberg, In the Workshop of the Revolution, 230–31.
36. Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 526.
37. Leggett, Cheka, 4–5.
38. Ibid., 15.
39. Pipes, Russian Revolution, 526. Richard Pipes’s scholarship on the Russian Revolution is part of the standard literature, and his writings are cited throughout this book. This requires some commentary. Pipes’s name has become symbolic with right-wing anti-communism, a reputation justly earned. In the 1970s, Pipes was an influential member of the notorious Team B, hired by then CIA director (and later president) George H. W. Bush. The work of the Team B section in which Pipes participated played a role in laying the foundation for the Reagan-era arms buildup, a policy whose intention was to destabilize the Soviet Union, and which largely succeeded. See Anne Hessing Cahn, “Team B: The Trillion-Dollar Experiment.” But should Pipes’s political actions disqualify his scholarship? The book that made Pipes’s reputation was his first, The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917–1923. Jeremy Smith, in The Bolsheviks and the National Question, 1917–23, an authoritative parallel study, calls Pipes’s book “the most influential treatment” of the national question in the Soviet Union, a treatment that draws very negative conclusions (x). For Pipes, writes Smith, “nothing positive can be found in the Bolsheviks’ approach to the national question.” Smith sets out to “challenge many of Pipes’ assumptions and conclusions.” However, he states unequivocally: “I do not challenge the accuracy of Pipes’ account, which is based on the most thorough research given the materials available at the time” (xi). It is in the same spirit that I use Pipes’s research into the 1917–18 anti-Bolshevik strike movements.
40. Pipes, Russian Revolution, 526–27.
41. Ibid., 527–28.
42. Alexander Rabinowitch, “The October Revolution,” 89.
43. Miéville, October, 294.
44. John Gooding, Socialism in Russia: Lenin and His Legacy, 1890–1991, 58.
45. Pipes, Russian Revolution, 529.
46. Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd, 306, 308.
47. Leggett, Cheka, 15.
48. Sovnarkom, “Meeting of the Council of People’s Commissars, December 7, 1917,” 6.
49. Leggett, Cheka, 16, quoting from the Sovnarkom meeting minutes, available in ed. G. A. Belov et al., Iz istorii vserossiiskoi chrezvychainoi komissii 1917-1921 gg.: Sbornik dokumentov [From the history of the all-Russian emergency commission of 1917-1921: Collection of documents] (Moscow: State Publishing House of Political Literature, 1958), 72.
50. Ibid., 17.
51. Pipes, Russian Revolution, 529.
52. Werth, “State Against Its People,” 62.
53. Sovnarkom, “Meeting of the Council of People’s Commissars,” 7.
54. “Establishment of the Extraordinary Commission to Fight Counter-Revolution,” 26.
55. Laura Engelstein, Moscow, 1905: Working-Class Organization and Political Conflict, 6.
56. Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary [1951], 94.
57. Victor Serge, Year One of the Russian Revolution [1930], 82–107.
58. Ibid., 103–4.
59. Ibid., 104, quoting Lev Kritsman, Geroicheskii period velikoi russkoi revoliutsii [The Heroic period of the great Russian revolution], 23. Serge is paraphrasing Kritsman, but the phrases emphasized in Serge are also emphasized in Kritsman: “The technical intelligentsia plays a double role in capitalist production, not only as the organizer of production, but also as the organizer of exploitation.”
60. Serge, Year One of the Russian Revolution, 93.
61. Roger Pethybridge, The Spread of the Russian Revolution: Essays on 1917, 17.
62. Ibid., 20.
63. Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, 2:231.
64. Steinberg, In the Workshop of the Revolution, 16–39.
65. Leggett, Cheka, 4–5.
66. P. Iu. Savel’ev and S. V. Tiutiukin, “Iulii Osipovich Martov (1873–1923): The Man and the Politician,” 66.
67. Pethybridge, Spread of the Russian Revolution, 52.
68. Steve A. Smith, “Petrograd in 1917: The View from Below,” 76.
69. Grégoire Aronson, “Ouvriers russes contre le bolchévisme,” 202.
70. Oliver Henry Radkey, Russia Goes to the Polls: The Election to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly, 1917, 138.
71. Ibid., 160.
72. Rosa Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution” [1918], 300.
73. Raphael R. Abramovitch, The Soviet Revolution, 1917–1939, 127–28.
74. Spargo, Greatest Failure in All History, 142, quoting Inna Ratinikov, How the Russian Peasants Fought for a Constituent Assembly, 30 May 1918, in John Spargo, Bolshevism (New York: Millibuch & Co., 1919), 331–84.
75. Chamberlin, Russian Revolution, 1:369.
76. Adam Bruno Ulam, The Bolsheviks: The Intellectual and Political History of the Triumph of Communism in Russia: With a New Preface, 396.
77. Israel Getzler, Kronstadt, 1917–1921: The Fate of a Soviet Democracy, 181, quoting L. S. Malchevsky (ed.), Vserossiiskoe uchreditel’noe sobranie [The all-Russian constituent assembly] (Moscow: Gos. izd-vo, 1930), 33–34.
78. William G. Rosenberg, “Russian Labor and Bolshevik Power: Social Dimensions of Protest in Petrograd after October,” 117.
79. Ibid., 118.
80. Vladimir Brovkin, “Politics, Not Economics Was the Key,” 245.
81. Ibid., 248.
82. Ibid., 250.
83. See Jonathan Aves, Workers Against Lenin: Labour Protest and the Bolshevik Dictatorship; Samuel Farber, Before Stalinism: The Rise and Fall of Soviet Democracy; Israel Getzler, Kronstadt, 1917–1921; Simon Pirani, The Russian Revolution in Retreat, 1920–24: Soviet Workers and the New Communist Elite.
84. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 716.
85. Aves, Workers Against Lenin, 107.
86. Ibid., 111–12.
87. Getzler, Kronstadt, 1917–1921, 258, quoting L. Martov, “Kronshtadt,” Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no. 5, 5 April 1921.
88. Ibid.
89. Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours: The Marxist View of Morality, 37.
90. Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution,” 305.
91. Rosa Luxemburg, “What Does the Spartacus League Want?” [1918], 352.

Bibliography

Notes

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Notes

Preface: On Forgetting to Read Solzhenitsyn

Introduction: Hope and Horror

Chapter 1: One Long Night, 1936–38

Chapter 2: Striking Against the Gulag, 1947–53

Chapter 3: The Vengeance of History, 1989–91

Chapter 4: The Peasant-in-Uniform

Chapter 5: The Agrarian Question

Chapter 6: Poland and Georgia—The Export of Revolution

Chapter 7: Germany and Hungary—The United Front

Chapter 8: Trotsky on Stalinism—The Surplus and the Machine

Chapter 9: A Movement’s Dirty Linen

Chapter 10: Lenin—Beyond Reverence

Chapter 11: Intellectuals and the Working Class

Conclusion: Ends and Means

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