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

1 Stites, Ibid, p.55

2 Israel Getzler, Kronstadt 1917 - 1921, Cambridge University Press, 1983, p.212

3 Paul Avrich, Kronstadt 1921, Princeton University Press, 1970, p.6

4 Ida Mett, The Kronstadt Uprising , Black Rose Books, 1971, Introduction by Murray Bookchin, p.2

5 Aves, Ibid, p.113, p.120

6 Aves, Ibid, p.112

7 Richard Sawka, Soviet Communists in Power: A Study of Moscow during the Civil War 1918 - 1921, Palgrave, 1988, p.94-95

8 Avrich, Ibid, p.35

9 Resolution of Second Conference of Communist Sailors of the Baltic Fleet cited in Mett, Ibid, p.36

10 S.M. Petrichenko, Pravda o Kronshtadtskikh Sobyittakh , 1921, p.6

11 Mett, Ibid, pp.40-41, for the Kronstadt resolution and political programme of the Kronstadt rebellion.

12 Alexander Berkman, The Bolshevik Myth: Diary 1920 - 1922, Pluto Press, 1989 (first published 1925), p.292

13 Kornatovskii miatezh , p.26, cited in Avrich, Ibid, p.43

14 Pravda o Kronshstade , 8th March, 1921, pp.82-8

15 Samuel Farber, Before Stalinism: The Rise and Fall of Soviet Democracy , Polity Press, 1990, pp.192-93

16 Getzler, Ibid, p.235

17 The “Ultimatum” to the Kronstadt sailors was issued in Petrograd by Trotsky as People’s Commissar of War. Its full text can be found in Kronstadt by V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky , Pathfinder Press, 1979, p.67

18 Figes, Ibid, p.767

19 Leon Trotsky, “Kronstadt and the Stock Exchange”, Pravda No 63, 23rd March, 1921

20 Cited in Broido, Ibid, p.66

21 Avrich, Ibid, p.224

22 Cohen, Ibid, p.124

23 Serge, Ibid, p.172

24 The entire text of Lenin’s “The Tax in Kind” article is at https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/apr/21.htm

25 Figes, Ibid, p.768, and references to support the estimation of the total imprisoned and shot during the suppression of the Tambov rebellion.

26 “Pause! Read! Consider!” proclamation cited in Appendix to Arshinov, Ibid

27 Cited in Figes, Ibid, p.683

28 Berkman, Ibid, p.310, p.311, p.314

29 Serge, Ibid, p.88

30 V. Alexandrovna, Perezhitoe (1917-21) (Past Life), Paper No 12, “Inter-University Project on the History of the Menshevik Movement”, pp.69-82

31 V.I. Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 33, Moscow, p.65

32 V.I. Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 32, Moscow, p.412

33 Record of the Eleventh Party Congress, CPSU in Resolutions, 1, p.607, p.610

34 Record of the Eleventh Party Congress, Ibid, pp.103-04

1 “Noam Chomsky on Violence, Leninism and the Left after Occupy”, interview with Christopher Helali, 11th September, 2013, at http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=10111

2 Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914 - 1991, Michael Joseph, 1994, p.69

3 Peter Koivisto, “The Decline of the Finnish-American Left 1925-45”, International Migration Review 17, 1983

4 Maurice Brinton, The Irrational in Politics , Black Rose Books, 1968, p.11

5 Vladimir Brovkin, Russia after Lenin: Politics, Culture and Society 1921 - 1929, Routledge, 1998, pp.174-75

6 John B. Hatch, “Labour Conflict in Moscow 1921-1926”, in Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture , edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick, Alexander Rabinowitch and Richard Stites, Indiana University Press, 1991, pp.62-67

7 Daniel R. Brower, “The City in Danger: The Civil War and the Russian Urban Population”, in Party, State and Society in the Russian Civil War , Ibid, p.61

8 Diane P. Koenker, Journal of Modern History , Ibid

9 Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Ronald G. Suny, “In Search of the Soviet Working Class”, in Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class and Identity , Ibid, p.16

10 Sotsialistichenskii vestnik No 18, 20th September, 1924

11 Diane P. Koenker, Republic of Labour: Russian Printers and Soviet Socialism 1918 - 1930, Cornell University Press, 2005, p.170

12 Koenker, Ibid, pp.166-67

13 Fitzpatrick, Ibid, p.21

14 Diane P. Koenker, “Urbanisation and Deurbanisation in the Russian Revolution and Civil War”, Journal of Modern History 57, 1985, pp.424-50

15 E.P. Thompson, “Eighteenth Century English Society: Class struggle without class?”, Social History 3, May 1978, p.147-8 and 149

16 Cited in A.V. Lunacharsky, Vpadochrye Nastoeniya Molodezhi , p.56-7

17 Tony Cliff, Trotsky: Fighting the Rising Stalinist Bureaucracy 1923 - 1927, Bookmarks, 1991, p.149

18 https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1927/opposition/

19 Articles by Bukharin cited in Cohen, Ibid, p.159

20 Articles by Bukharin cited in Cohen, Ibid, p.140

21 Deutscher, Ibid, p.234

22 Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps , Penguin, 2004, pp.44-45. Although Applebaum is a classic product of the Anglo-American ruling class (educated at Yale and Oxford, Foreign and Deputy Editor at the Spectator , on the editorial board of the Washington Post and married to the Polish Foreign Minister) her history of the Gulag, based on state and personal records previously unearthed or inaccessible, is definitive and irreproachable.

23 George Orwell, New English Weekly , 12th January, 1939

24 E.P. Thompson, “The New Left”, The New Reasoner No 9 (Summer 1959), pp.1-2

25 Jack Newfield, “A Populist Manifesto: The Making of a New Majority”, New York Magazine , 1971, pp.39-46

26 Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative , AK Press, 2000 (first published 1968), p.197, p.221

27 Foot, Ibid, p.448

28 http://www.redpepper.org.uk/my-supportfor-jeremy-corbyn-is-about-much-more-thanreclaiming-labour/

29 Bookchin, Ibid

30 Gorz, Ibid, p.7

31 Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution , Ibid, p.284

32 Victoria Burnett, “A Job and No Mortgage For All in a Spanish Town”, The New York Times , 25th May, 2009

33 Bukharin’s articles on the cooperative sector are cited in Cohen, Ibid, p.196

34 Karl Marx, Inaugural Address to the First International Working Men’s Association , 1864, cited McLellan, p.178

35 “Exiting the Vampire Castle”, Our Kingdom blog, 24th November, 2013

36 Bray, Ibid, p.257

37 For a fascinating analysis of the Mousai House, see http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_mousai_house_--_a_grassroots_model_for_a_cooperative_economy_20160702

38 Noam Chomsky, “Notes on Anarchism”, New York Review of Books , May 21st, 1970

39 Brand, Ibid, p.342

40 Leon Trotsky, “The USSR in War”, Byulleten Oppositzii , October 1939, p.9, p.15

41 W.H. Auden, “September 1st 1939”

42 See http://criticallegalthinking.com/2012/08/20/pussy-riot-maria-alyokhinas-closing-statement/

For almost three years, like Elvis Costello, “Every Day I Write the Book”. So first and foremost to my wife Sue, who said it would be nice, when it was finished, to have me back on the sofa watching the TV as used to be the case. I owe her much more than these words can say.

This book is not a work of original primary research, except to the extent that neglected works of forgotten socialists and anarchists can be found in old pamphlets in the second-hand sections of left-wing bookshops and online. Although my academic background is in history and I have done professional research work for the British trade union movement and for my first book on the Labour Party in the mid-1970s, I am an amateur historian. I have had neither the time nor resources to visit the archives of Moscow, St Petersburg or Harvard University, and I am glad that others have so that I can mine their work. In that respect I have stood on the shoulders of giants, most especially Diane Koenker, Richard Stites, Vladimir Brovkin, Sheila Fitzpatrick and Alexander Rabinowitch. I must also thank my friend Valerie Phillips for loaning me some of her collection of Russian revolutionary agitprop posters and prints.