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

8 Thomas Friedman, “Manifesto for a Fast World”, The New York Times , 28/02/99

9 Lenin, Ibid, p.118

10 V.I. Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks , Volume 14 of Fourth Edition of Collected Works , Progress Publishers, p.259-60.

11 Lenin, Ibid, p.109

12 Karl Marx, “Critical Notes on the King of Prussia and Social Reform”, 1844

13 Figes, Ibid, p.358

14 N.N. Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution 1917 : A Personal Record , edited, translated and abridged by Joel Carmichael, Princeton University Press, p.280

15 Shub, Ibid, p.216

16 V.I. Lenin, April Theses , Kindle Edition

17 The full text of the proclamation from the Okulovsky Paper Factory, 21st May, 1917, is in Mark Steinberg, Voices of Revolution 1917, Yale University Press, 2001, pp.99-100. A fascinating collection of informal reports, resolutions, complaints, petitions, letters and poems of 1917 translated from the Russian and taken from originals held in the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow, formerly the Central State Archive of the October Revolution. Steinberg’s collection is especially interesting in that it features the seldom-heard voice of semi-literate peasants and workers, some politicised by events, some not, some idealistic, some cynical, but all authentic and direct.

18 SR journal Dela Narodo , No.45, May 1917, quoted in King, Ibid, pp.30-31

19 Vero Broido, Lenin and the Mensheviks: The Persecution of Socialists under Bolshevism , Gower Publishing, 1987, p.15

20 E.H. Carr, Ibid, pp.40-41

21 V.I. Lenin, Vol. 19 of the Fourth Edition of Collected Works , English version, Progress Publishers, 1960-70, p.429

22 V.I. Lenin, Vol. 20, Ibid, p.45

23 Trotsky, Ibid, p.289

24 “A Flame of Gold Ablaze”, Pyotr Oreshin, 14th May, 1917, Delo Naroda No 49, p.2

25 Keep, Ibid, p.388

26 V.I. Lenin, Tasks of the Proletariat in our Revolution , Selected Works, Vol. 6, pp.62 and 85-6

27 Brinton, Ibid, p.5

28 “Argentinean Worker-Taken Factories: Trajectories of Workers’ Control under the Economic Crisis”, Marina Kabat, in Ours to Master and to Own , Haymarket Books, edited by Immanuel Ness and Dario Azzellini, 2011, pp.369-77

29 Gregory Wilpert, Changing Venezuela by Taking Power: The History and Policies of the Chavez Government , Verso, 2007, p.76

30 Brinton, Ibid, p.2

31 Castells, Ibid, p.11

1 Trotsky, Ibid, p.315. Despite his honestly expressed ideological bias Trotsky’s data is usually sound.

2 Deutscher, Ibid, p.266

3 Izvestia number 84, June 1917, quoted in Ascher, Ibid, p.97

4 Liebman, Ibid, p.158

5 Liebman, Ibid, p.148

6 Getzler, Ibid, p.154

7 Getzler, Ibid, p.151

8 Figes, Ibid, p.417

9 Figes, Ibid, pp.420-21

10 Figes, Ibid, p.428

11 Getzler, Ibid, pp.155-56

12 Trotsky, Results and Prospects , 1907, London, 1962, pp.246-7

13 Liebman, Ibid, p.127

14 Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution , Ibid, p.155

15 Adam Ulam, Lenin and the Bolsheviks , Fontana/ Collins, 1965, p.462

16 Frederich Engels, Anti-Duhring: Herr Eugen Duhring’s Revolution in Science , 1884, Third German Edition, p.303

17 V.I. Lenin, The State and Revolution , 1918, Peking Foreign Language Press, first edition 1976, originally published 1918, p.122

18 Carr, Ibid, p.35

19 Lenin, Ibid, p.123

20 Ramsay MacDonald, Socialism: Critical and Constructive , Cassell and Company Ltd, 1921, p.vi, p.112, p.32. The problem with MacDonald’s socialism was not his general analysis of capitalism–which is surprisingly radical–or faith in a more rational, cooperative alternative, but lack of any realistic plan to get from one to the other. In that respect he and Lenin, alike in no other way, were two sides of the same coin.

21 Wilson & Thompson, Ibid, p.164

22 Derek Wall, Economics After Capitalism: A Guide to the Ruins , Pluto, 2015, p.103

23 Andrew Fisher, The Failed Experiment: And How to Build an Economy that Works , A Radical Read, 2014, p.123

1 Marc Ferro, The Bolshevik Revolution: A Social History of the Russian Revolution , Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976, p.38

2 N. Podvoysky, “The Military Organisation of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party in 1917”, Krasnaya Letopis No 9, Leningrad, 1923, p.34

3 Abraham Ascher, The Russian Revolution , 2014, One World, p.100

4 Steve A. Smith, Petrograd in 1917 : The View From Below , in Kaiser, Ibid, p.7

5 Leon Trotsky, The Lessons of October , 1924, Bookmarks (1987), p.40

6 Deutscher, Ibid, p.298

7 V.I. Lenin, The Bolsheviks Must Assume State Power: a Letter to the Central Committee and the Petrograd and Moscow Committees of the RSDLP, Progress Publishers, Collected Works , English Edition, Vol. 26, p.19

8 V.I. Lenin, Advice of an Onlooker , Progress Publishers, Collected Works , English Edition, Vol. 26, pp.179-81 Proletarskaya Revolyutziya No 10, Moscow, 1922, p.462

9 Trotsky, Ibid, pp.44-45

10 Rabinowitch, Ibid, p.3

11 Trotsky, Ibid, p.51

12 P.A. Sorokin, Volya narado No 116, September 1917

13 Howe, Ibid, p.50

14 Sukhanov , Ibid , p.578

15 Deutscher, Ibid, p.310

16 Trotsky, Ibid, p.1074

17 Shub, Ibid, pp.274-75

18 Sukhanov, Ibid, p.628

19 Sukhanov, Ibid, p.630

20 Figes, Ibid, p.493-94

21 P.N. Maliantovich, “In the Winter Palace, October 25-26 1917”, The Past No 12, 1918, p.117-19. Antonov-Ovseenko would later discover just how interesting the social experiment would become. A principled Bolshevik, he was appalled at the rise of the Stalinist machine in the 1920s and was a prominent member of the Trotskyist opposition until Trotsky’s exile in 1929. He was sent to Spain in the 1930s to work for the Comintern but on his return to the Soviet Union in 1938 he was executed in the Great Terror. Thus Stalin murdered the Bolshevik who had led the storming of the Winter Palace.

22 Sukhanov, Ibid, p.635

23 Figes, Ibid, p.494

24 John L.H. Keep, The Russian Revolution: A Study in Mass Mobilization , W.W Norton & Company, 1976, p.255

1 Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution , Ibid, p.838

2 Trotsky, Ibid, p.839

3 Sukhanov, Ibid, p.636

4 Boris Nicolaevsky, “Pages from the Past”, Sotsialisticheskii vestnik , No 77-78, 1958, p.150

5 Oleg Budnitskii, Russian Jews Between the Reds and the Whites 1917 - 1920, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012, p.65

6 T.H. Rigby, Lenin’s Government: Sovnarkom 1917 - 22, Cambridge University Press, 1979, p.3

7 For the complete translated texts of Sovnarcom’s most important Decrees between October 1917 (November in the subsequently adopted Gregorian calendar) and July 1918 see First Decrees of Soviet Power: Acts of Legislation November 1917 -July 1918, compiled with an introduction and explanatory notes by Yuri Akhapkin, Lawrence and Wishart, 1970. Most of the Decrees published in Akhapkin were translated from Decrees of the Soviet Government Volumes I and II, 1957 and 1959, prepared by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Institute of History of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

8 Brinton, Ibid, p.12