A Note on Translations and Transliterations

For the most part, I have chosen to quote from and cite standard English translations of sources originally in Russian, as these translations are readily available to English-speaking readers. For writings by Lenin, those are found primarily in the English translation of the fourth edition of his Collected Works (Lenin: Collected Works, or LCW). Where no such translations exist, or where the published translations seemed in some way deficient, I have provided my own translations—for Lenin, translating primarily from the Russian fifth edition of his Collected Works (Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, or PSS). The excerpts from World Bolshevism were translated jointly by myself and Mariya Melentyeva. Otherwise, all translations are my responsibility alone.

Several systems exist for the transliteration of the Cyrillic alphabet. To facilitate library searches for the sources cited, I have opted to follow the system used by the American Library Association (ALA) and the Library of Congress (LC), although without recourse to diacritics. There are some exceptions. When a name has acquired a standard English spelling (such as Gorky, Lunacharsky, Preobrazhensky, and Trotsky), I have adopted that. For some, we have competing standards. The last name of the author of The Soviet Revolution: 1917-1939 has been transliterated in two ways—Abramovich and Ambrovitch. I have opted for the latter, as it was the transliteration that he himself approved when The Soviet Revolution was published in English in 1962. For the first name of his mentor and co-thinker Martov, we similarly have two standards—Julius and Iulii. I have opted for the latter as it more accurately reflects the Russian pronunciation. For the same reason, I would have preferred to spell the surname “Joffe” as “Ioffe,” but I have retained “Joffe” for all three Joffes, Adolph, Maria, and Nadezhda, in accord with what has become standard practice.

Translation of Russian language titles has respected the practice in that language of using minimal capitalization. As a result, normally, just the first word of the translated title has been capitalized, or the first word following a colon. However, there are no articles in the Russian language, and thus where the first word of a translated title in English is preceded by an article (or the first word following a colon), I have capitalized both the article and the noun that it modifies. The German language texts used have the opposite issue—in German, all nouns are capitalized, and my translations of German-language titles respect that practice.

Access to the works of different authors is affected by geopolitics and history. For the majority of the authors quoted, we have, for the most part, “traditional” sources—published books and journal articles. For individuals such as Martov—who became persona non grata in the decades following the revolution—there is a dearth of these even in Russian let alone in English translation, despite the fact that he was a prolific author. For Lenin, by contrast, we have access to far more. Massive quantities of his writings have been carefully, almost reverentially, preserved for posterity. Some were originally published as books, journal articles, or pamphlets (that is, essays, often quite lengthy, issued as independent publications). Some were letters to individuals that were never intended for publication. Some were unpublished drafts. Some were consciously withheld from publication. A great many were short, often polemical, newspaper articles commenting on issues of the day.

Why does this matter? The type of publication in which an argument appears has a strong impact on the manner in which that argument is developed. Articles written for a book or journal are composed over months and years with the anticipation of acquiring an audience. Necessarily, they involve considerable reflection and editing. Articles written in haste for a daily or weekly newspaper tend to use sharper and more extreme formulations and to be pitched in a higher emotional register than what would typically be found in a 300-page book or a 15,000-word journal article. Knowing the kind of publication, then, can be helpful in assessing the merits of a particular piece of writing. Consequently, as I was conducting my research, I found it useful to be very specific, identifying exactly what “type” of publication I had before me when I cited Lenin in particular, and I think this might, where appropriate, be similarly useful for readers of the book. For many authors in this book—particularly the “scholar activists” (Abramovitch, Lenin, Luxemburg, Martov, Marx, Serge, and others)—it is helpful to know when a work was written, and this is not always evident from the bibliographic entry (such as when it is part of a collected works project, a compilation, or a reprint). So, on many occasions, I have found it helpful to indicate (within square brackets) in the bibliography, as well as at the first use of each of the appropriate sources, the year in which such works were first published (or first written, in the case of works that remained unpublished for some time).

All works directly cited are listed in the bibliography. A complete reference for works by Lenin that are taken from LCW or PSS can be found in the first reference. For items not taken from LCW or PSS, publication information is listed in the bibliography.

Finally, a text that plays a central role in part 3 of this book—Leon Trotsky’s last (and unfinished) manuscript, his biography of Joseph Stalin—exists in English translation in two versions, both titled Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence. One is an abridged edition, translated by Charles Malamuth and published in 1941, and the other is a complete edition, prepared by Alan Woods, that was published in 2016. The earlier translation has been charged, on occasion, with being misleading, a charge with which I do not agree. However, to address any concerns on this issue, whenever I quote from a passage that appears in both versions, I have cited the appropriate page numbers for each.