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

29 Brovkin, Ibid, p.369, cites reports that reveal what actually happened in Astrakhan, despite the Soviet government imposing a complete news blackout on events in the town.

30 Brovkin, Ibid, p.371

31 The complete text of F.W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management , is at http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/gilded/progress/text3/taylor.pdf

32 For a summary of Gorz’s analysis and its implications for trade unions, see http://globalsolidarity.antenna.nl/gorz.html#top

33 Stites, Ibid, p.147

1 Keep, Ibid, p.289

2 Report in I s’yezd , Moscow, p.76

3 Diane P. Koenker, Republic of Labor: Russian Printers and Soviet Socialism 1918 - 1930, Cornell University Press, 2005, p.4

4 Sobraniye Uzakonenii , 1920, No 8, Article 49; in record of Third All-Russian Trade Union Congress, 1920, 1, Plenum, p.50-51

5 “The Tasks of the Trade Unions”, M. Tomsky, Ninth Party Congress, Appendix 13, p.534

6 Leon Trotsky, Sochinenya , Vol. 15, p.126

7 Leon Trotsky, Ninth RCP Congress, p.100, cited in Robert V. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia , Harvard University Press, 1960, p.121

8 Koenker, Ibid, p.165

9 V.I. Lenin, Ninth RCP Congress, Report of the Central Committee of the RCP, Vol. 27, p.76, quoted in Maximoff, Ibid, p.114

10 Ninth Party Congress, Resolutions, Appendix 12, p.532

11 Third All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions, stenographic report, Moscow, 1920, p.87-97

12 Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky , Verso, 2007 (first published 1920), p.124, p.125

13 Trotsky, Ibid, p.127, p.137

14 Brinton, Ibid, p.65

15 It is impossible to tease out Lenin’s motivations for allowing Martov to travel to Halle, when doing so was an obvious threat to Bolshevik interests. The Lenin-Martov relationship was a deep and complex one, in some respects second only to Lenin’s relationship with Inessa Armand. Despite their intense political differences, which Lenin never soft-pedaled, he seems to have felt a genuine affection and respect for Martov. When Martov was ill in 1919 he sent him one of the best doctors in Petrograd. Lenin’s insistence that Martov be allowed to travel abroad, with the likelihood he would not be allowed back, may have been an attempt to remove him from harm’s way. After 1920 Martov would not have survived much longer in Soviet Russia and it is certain he would never have compromised his principles. In 1923, when Lenin lay incapacitated by a severe stroke, he is said to have told his wife with obvious sadness, “They say Martov too is dying”.

16 Record of Seventh All-Russian Soviet Congress, 1919, p.20

17 Record of Seventh All-Russian Soviet Congress, 1919, pp.60-63

18 Record of Eighth All-Russian Soviet Congress, 1920, pp.55-57

19 Ben Lewis and Lars T. Lih, Martov and Zinoviev: Head to Head in Halle , November Publications, 2011, p.27

20 The entire translated text of Zinoviev’s speech is in Lewis and Lih, Ibid, pp.117-58

21 The entire translated text of Martov’s speech is in Lewis and Lih, Ibid, p.167-79

22 Chris Harman, The Lost Revolution: Germany 1918-1923, Bookmarks, 1982, pp.196-201, contains a very useful examination of the “March Action”.

23 Martov’s The State and Socialist Revolution consisted of several essays. “The Ideology of Sovietism” first appeared in the Menshevik journal Mysl in 1919; “The Conquest of the State” in the exile Menshevik journal Sozialsticheski Vestnik in Berlin in 1923. The main essay, “Marx and the Problem of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat”, was published originally in 1918 in Workers International of Moscow .

24 George Orwell, “Reflections on Gandhi”, Partisan Review , January 1949

1 See Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine , Oxford University Press, 1996, for a complete account of the Tambov Rebellion.

2 Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary (1951), New York Review Books, 2010, p.136-137

3 V.I. Lenin, Collected Works , Vol. 20, Moscow, pp.539-41

4 “Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia”, Sovnarcom, 2nd November, 1917, in Akhapin, Ibid, pp.31-32

5 “Draft Theses of the Central Committee RPK(b) Concerning Policy in the Ukraine”, entire text in Pipes, Ibid, pp.76-77

6 See Paul Avrich and Michael Malet for two excellent accounts of Makhno’s politics, and a thorough demolition of the claims that he and his movement were anti-Semitic https://libcom.org/history/anti-semitism-makhnovists-michael-maletand https://libcom.org/history/nestor-makhnoman-myth

7 M. Agursky, The Third Rome: National Bolshevism in the USSR, Boulder, 1987, p.185

8 Stites, Ibid, p.99

9 Ronald Grigor Suny, “Social Democrats in Power: Menshevik Georgia and the Russian Civil War”, in Party, State and Society in the Russian Civil War , Ibid, p.345

10 Text of the Appeal cited in Maximoff, Ibid, pp.171-72

11 The full text of Kautsky’s book on Georgia, which is one of his leanest, clearest and most personally engaged works, is at https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1921/georgia/index.htm

12 Goldman, Ibid, p.12

13 Goldman, Ibid, p.174

14 Cited in Diane P. Koenker, Republic of Labor: Russian Printers and Soviet Socialism, 1918 - 1930, Cornell University Press, 2005, p.52

15 Jonathan Aves, Workers against Lenin: Labour Protest and the Bolshevik Dictatorship 1920 - 1922, I.B Tauris, 1997, p.69, p.74

16 Koenker, Ibid, p.53

17 Dybenko later became a Stalin loyalist who led the purging, torture and murder of his old commander Marshall Tukchachevsky and other Red Army leaders in 1937. Like many who led the first wave of the Great Terror, Dybenko perished in the second. In 1938 Stalin had him arrested and executed.

18 Alexandra Kollontai, The Workers’ Opposition , First Prism Key Press Edition, 2011 (first published 1921), full text.

19 Leon Trotsky, “The Trade Unions and their Further Role”, Tenth Congress of the RCP, appendix 10. p.786

20 V.I. Lenin, Collected Works , Vol. 32, Moscow, p.20-21

21 Brinton, Ibid, p.79

22 Cathy Porter, Alexandra Kollontai: A Biography , Virago, 1980, p.369

23 Daniels, Ibid, p.135

24 Anna Itkina, Revolutionary, Tribune, Diplomat: A Brief Life of Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai , Moscow, p.213

25 Porter, Ibid, p.370

26 Itkina, Ibid, p.193

27 Resolutions of the Tenth Party Congress “On the Unity of the Party” and “on the Syndicalist and Anarchist Deviation in our Party”, CPSU in Resolutions, pp.527-30 and p.531, as cited in Daniels, Ibid, p.468

28 K. Radek, record of Tenth Party Congress, p.540, cited in Daniels op cit

29 The total number of people who perished in the Great Purge is contested and ranges from the “low hundreds of thousands” to 1.2 million, depending on the criteria used to establish “murder”, i.e. direct execution by the NKVD or a range of other deaths brought about by the conditions in the Gulag camps. Anne Applebaum points out that as terrible as the Great Purge was and the high level of deaths in 1936-38, the death rate in the Gulag in the periods before and after the Purge, at the time of the state-directed rural famine of 1932-33 and again in 1942-43, was much higher.

30 Leon Trotsky, Thirteenth Congress of the RCP, pp.166-67, cited in Daniels, Ibid, p.240