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

20 Hugh Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire 1801 - 1917, Oxford University Press, 1967, p.61

21 Cliff, Ibid, p.275

22 Cliff, Ibid, p.277

23 A.S. Izgoyev, Russkaya mysl’ , December 1907

24 Barbara Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War 1890 - 1914, Papermac, 1966, p.410

25 Paul Foot, The Vote: How it was Won and How it was Undermined , Penguin, 2005, p.404

26 Karl Kautsky, “Nochmals unsere Illusionen”, Die Neue Zeit No 23, 1914, p.268

27 The Erfurt Programme, Berlin, 1965, p.112, quoted in Salvadori, Ibid, p.34

28 Friedrich Engels, Introduction, Class Struggles in France 1848 - 1850 (Marx), International Publishers, 1964, p.20, p.27.

29 Eduard Bernstein, Die Neue Zeit , January 1898

30 For a detailed account of how the Bolshevik faction within the RSDLP financed itself, and the sometimes dubious individuals and schemes it used to keep up the secret funding stream to the Bolshevik “Centre”, see David Shub, Lenin: A Biography , p.125-37.

31 Shub, Ibid, p.112

32 Figes, Ibid, p.218

33 Getzler, Ibid, 115

1 Liebman, Ibid, p.56

2 Russell Brand, Revolution , Century, 2014, p.301

3 H.G. Wells, History of the World , Pelican, 1960, p.157

4 www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/russell_brand_socialism_is_christianity_politicized_20140120

5 The Authorised King James Version of the Bible , New Testament, Book of James, Chapter 5, Verse 1-6.

6 Read, Ibid.

7 Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art 1863 - 1922, Thames and Hudson, 1962, p.31

8 Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organisation of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky October 1917 - 1921, Cambridge University Press, 1970, p.5

9 Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism , Moscow, 1909, p.257.

10 Robert Conquest, Lenin , Fontana Modern Masters, 1972, p.66

11 Murphy, Ibid, p.26

12 Shub, Ibid, p.149

13 Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, Trotsky: 1879 - 1921, Oxford, 1954, p.212

14 Tuchman, Ibid, p.449

15 Hobsbawm, Ibid, p.324

16 Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century , I.B. Taurus, 1996, p.30

17 Hobsbawm, Ibid, p.326

18 J. Martov, Golos No 19, 3rd October 1914

19 Rosa Luxemburg, “The Junius Pamphlet”, The Rosa Luxemburg Reader , Monthly Review Press, 2004, p.312-13

20 Lenin, letter to A. Shliapnikov, Quoted in Shub, Ibid, p.162

21 Deutscher, Ibid, p.226

22 Quoted in Shub, Ibid, p.168

23 V.I. Lenin, Collected Works , Fourth Edition, Vol. 23, p.96

24 V.I. Lenin, Ibid, Vol. 19, p.357

1 Although written in 1935 and therefore not reflecting later research, George Dangerfield’s The Strange Death of Liberal England is still the best account of those years. For literary flair and impressionistic flavour it is unmatched by more academic work on the period.

2 Murphy, Ibid, p.25-26

3 Figes, Ibid, p.252

4 Ascher, The Russian Revolution , Ibid, p.57

5 Edward Acton, Rethinking the Russian Revolution , Oxford University, 1990, p.102

6 Cited in Shub, Ibid, p.182

7 Shub, Ibid, p.184

8 Ascher, Ibid, p.67

9 Barbara Evans Clements, “Working Class and Peasant Women in the Russian Revolution, 19171923”, Signs Vol. 8, Winter, 1982, p.225

10 Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution , Haymarket Books, 2008 (originally published 1932), p.75

11 A.I Rodionova, “Semnadtsatyi god”, Zhenshchiny goroda Lenina , Lenizdat, 1963, p.89

12 Trotsky, Ibid, p.91

13 Orlando Figes, Revolutionary Russia, 1891 - 1991, Kindle edition.

14 Trotsky, Ibid, p.111

15 Castells, Ibid, p.27

16 Stephen M. Walt, “Why the Tunisian Revolution won’t spread”, ForeignPolicy.com, 16th January, 2011

17 Paul Mason, Why It’s Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions , Verso, 2013, p.14

18 Castells, Ibid, p.77

19 Ronald Grigor Suny, “Social Democrats in Power: Menshevik Georgia and the Russian Civil War”, in Party, State and Society in the Russian Civil War: Explorations in Social History , edited by Diane P. Koenker, William G. Rosenberg and Ronald Grigor Suny, Indiana University Press, 1989, p.327

20 Interviewed by Mark Bray and quoted in Bray, Translating Anarchy: The Anarchism of Occupy Wall Street , Zero Books, 2013, p.87

21 Bray, Ibid, p.3, p.5, p.28, p.29

22 The Bolshevik government was not so generous. In April 1918 it removed Nicholas and his family (and a few retainers) to Ekaterinburg. After the February Revolution he had applied for asylum in England. The British government was initially minded to accept but Nicholas’ cousin George V vetoed the idea as it could prove embarrassing for the Windsor (formerly Saxe-Goburg Gotha) dynasty. On 17th July, 1918, as the Russian Civil War was escalating, Nicholas and his family (wife, mother, son and daughters) were all shot to death by a hastily assembled firing squad in the basement of the house in which they had been detained.

The Bolsheviks said in explanation that the White Armies attempting to overthrow them would have used Nicholas as a rallying totem for monarchists and conservatives. The hereditary principle meant this applied to his close relatives as well. There was a brutal logic to this, although it fails to explain why they also shot the family doctor, maid and dog.

23 Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, Trotsky: 1879-1921, Oxford University Press, 1954, p.251.

24 Abraham Ascher (Editor), The Mensheviks in the Russian Revolution , Thames and Hudson, 1976, p.91

25 An extremely useful analysis of the Factory Committees arising from the February Revolution is to be found in Chapter 1 of Carmen Sirianni, Workers Control and Socialist Democracy: The Soviet Experience , Verso, 1982; and for a breakdown of their sometimes amorphous procedures see pp.29-32.

26 Maurice Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control 1917 - 1921 : The State and Counter Revolution , Black Rose Books, 1975, introduction, p.i

27 Sirianni, Ibid, p.17

28 Ronald Grigor Suny, “Revising the old story: The 1917 Revolution in light of new sources”, The Workers Revolution in Russia, 1917 : The View from Below , edited by Daniel H. Kaiser, Cambridge University Press, 1987, p.7

29 Sirianni, Ibid, p.26

30 Resolution of the workers of the Old Parvianan metal and machine factory, 13th April, 1917, reported in Izvestiia No 41, 15th April, 1917, p.3

1 Paul Mason, Post-Capitalism: A Guide to Our Future , Penguin, 2015, p.58

2 Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888 - 1938, Oxford University Press, 1973, p.25

3 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire , Harvard University Press, 2001, p.19

4 Hardt and Negri, Ibid, p.xv

5 V.I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism , Progress Publishers, 1978 (first published 1916), p.83.

6 Karl Kautsky, Bernstein und das sozialdemokratisches Programme , Eine Antkritik, 1899, p.43

7 Massimo Salvadori, Karl Kautsky and Socialist Revolution 1880 - 1938, NLB, 1979, p.15