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

9 Diane P. Koenker, “Labour Relations in Socialist Russia: Class Values and Production Values in the Printers Union 1917-1921”, in Making Workers Soviet , Ibid, p.171-72

10 Cited in Carr, Ibid, p.152

11 V.I. Lenin, Collected Works , Fifth Edition, Vol. 37, p.245; Lenin, Ibid, Vol. 41, p.383

12 Rabinowitch, Ibid, p.26

13 Broido, Ibid, p.22

14 The full text of the resolution of the Baltic Shipbuilding Works, 2nd November, 1917, is in Steinberg, Ibid, p.274

15 Getzler, Ibid, p.168

16 Rabinowitch, Ibid, p.31

17 Tony Cliff, Revolution Besieged: Lenin 1917 - 1923, Bookmarks, 1987, p.25

18 The Debate on Soviet Power: Minutes of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets, 2 nd Convocation, October 1917 -January 1918, Oxford University Press, 1979, translated and edited by John L.H. Keep, contains “a composite text, reconstructed according to published primary sources, of the proceedings of Soviet Russia’s first quasi-legislative assembly” between 27th October, 1917 and 6th January, 1918. It thus records the only period of free and uncensored debate in the CEC after 25th October, 1917, when Sovnarcom had not yet consolidated its power and all strands of socialist opinion could argue about the political and economic make-up of the regime, whether there should be a broad socialist coalition government, how accountable it should be to the CEC, and if the executive and legislative functions should be united or divided. As Keep summarises the matter of the arguments, “very few of these representatives, or the men for whom they spoke, were in favour of unlimited dictatorship by a single revolutionary party, the form which ‘Soviet power’ quickly assumed” (Keep, Preface, p.v). Ibid, pp.50-53

19 Keep, Ibid, p.63

20 Quoted in Shub, Ibid, p.310

21 See Shub, Ibid, pp.311-12 for a breakdown of all socialist newspapers forcibly closed down in late 1917.

22 Keep, Ibid, pp.68-74

23 Keep, Ibid, pp.77-78

24 Quoted in Pipes, Ibid, p.523, drawn from the Minutes of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets, 4th November, 1917

1 The most forensic examination of the Constituent Assembly general election, Oliver H. Radkey’s Russia Goes to the Polls: The Election to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly 1917, first published in 1950, found that although the electoral statistics were in “a deplorable condition” it was still possible, with great care, to reconstruct them and establish reliable results. Radkey’s definitive totals, while clarifying and improving some regional returns, were surprisingly not that far from those published at the time. In all the controversy surrounding the Constituent Assembly elections it is significant that no party, not even the Bolsheviks, seems to have questioned the overall statistical accuracy of the result, and there is no reason to do so now.

2 Sheila Fitzpatrick, Introduction to Radkey, p.2

3 See Radkey’s chart on pp.18-19 of Russia Goes to the Polls (1977 version) for a breakdown of the electoral returns. Chapter 2 considers the returns by regions and provinces, and also other segments of the vote such as soldiers still at the front.

4 Liebman, Ibid, p.233

5 Leninist arguments about a misleading united SR Party list have some validity but miss the main point. Most SR voters, before and after the SR split, did not differentiate between Left SR and Right SRs. The vast bulk of their peasant supporters saw the historic SR programme as a whole, and voted for it. There is no evidence that any of those who voted the main SR slate did so because of a hidden desire for an urban-based dictatorship of the proletariat overseen by another party. Additionally, if a united SR electoral list was misleading it was no more misleading than a united Bolshevik party list. The Bolsheviks, too, had vast and fundamental internal differences, although these had been disguised. And the Bolsheviks, in any guise, had not gone to the electorate offering what became their actual programme for the land. The peasant electorate would never get another chance to pronounce on this programme as there were no further national elections.

6 Radkey, Russia Goes to the Polls: The Election to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly, 1917, Cornell University Press, 1950 (updated edition 1977), p.16

7 V.I. Lenin, “Theses on the Constituent Assembly”, Pravda , 13th December, 1917

8 Cliff, Ibid, pp.35-36

9 Steinberg, Ibid, pp.267

10 Novaya Zhizn No 4, 6th January, 1918, p.3

11 Maxim Gorky , Novaya Zhizn No 6, 9th January, 1918, p.5

12 Liebman, Ibid, p.235

13 T.E. Novitskaya, compiler of Constituent Assembly records, Uchreditel’noe Sobranie , 1918, Nedra, pp.15859, quoted in King, Ibid, pp.95-96

14 Sub, Ibid, p.326

15 Broido, Ibid, p.26

16 Brinton, Ibid, p.16

17 A. Lozovski, Rabochii Kontrol , Socialist Publishing House, Petrograd, 1918, p.10

18 Sirianni, Ibid, p.102

19 David Mandel, “The Factory Committee Movement in the Russian Revolution”, in Ours to Master and to Own , Ibid, p.119

20 V.I. Lenin, Collected Works , Vol. 22, Moscow, p.215

21 William G. Rosenberg, “Russian Labour and Bolshevik Power: Social Dimensions of Protest in Petrograd after October”, originally published in Slavic Review Volume 44, 1985, reprinted in Kaiser, Ibid, p. 98-131

22 Quoted in Brinton, Ibid, p.26

23 Quoted in Brinton, Ibid, p.27

24 Kommunist , No 2, April 1918, p.5

25 Alexander Rabinowitch, “The Petrograd First City District Soviet during the Civil War”, in Party, State and Society in the Russian Civil War: Explorations in Social History , Indiana University Press, 1989, p.153

26 Rabinowitch, Ibid, p.134-36

27 Vladimir Brovkin, “The Mensheviks’ Political Comeback: The Elections to the Provincial City Soviets in Spring 1918”, Russian Review Volume 42, Issue 1, 1983, p.1

28 V.I. Lenin, Collected Works , Vol. 27, p.133

29 Brovkin, Ibid, p.6

30 Kostromskoi Guberni , May 1918, p.305-06

31 Brovkin, Dear Comrades: Menshevik Reports on the Bolshevik Revolution and Civil War , Ibid, p.83-85

32 Brovkin, Russian Review 42, Ibid, p.11, p.13, p.14

33 A. Lockerman, Les Bolsheviks a l’oeuvre , Paris, 1920, p.54

34 Quoted in Novaia Zaria No 1, 22nd April, 1918, p.34

35 Leonard Schapiro, The Origins of the Communist Autocracy: Political Opposition in the Soviet State, First Phase, 1917 - 22, Palgrave Macmillan, 1956, p.191

36 Rosenberg, Ibid, p.118

37 Rabinowitch, Ibid, p.226

38 Quoted in Broido, Ibid, p.77

39 Quoted in Rabinowitch, Ibid, p.255

40 Akhapkin, Ibid, p.147-53 for the full text of the Decree on Nationalisation, 28th June, 1918.

41 K. Radek, “After five months”, Kommunist 1, April 1918, p.3-4

42 V.I. Lenin, The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government , originally published in Izvestia , 28th April, 1918; Progress Publishers, 1970, p.19, p.21, p.25, p.35, p.46

43 Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky , originally published 1920, Verso, 2007, p.104

1 Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States , Harper Perennial, 2001, p.372

2 Sharon Smith, Subterranean Fire: A History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States , Haymarket Books, 2006, p.95

3 For a detailed breakdown and analysis of the FBI’s secret COINTELPRO memoranda, some of it redacted, see Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall at http://archive.is/YJA4m