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

4 Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA Penguin, 2007, p.556

5 John Pilger’s documentary The War on Democracy is a detailed exposé of the CIA and US State Department’s involvement in the attempted coup in 2002 against Hugo Chavez’s democratically elected socialist government, which unlike the Bolshevik government maintained freedom of the press and political pluralism.

6 Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed, Trotsky: 1921 - 1929, Oxford University Press, 1959, p.109

7 J.O. Martov, letter to P.B. Axelrod, 1st December, 1917, Hoover Institution Archives, Nicolaevsky collection, series no 17, box 511, files 1-12

8 Ulam, Ibid, p.550

9 Quoted in Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen , Penguin, 2004, pp.65-66. Rayfield’s work is full of detail on individual Chekists and Stalin’s inner circle, but it hardly touches on the mass killings of the White Terror, which on most evidence exceeded its red counterpart. His source evidence–drawn not only from the Russian State Archive of Social-Political History (formally the Communist Party Archives) and the State Archive of the Russian Federation, but also from the Georgian Central State Archive and the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, as well as formerly (until 2004) inaccessible Cheka and NKVD documents, correspondence, interrogation records etc.–is impressive but unbalanced.

10 Legget, Ibid, p.17

11 Golos Truda , 3rd November, 1917, p.1

12 N.I Pavlov, “Party Blindness”, Golos Truda , 18th November 1917, p.4

13 Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution , Oxford, 1991, p.56

14 For the complete chapter on Makhno in Avrich’s Anarchist Portraits (1988), see http://www.ditext.com/avrich/7.html

15 The entire text of the Declaration can be found in the Appendix to Peter Arshinov, History of the Makhnovist Movement 1918 - 1921, Freedom Press, 2005 (originally published 1923).

16 Michael Mallet, Nestor Makhno in the Russian Revolution , MacMillan, 1982, p.124

17 Cited in Arshinov, Ibid, p.103-04

18 Figes, Ibid, p.533

19 V.I. Lenin, “How to organise competition”, December 1917, Collected Works Vol.35, p.204

20 “‘The Socialist Fatherland is in Danger!’: Decree of the Council of People’s Commissars, 21st February, 1918”, in First Decrees of Soviet Power: Acts of Legislation November 1917 July 1918, ed. Yuri Akhapkin, Lawrence and Wishart, 1970, pp.108-09

21 Carr, Ibid, p.169

22 I.N. Steinberg, In the Workshop of the Revolution , New York, 1953, p.145

23 Dzerzhinsky’s report of 17th February, 1919 and the Soviet Central Executive Committee’s resolution on concentration camps are quoted in Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution 1899 - 1919, Collins Harvel, 1990, p.834

24 Karl Kautsky, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat , Manchester, 1918 (re-issued by Ann Arbor Paperbacks, University of Michigan Press, 1964), pp.4-5

25 Salvadori, Ibid, p.257

26 V.I. Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky , 1918, text in Selected Works , Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1952, p.11, 20

27 Kautsky, Ibid, p.23, pp.6-7

28 Lenin, Ibid, p.25, 24

29 V.I. Lenin, Collected Works , Vol. 26, Moscow, 1964, p.303

30 Karl Marx, “The Civil War in France”, in Selected Writings , Ibid, p.542

31 Karl Kautsky, “Demokratie und Demokratie”, Der Kampf , xiii, 1920, p.209

1 L.Trotsky, “Work, Discipline, Order”, Sochineniya xvii, p.17

2 Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921, Oxford University Press, 1954, p.406

3 Quoted in Deutscher, Ibid, p.421

4 Figes, Ibid, p.579

5 Rabinowitch, Ibid, pp.288-89

6 Figes, Ibid, p.649

7 Weekly of Kazan Cheka No 1, November 1918, reprinted in Pravda No 281, 25th December, 1918

8 Shub, Ibid, pp.360-61

9 This telegram, and others of similar ilk, are contained in The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive , Yale University Press, 1996, edited by Richard Pipes. The volume was prepared with the aid of the Russian Centre for the Preservation and Study of Documents of Recent History of the State Archival Service of Russia. When published it contained dozens of hitherto unreleased documents (letters, telegrams, memoranda, etc.). Whilst the contents are primary sources of the first importance it should be noted that Pipes himself has an extra-academic agenda. He was not just Baird Research Professor of History at Harvard University but also a former Director of East European and Soviet Affairs for the US National Security Council, and a consultant to the CIA. Pipes’ immense hostility to Lenin heavily colours his historical work, to its detriment. His selection in The Unknown Lenin must be seen in that light. That said, it appears to reflect the totality of the unpublished material and there is no question as to their authenticity.

10 The full text and a scanned facsimile of Lenin’s memorandum to N.N. Krestinsky is in Pipes, Ibid, p.56

11 Both decrees are quoted in Gregory Petrovich Maximoff, The Guillotine at Work, Vol. 1 : The Leninist Counter-Revolution , Black Thorn Books, 1979 (first published Chicago 1940 by the Alexander Berkman Fund), pp.76-77

12 Lyuobov Krassin, Leonid Krassin: His Life and Work , Skeffington & Son Ltd, 1929, p.98

13 https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/russian-revolution/ch01.htm

14 The Manchester Guardian , 13th July, 1920

15 Victor Serge, “During the Civil War”, Revolution in Danger: Writings from Russia 1919 - 1921, Redwords, 1997, p.11

16 Quoted in Figes, Ibid, p.677

17 Cliff, Ibid, p.18

18 Vero Broido, Daughter of Revolution: A Russian Girlhood Remembered , Constable, 1998, p.114

19 Figes, Ibid, p.604

20 Keep, Ibid, p.429

21 Sovnarcom Decree of 9th May, 1918 quoted in Cliff, Ibid, p.135

22 J. Sverdlov to Russian Communist Party Central Committee, as reported in the Protocols of the RCP CC May 4 th- 20 th 1918, Moscow, 1920, p.294

23 V.P. Miliutin, Agrarnaia Poilitika SSSR , Moscow, 1929, p.106

24 Keep, Ibid, p.435

25 Quoted in Cliff, Ibid, p.137

26 Quoted in Shub, Ibid, p.371

27 Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary (1951), New York Review Books, 2010, p.135

28 V.I. Lenin, Collected Works , Vol. 33, Moscow, p.421-2

29 Nikolai Bukharin, The Economics of the Transition Period , 1920, p.56, quoted in Cohen, Ibid, p.90

30 Bukharin, Ibid, quoted in Cohen, p.91

31 Cohen, Ibid, p.94

32 Serge, Revolution in Danger , Ibid, p.67

33 Resolution of the Menshevik Party Central Committee of 2nd August, 1918, reprinted in Rabochi Internatsional , 7th August, 1918, Petrograd

34 Getzler, Ibid, p.183

35 “The International Situation and the Tasks of the Russian Revolution”, Partiinoe soveshchanie , October 1918, pp.10-11

36 Serge, “During the Civil War”, Ibid, p.11, 14

37 Serge, Ibid, p.27

38 Serge, Memoirs , Ibid, p.107

39 Leon Trotsky, My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiograph y, Penguin, 1975, p.44

40 Quoted in Deutscher, Ibid, p.445

41 Serge, Ibid, p.109

1 Fitzpatrick, Ibid, p.15

2 Cited in Stites, Ibid, p.76

3 Serge, Ibid, p.13

4 Stites, Ibid, p.78

5 Liebman, Ibid, p.331