John Medhurst - No Less Than Mystic - A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left

9 Goldman, Ibid, p.200

10 Noam Chomsky, “Noam Chomsky on Violence, Leninism and the Left after Occupy”, interview with Christopher Helali, 11th September, 2013, at http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=10111

11 Diane P. Koenker, Labour Relations in Socialist Russia: Printers, Their Unions and Soviet Socialism, National Council for Soviet and East European Research, 1991, p.177

12 Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power: The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd , Indiana University Press, 2007, preface, p.x

13 Georg Lukács, Lenin: A Study in the Unity of his Thought , Verso, 2009 (first published 1924), p.63

14 Lukács, Ibid, p.84

15 Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921 , Oxford, 1954 ; The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky 1921 - 1929, Oxford, 1959; The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky 1929- 1940, Oxford, 1963.

16 Deutscher, Ibid, p.504

17 E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917 - 1923 Volume 1, Pelican, 1950, p.36

18 Lucio Colletti, From Rousseau to Lenin , NLB, 1972, p.236

19 Ernest Mandel, “The Leninist Theory of Organisation”, International Socialist Review 31, 1970

20 Marcel Liebman, Leninism under Lenin , Merlin, 1975, p.428

21 Liebman, Ibid, p.448

22 Lars T. Lih, Lenin , Reaktion Books, 2011, p.181

23 Kevin Murphy, Revolution and Counterrevolution: class struggle in a Moscow metal factory , Haymarket Books, 2005, p.4

24 Vladimir N. Brovkin, editor and translator, Dear Comrades: Menshevik Reports on the Bolshevik Revolution and the Civil War , Hoover Institution Press, 1991, p.16. Brovkin’s important collection of previously unpublished Menshevik documents is drawn from the Boris I. Nicolaevsky collection in the archives of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. It provides evidence of how the Menshevik Party was violently suppressed soon after October 1917, and of how urban and rural Soviets that turned to the Mensheviks during 1918 and 1919 were also suppressed. As well as hitherto unpublished letters from key figures like Martov, Dan and Axelrod, it includes reports from regional and local Menshevik parties to the Menshevik Central Committee and to party and trade union meetings, appeals to socialists abroad to counter Bolshevik propaganda, and snippets of individual stories. The cumulative picture is a damning one and stands in comparison with the best journalistic reports of the persecution of socialists and trade unionists by state police and military thugs.

25 Gordon Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police , Oxford University Press, 1981, p.313

26 Murphy, Ibid, p.2, p.x. Tony Cliff was also apparently unaware of the wave of anti-Bolshevik, pro-Soviet strikes in 1918-19. Volume 3 of his life of Lenin, covering the period 1917-23, does not mention them. His sole reference in the book to the suppression of the Soviets by the Bolsheviks, much of which took place in March-June 1918, before the Civil War began, is to note that “the civil war undermined the operation of local Soviets”. This meant that “much of the influence of the local Soviets was taken over by the party. One reason was that the local Soviet administration was often backward and corrupt”. He does not further substantiate this, although he repeats without criticism a report from Stalin that blames local Soviets for military setbacks in the civil war and the consequent need for the party to “supervise the unreliable Soviets”. Tony Cliff, Revolution Besieged: Lenin 1917 - 23, Bookmarks, 1987, p.150-51

27 Lenin Reloaded: Towards a Politics of Truth , edited by S. Budgen, S. Kovalakis, S. Žižek, Duke University Press, 2007.

28 Paul Le Blanc , Unfinished Leninism , Haymarket Books, 2014.

29 Le Blanc, Ibid, p.11, p.23

1 Christopher Read, “Russian Intelligentsia and the Bolshevik Revolution”, History Today , Vol. 34, Issue 10, 1984

2 http://www.counterpunch.org/2006/03/07/noam-chomsky-on-the-hopeful-signs-across-latinamerica/

3 Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891 - 1924, Penguin Books, 1996, p.108

4 See Derek Offord, The Russian Revolutionary Movement in the 1880 s , Cambridge University Press, 2004, p.65-81 for a fascinating discussion of the Narodniks’ views on post and alter-capitalist economic relations, derided at the time as insufficiently modernist but strangely relevant today.

5 Richard Pipes, Struve: Liberal on the Left, 1870 - 1905, Harvard University Press, 1970, p.37-40

6 V. Vorontsov, Sud’by Kapitalizma v Rossii , 1882

7 Karl Marx, Letter to Vera Zazulich, 1881, cited in David McLellan, The Thought of Karl Marx , Papermac, 1971, p.111

8 Preface to Second Russian Edition of Communist Manifesto , 1882, in Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, Selected Works Vol. 1, Moscow, 1962.

9 Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism (The Founders; The Golden Age; The Breakdown) , Norton, 2005, p.270

10 Joan Robinson, An Essay on Marxian Economics , Macmillan, second edition, 1966 (originally published 1942), p.xi

11 The entire text of Murray Bookchin’s “Listen, Marxist!” is at http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-listen-marxist

12 Sean Michael Wilson & Carl Thompson, Parecomic: The Story of Michael Albert and Participatory Economics , Seven Stories Press, 2013, p.147

13 Wilson & Thompson, Ibid, p.161

14 Rudolf Bahro, Socialism and Survival , Heretic Books, 1982, p.63

15 André Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class , Pluto, 1982, p.15

16 Karl Marx, Capital Volume III, New York: Vintage, p.949

17 Karl Marx, Capital Volume I , Moscow, 1954, p.302

18 Sal Englert, “The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Labour Bund”, International Socialism Issue 35, Summer 2012

19 The rich socialist culture of the Bund was disinterred in Paul Mason’s Live Working or Die Fighting (2006). Mason’s book is a superb example of how to make the history of labour and trade union struggle relevant to today’s anti-capitalists without boring them with postmodern jargon and Marxist slogans. It uncovered episodes and personalities of lost struggles–lost because they did not fit a narrow conception of class struggle centered on the Party and the urban proletariat–and drew lessons from them for the 21st century. In the words of its left-wing publisher, Haymarket Books, “It is a story of urban slums, self-help cooperatives, choirs and brass bands, free love, and self-education by candlelight”.

20 Richard Pipes, Social Democracy and the St Petersburg Labour Movement 1885 - 1897, Cambridge, 1963, p.60

21 Israel Getzler, Martov: A Political Biography of a Russian Social Democrat , Cambridge, 2003 (first published 1967), p.26. Martov has never received the historical and literary monument that, in my opinion, he deserves. In the absence of a full-scale first-rate biography this study of his political life will have to do.

22 G.V. Plekhanov, On the Tasks of the Socialists in the Russian Famine , Geneva, 1892, p.58

23 Tony Cliff, Lenin: Building the Party, 1893 - 1914, Bookmarks, 1986 (originally Pluto, 1975), p.46

24 Cliff, Ibid, p.58

1 Francis King, The Narodniks in the Russian Revolution: Russia’s Socialist Revolutionaries in 1917 , a Documentary History , Socialist History Society Occasional Paper No.25, 2007, p.4