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“Notes” in “World Bolshevism”
Notes
Introduction
1. Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, 160.
Boris Souvarine (né Boris Konstantinovich Lifschits, 1895-1984) was a cofounder of the French Communist Party and, from May 1921 until January 1925, a resident in
Moscow—where he “became a member of three of the leading bodies of the Comintern,” acronym for the Third or Communist International. Ibid., 161.
In the early years following the Russian Revolution of 1917, the name of Leon Trotsky (né Lev Davidovich Bronstein, 1879-1940) was as widely known as that of
Vladimir Lenin (né Vladimir Il’ich Ul’ianov, 1870-1924). From the mid-1920s on, Trotsky came to symbolize the socialist opposition to Stalin and Stalinism. A victim of Stalin’s
Great Terror, Trotsky was forcibly exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929 and assassinated by a Soviet agent in 1940. Unlike many victims of the Great Terror, he has never been
“rehabilitated.” Nelson P. Lande, “Posthumous Rehabilitation and the Dust-Bin of History,” 267.
Alexander (or Solomon) Lozovskii (né Solomon Abramovich Dridzo, 1878-1952), is best known for his leading role in the Red International of Labour Unions (RILU).
During the world war—in exile in Paris, along with Martov, Trotsky and others—he collaborated in the anti-war publication launched under the name Golos (The Voice). Arrested in 1949
on fabricated (and antisemitic) charges, he was executed in 1952—posthumously rehabilitated. Albert
Resis, “Lozovskii, A,” in The Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet History (hereafter MERSH), 20: 167–70); Reiner Tosstorff, The Red International of Labour
Unions (RILU) 1920-1937, 821–32.
4. The Mensheviks in the Russian Revolution, edited by Abraham Ascher (with translations
by Paul Stevenson), provides a small selection of Martov’s writings; see also Martov and Zinoviev: Head to Head in Halle, edited by Ben Lewis. For the Martov material on the Marxists Internet
Archive, see https://www.marxists.org/archive/martov/index.htm.
5. V. Ia. Zevin and T. V. Panchenko, “Lenin, Works of,” from The Great Soviet
Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Lenin%2c+Works+of.
6. “Index Translationum: ‘Top 50’ Author,” UNESCO, accessed 29 October
2018, http://www.unesco.org/xtrans/bsstatexp.aspx?crit1L=5&nTyp=min&topN=50. The database compiles
information received from 1980 to the present, although most of the published information dates to no later than 2010.
7. Alexander Potressov [Potresov], “Lenin: Versuch einer Charakterisierung” [Lenin:
An attempt at a Characterization], 415.
Alexander Nikolaevich Potresov (pseudonym Starover, 1869-1934) in 1895 “helped establish the St. Petersburg League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the
Working Class with Martov and Vladimir Lenin.” Potresov divided from Lenin in 1903 and drifted apart from Martov after 1905. He supported Russia during the world war. Jonathan Davis, Historical
Dictionary of the Russian Revolution (hereafter HDRR), 189 and 208–9.
8. Raphael R. Abramovitch, The Soviet Revolution, 1917–1939, 18–21.
Raphael R. Abramovitch (Rafail Abramovich, né Rein, also known as Rein-Abramovich, 1880-1963), was a leading member of both the Mensheviks and the Bund—from
the Yiddish word for “union”, shorthand for the General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, first mass working class party in the Russian empire. HDRR, 23 and
72.
9. During the late eighteenth-century revolution in France, the Jacobin clubs according to Paul Hanson “were the most important of the popular societies … By early 1790 there were roughly
1,000 members in the Paris club, and that number more than doubled by June 1791.” The Jacobins achieved the peak of their influence during the “Jacobin dictatorship” beginning in April
1793 when the Committee of Public Safety became the executive power in the French government. The dictatorship presided over the peak of the Great Terror in 1793 and 1794. Albert Soboul says that during
the Terror, between 100,000 and 300,000 people were detained and between 35,000 and 40,000 executed. Paul R. Hanson, Historical Dictionary of the French Revolution (hereafter HDFR), 74-76,
167; Albert Soboul, Précis d’histoire de la révolution française, 321–22.
10. Getzler, Martov, 37.
11. V. Markus and R. Senkus, “Kharkiv.”
12. Getzler, Martov, 192.
13. Dmitrii Dobrovol’skii and Liudmila Peppel’, “Revoliutsiia, vosstanie,
perevorot: Semantika i pragmatika” [Revolution, uprising, overturn: Semantics and pragmatics], 91.
14. Ibid., 90.
15. Ibid., 78–79.
16. The distinctions between revoliutsiia [revolution], perevorot [overturn]
and vosstanie [uprising] are quite different 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 20th century . . . there have been significant shifts in their meaning over the last hundred years.” Dobrovol’skii and
Peppel’, 99.
17. Leopold H. Haimson, The Making of Three Russian Revolutionaries: Voices from the
Menshevik Past, 19.
18. By “Extraordinary Commissions,” Martov is referring to the first iteration of
the post-revolutionary secret police, the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, the institution that we now know as the Cheka. HDRR, 75–76.
19. Iulii Martov, “Doloi smertnuiu kazn’!” [Down with the death penalty!]
(July 1918), in Martov, Izbrannoe [Selected works], 375, 379.
20. N. N. Sukhanov, Zapiski o revoliutsii [Notes on the revolution], 7:226. Compare with Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution, 1917: A Personal Record, 649–50.
Nikolai Nikolaevich Sukhanov (né Gimmer, 1882-?) was a founding member of the Petrograd Soviet in 1917. His Zapiski o revoliutsii (Notes on the
Revolution)—seven-volumes and approximately 2,700 pages in the original Russian—“has placed scholars in his debt and has made Sukhanov known to history.” The Notes—in which
he described Joseph Stalin as a “grey blur”— undoubtedly played a role in his arrest in the late 1920s and prosecution in the Menshevik trial in 1931, one of a series of show trials
carried out in the Soviet Union (trials which have now all been completely discredited). Sent to the Gulag along with thousands of other political prisoners, the circumstances of his death are unknown.
John D. Basil, “Sukhanov, Nikolai Nikolaevich,” in MERSH, 38: 25–28.
The two papers referred to were both liberal in the sense that they expressed views supporting the positions of the Kadets (acronym for
Konstitutsionno-demokraticheskaia partiia or Constitutional-Democratic Party). They were both mass-circulation daily papers, a survey published in May 1916 indicating that Sovremennoe slovo had a
daily circulation of 76,000, Rech 45,000. “News from Russia,” 248.
The term auto-da-fé—used here by Sukhanov in a bitterly sarcastic manner—refers to a practice which Francisco Bethencourt says dates from
“the medieval Inquisition” that “used its elaborate ceremonies to emphasize the triumph of Catholic faith over heresy.” Francisco Bethencourt, “The Auto da Fé:
Ritual and Imagery,” 155.
21. Central Committee of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (United),
“Suppression of the Press,” 107–8. The committee to which this translation refers is usually translated as the “Military Revolutionary Committee.”
22. The Social (or Socialist) Revolutionary (SR) Party (formally the Partiia
sotsialistov-revoliutsionerov or PSR) was “the most important non-Bolshevik socialist party in Russia from about 1901 to 1921.” It had “possibly a million members at its
peak.” Its internationalist (anti-war) minority separated from the majority between February and October 1917. The new party, the Left SRs, governed together with the Bolsheviks in a short-lived
coalition government from the end of 1917 to March 1918. Maureen Perrie, “Socialist Revolutionary Party,” in MERSH, 36: 95–102.
25. F. Dan, Dva goda skitani (1918-1921) [Two years of wandering (1918-1921)]. Berlin:
1922, 13, 14. Quoted in David Dallin, “Between the World War and the NEP,” 227.
Fedor Il’ich Dan (né Gurvich, 1871-1947) was a physician by profession, and a leading member of the Russian Marxist left from the mid-1890s until his death.
He worked closely with Martov, taking an internationalist (anti-war) position during the world war. John D. Basil, “Dan, Fedor Il’ich,” in MERSH, 8: 162–65.
Viktor Mikhailovich Chernov (1873-1952) was a founder of the SRs, its leading ideologist and theoretician. During the world war, Chernov was part of the
internationalist (anti-war) minority inside the party. He was elected in 1917 to the Petrograd Soviet’s Central Executive Committee, becoming its deputy chairman, and was elected president for the
one and only session of the Constituent Assembly, forcibly disbanded by the Bolsheviks in January 1918. Maureen Perrie, “Chernov, Viktor Mikhailovich,” in MERSH, 7: 4–7.
26. Dallin, “Between the World War and the NEP,” 228.
In fact, we now know that later that decade, there were mass oppositional meetings organized by the anti-Stalinist United Opposition. Ivan Khoroshev (writing under the
pseudonym Mikhail Nil’skii) reports that in the Autumn of 1927, opposition students took over “the largest auditorium of the Moscow Higher Technical School” as the venue for a 3,000
strong meeting which heard speeches from United Opposition leaders Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev. Mikhail Nil’skii [Ivan Mitrofanovich Khoroshev], Vorkuta,
74–78.
Lev Borisovich Kamenev (né Rozenfel’d, 1883–1936) and Grigory Evseevich Zinoviev (né Radomysl’skii, 1883–1936) were “Old
Bolsheviks” and among Lenin’s closest associates. Both became victims of the Great Terror under Stalin and were executed in August 1936—belatedly “rehabilitated” in 1988.
R.C. Elwood, “Kamenev, Lev Borisovich,” in MERSH, 15: 212–17; HDRR, 313–17. Lande, “Posthumous Rehabilitation and the Dust-Bin of History,” 267.
27. Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin (né I. V. Dzhugashivili, 1879–1953) was born in
Georgia and became a leading member of the Bolsheviks. He “did not distinguish himself in the October Revolution” but emerged in the 1920s as the dominant figure in the Soviet government, a position he was to hold until his death in 1953. Revered by many, including through a cult of
personality which is “usually dated from his fiftieth birthday in 1929” Stalin has also been associated with the horrors of the 1930s – the “liquidation of the kulaks as a
class,” the rise of the gulag forced labour system of mass incarceration, and the years of the terror. Robert McNeal, “Stalin, losif Vissarionovich,” in MERSH, 37:
63–72.
28. Raphael Abramowitsch [Abramovitch], Vassily Suchomlin, and Iraklii Zeretelli [Tsereteli],
Der Terror Gegen Die Sozialistischen Parteien in Russland Und Georgien [The Terror against Socialist Parties in Russia and Georgia]. Portions of this, at the time, were translated into English.
[Raphael R. Abramovitch], Bolshevik Terror Against Socialists.
30. An approach to politics first developed by Kimberle Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the
Intersection of Race and Sex”; Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins.”
32. Ibid., 21.
33. Ibid., 1.
34. Ibid., 22.
35. Ibid., 24.
36. Ibid.
38. Potressov, “Lenin,” 412.
39. V. I. Lenin, “S chego nachat’?” [Where to begin?], Iskra, no. 4
(May 1901), in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [The complete collected works] (hereafter PSS), 5:11–12. For the standard English translation, see Lenin: Collected Works (hereafter
LCW), 5:22–23.
40. P. Iu. Savel’ev and S. V. Tiutiukin, “Iulii Osipovich Martov
(1873–1923): The Man and the Politician,” 18.
42. Rossiiskaia sotsial-demokraticheskaia rabochaia partiia [Russian Social Democratic Labour
Party], 1903, Second Ordinary Congress of the RSDLP, 529n7.
The translator, Brian Pearce, has chosen to take the acronym for the
party from its English translation, rather than the Russian transliteration, hence RSDLP as opposed to RSDRP.
43. Nadezhda K. Krupskaya, Memories of Lenin, 75. In this translation, the name Bauman
is written “Baumann.”
Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya (1869-1939) was a senior Bolshevik leader, as well as being life partner with Lenin. Co-founder in 1910 of what is today known as
International Women’s Day, in 1914, she helped to establish the newspaper Rabotnitsa (The Woman Worker). Krupskaya was briefly a member of the anti-Stalinist opposition. HDRR,
165–66.
In 1926, according to Trotsky, “Krupskaya said, in a circle of Left Oppositionists: ‘If Ilyich [Lenin] were alive, he would probably already be in
prison’” Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, 93–94.
Pavel Borisovich Axelrod (1850-1928) grew up in a poor Jewish family in the Ukrainian town of Pochep. In 1883, together with Georgii Plekhanov and Vera Zasulich, he
helped found the first Russian Marxist organization, the Group for the Emancipation of Labour. In 1900 Axelrod helped Martov, Lenin and Potresov found Iskra. After the 1903 division, Ascher says
that: “For the next two and a half decades Axelrod was the oustanding ideologist though not necessarily the most influential political leader, of Menshevism.” Sukhanov calls him the
“founder of Russian Social-Democracy.” Abraham Ascher, “Axelrod, Pavel Borisovich,” in MERSH, 2: 197–203; Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution, 1917: A Personal
Record, 351. Leopold H. Haimson, The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism, 26.
48. 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 here
quoted. The Mensheviks in the Russian Revolution, edited by Abraham Ascher, 48–52.
49. Leon Trotsky, Nashi politicheskie zadachi [Our political tasks], 25; Compare with Trotsky, Our Political Tasks, 39.
51. Potressov, “Lenin,” 413.
52. V. I. Lenin, “A. M. Kalmykovoy” [To A. M. Kalmykova] (1903 first published
1927), in PSS, 46:301. Compare with “To Alexandra Kalmykova,” in LCW, 34:168–70.
53. Potressov, “Lenin,” 407.
54. Ibid., 413.
55. Ibid., 417.
Vera Ivanovna Zasulich (1849-1919), a populist in her youth, attained notoriety in 1878 for the attempted assassination of the Governor of St. Petersburg. On the
editorial board of Iskra from 1900 to 1905, in 1912, she aligned with Plekhanov, and in 1914, supported Russia in the world war. HDRR 310-15; Michael Ellman, “Zasulich, Vera
Ivanovna.”
56. Lenin, “A. M. Kalmykovoy” [To A. M. Kalmykova] in PSS, 46:301. Getzler
renders the first phrase “scourge and monster” (Martov, 67), while the standard translation offers “flayers and monsters” (LCW, 34:169). “Scourge” is
somewhat better than “flayer,” but both have an archaic feel to them.
Georgii Valentinovich Plekhanov (1856–1918), is often called the “Father of Russian Marxism.” In 1883, together with Axelrod and Zasulich, he helped
found the first Russian Marxist organization, the Emancipation of Labour Group (or Group for the Emancipation of Labour). In 1900, he assisted Lenin, Martov and Potresov in the launching of
Iskra. In the world war, he supported Russia and its allies against Germany. Samuel H. Baron, “Plekhanov, Georgii Valentinovich,” in MERSH, 28: 126–30.
57. Lydia [Lidiia] Osipovna Dan, ‘Tenth Interview’, 181–82.
Dan, Lidiia Osipovna (née Tsederbaum, 1878-1963), served on the editorial board of Iskra from 1901 until she was arrested in 1902 and banished to Siberia.
After escaping in 1904, she resumed her role on Iskra. Internationalist during the war, she was expelled from Russia in 1922 for opposing Bolshevik policies. She was the sister of Martov, and
life partner with Fedor Dan. “Dan, Lidiia Osipovna,” in MERSH, 8: 165–66.
58. Getzler, Martov, 66–67; The interview with Dan uses “Mitrov” rather than “Metrov”. Another account that reads very similarly, is in Jane Casey’s
fictionalized biography of Krupskaya, I, Krupskaya: My Life with Lenin, 179-86.
59. Dan, ‘Tenth Interview’, 181–82.
61. Ibid.
62. V. I. Lenin and G. V. Plekhanov, “Proekt osobogo mneniia po delu N. E.
Baumana” [Draft dissenting opinion in the N.E. Bauman case].
63. Quoted in ibid.
64. Lenin, “A. M. Kalmykovoy,” 301. For the English translation used here, see
Lenin, “To Alexandra Kalmykova,” in LCW, 34:169. Getzler’s translation reads “sheer obstinacy and threats of making it a public issue.” Getzler, Martov,
67.
67. Potressov, “Lenin,” 417.
68. Barbara Ryan, “Personal Is Political,” 2.
69. Abigail Bakan has, with tongue only partly in cheek, called our attention to the way in
which this creates problems for the Left with her coining of the phrase “Communist Urgent Man,” which she uses to describe someone who too often devolves into simply a small group bully. See
Bakan, “Marxism, Feminism, and Epistemological Dissonance.”
70. Bruno Naarden, Socialist Europe and Revolutionary Russia: Perception and
Prejudice, 1848–1923, 274.
72. Savel’ev and Tiutiukin, “Iulii Osipovich Martov,” 40.
73. James D. White, Lenin: The Practice and Theory of Revolution, 108. Among those
involved were—Antonov-Ovseenko, Kollontai, Larin, Lozovskii, Lunacharshky, Manuilskii, Martynov, Pavlovich, Pokrovskii, Trotsky, Uritskii, and Zalewski.
77. Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 128.
Victor Serge (né Victor Lvovich Khibalchich, 1890-1947), was born in Belgium to Russian emigré parents. Before the world war he was a libertarian anarchist.
In exile in Russia in 1919, he became a prominent supporter of the Bolsheviks, with a particularly key role in the Communist International. David M. Walker and Daniel Gray, Historical Dictionary of
Marxism (hereafter HDM), 283–84.
A member of the anti-Stalinist opposition in the 1920s, he spent time in the Gulag, until being expelled from the Soviet Union just prior to the years of the Great
Terror and mass execution of oppositionists. He famously broke with Trotsky in the 1930s over the 1921 Kronstadt uprising. Serge, “A Letter and Some Notes.”
78. Getzler, Martov, 4, quoting Iulii Martov, Zapiski sotsial-demokrata [Memoirs of a
social-democrat]. (Berlin-Petersburg-Moscow, 1922), 18.
80. Ibid., 4, 5.
81. Ibid., 4n23, quoting L. O. Dan, “Sem’ia (iz vospominanii)” [The Family:
Fragments from memory], in Grigorii Aronson, ed., Martov i ego blizkie: Sbornik [Martov and his circle: a Compilation], New York: s.n., 11.
82. Ibid., 218–19.
83. Leon Trotsky, “Martov,” in Trotsky, Politicheskie siluety [Political
profiles], 66–67. Originally published in Trotsky, Voina i revoliutsiia [War and revolution]. Petrograd: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo [State publishing house], 1922.
85. Ben Lewis “The four-hour speech and the significance of Halle,” 27.
88. The qualifier “for a time” is necessary because “original copies of
Trotsky’s Sochineniia must be regarded as extremely rare.” https://www.trotskyana.net/Leon_Trotsky/Sochineniia/sochineniia.html
89. Leon Trotsky, “Beglye mysli o G. V. Plekhanove” [Passing thoughts on G. V.
Plekhanov], in Trotsky, Politicheskie siluety [Political profiles], 59.
90. I. M. Pavlov, “Primechaniia” [Notes], in Trotsky, Politicheskie siluety [Political profiles], 334 n46.
91. Leon Trotsky, “Negodiai” [The scoundrel] and “Ostav’te nas v
pokoe” [Leave us alone], both in Trotsky, Politicheskie siluety [Political profiles], 68–69 and 62–64, respectively. “Negodiai” was first published in the 22 October
1916 issue of Nachalo [The beginning], while “Ostav’te nas v pokoe” appeared a year earlier, in the 14 October 1915 issue of Nashe slovo [Our word].
92. Trotsky, “Martov,” 66–67.
93. Leon Trotsky, “Ot avtora” [From the author], in Trotsky, Politicheskie
siluety [Political profiles], v.
94. See “Leon Trotsky: Political Profiles,” Marxists Internet Archive, 2007, https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/profiles/index.htm.
95. Lewis “The four-hour speech,” 8.
96. Grigory Zinoviev, “Twelve Days in Germany,” 67 and 91.
97. Lewis “The four-hour speech,” 30.
98. Lih, “Martov in Halle,” 161.
100. Savel’ev and Tiutiukin, “Iulii Osipovich Martov (1873–1923),”
81; Jane Burbank, Intelligentsia and Revolution: Russian Views of Bolshevism, 1917–1922, 272.
101. Savel’ev and Tiutiukin, “Iulii Osipovich Martov (1873–1923),”
81.
103. Ibid.
104. Savel’ev and Tiutiukin, “Iulii Osipovich Martov (1873–1923),”
83–84.
105. André Liebich, From the Other Shore: Russian Social Democracy after 1921,
1. According to Liebich: “Every document published in Vestnik in the 1920s relating to the intra-Bolshevik struggle has proven authentic.” Ibid., 142.
106. Raphael R. Abramovitch, “Iu. O. Martov i mirovoi men’shevizm [I. O. Martov
and world menshevism],” 73.
107. With apologies to the Tragically Hip, “Ahead by a Century,” Trouble at
the Henhouse, 1996. http://www.thehip.com/albums/Trouble+at+the+Henhouse/.
109. Grigorii Aronson, Rossiia v epokhu revoliutsii: Istoricheskie etiudy i memuary
[Russia in the age of the revolution: Historical sketches and memoirs], 67. The figures for Putilov are taken
from S. P. Mel’gunov, Kak bol’sheviki zakhvatili vlast’ [How the bolsheviks seized power]. Paris: La Renaissance, 1953. Available in abridged English translation. Melgunov, The
Bolshevik Seizure of Power, 95.
110. Aronson, Rossiia v epokhu revoliutsii [Russia in the age of the revolution],
181; Compare with Grégoire Aronson, “Ouvriers russes contre le bolchévisme,” 201; The chapter of Aronson’s book from which this is taken, is an updated version of an article
published in 1952. Aronson, “Rabochee dvizhenie v bor’be s bol’shevistskoi diktaturoi” [The labour movement in the struggle against the bolshevik dictatorship].
I. The Roots of World Bolshevism
1. The Russian original is gnilogo Zapada, translated as either “the rotten
West” or the “decaying West,” a phrase whose roots are in nineteenth century disputes between Slavophiles and Westernizers. Arthur Rees writes that the term refers to “the west of
the struggles between the rulers and the ruled; between Scripture and tradition and the upper and lower classes.” Arthur D. Rees, “An Interpretation of Slavophilism,” 52.
2. “International” is shorthand for the Second International (officially called the
Second International Workingmen’s Association), formed in 1889, soon to bring together the principal socialist parties in Europe and to some extent the rest of the world, effectively ceasing to
exist in August 1914, when most of its constituent parties supported their respective governments in the First World War. J. C. Docherty, Historical Dictionary of Socialism (hereafter HDS),
208–9.
3. It is especially important here not to forget that we are talking about 1918 and early 1919.
—Dan Karl Johann Kautsky (1854–1938) was the principal theorist of Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD), the largest and most influential party within the Second
International. After 1917, he became one of the main socialist critics of Bolshevik Russia. HDM, 164-65.
4. The end of the First World War in Germany was marked by a revolution which saw mutinies by
sailors and soldiers, the emergence of councils (soviets) of workers, soldiers and sailors, and the replacement of the autocratic Kaiser by what came to be known as the Weimar Republic. Pierre Broué, The German Revolution, 1917-1923, 129–260.
5. Russia’s revolution in 1917 initially led to independence for many formerly subjugated
nations, including Finland. In that country, November 1917 saw a general strike, December 1917 a declaration of independence (recognized by the Bolshevik-led Russian state) and January 1918, the beginning
of a civil war between the Finnish Left and the conservative “Whites”. A military intervention by Germany proved decisive, leading to the victory of the Whites, and the defeat of the Left.
Risto Alapuro, State and Revolution in Finland, 137–78.
6. The term “soviet” has acquired a very specific meaning in the years since the
Russian Revolution, a meaning implicated with the authoritarianism which developed in what was to become the Soviet Union. In other places—Germany, in particular—while “soviet” is
accurate linguistically as a translation of the Russian original, it is often more meaningful in English-language translation to understand this as “council,” and this will on occasion be
indicated throughout.
7. Hugo Haase (1863-1919) and Friedrich Ebert (1871-1925) were two of the leading socialists in
early 20th century Germany. Ebert was part of the conservative pro-war SPD majority, in February 1919 elected president of the new German Republic. Haase before the war emerged as a leading member of the
SPD, serving as cochair of the party from 1911 until 1916. The pressures of war ultimately led to a split in the SPD, Haase and others on the antiwar left wing of the party forming the Independent Social
Democrats (USPD) in the spring of 1917. In the post-war period Haase and Ebert briefly collaborated. From the November revolution of 1918 until February 1919—i.e., prior to Ebert’s election
and the consolidation of the Weimar Republic—a coalition of socialist parties was the de facto government of Germany. The coalition was dominated by Ebert for the SPD and included Haase from
that section of the USPD which agreed to participate in the coalition (many on the left of the USPD were opposed to cooperating with the SPD). Haase was assassinated by a German nationalist in 1919.
Broué, The German Revolution, 969. HDS, 80-82. David W. Morgan, The Socialist Left and the German Revolution, 461.
8. Martov takes this phrase from Pliny the Elder, Pliny’s Natural History, in Thirty-Seven
Books, book 7, p. 174: “Man alone she [Nature] hath cast all Naked upon the bare Earth, even on
his Birth-day, immediately to cry and lament.”
9. Burgfrieden—literally “truce” or “civil peace,” in this
context best understood as a “truce between parties”—refers to an agreement, in Germany, during the First World War in Germany, “under which political parties vowed not to compete
with each other or challenge the government, which acquired special wartime dictatorial powers.” Helen Scott, “Introduction to Rosa Luxemburg,” 23.
“Socialization of consciousness” is best understood as “making consciousness operate on socialist principles.”
10. Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin (1814-1876) was a leading member of the First International
(the International Workingmen’s Association which preceded the Second or Socialist International), and one of the early figures in European Anarchism. Socialists such as Rosa Luxemburg and Paul Levi
challenged Bakunin-influenced politics, disagreeing that a radical minority could “force” a revolution against the wishes of the majority. HDS, 34-5; Rosa Luxemburg, “The Mass
Strike, the Political Party, and the Trade Union,” 111–13; Paul Levi, “Our Path: Against Putschism,” 147.
Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-1864) was the founder of the General German Workingmen’s Association, often seen as that country’s first socialist party, and from
its founding in 1863 until 1875 the largest. It became an important component part of the founding of the SPD in 1875. Lassalle focussed on winning reforms with an emphasis on workers’
cooperatives. HDS, 152. Eduard Bernstein, Ferdinand Lassalle as a Social Reformer.
The term “sans-culottes” is widely used as a shorthand for the radical, urban masses of the late eighteenth century French Revolution. During that
revolution, the Jacobin leader Maximilien Robespierre used to differentiate the aristocratic elite with their “golden breeches” from the artisans and shopkeepers who did not wear breeches
(hence “sans-culottes”) but more typically wore long trousers. HDFR, 294-5; Albert Soboul, The Sans-Culottes, 2.
11. Émile Vandervelde (1866-1938) was a leading member of the Belgian Workers’ Party.
Supporting Belgium and the Allied Powers in the world war, in 1916 he accepted an invitation to join the war cabinet of the Belgian government.
Philipp Scheidemann (1865-1939) was a German socialist and SPD leader.
Supporting Germany and the Central Powers in the world war, in October 1918 he was appointed minister without portfolio in the German wartime government. Scheidemann would in 1919 briefly serve as
Chancellor of the new German Republic. Famously, it was Scheidemann in November 1918, who decided to “proclaim the Republic” from a balcony in Berlin, before a demonstration of tens of
thousands. Broué, The German Revolution, 149. HDS, 206, 234–35.
By “laughing third,” Martov is referencing the tertius gaudens made famous by Georg Simmel. According to Simmel, while there are often two
principles in a relationship or a conflict, an often relatively passive “third party” may in the end become the principal beneficiary of their relationship and/or competition. Georg Simmel,
“The Triad,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 145–69.
12. Martov here caught the attention of Lenin, who penned an angry (and unfinished) riposte,
directly quoting this first portion of Martov’s paragraph, a riposte in which you can feel the emotionally charged differences of that era. Lumping together Martov and Kautsky, Lenin says, “In
this reasoning there is so much sophisticated villainy, such an abyss of lies, such deception of the workers, such deep betrayal of their interests, such hypocrisy and abandonment of socialism that you
marvel at how much servility Kautsky and Martov have accumulated in the course of decades of ‘playing’ with opportunism!” V. I. Lenin, “V lakeiskoi” [In the servants’
quarters], (July 1919, first published 1925), in PSS, 39:143. Compare with LCW, 29:543.
13. The Kienthal Conference was a 1916 anti-war gathering, designed to build on the work of the
more well-known 1915 anti-war Zimmerwald Conference. In 1919 a resolution at a USPD congress ended with the phrase, “in the spirit of the international conferences in Zimmerwald and Kienthal,”
a shorthand for anti-war internationalist socialism which would need no translation for activists of that generation. HDS, 144. Broué, The German Revolution, 337.
14. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, “Preface” to Philosophy of Right. In Greek
mythology, knowledge and understanding were symbolized by the owl of Minerva. Hegel, then, is saying that knowledge and understanding are always clearer at the end of the day—i.e.,
retrospectively.
15. Here Martov references another core idea from Hegel. According to Robert Pippin, Hegel “divides up the domains of nature and spirit in the same way as Kant, as between the realm of necessity
and the realm of freedom, or between events for which causes can be sought (which stand under laws, which laws, together with empirical initial conditions, determine a unique future) and actions for which
reasons may be demanded (which are enacted because of ‘conceptions of law’)” Robert Pippin, “Hegel’s Practical Philosophy,” 180.
16. Martov is here making oblique reference to a speech by Lenin in January 1918, where Lenin
relayed the following anecdote. “One old Bolshevik gave a correct explanation of Bolshevism to a Cossack. The Cossack asked him: ‘Is it true that you Bolsheviks plunder?’ ‘Yes,
indeed,’ said the old man, ‘we plunder the plunder.’” V. I. Lenin, “Speech to Propagandists [Newspaper Report, Pravda, 6 February 1918],” in LCW,
26:516.
17. The English Revolution of the 17th century was marked by a civil war between supporters of
the monarchy and supporters of Parliament, culminating in the overthrow of the monarchy and the 1649 execution of King Charles I. According to Christopher Hill, “the English Revolution of 1640-60
was a great social movement like the French Revolution of 1789. The state power protecting an old order that was essentially feudal was violently overthrown, power passed into the hands of a new class,
and so the freer development of capitalism was made possible.” Christopher Hill, The English Revolution 1640, 6.
The late Neil Davidson documented the other side of these revolutions, including the sometimes-arbitrary nature of the 1793-94 Great Terror in France and the brutal
war against Ireland carried out by the English revolutionaries. “There are therefore great difficulties involved in ascribing a progressive role to the system responsible for such events.”
Neil Davidson, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions?, 632–57.
18. The year 1848 witnessed a series of revolutionary upheavals throughout Europe, the most
profound of which was in France, culminating in the abdication of the king on 24 February 1848, and the creation of France’s short-lived Second Republic. According to Ferdinand Lassalle, “The
24th February 1848 saw the first light of the dawning of a new historical era.” Quoted in Eduard Bernstein, The Preconditions of Socialism, 136. The Second Republic was overthrown in a
December 1851 coup carried out by the republic’s own president, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (nephew
of the famous Napoleon I). Bonaparte would go down in history as “Napoleon III,” dictator of France’s Second Empire (1852–1870).
19. “Sabotage” refers to the two-month long strike by government employees—a
strike movement that spread to teachers, librarians, bank employees, telephone and telegraph operators—in the immediate aftermath of the October overturn in Russia in 1917. Tony Cliff, Lenin,
vol. 3, Revolution Besieged, 15.
20. The Spartacist group (Spartakusbund) whose most prominent figures were Rosa Luxemburg and
Karl Liebknecht, originated as the anti-war wing of the SPD in 1914, helped form the USPD in 1917, and would ultimately provide the core of the German Communist Party (KPD) founded early January 1919.
According to Broué: “When the Spartacus group, following Liebknecht, declared that the main enemy was at home, it took its place in the revolutionary wing which was gradually taking shape
within the international socialist movement.” Broué, The German Revolution, 64.
21. In our time, Martov could, of course, give still more striking examples of the lack of care
for and even conscious destruction of the forces of production by a bourgeois reaction—all while speaking tirelessly of the development and preservation of these same forces of production. Suffice
it to recall the devastating damage done by the magnates of capital to the entire national economy of Germany, especially its finances, or the prolonged complete paralysis of Ruhr industry as a result of
its occupation under the leadership of French capital. —Dan
22. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1753-1794) is often regarded as the founder of modern chemistry.
One of the many victims of the Terror during the French Revolution, he was executed in May 1794, for having been a tax agent of the former king. It was in fact one of the three judges at his trial who
said: “The Republic has no need for scientists.” Vivian Grey, The Chemist Who Lost His Head, 20.
Maximilien-François-Isidore Robespierre (1758-1794) was the most prominent Jacobin leader during the French Revolution. He was elected to the Committee of Public
Safety in July 1793, the executive power of the French government from April 1793 until October 1795. A split in the Jacobins led to his arrest on 9 Thermidor (27 July) 1794, and he was executed the next day, effectively marking the end of the Terror. HDFR, 280-82.
Jean-Paul Marat (1743-1793) acquired the nickname “Friend of the People” during the French Revolution, after the name of the paper L’Ami du
Peuple which he launched in 1789. From 1792, Marat and his paper were supported by the Club of the Cordeliers. On 13 July 1793, he was stabbed to death in his bath by Charlotte Corday.
HDFR, 209-10.
The Club of the Cordeliers was “founded in April 1790 as the Society of the Friends of the Rights of Man and Citizen” and according to Hanson was
“politically more radical than the Jacobin club.” It had a “low membership fee” making it accessible to the some of the urban poor. “Women were also welcome at its meetings
which generally ranged between 300 and 400 in attendance.” On 24 March 1794, the leaders of the Cordeliers fell victim to Robespierre and the Terror, effectively marking the end of the Cordeliers.
HDFR, 87–88.
Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) is credited with the discovery of oxygen. In England he was “the central figure in the formation of English Unitarianism, and he
anticipated many of the viewpoints of Protestant liberalism in general.” He was also a materialist philosopher and a partisan of the French Revolution. To escape persecution for his political
views, following the outbreak of war between England and France, he and his family emigrated to the United States in 1794. Ira V. Brown, “The Religion of Joseph Priestley,”
85–95.
23. A report on the damage caused by Bolshevik artillery to the dome of the Cathedral of St.
Basil the Blessed during the October 1917 battles in Moscow prompted the people’s commissar of education, A. Lunacharsky, to resign from the government. He withdrew this resignation request,
however, after a few days. —Dan
Anatoly Vasil’evich Lunacharsky (1875-1933) was a journalist, writer and philosopher, often called the “poet of the revolution.” He joined Lenin and
the Bolsheviks in 1904, but in the years following launched a rival left-wing group around the paper Vpered (Forward). Lunacharsky worked closely with Trotsky and Martov on the anti-war paper
best known by its second name Nashe slovo (Our word). In 1917, with Trotsky, he joined the Mezhraionka group (Petrograd Interdistrict Committee) before, along with Trotsky and most other
“Mezhraiontsii”, joining the Bolsheviks, serving as People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment (Education) in the Bolshevik government until resigning in the spring of 1929. Larry E. Holmes, “Lunacharskii, Anatolii Vasil’evich,” in MERSH,
20: 188–94; HDRR, 181–84.
24. Romain Rolland (1866-1944) was a major French literary figure (winner of the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1915) and also a fierce critic of world war. “In the period 1917–1919” Rolland “played with the idea of a fraternal organization of intellectuals, an
‘intellectual’s international’ of thinkers who had not capitulated to war propaganda.” David James Fisher, Romain Rolland and the Politics of Intellectual Engagement, 47.
Norman Angell (1872–1967) was a British pacifist intellectual, one of those Rolland saw as being part of the “intellectual’s international.”
Just prior to the outbreak of world war, he formed the short-lived Neutrality League. Martin Ceadel, “Angell, Sir (Ralph) Norman [Formerly Ralph Norman Angell Lane] (1872–1967), Peace
Campaigner and Author.”
25. Martov is here cryptically citing Molière. The portion in square brackets is not in
Martov, but is in Molière, and is necessary for the reference to be properly understood. The full extract is: “Vous l’avez voulu, vous l’avez voulu, George Dandin, vous l’avez
voulu; cela vous sied fort bien, et vous voilà ajusté comme il faut; vous avez justement ce que vous méritez.” Molière, “George Dandin ou le mari confondu,” 24 (act
1, scene VII).
II. The Ideology of “Sovietism”
1. The expression “four-tails of suffrage” was associated most closely with the Kadets
(Constitutional Democrats). Peter Enticott, The Russian Liberals and the Revolution of 1905, 39 and 66n22.
2. Martov is here invoking a quotation from the New Testament, “social betrayal” being
substituted for “evil.” The portion in square brackets is in the Biblical original, but not in Martov. Matthew 3:37 [KJV]).
3. The “sweet and bitter” imagery, used here and elsewhere in this section, is a
variation on a traditional Russian proverb: “If you don’t taste the bitter, you won’t know the sweet.” Alexander Margulis and Asya Kholodnaya, Russian-English Dictionary of
Proverbs and Sayings, 142.
4. Peace negotiations between the new Bolshevik-led state and the German state took place in the
German-controlled border town of Brest-Litovsk (today known as Brest, a city in Belarus), following an armistice in December 1917. The Brest-Litovsk treaty was eventually agreed to and signed by representatives of the Russian state on 3 March 1918, with terms that were extremely punitive toward Russia.
“Russia lost its sovereign claims to about 34 percent of its population, 32 percent of its agricultural lands, 85 percent of its sugar beet lands, 54 percent of its industrial establishments and 89
percent of its coal mines.” G. Douglas Nicoll, “Brest-Litovsky, Treaty of,” in MERSH, 20: 188–94.
5. Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin (1888-1938) was an “Old Bolshevik,” a widely published
economist and theoretician, and a close associate of Lenin’s, who famously called him the “darling of the party.” One of the many victims of the Great Terror under Stalin, he was
executed in August 1936—belatedly “rehabilitated” in 1988. Lyman H. Legters, “Bukharin, Nikolai Ivanovich,” in MERSH, 5: 237–40; HDRR, 70–72; Lande,
“Posthumous Rehabilitation and the Dust-Bin of History,” 267.
6. Martov’s transcription of this wireless message, while having essentially the same
meaning, differs from what we have in the Russian version of Lenin’s collected works: “Report, please, what actual guarantees you have that the new Hungarian Government will actually be
communist, and not merely socialist, that is composed of social-traitors.” V. I. Lenin, “Radiotelegramma Bela Kunu” [Telegram to Béla Kun] (March 1919, first published 1932), in
PSS, 38:217. Compare with the standard English translation, LCW, 29:227. “(!)” appears in Martov’s Russian-language version.
Béla Kun (1886-1939), was an Hungarian conscript soldier in the world war. After being captured by the Russians in 1916, he led a Marxist study circle among other
Hungarian prisoners of war, a study circle which became the core of the Hungarian Group of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik). In November 1918, he returned to Budapest, was arrested for his
political activities, and then in confusing circumstances emerged from jail in March 1919 as the head of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. When the republic collapsed 1 August 1919, Kun sought exile in
Russia, where he went on to play a leading role in the Communist International. Arrested during the years of Stalin’s Great Terror, he apparently died in prison in 1939. Kun, like many others, was
posthumously rehabilitated. James K. Libbey, “Kun, Béla,” in MERSH, 18: 163–65.
7. While identical in meaning, Martov’s Russian version in these two quotations, has wording
that is slightly different from that in the standard Russian edition. See V. I. Lenin, Gosudarstvo i
revoliutsiia [The state and revolution], 1917, in PSS, 33:109, 42–43. Compare with the standard English translation, LCW 25:486, 424–25.
8. The first quote from Lenin can be found in The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our
Revolution, 10 April 1917 (published September 1917); Martov added the emphasis, as well as the word “universal.” The second quotation, about the election of judges, can be found in
Lenin’s Materials Relating to the Revision of the Party Programme, April–May 1917 (published June 1917). For the English, see, respectively, LCW, 24:70 and 24:473.
9. Arthur Tsutsiev, “Administrative Units of the Russian Empire and the USSR”.
Vladimir Evgenievich Trutovskii (1889-1937), was a leading Left SR, and commissar in the Bolshevik-Left SR coalition government, until resigning along with all the
Left SRs, in protest at the signing of the Brest-Litovsk treaty. HDRR, 267.
Imprisoned in Moscow in 1923, a group of Left SR prisoners launched a hunger strike to protest horrendous conditions, in the course of which Trutovskii attempted to
commit suicide by self-immolation. 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], 41 and 69.
Trutovskii was executed in 1937 during the Great Terror, posthumously rehabilitated in 1992. https://stalin.memo.ru/persons/p9101/.
10. Lenin, Gosudarstvo i revoliutsiia [The state and revolution], in PSS, 33:53.
In Martov’s Russian original, the wording of the quotation differs slightly from that in the PSS edition, but the meaning is unchanged. For the standard English translation, see LCW,
25:434.
11. V. I. Lenin, On Slogans, July 1917, in LCW, 25:185–92.
The “July Days” were two days of armed demonstrations in Petrograd, 3 and 4 (16 and 17) July 1917, in the context of a disastrous offensive launched by the
Russian armies in the world war. “For two whole days” writes Abramovitch, “trucks packed with soldiers, sailors and some workers, all armed with loaded rifles, roamed up and
down” the streets of the city. Samuel Oppenheim estimates the numbers demonstrating on 4 July as upwards of half a million. David Mandel says that approximately 400 were injured or killed,
resulting from “clashes between the demonstrators and provocateurs.” Abramovitch, The Soviet
Revolution: 1917-1939, 59; Samuel A. Oppenheim, “July Days,” in MERSH, 15: 150–56; David Mandel, The Petrograd Workers and the Fall of Old Regime, 191.
Lenin’s pamphlet On Slogans clearly makes the claim that “All power to the Soviets!” was a dated slogan, but it does not explicitly make the
claim that it should be replaced by the slogan “All power to the Bolshevik Party.” Martov may be referencing a Bolshevik Central Committee resolution which in July 1917, in the wake of the
July Days, did vote to replace the slogan “All power to the soviets” with that of “All power to the working class led by its revolutionary party—the Bolshevik-Communists.”
Oppenheim, “July Days,” in MERSH, 15: 154.
Interestingly, however, in an unpublished and unfinished article where he sharply criticizes many aspects of Martov’s analysis, Lenin remains silent on this
quite important point. Lenin, “V lakeiskoi” [In the servants’ quarters], in PSS, 39:139–45. Compare with LCW, 29:540–46.
12. Here and throughout, Martov is invoking a phrase made famous by Marx, when he described the
Paris Commune of 1871 as “the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour.” Karl Marx, The Civil War in France: Address of the General
Council of the International Working-Men’s Association (third English edition, August 1871), in MECW, 22:333–34.
13. The committees of the poor—often known as “Kombedy”, an acronym
derived from their Russian name (komitety bednoty)—were established by decree on 11 June 1918 and were, according to James Nutsch, “the most significant early feature of War
Communism.” Through these committees, the poorest peasants were organized and allied with “Bolshevik-backed groups from the city, primarily armed detachments of workers, but at times by
members of the Cheka and even Red Army soldiers.” In theory, this was a class war against the very rich among the peasantry, but in practice this pitted the poor peasants “against families who
often owned not more than a few acres of land and two or three head of cattle.” The Kombedy were disbanded by decree 2 December 1918. James G. Nutsch, “Committees of the Poor,” in
MERSH, 7: 210–12.
14. Louis August Blanqui (1805-1881)—labelled by some a communist and revolutionary
(Bernstein), by others an “insurrectionist” (Docherty)—was influential in the European left of the nineteenth century and according to Bernstein, “took an active part in all Paris
uprisings from 1830 to 1870.” Prior to the unsuccessful May 1839 uprising in Paris, Monty Johnstone
says that “Blanqui sought to organise a relatively small, centralised, hierarchical elite to prepare and lead an insurrection, which would replace capitalist state power by its own temporary
revolutionary dictatorship.” Johnstone says that while Marx and Engels came to reject this conception of an “educational dictatorship by a revolutionary minority,” they nonetheless held
him “in high esteem.” During the Paris Commune of 1871, Blanquists were the most influential left current. Bernstein, The Preconditions of Socialism, xliii. HDS, 107. Monty
Johnstone, “Marx, Blanqui and Majority Rule,” 299–306.
15. In his well-known speech at the Second Congress of the RSDRP in 1903. —Dan
In that speech, Plekhanov said: “Any given democratic principle should be considered not by itself in the abstract, but in its relation to what may be called the
basic principle of democracy, namely the principle which says that salus populi suprema lex [the welfare of the people is the highest law] . . . . [I]f, for the sake of the success of the
revolution, it was necessary to temporarily restrict the operation of this or that democratic principle, then it would be a crime to refrain from imposing such a restriction. My personal opinion, I will
say, is that even the principle of universal suffrage must be looked at from the point of view of what I have called the basic principle of democracy. Hypothetically we can think of a case where we
social democrats would be against universal suffrage. . . . The revolutionary proletariat may restrict the political rights of the upper classes, just as the upper classes had once restricted their [the
proletariat’s] political rights. The suitability of such a measure could only be judged in terms of the principle: salus revolutionis suprema lex [the welfare of the revolution is the
highest law].” Institut Marksizma-Leninizma pri tsk KPSS [Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee of the CPSU], Vtoroi s”ezd RSDRP Iiul’-Avgust 1903 Goda:
Protokoly [Second Congress of the RSDLP July-August 1903: Minutes], 181–82.
See note 25 in Section III for Martov’s comments on this speech.
16. It is worth recalling here Kautsky’s remarks about the “curial” nature of
Soviet elections and their inevitable consequences. —Martov.
The term “curial” references the limited suffrage allowed under tsarism. Voting eligibility in Russia was expanded after the 1905 revolution but did not by any means amount to universal suffrage. Access to the vote “depended on the ownership of
property or the payment of taxes, and the population was divided into four curiae: landowners, peasants, town dwellers, and workers” leading to very skewed representation. Landowners, for
instance, comprised 32.7 percent of the electors, while workers comprised just 2.5 per cent. Abraham Ascher, The Revolution of 1905: A Short History, 110–11.
Eligibility to vote under the Soviet system was also weighted by economic class location. The 1918 draft Soviet constitution “lays it down that not all the
inhabitants of the Russian Empire, but only specified categories have the right to elect deputies to the Soviets. All those may vote ‘who procure their sustenance by useful or productive
work’.” Among those whom this definition excluded was “the worker who loses his work, and endeavours to get a living by opening a small shop, or selling newspapers.” Karl
Kautsky, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, 81–82.
17. Charles Naine, Dictature du prolétariat ou démocratie, 7.
Charles Naine (1874-1926) was a prominent anti-war socialist from Switzerland. He joined the anti-militarist league in 1905, and was a leading figure in the building
of the Social Democratic Party (SPS). Karl Lang, “Naine, Charles.”
19. P. Orlovskii, “Kommunisticheskii Internatsional i Mirovaia Sovetskaia
Respublika” [The Communist International and the World Soviet Republic]. Martov gives the date for this article as 13 March 1919, when in fact it was 13 May 1919.
20. Ibid.
Alexander Feodorovich Kerensky (1881-1970) was a prominent leader of the Russian progressive movement, associated variously with the Social-Revolutionaries and the
Trudovik Party (a small agrarian socialist party, close to the Constitutional Democrats). As minister of justice following the February (March) Revolution of 1917, Docherty listed his main
accomplishments as “abolishing ethnic and religious discrimination—a czarist policy that particularly affected Jews—and the death penalty.” Kerensky served as Prime Minister
until the Bolshevik seizure of power in October (November) 1917. HDS, 143-44. HDRR, 152-56.
22. After the split of the Independent Party [USPD] at the congress of 1920 in Halle, he moved
to the Communists. —Dan
Ernst Däumig (1866-1922) was an army veteran who joined the SPD in 1898. During Germany’s November 1918 revolution he was one of the leaders of the
Revolutionary Shop Stewards’ movement in Berlin. He and many others on the Left of the Independent Social Democratic Party (hence “Left Independent”) joined the KPD in 1920. Stefan
Berger, “Däumig, Ernst.”
23. Translated directly from Martov. The original Russian word filisterskii has been
translated as “pedestrian,” here and throughout.
Fritz Heckert (1884-1936) was born in Chemnitz, Germany, joined the SPD in 1902, and in 1916 co-founded the Chemnitz Group of the Spartacus League (Spartakusbund). A
workers’ council leader in 1918, he helped co-found the KPD at the end of that year. Klaus Schönhoven, “Heckert, Fritz.”
24. Iraklii Georgievich Tsereteli (1881-1959) was a socialist from Georgia, who became a leader
of the Menshevik wing of the RSDRP. During the world war he took an internationalist (anti-war) position. When he returned from internal exile after the February / March Revolution of 1917, he played a
leading role in the Petrograd Soviet, where he advocated a defensist position (i.e., justifying a continuation of the war in order to defend the revolution). After the dissolution of the Constituent
Assembly in January 1918, Tsereteli escaped arrest and returned to Georgia, after the Russian conquest of Georgia, ending up in exile in Europe and eventually the United States. Ziva Galili y Garcia,
“Tsereteli, Iraklii Georgievich,” in MERSH, 40: 25–28.
Tsereteli co-authored one of the first major exposés of the Russian labour camp system. 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].
25. See note 11 this section.
26. Martov here makes cryptic, and incomplete reference to a famous phrase from Schiller. The
word “servant” is not in the original but preserves the meaning. The portion in square brackets is not in Martov, but is in Schiller, and is necessary for the reference to be properly understood. Friedrich Schiller, “Fiesco; or, the Genoese Conspiracy,” 224.
27. François Noel (Gracchus) Babeuf (1760-1797) in the early years of the French
Revolution, published the Correspondent Picard, and organized opposition to seigneurial dues. After the overthrow of Robespierre in 1794, he launched the newspaper Tribun du people, and
later organized an early communist organization, the Conspiracy of Equals. HDFR, 23-24.
Philippe Buonarroti (1761-1837) is primarily known for his book Buonarroti’s History of Babeuf’s Conspiracy for Equality (translated by Bronterre.
1836. London: H. Hetherington.) He was also “in the front ranks among the conspirators who, prior to 1859, worked for the liberation of Italy.” Georges Weill, “Philippe Buonarroti
(1761-1837),” 241.
28. The standard English-language translation is slightly different. “All Socialists with
the exception of the followers of Fourier … are agreed that the form of government which is called the sovereignty of the people is a very unsuitable, and even dangerous, sheet anchor for the young
principle of Communism about to be realized.” Quoted in Kautsky, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, 20.
Wilhelm Weitling (1808-1871) was one of many German veterans of the 1848 revolution, who after the revolution, emigrated to the United States of America. Hans
Mühlestein calls him “the most important proletarian representative of ‘equalitarian communism.’” Carl Frederick Wittke, The Utopian Communist; a Biography of Wilhelm
Weitling, Nineteenth-Century Reformer, v. Hans Mühlestein, “Marx and the Utopian Wilhelm Weitling,” 113.
François Marie Charles Fourier (1772-1837) was a French utopian socialist. “He envisaged a harmonious society based on cooperative communities that he
called phalanstères, (phalanxes).” HDS, 91. According to Bernstein, during the French Revolution, he “survived the ‘Terror’ by the skin of his teeth.”
Bernstein, The Preconditions of Socialism, xliv.
29. Étienne Cabet (1788-1856) was one of a group of thinkers labelled “utopian
socialist” by Marx and Engels because of their “visionary schemes for separate societies practicing social equality.” HDS, 233.
30. Georges Bourgin and Hubert Bourgin, Le socialisme français de 1789 à 1848,
64–65.
Armand Barbes (1809–1870) was a French revolutionary democrat and
associate of Blanqui. Bernstein, The Preconditions of Socialism, xlii–xliii.
31. Émile Pouget, La Confédération générale du travail, 34–35.
Émile Pouget (1860-1931) was “one of the founders and leaders of revolutionary trade-unionism in France.” Edward Peter Fitzgerald, “Emile
Pouget, the Anarchist Movement, and the Origins of Revolutionary Trade-Unionism in France (1880-1901),” i.
32. Robert Owen (1771-1858) born in Montgomeryshire Britain, was a well-to-do philanthropist and
later in life, a socialist. He was famous for purchasing the community of New Harmony, Indiana, to set up a “model” community. Owen was one of the most well-known of those often labelled
“utopian socialist.” HDS, 187-88; Gregory Claeys, “Owen, Robert (1771-1858), Socialist and Philanthropist.”
33. In deploying the phrase “of blessed memory,” Martov was signalling a political,
not actual, obituary for Gustave Hervé (1871-1944). Two years prior to the outbreak of world war, Hervé abandoned his previous anti-war radicalism, and came out as a French patriot, after the
war becoming an infamous far right “national socialist,” going so far as to argue “that France needed its own version of Hitler or Mussolini.” Michael B. Loughlin, “Gustave
Hervé’s Transition from Socialism to National Socialism,” 531.
34. While this idea is very much part of the Owen text, I could not find this direct quotation
as presented by Martov. Robert Owen, A New View of Society and Other Writings.
35. Karl Marx, “Marx über Feuerbach” [Theses on Feuerbach], 793. This
translation is my own, and differs from the standard English one in certain respects, including by substituting “people” for “man,” “education” for
“upbringing,” and “educators” for “educator,” the latter to facilitate use of the third-person pronoun. The emphasis on “above” was added by Martov. Compare
with MECW, 5:7.
36. The possibility for the proletariat to achieve complete spiritual emancipation in bourgeois
society was the subject of lively debates in the Menshevik literature on the eve of the war (in articles by Potresov, Martynov Cherevanin et al. in Nasha zaria [Our dawn]), and even earlier in the
emigrant literature in articles by A. Bogdanov, A. Lunacharsky et al.). —Martov
37. The suppression of all press except the official one has its supporters and has even been partially tried in the West under the sweet-sounding name “socialization of the press.”
—Martov
III. Decomposition or Conquest of the State?
1. A mass movement in Britain in the 1830s and 1840s, Chartism—“named after the
People’s Charter, the statement of its demands”—was in its origins a social movement for democratic reform. “The objectives of the movement were the suffrage for all adult males,
annual parliaments, vote by secret ballot, public payment of members of parliament, population equality of electoral districts, and the abolition of property qualifications for members of
parliament.” HDS, 57-58.
The Chartists were also early precursors of organized labour and collective labour action, the August 1842 general strike they organized and led posing “a
profound challenge to early industrial capitalism.” Mark O’Brien, Perish the Privileged Orders: A Socialist History of the Chartist Movement, 38.
James Elishama Smith (1801-1857) was born near Glasgow in Scotland. John Saville describes him as “editor of the weekly Crisis, the main Owenite journal,
from the autumn of 1833 until its demise in August 1834.” Timothy Stunt suggests that he is the person behind the pseudonym Senex, who in 1834, wrote “a series of ‘Letters on
associated labour’ in James Morrison’s Pioneer.” Saville, “JE Smith and the Owenite Movement, 1833-1834,” 115; Timothy C. F. Stunt, “Smith, James Elishama
[Called Shepherd Smith].”
James Morrison (1802-1835), born in Newcastle upon Tyne in Britain, was a follower of Robert Owen. In 1832 he launched a weekly newspaper, The Pioneer. When
Morrison became a member of the executive of the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union (GNCTU) in 1834, The Pioneer became that organization’s newspaper, the “circulation of which
at its peak may have reached 30,000 copies.” John Rule, “Morrison, James (1802–1835), Journalist and Trade Unionist.”
2. Quoted in Max Beer, A History of British Socialism, 339. The Russian version, cited by
Martov, uses the phrase “trade-union” or “trades-unions” where, in every instance, Beer in the English original simply says “trade” or “trades.” The Russian version renders “not easily recovered” as “will never be
recovered.”
3. Quoted in Beer, 340. The emphasis throughout is Martov’s.
4. Quoted in Ibid., 337. The emphasis is Martov’s.
Bronterre O’Brien (James O’Brien, 1804-1864), born in Ireland, would become, shortly after moving to London in 1830, the effective editor of the Poor
Man’s Guardian. “From the beginning of the Chartist movement O’Brien was one of its most prominent figures.” Miles Taylor, “O’Brien, James [Pseud. Bronterre
O’Brien] (1804–1864), Chartist.”
5. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (English edition of
1888; originally published in German, 1848), in MECW, 6:504.
7. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (edition of 1869; originally
published 1852), in MECW, 11:186. The words “[previous]” and “[state]” were added in the present translation, for the sake of clarity.
8. Karl Marx, “Letter to Ludwig Kugelmann” (12 April 1871), in MECW, 44:131.
Ludwig Kugelmann (1828-1902) was a “German physician, member of the First International, with whom Marx maintained a lively correspondence for a dozen years
(1862-74).” Saul K. Padover, note, in Karl Marx, On History and People, ed. Saul K. Padover, 216.
10. In The Civil War in France, Marx writes, “The Commune was to be a working, not
a parliamentary, body, executive and legislative at the same time” (MECW, 22:331). It is thus Martov, not Marx, who counterposes “talking” to “working.”
13. Aleksandr Herzen, “Letter Ten (Paris, 10 June 1848),” 148.
Alexander Herzen (1812-1887) was an early Russian socialist and a supporter of Proudhon. HDS, 198.
14. Lenin, Gosudarstvo i revoliutsiia [The state and revolution], in PSS, 33:38.
Compare with LCW, 25:420. The standard English language translation uses “Britain” instead of “England.” The phrase “the prior condition” is not in
Martov’s version.
15. Lenin, Gosudarstvo i revoliutsiia [The state and revolution], in PSS, 33:38; emphasis in the original. Compare with LCW, 25:421.
16. Frederick Engels, Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in
Science, 1894, in MECW, 25:268.
17. Frederick Engels, “Introduction,” to the third German edition (1891) of Karl
Marx, The Civil War in France, in MECW, 27:190.
18. Frederick Engels, “A Critique of the Draft Social-Democratic Programme of 1891”
(29 June 1891, first published 1901–2), in MECW, 27:227. Emphasis added by Martov.
19. “The Erfurt Program was the official policy of the German Social Democratic Party
adopted at the party’s conference at Erfurt in October 1891.” HDS, 85.
20. Lenin, Gosudarstvo i revoliutsiia [The state and revolution], in PSS,
33:70–71. Compare with LCW, 25:450.
21. But, of course, Engels does not go as far as the current leader of the German Communist
Party, Brandler, who stated during his trial that the dictatorship of the proletariat can be realized in Germany without changing its current constitution. —Dan
23. Kautsky, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, 43. Martov’s quote does not
include the last part of Kautsky’s statement, “which must everywhere arise when the proletariat has conquered political power.” It is included here, because without it the sentence
becomes difficult to understand.
24. Marx, The Civil War in France, in MECW, 22:336. The words in square brackets
have been added to make this English-translation consistent with the Russian-language version used by Martov.
25. In 1903, as is well known, G. V. Plekhanov declared that when the revolutionary proletariat
has realized its dictatorship, it may find it necessary to deprive the bourgeoisie of all political rights (including the right to vote). However, for Plekhanov this was one of the possibilities of
the dictatorship of the proletariat, and not necessarily its inevitable consequence. In my pamphlet The Struggle against the State of Siege within the Social-Democratic Labor Party of Russia, I
tried to interpret Plekhanov’s words as presenting an example admissible only in logical abstraction and therefore used by him to illustrate the thesis “the welfare of the revolution is
the highest law,” to which all other considerations must be subordinated. I expressed the belief that Plekhanov himself probably did not presume that the proletariat of countries that were economically ripe for socialism would, upon acquiring power, find themselves in a situation where it
was not possible for them to support themselves on the willing acceptance of their direction by the people but, on the contrary, had to deny to the bourgeois minority, by force, the exercise of political
rights. In a private conversation with me, Plekhanov expressed displeasure with this interpretation of his words. I understood then that his concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat was not devoid
of the features characteristic of the Jacobin dictatorship by a revolutionary minority. —Martov.
26. During the French Revolution: “The Montagnards were the left-wing deputies in the
National Convention” which sat from 20 September 1792 until 26 October 1795, “and represented one of the two main political factions within that body, the other being the Girondins.” The
label “Montagnard” was coined by Joseph-Marie Lequinio, labelling these left-wingers the “deputies of the Mountain (la Montagne)” in the Legislative Assembly which sat from
1 October 1791 until 20 September 1792, “because they chose to sit in the highest seats of the meeting hall.” HDFR, 223.
It was also in the Legislative Assembly that the Girondins “first become recognizable” as a distinct political current. During the trial of the former
king, Louis XVI, they were denounced by the Montagnards for allegedly trying to save him from execution. Following the insurrection of 31 May 1793, many Girondins were proscribed from sitting in the
National Convention. Any who remained in Paris were executed. Many of those who fled were eventually captured and “either committed suicide or died on the guillotine.” HDFR,
140-42.
27. Paul Louis, historian of French socialism, writes: “The 18th of March took on the
aspect of a rebellion of Paris against provincial oppression.” —Martov.
In the source he cites for this quotation, the nearest equivalent I could find was the following: “The May 1871 crushing [of the Paris Commune] can be explained,
in large part, by the antagonism and moral divide between Paris and the provinces.” Paul Louis, Histoire du socialisme français, 304.
29. Martov is in fact referencing a letter to Sorge in which Marx does say he “defended them” but says nothing about “honour.” Karl Marx, “Marx to Friedrich Adolph
Sorge” (9 November 1871), in MECW, 44:241–42.
30. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865) was a French radical active in the Revolution of 1848.
Proudhon in 1840, according to Merriman, was “the first to call himself an anarchist.” Docherty reminds us that Proudhon “became famous for his declaration that ‘property is
theft.’” Johnston says that the Proudhonists, after the Blanquists, were the second most influential left current during the Paris Commune of 1871. John M. Merriman, The Dynamite Club: How
a Bombing in Fin-de-Siècle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror, 42. HDS, 198. Johnstone, “Marx, Blanqui and Majority Rule,” 306.
Jacques René Hébert (1757-1794) was an activist in the Paris Club of the Cordeliers during the French Revolution, editor of Le Père Duchesne
“which would become one of the most popular, and most maligned, revolutionary newspapers of the capital,” a paper which was “written in the language of the people” and would
become “the mouthpiece of the Parisian sans-culottes.” An advocate of the Terror, he eventually became its victim, executed on the guillotine 24 March 1794. HDFR, 255.
31. The Russian-language word—golyt’bu—which Martov puts in quotations
marks here (and to which Dan refers in his introduction) might be translated as “rabble,” but that carries with it a quite negative connotation. Given the literature on the French Revolution,
we were tempted to use “sans-culottes.” However, there is a specific Russian word used throughout the text— sankiuloty—with precisely that meaning. In the French language
literature, there is another specific term frequently used, menu people (little people), which some might suggest as an alternative. HDFR, 294.
32. From the Commune in Paris of Hébert as well as its counterpart in Lyon came the
initiative for the extreme measures of political terror (the September executions, the expulsion of the Girondins from the Convention) and also for those socio-revolutionary measures of “consumer
communism” by which the impoverished cities attempted to force the petite bourgeoisie of the villages and the outlying provinces to provide them with foodstuffs. It is in the Communes of Paris and
Lyon where the expeditions of the provisioning armies [i.e., food armies] started. It is there where “committees of poor peasants” were organized for the purpose of appropriating grain from the so-called “kulaks”—who, in the jargon of the period, were
called “aristocrats.” The two Communes of the French Revolution extracted contributions from the bourgeoisie and took charge of the stocks of commodities produced by industry during the
preceding years (especially at Lyon). From these organizations emanated the requisitioning of residences, the forcible attempts to lodge the poor in houses considered too large for their occupants, and
other egalitarian measures. If, in their quest for historical analogies, Lenin, Trotsky, and Radek had shown a greater knowledge of the past, and a lesser inclination to skim over the surface of
phenomena, they would not have tried to tie the genealogy of the Soviets to the Commune of 1871, but rather to the Paris Commune of 1793–94, which was a centre of revolutionary energy and power of
the strata of the population most similar to the modern proletariat. —Martov
Karl Radek (né Sobelsohn, 1885–1939), was born in Lviv (Lvov) in Austrian-occupied Poland and became a prominent figure in the socialist movements of both
Poland and Russia. He attended the 1915 Zimmerwald anti-war conference, and from 1917 on worked closely with Lenin. In the early 1920s he played a leading role in the Communist International. Until
“capitulating” in 1929, he was a key supporter of Trotsky in the fight against Stalin. Arrested in 1936, and “convicted” in a Show Trial in 1937, he died in a forced labour camp
in 1939. Radek was posthumously rehabilitated in 1988. Robert D. Warth, “Radek, Karl,” in MERSH, 30: 139–43. Lande, “Posthumous Rehabilitation and the Dust-Bin of
History,” 267.
33. In his letter to Marx, 6 July 1869 [Frederick Engels, “Engels to Marx” (6 July
1869), in MECW, 42:308], Engels mentions Tridon’s pamphlet Gironde et Girondins. La Gironde en 1869 et en 1793, in which the author presents the arguments of that wing of Blanquism:
“It’s a comic idea that the dictatorship of Paris over France, which led to the downfall of the first revolution, could be accomplished without more ado today once again, and with a
quite different result.” —Martov
34. Claude Ovtcharenko, ed., “Déclaration au people français,” 903.
35. Arthur Arnould, Histoire populaire et parlementaire de la Commune de Paris, 2:142,
144. Except where indicated, emphasis in extracts from Arnould are in the original, but not in Martov’s translation.
36. Ibid., 2:147.
37. Georges Sorel (1847–1922) and his follower and co-thinker Édouard Berth (1875–1939) were two of the pre-eminent representatives of the trend of syndicalism (or revolutionary
syndicalism) which emerged in France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Syndicalists saw “governments and political parties, including socialist parties, as instruments of
working-class oppression. Syndicalist thought stressed direct action, particularly the general strike.” J. C. Docherty and Jacobus Hermanus Antonius van der Velden, Historical Dictionary of
Organized Labor (hereafter HDOL), 255.
At a formal level, Martov is not wrong to include Daniel De Leon (1852-1914) in the same category as Sorel and Berth. De Leon was one of the founders in the United
States of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or Wobblies), and the IWW has been called “the American expression of syndicalism” HDOL, 137.
However, Sorel and Berth became drawn towards nationalism, and that combined with their rejection of parliamentary democracy and embrace of violence as a means for
social change, made their ideas very compatible with fascism. The Wobblies, by contrast, were harsh critics of nationalism. Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Communist leader who would spend years in a
fascist jail, took his inspiration from De Leon. Benito Mussolini – the fascist leader of Gramsci’s Italy – saw his politics as compatible with those of Sorel. Antonio Gramsci,
“On the L’Ordine Nuovo Programme,” 296; James H. Meisel, “A Premature Fascist?,” 14.
38. Arnould, Histoire populaire et parlementaire de la Commune de Paris, 2:147n. Emphasis
is Martov’s.
39. Ibid., 2:154.
40. Charles Seignobos, “La troisième république.”
41. Mitch Abidor, trans., “International Workingmen’s Association Federal Council of
Parisian Sections.”
42. Peter Lavrov, Parizhskaia kommuna 18 marta 1871 goda [The Paris Commune of 18 March
1871], 130, 157.
43. Ibid., 156-57.
44. We find today (1918–19) among the Bolsheviks inside and outside Russia the same
confusion introduced by the communards with their specific “political form at last discovered” for the social emancipation of the proletariat. They, too, have substituted the territorial
organization of the state for the union of producers that, at first, was seen as the essence of the soviet
republic. This substitution is presented to us either as the natural result of the functioning of a fully formed socialist society, or is transformed into a necessary precondition for the accomplishment
of the social transformation itself. The confusion becomes hopeless when an attempt is made to overcome it by resorting to the notion of a “soviet state” which is supposed to be the organized
violence of the proletariat and, as such, is preparing the ground for the “extinction” of all forms of the state, but which at the same time is itself something fundamentally opposed to the
state as such. The Parisian Communards reasoned the same way. They permitted themselves to imagine that the commune-state of 1871 was something whose very principle was the opposite of any form of the
state, while, in reality, it represented a simplified modern democratic state functioning in the manner of the Swiss canton. —Martov
45. Quoted in Lavrov, Parizhskaia kommuna 18 marta 1871 goda [The Paris Commune of 18
March 1871], 158.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid., 333.
50. Ibid., 334. The italicized portion in the Russian-language version provided by Martov, would
translate more literally as “which is now becoming redundant.”
51. Ibid., 328.
53. Martov does not provide a source for this quotation, but Franz Mehring makes a similar point
without quoting Bakunin directly. Franz Mehring, Karl Marx, 453.
55. Bernstein, The Preconditions of Socialism, 154.
Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932), was one of the most prominent socialists in Germany after the death of Marx and Engels. Challenged by Rosa Luxemburg and others on
what she and others called his “revisionism.” As an SPD member of the Reichstag, he refused to vote for war credits in 1914. Joined the USPD in 1917, but returned to the SPD in 1918.
HDS, 40-42.
57. Of course, Lenin, too, wrote a great deal on the subject of Eduard Bernstein’s book without taking the trouble of correcting that “distortion.” —Martov
58. “The Address” is shorthand for The Civil War in France: Address of the
General Council of the International Working-Men’s Association.
60. Ibid., 453.
61. Ibid.
62. Let us recall that Lenin said that if 200,000 landowners could administer an immense
territory in their own interests, 200,000 Bolsheviks would do the same thing in the interest of the workers and peasants. —Martov
The full quotation from Lenin uses slightly different figures. “Since the 1905 revolution, Russia has been governed by 130,000 landowners, who have perpetrated
endless violence against 150,000,000 people, heaped unconstrained abuse upon them, and condemned the vast majority to inhuman toil and semi-starvation.
“Yet we are told that the 240,000 members of the Bolshevik Party will not be able to govern Russia, govern her in the interests of the poor and against the rich.
These 240,000 are already backed by no less than a million votes of the adult population, for this is precisely the proportion between the number of Party members and the number of votes cast for the
Party that has been established by the experience of Europe and the experience of Russia as shown, for example, by the elections to the Petrograd City Council last August. We therefore already have a
‘state apparatus’ of one million people devoted to the socialist state for the sake of high ideals and not for the sake of a fat sum received on the 20th of every month.” V. I.
Lenin, “Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?,” Prosveshchenie, nos. 1–2 (1 October 1917), in LCW, 26:111.
63. In Iu. O. Martov’s papers we found the following alternative lines [after this first
comma]:
… the edifice of communalist ideology, surpassed by the development of the labour movement since the time of 1871, is again emerging. This ideology, as in the
Paris Commune, combines two tendencies. On the one hand—thanks to the war-induced collapse of socialism and the inner cohesion and organization that is necessary to master the state machine as a
whole—the masses try to solve the problem of how to destroy the bourgeoisie’s political power
by entrenching themselves in autonomous and self-organized urban communes. Like the Paris workers of 1871, the Berlin, Leipzig, Munich, Zurich, or Stockholm communist-minded workers of 1919 do not ask
themselves whether the consistent implementation of the principle of “All power to the soviets!” will dig a political abyss between town and country, between the industrial centres
and petit-bourgeois provinces—an abyss that renders inconceivable the implementation of a unified collectivist economy.
On the other hand, the same masses, overestimating the actual cohesion of the large centres and not realizing the power and significance of all the social forces that
they have to deal with during the revolution, are easily inclined toward the idea of the dictatorship of these centres over the whole country, to a “Hébertist” dictatorship of the
communes of the major urban centres over the whole country.
Max Adler was absolutely right when, in one of his articles on the problems of the social revolution (in the Vienna Workers’ Journal), he concluded that
“it is sufficient that just one large section of the peasantry stand aside from the socialist movement for us to conclude: the slogan of Soviet government means either naked violence against the
peasants or a coalition with the peasants.”
Here this alternative breaks off. —Dan
Appendix: Marx and the Problem of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat
1. Rosa Luxemburg, “Social Reform or Revolution,” 57.
Rosa Luxemburg (1870-1919), was the outstanding pre-world war representative of the European internationalist anti-war left. Born in Russian-occupied Poland, she
played a leading role in the socialist movement of both countries. Luxemburg famously challenged the “revisionism” of Eduard Bernstein. She was jailed during the world war for her anti-war
politics, from jail wrote a devastatingly accurate pamphlet outlining both the strengths and weaknesses of the new Russian state (Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution.”). She helped found the
KPD at the end of 1918, and was assassinated just a few days later, in January 1919, by right-wing former army officers. HDS, 160-61. Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution”.
2. Democracy and Dictatorship is in fact the name of a short book published in Berlin in 1918 that comprises the first half of Kautsky’s The Dictatorship of the Proletariat,
however no such comment appears in that work. Martov is perhaps referring here to an earlier work by Kautsky, The Road to Power, where he writes, “In their recognition of the necessity of
capturing political power Marx and Engels agreed with Blanqui. But while Blanqui thought it possible to capture the power of the state by a sudden act of a conspiratory minority, and to use that power in
the interest of the proletariat, Marx and Engels recognized that revolutions are not made at will” (6).
4. Ibid., 27: 520.
5. In the authoritative English edition of Marx and Engels’s Collected Works, this is
translated as “The realization of communism is now out of the question. First the bourgeoisie must take the helm.” “Notes,” in MECW, 48:570.
6. The available English translation of the letter puts this as “Marx and Engels argued
vehemently against me.” Wilhelm Weitling, “Letter by Wilhelm Weitling to Moses Hess.”
7. Marx, “Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality” (28 October 1847), in MECW,
11:319. Martov’s emphasis.
8. Ibid.
9. It was “conservatives who generally referred to the revolution as the ‘mad year’
or ‘crazy year.’” Dieter Langewiesche, “Revolution in Germany: Constitutional State—Nation State—Social Reform,” 135.
11. Compare with the standard English translation: Marx, The Civil War in France, in
MECW 22:336–37. Among the differences with the Russian text used by Martov is the use of the phrase “middle class.” We have kept the phrase “Third Estate” used in
Martov’s Russian text.
12. Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law.
Introduction,” (1844), in MECW, 3:185. Martov uses “class” instead of “estate,” and writes “as early as 1845” rather than 1844.
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