Stalin, Volume 1

192. Miliukov, Russian Revolution, II: 100; Savich, Vospominaniia, 247, 250–1.

193. Kerensky, Delo Kornilova, 81. “General Korniloff came to the Moscow Conference in great pomp,” Kerensky later wrote. “At the station he was met by the entire elite of the capital. . . . On the streets of Moscow pamphlets were being distributed, entitled, ‘Korniloff, the National hero.’” Kerensky, The Catastrophe, 315. See also Miliukov, Istoriia vtoroi, II: 133; Miliukov, Russian Revolution, II: 107.

194. Dumova, “Maloizvestnye materialy po istorii kornilovshchiny,” 78; Savich, Vospominaniia, 246–50. See also Rosenberg, Liberals, 196–233, who shows Cadet party complicity in as well as division over a possible Kornilov dictatorship. After Kornilov’s imprisonment, Miliukov, on the pretext of taking a holiday, would quietly depart the capital. The newspaper he edited, Rech’, was now subjected to Provisional Government censorship. Novoe vremia, further to the right, was shut down altogether.

195. George Katkov adduced persuasive evidence that Kerensky engaged in a provocation, but Katkov allowed that “we may presume that Kornilov had certain plans in mind in the event of the government’s not taking the desired action.” General Lukomsky, a confidant of Kornilov, had admitted just such plans on the part of Kornilov. Katkov, Russia, 1917. Katkov, The Kornilov Affair, 65; Lukomskii, Vospominaniia, I: 228–9; Loukomsky, Memoirs of the Russian Revolution, 100–1.

196. That is why some members of the general staff, disgusted as they were, saw no other way to prosecute the war than by cooperating with the distasteful “democratic” forces (soldiers’ committees). Wildman, “Officers of the General Staff and the Kornilov Movement.”

197. Lukomskii, Vospominaniia, I: 228, 232. “Gentlemen,” the Savage Division commander Chavachadze had told his men in June 1917, “I am sorry indeed that the young officers who joined our colors recently will have to start their fighting career by doing a rather repulsive sort of police work.” Kournakoff, Savage Squadrons, 321.

198. Lih, Lenin, 140.

199. Rabochii, August 25, 1917, in Sochineniia, III: 251–5.

200. For an overview, see Munck, Kornilov Revolt. Kerensky and his minions shaped most of the historical record on the Kornilov affair. But R. R. Raupakh, a member of the investigatory commission, collected depositions from witnesses in a way to protect Kornilov. Allan K. Wildman, “Officers of the General Staff and the Kornilov Movement,” in Frankel, Revolution in Russia, 76–101 (at 101, n36). Kornilov was practically the only participant who did not write an account (he died the next year); for Kornilov’s September 1917 deposition, see Katkov, Russia, 1917, appendix.

201. “The Kornilov affair represented, on the one hand, a reaction against the disintegration of the old army and, on the other, a juncture of two intrigues, which weren’t exactly the same but closely interwoven and headed in the same direction”—i.e. Kerensky’s and Kornilov’s. Shklovsky, Sentimental Journey, 63. There is a third view that the affair involved misunderstanding on both sides; misunderstanding there was aplenty, but matters were darker than that.

202. Russkoe slovo, August 31, 1917 (N. V. Nekrasov); Martynov, Kornilov, 101. Amid the relentless rumors of a Bolshevik coup, August 27 stood out for being the six-month anniversary of the February Revolution, and may have been part of Kornilov’s calculations of dates.

203. Avdeev, Revoliutsiia 1917 goda, IV: 98. See also Ukraintsev, “A Document on the Kornilov Affair” (Ukraintsev was a member of the Investigatory Commission established by Kerensky and he punctures Kerensky’s account). See also Pipes, Russian Revolution, 448–64; and Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks Come to Power, 117–27.

204. Lukomskii, Vospominaniia, I: 242; Avdeev, Revoliutsiia 1917 goda, IV: 100–1; Novaia zhizn’, August 31, 1917; Kerenskii, Delo Kornilova, 104–5; Abraham, Kerensky, 277; Pipes, Russian Revolution, 457–9.

205. Chugaev, Revoliutsionoe dvizhenie, 446; Golovin, Rossiiskaia kontr-revoliutsiia, I/ii: 37; Pipes, Russian Revolution, 460.

206. Trotsky, My Life, 331.

207. Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks Come to Power, 148–9.

208. Krymov is said to have stated that “The last card for saving the motherland has been beaten—living is no longer worthwhile,” and to have left a suicide note for Kornilov, but no text survives. Martynov, Kornilov, 135–42, 14–51; Avdeev, Revoliutsiia 1917 goda, IV: 143, 343–50; Kerenskii, Delo Kornilova, 75–6; Browder and Kerensky, Russian Provisional Government, III: 1586–9.

209. Stalin, “Protiv soglasheniia s burzhuaziei,” Rabochii, August 31, 1917, in Sochineniia, 236–7. See also Stalin, “My trebuem,” Rabochii, August 28, 1917, in Sochineniia, 256–60.

210. Gilliard, Thirteen Years, 243; Steinberg and Khrustalëv, Fall of the Romanovs, 198 (for Nicholas II’s own diary entry).

211. Officers in the capital had been alerted to prepare to respond. (Rendle, Defenders of the Motherland, 182–3.) The officers took little or no action, but then again, there was no action to be taken: the episode had ended even before Krymov had set foot in Petrograd. Therefore, it is not correct that “hard-core support” was “exceedingly slight.” (Allan K. Wildman, “Officers of the General Staff and the Kornilov Movement,” in Frankel, Revolution in Russia, 98.) Also—it must be kept in mind—Kerensky spread lies and deliberately sowed confusion about what was going on, sowing uncertainty and inaction among potential supporters of Kornilov. (Pipes, Russian Revolution, 460–1.) For uncertainty among elites about Kornilov, see Rendle, Defenders of the Motherland, 234. That said, Wildman is right that Kornilov enjoyed his strongest support among the most senior officers at headquarters, linked as alumni of the general staff academy.

212. “How was it that Kornilov sent his troops while he himself sat quietly at headquarters?” Zinaida Gippius observed in her diary during those days. She perceived, in real time, a provocation by Kerensky instead of a Kornilov coup. Gippius, Siniaia kniga, 180–1 (August 31, 1917).

213. Kerensky’s obvious betrayal of Kornilov was noted at the time by one contemporary correspondent, Harold Williams, a New Zealander. Zohrab, “The Socialist Revolutionary Party,” 153–4.

214. Kolonitskii, “Pravoekstremistskie sily,” pt. 1: 111–24. Kornilov’s supporters among industrialists and financiers in Petrograd and Moscow, meanwhile, may have damaged him by their mutual animosities. White, “The Kornilov Affair.”

215. Most of the high command despised the soldiers’ committees (soviets), unable to comprehend that the army’s disintegration had been partly contained by the committees’ advent. Wildman, End of the Russian Imperial Army, I: 246.

216. See the analysis of the sympathetic fellow-lawyer, Vladas Stanka [V. B. Stankevich], Kerensky’s political commissar-in-chief to the military, who argued that Kerensky’s actions, though ultimately ineffective, were the only ones compatible with upholding democratic values. Stankevich, Vospominaniia, 215–22. See also Keep, Soviet Studies.

217. Nielsen and Weil, Russkaia revoliutsiia glazami Petrogradskogo chinovnika, 9 (September 19, 1917).

218. Golovin, Rossiiskaia kontr-revoliutsiia, I/ii: 71, 101. Pipes cites, as final verdict on Kornilov’s motives, the observations of the British eyewitness. Wilcox, Russia’s Ruin, 276; Pipes, Russian Revolution, 464.

219. Alexeyev apparently had accepted in order to try to protect Kornilov and other arrested traitors. Ivanov, Kornilovshcina i ee razgrom, 207.

220. “The prestige of Kerensky and the Provisional Government,” wrote Kerensky’s wife, “was completely destroyed by the Kornilov Affair; and he was left with almost no supporters.” Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 455 (quoting O. L. Kerenskaia, “Otryvki vospominanii,” 8, in House of Lords Record Office). The Directory endured until September 25, when it was replaced by the so-called third coalition (and final incarnation) of the Provisional Government. Browder and Kerensky, Russian Provisional Government, II: 1659–61.

221. At the Third All-Russia Congress of trade unions in Petrograd on June 20–28, 1917, the Bolsheviks claimed 73 delegates out of 211; the Mensheviks, SRs, and other moderate socialists had a majority that defeated Bolshevik motions against cooperation with the “bourgeoisie.” Tret’ia Vserossiiskaia konferentsiia professional’nykh soiuzov (Moscow: VTsSPS, 1917). In the June 1917 municipal elections in Moscow, the SRs had triumphed (58 percent); the Bolsheviks came in fourth, after the Cadets and Mensheviks. Colton, Moscow, 83.

222. Duvall, “The Bolshevik Secretariat,” 57; Steklov, Bortsy za sotsializm, II: 397–8; Ia. S. Sheynkman, “Sverdlov,” Puti revoliutsii [Kazan], 1922, no. 1: 7; Podvoiskii, Krasnaia gvardiia, 23; Sverdlova, Iakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov [1957], 301, 336; Sverdlov, Izbrannye proizvedennye, II: 38, 48–9, 277; Schapiro, Communist Party, 173. Sukhanov’s wife Galina worked in Sverdlov’s secretariat.

223. Sukhanov, Zapiski, I: 201.

224. Lih, “The Ironic Triumph of ‘Old Bolshevism,’” (citing Listovki Moskovskoi organizatsii bol’shevikov, 1914–1925 gg. [Moscow: Politcheskaia literatura, 1954]).

225. Mel’gunov, Bolshevik Seizure of Power, 4.

226. Kerensky, The Catastrophe, 321; Trotskii, Istoriia russkoi revoliutsii, II: 136–40; Chamberlin, Russian Revolution, I: 277; Wildman, End of the Russian Imperial Army, II: 185; Kolonitskii, “Kerensky,” 146.

227. Stalin, “Svoim putem,” Rabochii put’, September 6, 1917, in Sochineniia, III: 272–4.

228. Stalin, “Dve linii,” Rabochii put’, September 16, 1917, in Sochineniia, III: 293–5.

229. V. I. Lenin, “Letter to the Bolshevik Central Committee, the Moscow and Petrograd Committees and the Bolsheviks Members of the Moscow and Petrograd Soviets,” in Selected Works, II: 390. See also Volkogonov, Lenin: Life and Legacy, xxxi (RGASPI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 4269, l. 1); and PSS, XXXIV: 435–6.

230. Browder and Kerensky, Russian Provisional Government, III: 1641–2.

231. “Every discussion in a public place in Russia now concerns food,” wrote one foreigner after having traveled the Volga valley. Price and Rose, Dispatches from the Revolution, 65. As of October 15, there were perhaps three to four days’ worth of food reserves in the capital. Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie, II: 351–2. In early October, the Putilov factory director reported that he had run completely out of coal and that thirteen of the factory’s shops were shutting down. Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie, II: 163–4.

232. Kitanina, Voina, khleb i revoliutsiia (Leningrad, 1985), 332–3 (October 13, 1917); Golovine, Russian Army, 175–6.

233. Abraham, Kerensky, 244.

234. Daniels, Red October, 61.

235. Stalin, “Kontrrevoliutsiia mobilizuetsia—gotovtes’ k otporu,” Rabochii put’, October 10, 1917, in Sochineniia, III: 361–3.

236. Trotskii, O Lenine, 70–3; Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution [1961], 148–9; Slusser, Stalin in October, 226–36; Protokoly Tsentral’nogo komiteta RSDRP (b, 55; Kudelli, Pervyi legal’nyi Peterburgskii komitet bol’shevikov, 316 (Kalinin); Abrosimova, Peterburgskii komitet RSDRP (b), 508; Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks Come to Power, 209–16.

237. Novaia zhizn’, October 18, 1917: 3. Kamenev worried about the supposedly well-organized and loyal government troops, Cossacks and junkers (cadets), and warned that a failed uprising would possibly destroy the party for good. Raskolnikov claims he argued with Kamenev but neither could convince the other. F. F. Raskolnikov, “Nakanune Oktiabr’skoi revoliutsii” [written 1921–2], RGVA, f. 33 987, op. 2, d. 141, l. 463–500, Volkogonov papers, container 17.

238. PSS, XXXIV: 419–27; Protokoly Tsentral’nogo komiteta RSDRP (b), 106–7. In forcing the party to a coup, Lenin had threatened to resign from the Central Committee and publicly oppose it, carrying on from the lower ranks, a right he accorded no one else (Protokoly Tsentral’nogo komiteta RSDRP (b), 74).

239. Novaia zhizn’, October 18, 1917; Protokoly tsentral’nogo komiteta RSDRP, 106–18; Slusser, Stalin in October, 234–37.

240. M. V. Fofanova, “Poslednoe podpol’e V. I. Lenina.”

241. Izvestiia, October 14, 1917: 5; Avdeev, Revoliutsiia 1917 goda, V: 70–1. See also Sukhanov, Zapiski, VII: 40–1; Gronsky, The War and the Russian Government, 112. Trotsky had addressed the Petrograd Soviet about MRC, saying, “They say we are setting up a headquarters for the seizure of power. We make no secret of it.” Trotskii, Sochineniia, III: 15.

242. When the Provisional Government finally announced elections for the Constituent Assembly for November 12, many in the Soviet wanted to cancel the Second Congress of Soviets, but the Bolsheviks helped keep it on course by having the agenda be drafting legislative proposals for the Constituent Assembly.

243. Avdeev, Revoliutsiia 1917 goda, V: 109; Novaia zhizn’, October 18, 1917: 3.

244. The MRC elected a five-member leadership (three Bolsheviks and two Left SRs), and asserted authority over the garrison. Chugaev, Petrogradskii voenno-revoliutsionnyi komitet, I: 63.

245. Sukhanov, Zapiski, VII: 91; Volkogonov, Trotsky, 88.

246. Chugaev, Petrogradskii voenno-revoliutsionnyi komitet, I: 84, 86; Ditetrich Geyer, “The Bolshevik Insurrection in Petrograd,” in Pipes, Revolutionary Russia, 164–79.

247. Trotsky spoke to the same group and confirmed Stalin’s presentation, noting that a consolidation or defensive posture would enable the congress to open. Presumably, the votes were at hand for approving a transfer of “all power to the soviets.” Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks Come to Power, 252–4; Alexander Rabinowitch, “The Petrograd Garrison and the Bolshevik Seizure of Power,” in Pipes, Revolutionary Russia, 172–91. Later both Trotsky and Stalin claimed this “defensive” posture had been camouflage. Trotskii, O Lenine, 69; Mints, Dokumenty velikoi proletarskoi revoliutsii, I: 3 (Stalin).

248. “The existing government of landlords and capitalists must be replaced by a new government, a government of workers and peasants,” Stalin’s confiscated editorial stated. “If all of you act solidly and staunchly, no one will dare to resist the will of the people.” Sochineniia, III: 390. See also Rech’, October 25, 1917: 2; Kerensky, The Catastrophe, 325–6; Izvestiia, October 25, 1917: 7.

249. Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, III: 121. See also Stankevich, Vospominaniia, 258. On October 17, the interior minister had reported that he commanded sufficient reliable troops to beat back any insurrection, although not enough to crush the left preemptively. On the night of October 21–22 Kerensky assured Supreme Commander General Dukhonin that he would still come out to meet him at Mogilyov, undeterred “by fear of some kind of unrest, rebellions, and the like.” Browder and Kerensky, Russian Provisional Government, III: 1744. But nerves were on edge. “I only wish that [the Bolsheviks] would come out and I will put them down,” Kerensky told British ambassador Buchanan. Buchanan, My Mission to Russia, II: 201. During mass meetings on October 22, proclaimed a “Day of the Petrograd Soviet,” Sukhanov recorded “a mood bordering on ecstasy.” Sukhanov, Russian Revolution, II: 584.

250. “The government of M. Kerensky fell before the Bolshevik insurgents,” the Manchester Guardian correspondent correctly reported, “because it had no supporters in the country.” M. Philips Price, Manchester Guardian, November 20, 1917, reprinted in Price and Rose, Dispatches from the Revolution, 88. “The ease with which Lenin and Trotsky overthrew the last coalition Government of Kerensky revealed its inward impotence. The degree of this impotence was an amazement at the time even to well-informed people.” Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, III: 870 (quoting Nabokov, without citation).

251. Reed, Ten Days [1919], 73; Wade, Red Guards and Workers’ Militias, 196–207.

252. Daniels, Red October, 166; “Stavka 25-26 oktiabria 1917 g.”

253. Garrison troops numbered about 160,000 in the city proper, and another 85,000 in the outskirts. Sukhanov estimates that in the city one-tenth took part at most, “very likely fewer.” Sukhanov, Zapiski, VII: 161; Solov’ev, “Samoderzhavie i dvorianskii vopros,” 77; Erykalov, Oktiabr’skoe vooruzhennoe vosstanie, 435.

254. Mel’gunov, Kak bol’sheviki zakhvatili vlast’, 87–9. About thirty shells were fired from Peter and Paul Fortress and two made contact (one hit a cornice). No one was wounded, let alone killed in the shelling. Avdeev, Revoliutsiia 1917, V: 189.

255. Miliukov, Istoriia, III: 256.

256. Lutovinov, Likvidatisiia miatezha Kerenskogo-Krasnogo, 7.

257. Erykalov, Oktiabr’skoe vooruzhennoe vosstanie, 435; Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks Come to Power, 305. General Cheremisov on October 14 had issued an order implying that units of the Petrograd garrison would be deployed to the front.

258. Rakh’ia, “Poslednoe podpol’e Vladimira Il’icha,” 89–90; Rakh’ia, “Moi predoktiabr’skie i posleoktiabr’skie vstrechi s Leninym,” 35–6; Daniels, Red October, 158–61: Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks Come to Power, 266.

259. Kotel’nikov, Vtoroi vserossiiskii s”ezd sovetov, 144–53.

260. Kotel’nikov, Vtoroi vserossiiskii s”ezd sovetov, 4, 34–5; Sukhanov, Zapiski, VII: 198–9; Mstislavskii, Piat’ dnei, 72; Mstislavskii, Five Days, 125.

261. Sukhanov, Zapiski, VII: 203; Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, III: 311 (quoting Sukhanov).

262. Nikolaevskii, “Stranitsy proshlogo,” Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, July–August 1958: 150. The Bolshevik who confronted Martov was Ivan Akulov.

263. Park, Bolshevism in Turkestan, 12–3; Khalid, “Tashkent 1917,” 279; Stalin, “Vsia vlast’ sovetam!” Rabochii put’, September 17, 1917, in Sochineniia, III: 297–99; Blank, “Contested Terrain.”

264. Daniels, Red October, 226; Wade, Russian Revolution, 302–3.

265. “We left not knowing where or why,” Sukhanov wrote a few years later, “cutting ourselves off from the Soviet, getting mixed up with elements of the counterrevolution, discrediting and debasing ourselves in the eyes of the masses. . . . Moreover, in departing, we left the Bolsheviks a totally free hand and complete masters of the situation.” Sukhanov, Zapiski, VII: 219–20. See also Schapiro, Origins of the Communist Autocracy [1965], 66–8. The congress walkouts set up a “Committee for Salvation of the Fatherland and the Revolution,” but it lacked the magical resonance of the Soviet. On October 29, military school cadets (junkers) under their command seized the telephone station, the state bank, and the Astoria Hotel, then set their sights on Smolny, but the Military Revolutionary Committee retook all these points and easily dispersed the junkers. Novaia zhizn’, October 30, 1917: 3.

266. History has nowhere recorded precisely how many delegates had left the hall. Kotel’nikov, Vtoroi vserossiiskii s”ezd sovetov, 53–4; Browder and Kerensky, Russian Provisional Government, III: 1797–8; Dekrety Sovetskoi vlasti, I: 1–2. On the eve, Lunacharsky had come out against the insurrection, in print, alongside Kamenev and Zinoviev.

267. Kotel’nikov, Vtoroi vserossiiskii s”ezd sovetov, 164–5; Izvestiia, October 26, 1917: 5–6, October 27: 4, October 28: 4; Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks Come to Power, 273–304; Daniels, Red October, 187–96. Even though most textbooks place the arrests in the cabinet room (Malachite Hall, on the river side), the government ministers had moved to Tsar Nicholas II’s private dining room, facing the inner courtyard. M. Levin, “Poslednie chasy vremennogo pravitel’stva v 1917 g.,” Krasnyi arkhiv, 1933, no. 56: 136–8 (P. I. Palchinsky notes).

268. Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks Come to Power, 269–92; Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 485–95. John Reed, his wife Louise Bryant, and Albert Rhys Williams just walked into the Winter Palace, hoping to interview Kerensky, strolled around, and left, while Red Guards stood outside; the Red Guards finally entered through windows and unlocked doors. See Delo naroda, October 29, 1917: 1–2 (S. L. Maslov).

269. Trotsky, Stalin, 228–34; Radzinsky, Stalin, 115–19.

270. Lenin had arrived at the Finland Station in April 1917 wearing a dressy hat (it appears in the photograph taken of him en route in Stockholm). Nikolai I. Podvoiskii, “V. I. Lenin v 1917,” Istoricheskii arkhiv, 1956, no. 6: 111–32 (at 115).

271. Reed, Ten Days [1919], 125–7; Kotel’nikov, Vtoroi vserossiiskii s”ezd sovetov, 59, 165–6; Avdeev, Revoliutsiia 1917 goda, V: 179–80; Izvestiia, October 26, 1917: 7. Lenin had also appeared (after Trotsky) at the parallel session of the Petrograd Soviet held on October 25 around 2:35 a.m.

272. Volkogonov, Lenin: Life and Legacy, xxxvi (citing Obshchee delo [Paris], February 21, 1921).

273. Volkogonov, Lenin: Life and Legacy, xxxvi, (citing Velikii Lenin [Moscow, 1982]), 16–7.

274. Kotel’nikov, Vtoroi vserossiiskii s”ezd sovetov, 15–21, 59–68.

275. Kotel’nikov, Vtoroi vserossiiskii s”ezd sovetov, 22.

276. Sukhanov, Zapiski, III: 361.

277. Kotel’nikov, Vtoroi vserossiiskii s”ezd sovetov, 25–30, 82–7.

278. McCauley, Russian Revolution, 282–3, translation of K. G. Idman, Maame itsenaistymisen vuosilta (Porvoo-Helsiniki, 1953), 216.

279. Fulop-Miller, Mind and Face of Bolshevism [1927], 29. Robert Service observed that Lenin had “not been a nonentity [in Russia] in 1917; but his celebrity had grown inside the confines of Russia’s clandestine political groups.” Service, Lenin, I: 1.

280. Pavel Malyantovich (a Menshevik), just recently named justice minister, cabled a signed decree to all provincial prosecutors that the arrest order for Lenin was still in effect in September 1917. He was executed by firing squad on January 21, 1940, the anniversary of Lenin’s death.

281. On Lenin as a “revolutionary of genius,” see Schapiro, “Lenin After Fifty Years,” 8.

282. “Had I not been present in 1917 in Petersburg, the October Revolution would still have taken place—on the condition that Lenin was present and in command,” Trotsky confided in his diary in late March 1935. “If neither Lenin nor I had been present in Petersburg, there would have been no October Revolution.” Trotsky’s Diary in Exile [1963], 53–4.

283. Bolshevik Propaganda: Hearings Before a Subcommittee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 790; Hard, Raymond Robins’ Own Story, 52.

284. Waters, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, 367.

285. Brinton, Anatomy of Revolution. Brinton’s radicalization process—through three stages (rosy, polarization, radicalization)—ended in counterrevolution (Thermidor), however.

286. Lyttelton, Seizure of Power, 86.

287. Wildman, End of the Russian Imperial Army, II: xv. During the eight months of the Provisional Government’s tortured existence, Russia experienced more than a thousand strikes—far more strike activity than before the monarchy’s fall: 41,000 workers in March 1917; 384,000 in July; 965,000 in September; and 441,000 in October. Orlovsky, “Russia in War and Revolution,” 244. But strikes did not overturn the Provisional Government any more than they had cashiered the monarchy.

288. Maklakov, “The Agrarian Problem.”

289. “Okruzhili mia tel’tsy mnozi tuchny,” Rabochii put’, October 20, 1917, reprinted in Sochineniia, III: 383–6.

290. Protokoly Tsentral’nogo komiteta RSDRP (b), 107 (October 20, 1917).

291. Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, III: 211. “I spent the decisive night of October 25–26 together with Kamenev in the offices of the Military Revolutionary Committee, answering inquiries on the telephone and sending out instructions.” Trotsky added: “I simply cannot answer the question of what precisely was Stalin’s role in those decisive days.” Trotskii, Stalinskaia shkola fal’sifakatsii, 26. Even Stalin’s relations undersold him. “In those days,” wrote Fyodor Alliluyev, who witnessed Stalin’s catnaps in his family’s apartment, “comrade Stalin was genuinely known only to the small circle of people who had come across him in work in the political underground.” RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d, 668, l. 30 (F. S. Alliluev, “V Moskve [Vstrecha s t. Stalinym],” undated typescript). All the key Bolshevik men on the frontlines in October—Raskol’nikov, Dybenko, Podvoisky, Krylenko—would be murdered by Stalin’s regime.

292. The notion, stated by Tucker, that “Stalin was not really in his element in the turbulent mass politics of 1917,” is belied by Stalin’s Chiatura experience back in 1905. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 178.

293. De Lon, “Stalin and Social Democracy,” 204. After the Constituent Assembly was dispersed in January 1918, Sagirashvili dejectedly left Petrograd for Tiflis.

294. Kotel’nikov, Vtoroi vserossiiskii s”ezd sovetov, 90, 174–5. The list was likely submitted by Kamenev.

CHAPTER 7: 1918: DADA AND LENIN

1. Motherwell, Dada Painters and Poets, 78–9, 81.

2. Malkov, Reminiscences, 178.

3. Miliukov added that “experience showed that this light-minded self-assurance was a profound error.” Miliukov, Istoriia vtoroi, I/iii: 179. John Reed wrote that it “never occurred to anybody—except perhaps to Lenin, Trotzky, the Petersburg workers and the simpler soldiers”—that “the Bolsheviki would remain in power longer than three days.” Reed, Ten Days [1919], 117.

4. “I prefer Lenin, an open enemy, to Kerensky, that wolf in sheep’s clothing,” one official wrote on October 31, 1917. Nielsen and Weil, Russkaia revoliutsiia glazami Petrogradskogo chinovnika, 21. Kerensky bitterly denounced such types as “Bolsheviks of the Right.”

5. Trotsky, On Lenin, 114; Miliutin, O Lenine, 4–5; Rigby, Lenin’s Government, 23.

6. Figes, “Failure of February’s Men.” See also the bitter remarks of Chernov, Great Russian Revolution, 256–7.

7. In 1918, the Julian calendar was thirteen days behind the Gregorian; Wednesday, January 31, 1918, in Russia was followed by Thursday, February 14. Thereafter, the “February Revolution” would be celebrated on March 13 (at least through 1927, after which official commemoration of February ceased), while the “October Revolution” would be celebrated on November 7. Orthodox Christmas became January 7.

8. Larin, “Ukolybeli,” 16–7; Pestkovskii, “Ob oktiabr’skikh dniakh v Pitere,” 99–100; Mal’kov, Zapiski [1967], 42–7; Chugaev, Petrogradskii voenno-revoliutsionnyi komitet, I: 485.

9. Gil’, Shest' let s V. I. Leninym, 10–3. Lenin also had a luxurious Delaunay-Belleville 70, a six-cylinder ahead of its time, that had been purchased for Nicholas II.

10. Krupskaia, “Lenin v 1917 godu,” Izvestiia, January 20, 1960, reprinted in O Lenine, 54. She made the remarks in 1934.

11. Iroshnikov, Sozdanie, 156–61. The best contemporary accounts are M. Latsis, Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, 1925, no. 2: esp. 144.

12. The Petrograd Soviet had set up a commission on June 11, 1917, to manage affairs with the Ukrainian Rada (which was demanding autonomy).

13. The original plan for nationalities may have been for a mere “commission,” rather than a full-fledged commissariat. Gorodetskii, Rozhdenie, 158.

14. “Lenin,” Pestkowski ingratiatingly wrote, “could not get along without Stalin for even a single day.” Pestkovskii, “Vospominaniia o rabote v narkomnaste,” 128.

15. Trotskii, Moia zhizn’, II; 62–4; Sukhanov, Zapiski, VII: 266; Zalkind, “N.K.I.D. v semnadtsatom godu.” See also Deutscher, Prophet Armed, 325.

16. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1989, no. 5: 155 (August 26, 1918, letter to Vologda party committee). Sagirashvili speculated that Stalin coveted Sverdlov’s position, relating hearsay from Stalin’s close comrade Orjonikidze. De Lon, “Stalin and Social Democracy,” 199. Sverdlov was often out at meetings on behalf of the party’s secretariat and seldom on the premises at Smolny.

17. In 1918 Lenin was paid 24,683.33 rubles: 9,683.33 in salary as chair of Sovnarkom and 15,000 as an honorarium for publications; the payments were made via Bonch Bruevich, who handled party money. RGASPI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 11186, l. 2 (September 20, 1919).

18. Bunyan and Fisher, Bolshevik Revolution, 185–7; Sobranie uzakonenii i rasporiazhenii rabochego i krest'ianskogo pravitel'stva, 1917, no. 1: 10–1; Goikhbarg [Hoichberg], Sotsial’noe zakonodatel’stvo sovetskoi respubliki; Goikhbarg, A Year in Soviet Russia; Trotsky, My Life, 342.

19. Magerovsky, “The People’s Commissariat,” I: 29–31.

20. Pestkovskii, “Ob Oktiabr’skikh dniakh v Pitere,” 104; Trotsky, Stalin, 245.

21. Izvestiia, November 27, 1917: 6. Pestkowski was named to the bank job through Wieczysław Mezynski, yet another high-placed Pole.

22. Codrescu, Posthuman Dada Guide, 11.

23. Sandqvist, Dada East; Dickerman, Dada.

24. Nielson and Boris, Russkaia revoliutsiia glazami Petrogradskogo chinovnika, 13 (October 22, 1917).

25. Jan Gross correctly surmised that “the architects of the Soviet state discovered early that one accumulates power simply by denying it to others.” Gross, “War as Social Revolution,” 32.

26. Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence [1965], 331, 338; Marx and Engels, Selected Works. See Gouldner, The Two Marxisms, 350–1. Louis Auguste Blanqui, the original Leninist, had spent the commune’s entire existence in prison.

27. McLellan, Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 592–4; Marx and Engels, The Civil War in France, in Selected Works, I: 473–545; and Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence [1965], 318–20 (letters to Kugelmann, April 12 and 17, 1871).

28. Zagranichnaia gazeta, March 23, 1908.

29. Lenin, Collected Works, XXIV: 170, n24.

30. Lenin, Collected Works, XXVII: 135.

31. Sakwa, “The Commune State in Moscow.”

32. Warth, The Allies, 159. The head of the Provisional Government chancellery, when asked if he could provide a car for Kerensky’s flight from Russia, thought it a ruse by a thief to steal one! Startsev, “Begstvo Kerenskogo”; Medlin and Powers, V. D. Nabokov, 157–8. Kerensky reached Tsarskoe Selo (and its crucial radio transmitter), but had to retreat farther, to Pskov (Northern Front Headquarters), where Nicholas II had abdicated. Brief fighting broke out in the Pulkovo Heights near Petrograd on October 30, but anti-Bolshevik forces were easily turned back. Kerensky never returned to Petrograd.

33. P. N. Krasnov, “Na vnutrennom fronte,” in Gessen, Arkhiv Russkoi revoliutsii, I: 148–51; Kerensky, The Catastrophe, 340–3; Daniels, Red October, 205–6.

34. Novaia zhizn’, October 30, 1917: 3.

35. Izvestiia, November 3, 1917: 5; Kerensky, Russia and History’s Turning Point, 443–6.

36. Novaia zhizn’, October 30, 1917: 3; Delo naroda, Ocotber 30, 1917: 2; Izvestiia, October 30, 1917: 2; Williams, Through the Russian Revolution, 119–49. See also Reed, Ten Days [1919], 193–207; and Gindin, Kak bol’sheviki ovladeli gosudarstvennym bankom.

37. Malyshev, Oborona Petrograda.

38. De Lon, “Stalin and Social Democracy,” 257–8.

39. Novaia zhizn’, October 30, 1917: 2; Keep, Debate on Soviet Power, 44–5; Vompe, Dni oktiabrskoi revoliutsii i zheleznodorozhniki, 10.

40. Izvestiia, October 31, 1917: 7–8; Avdeev, Revoliutsiia 1917 goda, VI: 23, 45.

41. Protokoly Tsentral’nogo komiteta RSDRP (b) 1958, 122–3. The Bolsheviks and the October Revolution: Central Committee Minutes, 127–8.

42. Avdeev, Revoliutsiia 1917 goda, IV: 22–3; Protokoly Tsentral’nogo komiteta RSDRP (b), 271–2, n156; Vompe, Dni oktiabr’skoi revoliutsii i zheleznodorozhniki. See also Abramovitch, Soviet Revolution.

43. Rabochii i soldat, November 1, 1917. See also Delo naroda, October 31, 1917: 2.

44. The minutes published in 1927 omit the passage praising Trotsky: Pervyi legal’nyi Peterburgskii komitet bol’shevikov. Trotsky reproduced a photograph of the minutes of the Petersburg Committee of Bolsheviks, November 1, 1917. Biulleten’ oppozitsii, 1929, no. 7: 30–2.

45. Peterburgskii komitet RSDRP (b) v 1917 godu, 546. The young Molotov also backed the hard line (544).

46. “Zasedanie TsK 1 noiabria 1917 g.,” Protokoly tsentral’nogo komiteta RSDRP (b), 124–30. Stalin is not listed as in attendance.

47. Protokoly Tsentral’nogo komiteta RSDRP (b), 272, n162; Protokoly zasedanii VTsIK.

48. Oktiabr’skoe vosstanie v Moskve: Sbornik dokumentov (Moscow: Gosizdat moskovskoe otdelenie, 1922), 97–8, reprinted in Bunyan and Fisher, The Bolshevik Revolution, 179; Pipes, Russian Revolution, 501–3; Koenker, Moscow Workers, 332–4; Pethybridge, Spread of the Russian Revolution, 198. See also Sovety v Oktiabre, 31–86; Mel’gunov, Kak bol’sheviki zakhvlatili vlast’, 277–382; Nikolai N. Ovsiannikov (ed.); Ignat’ev, Oktiabr’ 1917 goda; Grunt, Moskva 1917-i, ch. 6.

49. Protokoly Tsentral’nogo komiteta RSDRP (b), 133–4; The Bolsheviks and the October Revolution: Central Committee Minutes, 138–40; Lenin v pervye mesiatsy sovetskoi vlasti, 46.

50. Perepiska sekretariata TsK RSDRP (b), II: 27.

51. Izvestiia, November 4, 1917; Avdeev, Revoliutsiia 1917 goda, VI: 423–4; Protokoly Tsentral’nogo komiteta RSDRP (b), 133–7; Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, 1927, no. 8–9: 321–51, no. 10: 246–98, no. 11: 202–14; 1928, no. 2: 132–69.

52. Dekrety Sovetskoi vlasti, I: 20.

53. Keep, Debate on Soviet Power, 86; Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks in Power, 48–9. A slightly different accounting of the votes is in Pipes, Russian Revolution, 524–5.

54. Protokoly Tsentral’nogo komiteta RSDRP (b), 146; The Bolsheviks and the October Revolution: Central Committee Minutes, 151–2; Bonch-Bruevich, Na boevykh postakh, 164; Novaia zhizn’, November 9, 1917.

55. Steklov, Bortsy za sotsializm, II: 400–1; Paustovsky, Story of a Life, 529; Trotskii, Sochineniia, VIII: 254. Sverdlov had the authority to make decisions on his own, yet he consulted Lenin assiduously. Iroshnikov, Predsedatel soveta narodnykh komissarov V. I. Ul’ianov (Lenin), 57 (citing the unpublished memoirs of Paniushkin).

56. On the rumors to install Grigory Pyatakov as head of a new government, see Pravda, December 15, 1923, December 16, 1923, and January 3, 1924; and Biulleten’ oppozitsii, April 1938, no. 65: 13–4.

57. Raleigh, Revolution on the Volga, 319.

58. VII ekstrennyi s”ezd RKP (b), mart 1918 goda, 6. The Soviet editors inserted a note deeming Sverdlov’s accurate statement “not exact” (359).

59. Fel’shtinskii, Bol’sheviki i levye esery.

60. Dekrety Sovetskoi vlasti, I: 24–5.

61. Berlin and Jahanbegloo, Conversations, 4. See also Sorokin, Leaves from a Russian Diary, 105–6.

62. Delo naroda, November 25, 1917: 4.

63. Izvestiia, October 28, 1917: 2; Bunyan and Fisher, Bolshevik Revolution, 220.

64. Trotskii, O Lenine, 102.

65. Holquist, Making War, 130–1.

66. Colton, Moscow, 103 (Tikhomirov in Izvestiia, April 30, 1918).

67. McLellan, Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 592–4. See also V. I. Lenin, “Lessons of the Commune,” Zagranichnaia gazeta, March 23, 1908.

68. “With the functionaries of our body,” one finance official recorded, “the Bolsheviks in Smolny were unfailingly polite and only upon achieving nothing did they turn to threats that, if we do not hand over 15 million in cash, they will seize the State Bank and take as much as they need,” breaking open the vaults. Finance ministry personnel (on the Moika) went on strike. Nielsen and Weil, Russkaia revoliutsiia glazami Petrogradskogo chinovnika, 14–5 (October 25, 1917), 23 (November 6, 1917).

69. Bunyan and Fisher, Bolshevik Revolution, 225–31; Vlast’ sovetov, 1919, no. 11: 5; Trotskii, “Vospominaniia ob oktiabr’skom perevorote”; Trotsky, My Life, 293.

70. Denezhnoe obrashchenie i kreditnaia sistema Soiuza SSR za 20 let, 1–2; Morozov, Sozdanie i ukreplenie sovietskogo gosudarstsvennogo apparata, 52; Novaia zhizn’, November 16, 1917; Ekonomicheskaia zhizn’, November 6, 1918: 2–3 (V. Obolensky-Osinsky). Mezynski is sometimes also given the title “temporary” or “acting” people’s commissar for the finance ministry. The commissar was, nominally, Skortsov-Stepanov. The Bolsheviks did manage to elicit the cooperation of the finance ministry officials and the director of the treasury (P. M. Trokhimovsky). Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, 1922, no. 10: 62–3; Iroshnikov, Sozdanie, 195.

71. Larsons, Im Sowjet-Labyrinth, 61–6.

72. Nielsen and Weil, Russkaia revoliutsiia glazami Petrogradskogo chinovnika, 40 (December 29 and 31, 1917). The Council of People’s Commissars issued a decree ordering discontinuance of such payments on January 11, 1918. Obzor finansogo zakonodatel’stva, 1917–1921, gg. (Petrograd, 1921), 15.

73. Schwittau, Revoliutsiia i narodnoe khoziaisto, 337; D’iachenko, Istoriia finansov SSSR, 24–7; Svoboda Rossii, April 19, 1918: 5; Katzenellenbaum, Russian Currency and Banking, 55–60; Bunyan and Fisher, Bolshevik Revolution, 607–9; Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States: Russia, III: 32–3.

74. Debt service had amounted to a hefty 345 million rubles per annum from 1909 to 1913, but by 1918 it had exploded because of vast new wartime debt. Dohan, “Foreign Trade,” 218.

75. The Russian State Bank had a monopoly on the issuance of currency (in 1891). The total gold stock in November 1917 amounted to 1.26 billion rubles. Atlas, Ocherki po istorii denezhnogo obrashcheniia, 16–8; Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, II: 133–7.

76. Lenin, Collected Works, XLII: 64. As of February 1918, Lenin estimated state expense obligations at 28 billion rubles, and revenues at 8 billion, because of nonpayment of taxes. PSS, XXXV: 326–7, 331. Very soon, the Bolsheviks began to worry that easily available paper money could finance counterrevolution. Pravda, April 19, 1918. Mezynski’s stint at finance was shortlived: by April 1918 he was in the Cheka.

77. Owen, Russian Peasant Movement.

78. Brutzkus, “Die russische Agrarrevolution.” In Ukraine, a critical breadbasket feeding tens of millions, the peasant revolution has been likened to a cyclone. Arthur Adams, “The Great Ukrainian Jacquerie,” in Hunczak, The Ukraine, 247–70.

79. Pipes, Russian Revolution, 718–9. See also Channon, “The Bolsheviks and the Peasantry.”

80. Conversely, inflation soon obliterated any savings they had in the state savings bank or buried in the ground near their huts. Pipes, Russian Revolution, 719–21.

81. Atkinson, End of the Russian Land Commune, 185.

82. Novaia zhizn’, December 31, 1917: 2 (Kolegaev). Liberals in the Provisional Government viewed Victor Chernov, leader of the Socialist Revolutionary party and agricultural minister in the Provisional Government, as the inspiration and embodiment of the chaos caused by land seizures, but in the countryside Chernov and the SR party were seen as traitors for opposing immediate land redistribution. Local SRs broke with the central party hierarchs, but the party as a whole got no credit for it. Chernov called the peasantry “the sphinx in the political history of Russia,” but the characterization applied to himself. Chernov, Rozhednie revoliutsionnoi Rossii, 75. The Bolsheviks borrowed more than the SR land program. “We got a copy of the SR municipal program (they developed it, I believe, in 1905) and began to study it and put together our municipal program in a form much like it,” recalled one Moscow Bolshevik of spring 1917. Volin, “Vokrug Moskovskoi Dumy,” 98.

83. “No law was more widely published than the land law,” recalled Bonch-Bruevich, Na boevikh postakh, 115. The anecdote on the calendars does not appear in the first edition from the previous year of the Bonch-Buevich memoir (Federatsiia, 1930), 125–7. See also Pethybridge, Spread of the Russian Revolution, 154.

84. Keep, Russian Revolution, 178.

85. Siegelbaum, “The Workers Group,” at 155.

86. Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking.

87. Chugaev, Petrogradskii voenno-revoliutsionnyi komitet, II: 111.

88. “The drowned were carried out of the cellars and stacked in rows on Palace Square.” Antonov-Ovseenko, Zapiski o grazhdanskoi voine, I: 19–20.

89. Izvestiia, December 6, 1917; Bonch-Bruevich, Na boevykh postakh, 191. Bonch-Bruevich also collected rumors of enemies in disguise who were stockpiling weapons and counterfeiting documents, to which he responded with peremptory arrests. Zubov, F. E. Dzerzhinskii, 161.

90. Iroshnikov, Sozdanie, 96, 201, 214–5; Z. Serebrianskii, “Sabotazh i sozdanie novogo gosudarstvennogo apparata,” 8–11.

91. GARF, f. 130, op. 1, d. 1, l. 29–30, 30 ob; Izvestiia, December 10, 1917; Tsvigun, V. I. Lenin i VChK [1975], 34, n1; Belov, Iz istorii Vserossiiskoi Chrezvychainoi komissii, 72–9; Krasnyi arkhiv, 1924, no. 5: xiv–xv; PSS, XXXV: 156–8; Pogranichnye voiska SSSR 1918–1928, 67; Chugaev, Petrogradskii voenno-revoliutsionnyi komitet, III: 663–4; Latsis, Chrezvychainye komissii, 7–8; Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, “Kak organizaovalas VChK,” Ogonek, 1927, no. 3, reprinted in Vospominaniia o Lenine, 134–9 (at 137) and expanded in Na boevykh postakh, 193–203 (at 198–9); Carr, “Origins and Status.” The Council of People’s Commissars’ discussion of Dzierzynski’s report was presented as a “decree” (and altered) when later published: Belov, Iz istorii Vserossiiskoi Chrezvychainoi komissii, 78–9. See also Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, 1924, no. 10 (33): 5–6 (Peters) and 1926, no. 9 (58): 82–3 (Vacietis); and Pravda, December 18, 1927: 2. For Lenin’s note to Dzierz˙ynski, see PSS, XXXV: 156–8; Tsvigun, V. I. Lenin i VChK [1975], 37, and [1987], 19, 22. The phrase “proletarian Jacobin” appears in Zubov, F. E. Dzerzhinskii, 162, and appears as “revolutionary Jacobin” in an earlier edition: Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinskii: kratkaia biografiia, 2nd ed. (Moscow: OGIZ, 1942), 53. The Cheka technically replaced the MRC, whose power was real and demise sudden on December 5, 1917. Rigby, “The First Proletarian Government”; Pietsch, Revolution und Staat, 44–66. The assertion that Lenin hurriedly founded the Cheka because he worried the Left SRs who had agreed to enter the government would insist on moderation is contradicted by the fact that he allowed the Left SRs into the Cheka’s governing collegium. Latsis, Otchet VChK za chetyre goda ee deiatel’nosti, 20 dekabria 1917–20 dekabria 1921 g. Moscow: VChK, 1922, 8. I: 8; Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks in Power, 81–7, 103. But cf. Pipes, Russian Revolution, 536–7.

92. RGASPI, f. 76, op. 2, d. 270, l.32–33.

93. A key instrument in breaking the strike was the closure of the Petrograd City Duma, which had survived the coup and served as a rallying point. Dekrety Sovetskoi vlasti, I: 91.

94. Peters, “Vospominaniia o rabote VChK,” 10. One of the Provisional Government’s few successes had been the formation of an agency engaged in systematic, sensational leaking of secret files about the okhranka’s dirty tricks. Osorgin, Okhrannoe otdelenie i ego sekrety; Avrekh, “Chrezvychainaia sledstvennaia komissiia vremennogo pravitel’stva”; Peregudova, “Deitel’nost komissii Vremennogo pravtitel’stva i sovetskikh arkhivov”; Ruud and Stepanov, Fontanka 16, 315–21. Police archives had been ransacked and burned by rioters; some top okhranka officials removed their files when they left office, erasing their failures as well as much else. Still, the work of the commission—chaired by Muravyov (formerly known to the okhranka as “The Fly”)—would be published in seven volumes [1927], based on GARF, f. 1647 (Avrekh, “Chrezvychainia sledstvennaia komissiia”); Zhilinskii, Organizatsiia i zhizn’ okhrannago otdeleniia, 4–6. The archive of the Paris branch was thought to have been destroyed by the tsarist ambassador to France, but turned up in 1957 (and is now at the Hoover Institution Archives).

95. “The enemies of Soviet power,” Dzierzynski explained, “are both our political opponents and all bandits, thieves, speculators, and other criminals.” Novaia zhizn’, June 9, 1918: 4.

96. Klement’ev, V Bol’shevitskoi Moskve, 53. Klement’ev, an artillery officer in the Russian imperial army, may have owed his presence in Moscow to General Kornilov; those claiming to be connected to Kornilov had ordered Klement’ev and a colonel (Perkhurov) to prepare anti-Bolshevik forces in Moscow, but Klement’ev claims they met indifference.

97. Bunyan, Intervention, 229 (a translation of Ezhedel’nik chrezvychainoi komissii, 1918, no. 4: 29–30).

98. Leggett, The Cheka, 56.

99. Motives in “nationalizations” (plundering, not assumption of state control) could range from professional ambition—a confiscator hoped to stand out as a better manager of the properties—to greed (“sometimes a competing factory owner would pay a special visit to the provincial council of the national economy bringing the necessary presents”). Gessen, Arkhiv russkoi revoliutsii, VI: 310–1 (Gurovich).

100. On January 1, 1918, Lenin had gotten in his car for the drive back to Smolny from Petrograd’s Archangel Michael Riding Academy, where he had spoken to a motley “socialist army” heading for the front. “They had gone only a few yards when their vehicle was strafed from behind,” Pravda would later report. Inside the car, the Swiss socialist Fritz Platten—an intermediary in the funneling of German money to the Bolsheviks and organizer of Lenin’s sealed-train return to Russia—pushed Lenin’s head down; one of Platten’s hands was said to have been grazed by a bullet. Pravda, January 3, 1918, January 14, 1925 (because of the new calendar, the anniversary of the event became January 14, thirteen days later), January 21, 1926; Zinoviev, “Piat’ let,” manuscript, RGASPI, f. 324, op. 1, d. 267, l. 1–7, in Hoover Institution Archives, Volkogonov papers, container 14; Bonch-Bruevich, Tri pokusheniie na V. I. Lenina, 3–77; Sovetskaia Rossiia, January 3, 1963; Volkogonov, Lenin: Life and Legacy, 229. Lenin’s speech that day was published only many years later (Pravda, January 17, 1929). Who was behind the attempted assassination remains uncertain. The (Right) Socialist Revolutionary Party newspaper first revealed the incident, while hinting that the Bolsheviks had staged it to discredit the SRs, but the Right SRs may have set the assassination in motion, which others clumsily carried out.

101. Iz istorii VChK, 95–6.

102. Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks in Power, 97 (citing GARF, f. 130, op. 2, d. 1098, l. 8), 97 (citing TsA FSB RF, f. 1, op. 2, d. 25, l. 1: report of Ivan Polukarov).

103. Just after the October 25 coup, Lenin’s fixer Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich went over to the Mariinsky Palace to meet the defunct Provisional Government’s head of chancellery, Vladimir Nabokov (father of the future novelist), who had helped write the Provisional Government’s dubious founding document—Mikhail Alexandrovich’s “abdication” manifesto. “He greeted me like an old friend, was ostentatiously polite,” Nabokov wrote, and “tried to convince me that the basis of Bolshevik authority was just as lawful, if not more so than the Provisional Government’s.” Medlin and Powers, V. D. Nabokov, 170–2. See also Izvestiia, Ocober 28, 1917: 2.

104. Initially, Lenin had contemplated “postponing” the ballot. Trotsky, Lenin, 110. For the October 27, 1917, decree affirming the vote would go forward as scheduled from November 12 to 14, see Dekrety Sovetskoi vlasti, I: 25–6.

105. There were no returns for Kaluga and Bessarabia regions, three Far Eastern districts of Kamchatka, Yakutsk, and the Chinese Eastern Railroad, even though voting took place there. The Kuban-Black Sea district of the North Caucasus province had elections only in the capital of Yekaterinodar.

106. Izvestiia, December 10, 1917: 3; Dekrety Sovietskoi vlasti, I: 165–6; Belov, Iz istorii Vserossiiskoi Chrezvychainoi komissii, 66–8; PSS, XXVI: 315; Tsvigun, V. I. Lenin i VChK, 15–7.

107. GARF, f. 130, op. 1, d. 1, l. 19–20; Volkogonov, Trotsky, 91.

108. Protokoly Tsentral’nogo Komiteta RSDRP (b), 157 (November 29, 1917); The Bolsheviks and the October Revolution: Central Committee Minutes, 164; Trotsky, Stalin, 240–1.

109. Radkey, Russia Goes to the Polls.

110. Holquist, Making War.

111. Lenin, Sochineniia 2nd and 3rd eds., XXIV: 631–49 (at 638).

112. Radkey, Russia Goes to the Polls, 16, 34–5; Znamenskii, Vserossiiskoe Uchreditel’noe Sobranie, 275, 338, 358, tables 1 and 2. Voting took place according to electoral lists, with proportional representation; a candidate was permitted to stand simultaneously in no more than five districts; those elected in more than one district had to choose.

113. Radkey, Russia Goes to the Polls, 14–23.

114. Volkogonov, Lenin: Life and Legacy, 252. Sukhanov had taken over the editorship from Maxim Gorky. New Life (Novaya zhizn’) would be closed by Bolsheviks in 1918 after the assassination of the German ambassador Count Mirbach.

115. As it happened, a revolver was stolen from Lenin’s overcoat, hanging on a hook, during a Bolshevik meeting on the Constituent Assembly; the culprit was found to be a sailor supposed to be guarding the assembly. He was promptly taken out back and shot. Iurii Fel’shtinskii, Brestskii mir, oktiabr’ 1917 goda—noiabr’ 1918 g. (Moscow, 1992), 219.

116. Pravda, April 20, 1924: 3 (Trotsky).

117. Sviatitskii, Kogo russkii narod izbral, 10–1.

118. Znamenskii, Vserossiiskoe, 339; Protasov, Vserossiiskoe Uchreditol’noe Sobranie.

119. To undercut Bolshevik moderates who had been taking the Constituent Assembly seriously as a people’s parliament, he and Sverdlov had manipulated meeting agendas and attendance for the Bolshevik caucus. Bunyan and Fisher, Bolshevik Revolution, 363; Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks in Power, 88–92.

120. Reed, Ten Days [1919], 248.

121. Mal’chevskii, Vserossiiskoe, 217; Golikov, Vladimir Il’ich Lenin, V: 180–1.

122. Mal’chevskii, Vserossiiskoe Uchreditol’noe, 110.

123. Some scholars have argued that the Provisional Government was ultimately responsible for the Constituent Assembly’s failure: had elections been held earlier “a parliamentary regime in Russia would surely have had a fighting chance.” Gill, Peasants and Government, 98. See also Jonathan Frankel, “The Problem of Alternatives,” in Frankel, Revolution in Russia, 3–13. Kerensky may have tried to attend the Constituent Assembly, but he had not been elected a delegate and was rebuffed by the Central Committee of the SR party. Vishniak, Vserossiiskoe uchreditel’noe sobranie, 106; Vishniak, Dan’ proshlomu, 365. Vishniak (b. 1883) served as secretary of the Constituent Assembly and bravely recorded its proceedings; he tried to fight Bolshevism, ended up in prison in Kiev, and emigrated to Paris in April 1919.

124. Volkogonov, Lenin: Life and Legacy, 177–8 (citing Arkhiv INO OGPU, 17 458, vol. II: 215).

125. “Shall we convene the Constituent Assembly?” asked Moisei Uritsky, put in charge of overseeing it. “Yes. Shall we disperse it? Perhaps; it depends on circumstances.” Chamberlin, Russian Revolution, I: 368.

126. Volkogonov, Trotsky, 121 (citing Trotskii, Sochineniia, XVII/i: 201). On December 19, 1917, Trotsky had summoned “the iron steamroller of the proletarian revolution to crush the spinal column of Menshevism.” These were fellow Social Democrats, not to mention Trotsky’s former party. Volkogonov, Trotsky, 78.

127. Radkey speculated that given SR weaknesses, the Constituent Assembly “would have fallen of its own weight.” Radkey, Sickle Under the Hammer, 466.

128. Several Guards regiments, totaling perhaps 10,000 troops, pledged to turn out with their weapons if requested, but the Socialist Revolutionary leadership wanted no armed defense. The SR Central Committee went so far as to set up a commission to investigate efforts to defend the Constituent Assembly by force. B. F. Sokolov, “Zashchita vserossiiskogo uchreditel’nogo sobraniia,” in Gessen, Arkhiv russkoi revoliutsii XIII: 5–70 (at 41–4), 50, 60–1; Bunyan and Fisher, Bolshevik Revolution, 380–4; Istochnik, 1995, 1: 25–40; Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks in Power, 95 (citing Sokolov and Bakhmeteff Archive, Zenzinov Collection, SR Central Committee protocols, pp. 18–9). Later, however, one Socialist Revolutionary claimed “there was no attempt at force on January 5, not because we did not wish it, but because we had no strength.” Pravda, June 15, 1922 (Likhach). The Mensheviks did not have much of an answer to Bolshevik assertiveness either. Just a short time before the opening of the Constituent Assembly, at a Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party-Menshevik attended by some 100 delegates, Yuly Martov had put forth a resolution (which won majority support) accurately labeling Bolshevism a “regime of permanent anarchy.” But Martov’s own position was scarcely tenable: he urged the Mensheviks to pursue an all-socialist coalition—with Bolsheviks, too—even though the Bolsheviks had no desire to share power and even though, in Martov’s own mind, genuine socialism in Russia remained impossible at this historical stage. He embraced the ongoing expropriations of the bourgeoisie, and thought the workers would somehow help carry through the bourgeois-revolution phase of history. Burbank, Intelligentsia and Revolution, 13–6 (citing Novyi luch, December 3, 1917: 4); Haimson, “The Mensheviks.”

129. Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War, 40–69.

130. In Moscow, up to 2,000 demonstrators marched on January 9, 1918; at least 30 were trampled to death or shot. Pravda, January 22, 1918: 3, and January 24, 1918: 3; Yarkovsky, It Happened in Moscow, 267–75; Colton, Moscow, 87 (citing Tsentral’nyi arkhiv obshchestvenno-politicheskoi istorii Moskvy [TsAOPIM], f. 3, op. 1, d. 46, l. 296).

131. Vishniak, Dan’ proshlomu, 289; Gorkii, Nesvoevremmenye mysli i rassuzhdenii, 110–1; Mal’chevskii, Vserossiiskoe uchreditel’noe sobranie; Radkey, Sickle Under the Hammer, 386–416; Novitskaia, Uchreditel’noe sobranie; Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks in Power, 123–5; Bailey, “The Russian Constituent Assembly of 1918”; Avrich, Anarchist Portraits, 107–9. Zhelznyakov is said to have taken part in the “storming” of the winter palace. He was killed in the civil war in 1919, age twenty-four, by a shell from White artillery.

132. Lenin wrote two sets of theses on the Constituent Assembly, one before and one after its dispersal. GARF, f. 130, op. 1, d. 7, l. 15–6, Hoover Institution Archives, Volkogonov papers, container 21; Pravda, January 12, 1917, republished in PSS, XXXV: 162–6. Just as Lenin and Sverdlov had calculated, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, after taking some lesser portfolios in the Council of People’s Commissars, became significantly less steadfast in defense of the Constituent Assembly.

133. Keep, Debate on Soviet Power, 247. From December 24 to 27, 1917, Lenin had briefly gone to a resort in nearby Finland (Stalin signed a December 27 decree on the nationalization of the Putilov Works “for the chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars”: Hoover Institution Archives, Volkogonov papers, container 14). Instead of resting, however, Lenin was busy writing. In any case, Bolshevik deputies of the Constituent Assembly showed up unannounced in Finland and retrieved Lenin.

134. Simultaneously, two congresses were taking place: one of peasant deputies and one of workers and soldiers’ deputies, which merged on January 13, 1918. The Congress of Soviets also reaffirmed “the right of all peoples to self-determination up to complete secession from Russia.” Tret’ii vserossiiskii s”ezd sovetov rabochikh, soldatskikh i krest’ianskikh deputatov (Petrograd, 1918), 73.

135. Oldenbourg, Le coup d’etat bolcheviste, 169–70, 173–4. When the congress, the next day, approved the “Decree on Peace,” Lenin had repeated his caveat that “wars cannot end by a refusal to fight, they cannot be ended by one side alone.” Kotel’nikov, Vtoroi vserossiiskii s”ezd sovetov, 62.

136. Avdeev, Revoliutsiia 1917 goda, IV: 285–6; Kennan, Russia Leaves the War, 75–6.

137. Bunyan and Fisher, Bolshevik Revolution, 268–75.

138. Izvestiia, November 10, 1917, translated in Bunyan and Fisher, Bolshevik Revolution, 242–4; Iroshnikov, Sozdanie, 166–7; DVP SSSR, I: 11–4

139. Warth, The Allies, 168.

140. The surreal quality of the new authority’s relation to the military was captured by Alexander Ilin (b. 1894), known as the “Genevan” (from his pre-revolutionary exile days), who was appointed the secretary to the new war commissariat and got a glimpse of the luxurious offices of the tsarist war ministry on St. Petersburg’s Moika Canal: “silken furniture, silken wallpaper, curtains over the doors and windows, mirrors, carved chandeliers and thick carpets into which one’s feet literally sank.” Ilin and his Bolshevik co-administrators insisted on eating “the same cabbage soup that the soldiers lived on,” to convey the “democratic character” of their authority. At the same time, Ilin recalled how Krylenko took offense when his authority went unacknowledged (“his entire small figure gave forth a real aura of power”). This imperiousness, however, did not bother Ilin, despite the “democratic” cabbage soup diet. “In circumstances in which we were subjected to lying, slander and, in part, refusal to recognize our authority [vlast’],” Ilin noted, “it was very important to maintain a firm line. After all, authority can only be recognized as such if it is convinced of its own competence and by its behavior inspires others with that conviction.” Il’in-Zhenevskii, Bol’sheviki u vlasti; Il’in-Zhenevskii, Bolsheviks in Power.

141. Bunyan and Fisher, Bolshevik Revolution, 232–42, 264–8; Spiridovich, Istoriia bol’shevizma v Rossii, 406–7; Wildman, End of the Russian Imperial Army, II: 380–401.

142. Novaia zhizn’, December 13, 1917; Russkoe slovo, December 6, 1917; Bunyan and Fisher, Bolshevik Revolution, 267–8; Masaryk, Making of a State, 163–4. Dukhonin took over as acting supreme commander only on November 3, 1917, seventeen days before his murder.

143. Fischer, Germany’s Aims, 477; Wildman, End of the Russian Imperial Army, II: 400–1; Sovetsko-Germanskie otnosheniia, I: 108; Niessel, Le triomphe des bolscheviks, 187–8.

144. Pravda, November 15, 1917: 1; Bunyan and Fisher, Bolshevik Revolution, 258–9. See also Izvestiia, December 2, December 3, December 4, December 5, December 6, and December 9, 1917; and Kamenev, Bor’ba za mir. In the event of a “general peace,” the Germans pledged to quit Belgium, northern France, Serbia, Romania, Poland, Lithuania, and Courland, thereby seeking to undercut the Allies’ contention that they needed to continue fighting to liberate these territories. But the pledge was insincere. Wheeler-Bennett, Forgotten Peace, 136.

145. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 9, l. 23.

146. Buchan, History of the Great War, IV: 135. These divisions had just been brought from the western front to Riga in late 1917. Ludendorff, My War Memoires, II: 34.

147. Freund, Unholy Alliance, 3. Radek retained his Austrian passport until 1918.

148. Ottokar, In the World War [1920], 246; Wheeler-Bennett, Forgotten Peace, 113.

149. Trotsky made the point slightly differently: History of the Russian Revolution to Brest-Litovsk, 5.

150. Sovetsko-germanskie otnosheniia, I: 194–6.

151. Michael Geyer has persuasively argued that societies that mobilized intensively (the Russian empire, Germany) rather than extensively (France and Britain, which relied on their colonies as well as loans from the United States) suffered the greatest dislocation and social upheaval. Geyer, “The Militarization of Europe,” 65–102.

152. Izvestiia, March 2, 1922 (Ioffe).

153. Proceedings of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Conference, 82; Trotsky, My Life, 311, 319–20; Trotsky, Lenin, 128.

154. Pavliuckenkov, Krest’ianskii Brest, 22 (citing GARF, f. 130, op. 2, d. 11, l. 20: report by Mikhail Bonch-Bruevich, a former tsarist officer who now headed the Red general staff, to the Council of People’s Commissars).

155. Pravda, February 24, 1918: 2–3 (Lenin’s theses, delivered January 7); Bunyan and Fisher, Bolshevik Revolution, 500–5; PSS, XXXV: 243–51; Wheeler-Bennett, Forgotten Peace, 139. Bolshevik party officials from around the country were in town for an upcoming Congress of Soviets, and Lenin included nearly fifty provincial party chiefs at the Central Committee meeting, hoping to use them as a pressure group. Debo, Revolution and Survival, 72–90.

156. Protokoly Tsentral’nogo Komiteta RSDRP (b), 171; The Bolsheviks and the October Revolution: Central Committee Minutes, 177.

157. Protokoly Tsentral’nogo Komiteta RSDRP (b), 173. See also VII ekstrennyi s”ezd RKP (b), mart 1918 goda, xxvi–xxvii; and Krupskaya, Reminiscences, 448.

158. PSS, XXXV: 253–4.

159. Pravda, January 17 and 18, 1918; Sochineniia, IV: 36–7.

160. Price, My Reminiscences, 224–5.

161. Protokoly Tsentral’nogo Komiteta RSDRP (b), 174–80; The Bolsheviks and the October Revolution: Central Committee Minutes, 185. On January 13, the Central Committees of both the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs had met together, and a majority favored Trotsky’s formula of “end the war, don’t sign a peace” (283).

162. Wargelin, “A High Price for Bread.”

163. Von Kuhlmann, Erinnerungen, 531.

164. As Hoffmann explained, “the difficulties were transitory; at any time we could support the [Rada] with arms and establish it again.” Hoffmann, War Diaries, II: 216.

165. Fedyshyn, Germany’s Drive to the East, 65–86.

166. Fischer, Germany’s Aims.

167. Ioffe, Mirnye peregovory v Brest-Litovske, I: 207–8; Proceedings of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Conference, 172–3; Hoffmann, War Diaries, II: 218–9; D. G. Fokke, “Na tsene i za kulisami,” 207; Wheeler Bennett, Forgotten Peace, 227–9; Freund, Unholy Alliance, 6; PSS, XXII: 555–8.

168. Trotsky, My Life, 386. “Versatile, cultivated, and elegant, he could be charming in his occasions of good-humor,” one scholar observed of Trotsky. “But in his more usual attitude of contemptuous anger, he was freezing fire.” Wheeler-Bennett, Forgotten Peace, 152.

169. Il’in-Zhenevskii, Bolsheviks in Power, 21–2.

170. Ottokar, In the World War [1919], 328; Hoffmann, War Diaries, II: 219. Austria-Hungary did not even have a border any longer with Russia, given the separate treaty with Ukraine. (Poles left Austrian military ranks and marched into Ukraine to retake “Polish” territory.)

171. Fischer, Germany’s Aims, 501–5; Sovetsko-germanskie otnoshniia, I: 328.

172. Magnes, Russia and Germany, 109–123.

173. Nowak, Die Aufzeichnungen, I: 187 (entry of February 22, 1918).

174. Khalid, “Tashkent 1917,” 279.

175. Chokaeiv, “Turkestan and the Soviet Regime,” 406.

176. Gordienko, Obrazovanie Turkestanskoi ASSR, 309–10.

177. Khalid, Politics of Cultural Reform, 273–4. Using contemporary Turkic-language newspapers, this corrects the version set down by Safarov, Kolonial’naia revoliutsiia, 64.

178. Pobeda oktiabr’skoi revoliutsii, II: 27.

179. Park, Bolshevism in Turkestan, 15–22.

180. Khalid, Politics of Cultural Reform, 277.

181. Chokaiev, “Turkestan and the Soviet Regime,” 408.

182. Chaikan, K istorii Rossiikoi revoliutsii, 133.

183. Alekseenkov, Kokandskaia avtonomiia, 58.

184. Etherton, In the Heart of Asia, 154.

185. PSS, XXXV: 245–54; Wheeler-Bennett, Forgotten Peace, 217–39.

186. The Bolsheviks and the October Revolution: Central Committee Minutes, 206; Protokoly Tsentral’nogo komiteta RSDRP (b) [1958], 171–2, 199, 202–4, 212–3, 215–7; “Deiatel’nost’ Tsentral’nogo komiteta partii v dokumentakh (sobytiia i fakty”), Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1989, no. 4: 142–4.

187. Trotsky, My Life, 382–4; Trotsky, Lenin, 106–10. To the 7th Party Congress in March 1918, Lenin divulged of his dealings with Trotsky, “it was agreed between us that we would hold out until the Germans presented an ultimatum, and then we would yield.” PSS, XXXVI: 30; Debo, Revolution and Survival, 80.

188. Protokoly Tsentral’nogo komiteta RSDRP (b), 204; The Bolsheviks and the October Revolution: Central Committee Minutes, 210–1; VII ekstrennyi s”ezd RKP (b), mart 1918 goda, 197–201; PSS, XXXV: 486–7; Deutscher, Prophet Armed, 383, 390. In favor were Lenin, Stalin, Sverdlov, Zinoviev, Sokolnikov, Smilga, and Trotsky; opposed were Joffe, Lomov, Bukharin, Krestinsky, and Dzierzyn΄ski.

189. Pravda, February 20, 1918.

190. Upton, Finnish Revolution, 62–144.

191. PSS, XXXVI: 10.

192. Wheeler-Bennett, Forgotten Peace, 254.

193. Trotsky, My Life, 333.

194. Trotsky, My Life [1930], 388–9.

195. Protokoly Tsentral’ngo komiteta RSDRP (b), 211–8; Pravda, February 24, 1918; Proceedings of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Conference, 176–7; Wheeler-Bennett, Forgotten Peace, 255–7; Debo, Revolution and Survival, 142.

196. Protokoly Tsentral’nogo komiteta RSDRP (b), 215; The Bolsheviks and the October Revolution: Central Committee Minutes, 223; Pravda, February 24, 1918; PSS, XXXV: 369–70, 490; Volkogonov, Stalin: Politicheskii portret, I: 86; Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, 36. The other abstentions were Krestinsky, Dzierz˙ynski, and Joffe. Bukharin voted no.

197. Pravda, February 26, 1918: 3.

198. PSS, XXXV: 381; Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks in Power, 172–8.

199. Sokolnikov pronounced “this triumph of the imperialist and the militarist over the international Proletarian Revolution . . . only a temporary and passing one.” Proceedings of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Conference, 180.

200. Bunyan and Fisher, Bolshevik Revolution, 521–3; Wheeler-Bennett, Forgotten Peace, 308.

201. Wheeler-Bennett, Forgotten Peace, 275–6. Lenin’s refusal to discuss the consequences of a revolution before the Bolsheviks had seized power is analyzed in Kingston-Mann, “Lenin and the Beginnings of Marxist Peasant Revolution.”

202. Hahlweg, Diktatfrieden, 51; Novaia zhizn’, April 30, 1918: 2 (S. Zagorsky).

203. Pipes, Russian Revolution, 595–7.

204. Dohan, “Soviet Foreign Trade in the NEP Economy,” 218.

205. It has been argued that Lenin’s German orientation, by cleaving off Bolshevik allies on the left such as the Left SRs, proved conducive to dictatorship, but first, the German orientation almost destroyed the Bolsheviks. Wheeler-Bennett, Forgotten Peace, 345–8; Mawdsley, Russian Civil War, 39–44.

206. VII ekstrennyi s”ezd RKP (b), mart 1918 goda, 11–3, 127–9, 133, 176–7; PSS, XXXVI: 1-77. Kin and Sorin, Sed'moi s'ezd.

207. Petrograd industries would also be evacuated to the interior. Avdeev, Revoliutsiia 1917 goda, V: 23, 30–1; Rabochii put’, October 6, 1916; Pethybridge, Spread of the Russian Revolution, 188; Colton, Moscow, 96. In Kerensky’s plan, the Petrograd Soviet and its central executive committee and soviet would have had to fend for themselves being, technically, “private” and not governmental entities. Miliukov, “From Nicholas II to Stalin.”

208. On October 9, when the Provisional Government announced it would deploy up to half the immense capital garrison (nearly 200,000) at the city’s approaches, to defend it, this provoked additional charges of wanting to snuff out the revolution by dispatching the (radicalized) garrison troops to the front. Avdeev, Revoliutsiia 1917 goda, V: 52.

209. “Iz perepiski E. D. Stasovoi.”

210. Bonch-Bruevich later claimed that the ruminations over relocating to Nizhny Novgorod on the Volga had been an elaborate charade played out with the SR-dominated railway union (Vikzhel). Bonch-Bruevich, Pereezd Sovetskogo pravitel’stva. See also Malinovskii, “K pereezdu TsK RKP (b).” Ryazanov made an analogy to the Communards of Paris in 1871, who went down with the city.

211. Trotskii, Kak vooruzhalas’ revoliutsiia, I: 105.

212. Sidorov, Revoliutsionnoe dvizheniie; Krastin’š, Istoriia Latyshskikh strelko; Germanis, Oberst Vacietis; “Iz vospominanii glavkoma I. I. Vatsetis.”

213. Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks in Power, 201 (citing TsA VMF, f. r-342, op. 1, d. 116, l. 34–56ob.).

214. Mal’kov, Zapiski komendanta [1967], 133–5.

215. Izvestiia, March 17, 1918: 2. The Soviet had post facto approved the capital’s “temporary” relocation. Zinoviev had opposed the move to Moscow; he favored Nizhny Novgorod, precisely because the latter would be temporary.

216. The “Muscovite tsardom” would not be formally dissolved until June 9, 1918, for the sake of “economizing.” Lenin, Leninskie dekrety o Moskve, 62–3; Ignat’ev, Moskva, 85–7. Lenin managed to abolish the province (oblast) council in August 1918, and placed Kamenev in charge of Moscow as chairman of the Moscow soviet.

217. Istoriia Moskvy, II: 127.

218. The Metropole Hotel became House of Soviets No. 2; the Theological Seminary, on Moscow’s innermost ring, House of Soviets No. 3, a residence with offices. The building housing the party’s Central Committee apparatus on Vozdvizhenka was designated House of Soviets No. 4. House of Soviets No. 5 was a residential complex on Sheremetev Street (renamed Granovskaya Street). The Central Committee apparatus had also gotten part of Moscow’s Hotel Dresden.

219. Krasnaia Moskva, 347; Izvestiia, January 25, 1921: 4; Narodnoe khoziaistvo, 1918, no. 11: 11–14 (V. Obolensky-Osinsky).

220. In December 1920, the Cheka moved its headquarters to the Russia Insurance Co. building on the Lyubyanka Square, 2. Leggett, The Cheka, 217–20 (Spravochnik uchrezdeniia RSFSR, January 22, 1920, 215–28). Within weeks of the March 1918 move to Moscow, the Cheka launched massive raids on more than two dozen “anarchist” compounds, including at the famous Ryabushinsky mansion designed by the architect Fyodor Shekhtel in art moderne, where the police made no attempt to dispel the large crowd of onlookers—let the masses see the Cheka! MChK, 20; Klement’ev, V Bol’shevistkoi Moskve, 139.

221. Solomon [Isetskii], Sredi krasnykh vozhdei, I: 192–4. Georgy Isetskii (1868–1934), aka Solomon, from a noble family, was close to Lenin. Isetskii claims he started living at the colossal structure of his commissariat (Narkomvneshtorg) on Miliutin Lane.

222. Germany’s postwar government, known as the Weimar Republic (where it was founded), had left the 1,200-room Hohenzollern Palace in Berlin empty, seeking to avoid association with the monarchy and militarist old regime. Hitler and the Nazi regime would also steer clear of the Hohenzollern Palace and its connotations of Prussian monarchy.

223. One person who attended Council of People’s Commissars meetings in 1918 found the first two floors below Lenin’s wing in the enormous structure lifeless. Bortnevskii and Varustina, “A. A. Borman,” I: 115–49 (at 129).

224. Mal’kov, Zapiski [1967], 116–20; Malkov, Reminiscences, 123–4. In Petrograd, officials of the new regime had commandeered tram cars. Mal’kov, Zapiski [1967], 43.

225. Mal’kov, Zapiski [1967], 133–5.

226. Trotsky, My Life, 351–2; Trotskii, Portrety revoliutsionerov, 54–5.

227. Stanisław Pestkovskii, “Vospominaniia o rabote v narkomnaste (1917–1919 gg.),” Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, 1930, no. 6: 124–31 (at 130).

228. Golikov, Vladimir Il’ich Lenin, V: 307–8. Official sources do not record the precise date of Stalin’s marriage, and it was left out of his chronology for 1918: Sochineniia, IV: 445–56. Stalin would return to Petrograd on only three more occasions for the rest of his life: 1919, when the city fell under threat from anti-Bolshevik forces; 1926, to mark the destruction of the Zinoviev machine; and 1934 when Kirov was murdered. McNeal, Stalin, 342, n1.

229. Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 104 (to Alisa Radchenko).

230. Alliluev, Khronika odnoi sem’i, 27.

231. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d, 668, l. 18 (F. S. Alliluev, “V Moskve [Vstrecha s t. Stalinym],” undated typescript); Alliluyeva, Vospominaniia, 187.

232. Moskovskii Kreml’—tsitadel’ Rossii (Moscow, 2008), 185.

233. Trotskii, Portrety revoliutsionerov, 54–5.

234. Astrov, Illustrated History, II: 509.

235. V. I. Lenin, “Doklad o ratifikatsii mirnogo dogovora 14 marta.” Pravda, March 16/17, 1918, in PSS, XXXVI: 92–111.

236. The congress also formally approved, belatedly, the relocation of the capital to Moscow on March 16, 1918. Delegate numbers conflict: Izvestiia, March 17, 1918: 2.

237. Chetvertyi Vserossiikii s”ezd sovetov rabochikh, 30–3; Bunyan and Fisher, Bolshevik Revolution, 532.

238. Warth, The Allies, 199–205, 235–41.

239. George, War Memoirs, II: 1542–3, 1550–1, 1891–2, 1901; Kettle, Allies and the Russian Collapse, 172–3. British intervention in Russia recalled the ill-fated Dardanelles campaign of the Great War, an attempt to reap large gains at seemingly low cost.

240. Not coincidentally, many of the British intelligence agents on the ground in Russia had previous India experience. Occleshaw, Dances in Deep Shadows.

241. GARF, f. r-130, op. 2, d. 1 (Sovnarkom meeting, April 2, 1918).

242. Protokoly zasedanii Vserossiiskogo, 263–70 (Lenin speech of May 14, 1918).

243. Pravda, March 26, March 27, 1918.

244. Pravda, April 3, April 4, 1918.

245. A. Goldenweiser, “Iz Kievskikh vospominanii (1917–1921 gg.),” in Gessen, Arkhiv russkoi revoliutsii, VI: 209–16; N. Mogilianskii, “Tragediia Ukrainy,” in Gessen, Arkhiv russkoi revoliutsii, IX: 84–90; Bunyan, Intervention, 6–17.

246. Bunyan, Intervention, 4; Collin Ross, “Doklad . . . o polozhenii del na ukraine,” in Gessen, Arkhiv russkoi revoliutsii, I: 288–92; Fedyshyn, Germanys’ Drive to the East, 133–83.

247. Martov, “Artilleriskaia podgotovka,” Vpered!, March 18, 1918.

248. Pravda, April 1, 1918; Zaria Rossii, April 17, 1918.

249. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 2, d. 3, l. 1–63; op. 2, d. 42. Stalin’s chief defender at the trial, Sosnovky, editor of Pravda, would be murdered in the purges.

250. Hoover Institution Archives, Nicolaevsky Collection, no. 6, box 2, folder 27; Grigorii Aronson, “Stalinskii protsess protiv Martova,” Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, 19/7–8 (April 28, 1930): 84-9; Vpered!, April 14 and April 26, 1918; Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution, 470–1 (citing oral interviews with Nicolaevsky, Rafael Abramowich, and Samuel Levitas); Chavichvili, Revolutionnaires russes à Geneve, 74–91; Trotsky, Stalin, 101–10; “Delo Iu. Martova v revoliutsionnyi tribunale,” Obozrenie, 1985, no. 15: 45–6, no. 16: 43–6; Kun, Unknown Portrait, 81–4. Later, the Menshevik Nicolaevsky, overreacting to Menshevik memoirs, wrongly argued that “the role played by Stalin in the activities of the Kamo group was subsequently exaggerated.” Nikolaevskii, Tainye stranitsy istorii, 88. The fate of the affidavits Nicolaevsky gathered from the Georgians remains mysterious.

251. Okorokov, Oktiabr’ i krakh russkoi burzuazhnoi pressy, 275–7.

252. This episode has often been garbled: Antonov-Ovseenko, The Time of Stalin, 3–7.

253. N. Rutych (ed.), “Dnevniki, zapisi, pis’ma generala Alekseeva i vospominaniia ob otse V. M. Alekseevoi-Borel,” in Grani, no. 125, 1982: 175–85.

254. Lincoln, Red Victory, 48 (citing K. N. Nikolaev, “Moi zhiznennyi put’,” 150–1, in Bakhmeteff Archive, Columbia University, K. N. Nikoaev Collection).

255. S. M. Paul, “S Kornilovym,” in Beloe delo, 7 vols. (Berlin: Miednyi vsadnik, 1926–1933), III: 67, 69.

256. Lincoln, Red Victory, 88 (citing A. Bogaevskii, “Pervyi kubanskii pokhhod [Ledianoi pokhod],” 82, in Bakhmeteff Archive, Columbia University); Khadziev, Velikii boiar, 369, 396.

257. Denikin, Ocherki russkoi smuti, II: 301.

258. “Rech’ v Moskokskom sovete . . . 23 aprelia 1918 g.,” Pravda, April 24, 1919; Izvestiia, April 24, 1919, in PSS, XXXVI: 232–7.

259. Jászi, Dissolution.

260. Rossiia v mirovoi voine 1914–1918, 41,

261. Klante, Von der Wolga zum Amur, 318; Bradley, Allied Intervention, 65–105.

262. Fić, The Bolsheviks and the Czechoslovak Legion, 206, 242, 262, 307–8, 313. The Legionnaires were mostly stationed in Ukraine, and in February 1918, when the German and Austrian army entered Ukraine in force, the Czechoslovak Legion had retreated into Soviet Russia.

263. In March 1918, the Omsk Soviet indicated it did not want to receive the Czechoslovak Legion, deeming it a counterrevolutionary force: Stalin telegrammed on March 26, 1918, to inform them it was by decision of the Council of People’s Commissars. Bunyan, Intervention, 81–2.

264. Maksakov and Turunov, Khronika grazhdanskoi voiny, 168. Trotsky had received a Cheka telegram (May 20–21, 1918) concerning a Serbian officer, Georgy Vukmanović, among the Czechoslovak Legion: “I am convinced that the organization of these troops has a counterrevolutionary character, they are being specially formed for dispatch to France but at the same time . . . they intend to concentrate their troops along the rail stations of Siberia and in the event of a Japanese attack they will take all rail lines into their hands.” It was countersigned by Dzierzynski, with a handwritten note, indicating he was skeptical about the Serb [“aforist”] and his alleged Bolshevism but not entirely dismissive. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 13, l. 1.

265. Bunyan, Intervention, 86–92.

266. Bullock, Russian Civil War, 46.

267. Bunyan, Intervention, 277, n1.

268. Pestkovskii, “Vospominaniia o rabote v narkomnaste,” 130.

269. Stalin, “O iuge Rossii,” Pravda, October 30, 1918. “Of all the difficulties which confront us,” Trotsky remarked in a speech on June 9, “the most pressing . . . is that of food,” citing countless telegrams of hunger and typhus. Bunyan, Intervention, 468; Trotskii, Kak vooruzhalas’ revoliutsiia, I: 74–86 (at 74).

270. Israelin, “Neopravdavshiisia prognoz graf Mirbakha.”

271. Pravda, April 27, 1918. Radek wrote of “the hate with which every working man in Moscow today greets the representative of German capital.” Izvestiia, April 28, 1918.

272. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 4, l. 10.

273. Izvestiia TsK KPSS,1989, no. 4: 143–4.

274. Nashe slovo, May 15, 1918: 2.

275. Drabkina, “Dokumenty germanskogo polsa v Moskve Mirbakha,” 124; Pipes, Russian Revolution, 617 (citing Winfried Baumgart, Vierteljahreshefte fur Zietgeschichte, 16/1 [1968]: 80).

276. Sverdlov followed up with additional circulars that month to all party organizations to reinforce the point. Pravda, May 19, May 22, and May 29, 1918; Perepiska sekretariata TsK RKP (b), III: 64, 72–4, 81–3; Sakwa, “The Commune State in Moscow,” 443–7; and Hegelsen, “The Origins of the Party-State Monolith.”

277. PSS, L: 88.

278. Nicoalevskii, Tainy stanitsy istorii, 384–6 (the words of Kurt Riezler).

279. Ludendorff, My War Memories, II: 658; Bunyan, Intervention, 177–9; Denikin, Ocherki russkoi smuty, III: 82–3. Ludendorff forwarded a long memorandum to the imperial chancellor on June 9, 1918.

280. In less than six months, it would be Wilhelm II who was kaput. Zeman, Germany and the Revolution in Russia, 126–7, 137–9. “Please use larger sums,” wrote Germany’s state secretary to the German minister (ambassador) Count Mirbach in Moscow on May 18, 1918, “as it is generally in our interests that the Bolsheviks should survive.” He added: “If further money required, please telegraph how much. It is very difficult to say from here which trend to support if Bolsheviks fall.” Zeman, Germany and the Revolution in Russia, 128–9.

281. Wheeler-Bennet, Forgotten Peace, 348–55.

282. Baumgart, Deutsche Ostpolitik 1918, 84.

283. Even as Germany, despite having signed the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, continued to seize former tsarist territory (Ukraine), Lenin turned to the Reichswehr to intercede against uncontrollable Red units (!). I. I. Vatsetis, Pamiat’, 1979, no. 2: 44.

284. N. Rozhkov, “Iskliuchenie oppozitsii iz TsIK,” Novaia zhizn’, June 18, 1918; Drabkina, “Moskva 1918.”

285. Hafner, Die Partei der linken Sozialrevolutionare; Leont’ev, Partiia levykh sotsialistov-revoliutsionerov. The Left SRs existed as a standalone party only since November 1917.

286. Makintsian, Krasnaia kniga VChK, II: 129–30; Gusev, Krakh partii levykh eserov, 193–4. The Cheka volume was soon withdrawn from circulation; during perestroika, it was reissued (Moscow: Politizdat, 1989).

287. Litvin, Levye esery i VChK, 69–73 (TsA FSB, d. N-2, t. 2, l. 10). This collection of documents amplifies Makintsian, Krasnaia kniga VChK.

288. V Vserossiiskii s”ezd sovietov, 5–37; Rabinowitch, “Maria Spiridonova’s ‘Last Testament,’” 426; Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks in Power, 288 (citing TsA SPb, f. 143, op. 1, d. 224, l. 75).

289. Bunyan, Intervention, 198, n57.

290. V vserossiiskii s”ezd sovetov, 22–3; Bunyan, Intervention, 200.

291. V. vserossiiskii s”ezd sovetov, 50–61; Izvestiia, July 5, 1918: 5; Bunyan, Intervention, 207–9. The reintroduction of the death penalty also angered the Left SRs, especially in an instance involving apparent heroism. The Baltic Fleet, still intact, was stationed at its main base Helsingfors (Helsinki), but the landing of German troops on the southwest of Finland in March 1918 jeopardized the fleet as well as Petrograd. The British, wary of German seizure of the Baltic Fleet, were conspiring with Trotsky to scuttle the ships. In March–April 1918, Alexei Schastny, the commander, worked a miracle to bring the fleet to safety at Kronstadt, his path cleared by icebreakers. But Trotsky wrongly suspected Schastny of hesitating to implement his orders to prepare the fleet for destruction. Schastny resigned in May. Unsatisfied, Trotsky himself organized a trial and had him executed on the fabricated charge of attempting to overthrow the Petrograd government. Trotsky was the sole witness allowed to testify. Rabinowitch, “Dos’e Shchastnogo.”

292. V vserossiiskii s”ezd sovetov, 73; Bunyan, Intervention, 210.

293. V vserossiiskii s”ezd sovetov, 63, 69; Gogolevskii, Dekrety Sovetskoi vlasti o Petrograde, 171.

294. Makintsian, Krasnaia kniga VChK, I: 185.

295. Makintsian, Krasnaia kniga VChK, I; 201–6 (Blyumin), II: 224–33. See also Neizvestnaia Rossiia: XX vek (Moscow, 1992), II: 55.

296. Latsis, Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, 1926, no. 9: 90.

297. Sadoul, Notes sur la revolution bolchevique, 305; Lockhart, British Agent, 295. Both Sadoul and Lockhart were eyewitnesses.

298. RGASPI, f. 4, op. 2, d. 527, l. 13 (recollections of Danishevsky).

299. Strauss, “Kurt Riezler, 1882–1955”; Thompson, Eye of the Storm.

300. Erdmann, Kurt Riezler, 713–4 (a deposition given in 1952); von Bothmer, Mit Graf Mirbach in Moskau, 72, 78; Makintsian, Krasnaia kniga VChK, I: 196–7; Hilger and Meyer, Incompatible Allies, 5–6, 8–9; Jarausch, “Cooperation or Intervention?” Andreyev would die of typhus in 1919. Their credentials also carried the signature of Ksenofontov, the Cheka secretary.

301. The German military attache, Bothmer, had raced to the Metropole Hotel to the commissariat of foreign affairs, whence Lev Karakhan, deputy commissar, phoned Lenin. Golikov, Vladimir Il’ich Lenin, V: 606.

302. Erdmann, Kurt Riezler, 715; Baumgart, Deutsche Ostpolitik 1918, 228, n71; Chicherin, Two Years of Soviet Foreign Policy; Sadoul, Notes sur la revolution bolchevique, 405. Some testimony indicates Lenin signed the condolence book.

303. Pravda, July 8, 1918, reprinted in Dzierz˙ynski, Izbrannye proizvedeniia, 111–6 (at 114). The quotation was retained in subsequent editions: (Moscow, 1967), I: 265; (Moscow, 1977), I: 176–9.

304. “He considers that Lenin is doing secretly what Kamenev and Zinoviev did in October,” a Bolshevik party meeting recorded Dzierzynski as having said. “We are a party of the proletariat and we should see clearly that if we sign this peace the proletariat will not follow us.” VII ekstrennyi s”ezd RKP (b): mart 1918 goda, 245.

305. Bonch-Bruevich, Ubiistvo germanskogo posla Mirbakha i vosstanie levykh eserov, 27. See also Spirin, Krakh odnoi aventiury, 38. Abram Belenky was also taken hostage with Dzierzynski.

306. Makintsian, Krasnaia kniga VChK, II: 194.

307. Litvin, Levye esery i VChK, 97 (Lacis: TsA FSB, d. N-8, t. 9, l. 8); Vladimirova, “Levye esery,” 121.

308. Steinberg, “The Events of July 1918,” 122.

309. Paustovskii, Povest’ o zhizni, I: 422–24; Lockhart, British Agent, 294–300.

310. Litvin, Levye esery i VChK, 211–33 (Shliapnikov: Za zemliu i voliu, July 16–19, 1918).

311. Steinberg, “The Events of July 1918,” 20.

312. PSS, L: 114.

313. “Pis’mo V. I. Leninu,” Sochineniia, IV: 118–9; Pravda, December 21, 1929; Voroshilov, Lenin, Stalin, i krasnaia armiia, 43; Bolshevik, 1936, no. 2: 74.

314. Vatsetis, “Grazhdanskaia voina: 1918 god,” 26–7.

315. Muravyov had begun his career as the head of security in Petrograd in 1917. He went on to crush the Rada in Ukraine in February 1918, then was sent to Bessarabia. In April, Dzierzynski had Muravyov arrested for looting, summary executions, discrediting Soviet power, and plotting with anarchists in Moscow. On June 13, 1918, however, the high command had appointed the fearless, no-holes-barred Muravyov as supreme commander of pro-Bolshevik forces on the key Volga front. The German embassy official in Moscow, Kurt Riezler, meanwhile, was funneling bribes to Muravyov to take on the Czechoslovak Legion rebels, a fact that became known to the Cheka. After the Left SR rebellion in Moscow was put down, on July 10, Muravyov declared he was switching sides to make war against Germany, “the vanguard of world imperialism,” and invited his enemies of the days before, the Czechoslovaks, to join. He commanded the largest single intact Red force at the time, and his betrayal threatened to detach from the Bolsheviks the entire strategic Volga valley and its food supply—a potential turning point. A young Lithuanian worker Bolshevik in the town of Simbirsk, Jonava Vareikis, saved the day, luring Muravyov to a trap, where on July 11 he was shot and bayonetted to death. (Vacietis would be sent eastward to sort matters out.) Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks in Power, 25 (citing Izvestiia, November 2, 1917); Savchenko, Avantiuristy grazhdanskoi voiny, 44–64 (at 56); Baumgart, Deutsche Ostpolitik 1918, 227; Erdmann, Kurt Riezler, 474, 711; Alfons Paquet, in Baumgart, Von Brest-Litovsk, 76; Pipes, Russian Revolution, 631; Dekrety sovetskoi vlasti, III: 9–10; Vladimirova, “Levye esery,” 120, 131; Lappo, Iosif Vareikis, 13–4; Spirin, Klassy i partii, 193–194; Mawdsley, Russian Civil War, 56–7.

316. Vatsetis, “Grazhdanskaia voina: 1918 god,” 16. Many Latvian units had been sent to the Volga valley.

317. Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks in Power, 294 (citing GARF, f. 130, op. 2, d. 1098, l. 2).

318. Vatsetis, “Grazhdanskaia voina: 1918 god,” 40–1. He claimed the fighting lasted seven hours, from 5:00 a.m. until noon, but this is highly improbable. See also Makintsian, Krasnaia kniga VChK, I: 201–4 (Sablin).

319. Valdis Berzins, “Pervyi glavkom i ego rukopis,” Daugava, 1980, no. 2–5 (Vacietis memoirs from 1919); V. D. Bonch-Bruevich—I. V. Stalinu,” Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1989, no. 4: 199–201.

320. Leggett, The Cheka, 70–83; Steinberg, “The Events of July 1918,” 21–2 (citing Lacis); Steinberg, Spiridonova, 216.

321. Izvestiia, July 8, 1918. Even now, one on-site Latvian commander reported that many of his compatriots thought the Bolsheviks’ days were numbered. Swain, “Vacietis,” 77 (citing Latvian State Archives, f. 45, op. 3, d. 11, l. 3).

322. Chudaev, “Bor’ba Komunisticheskoi partii za uprochnenie Sovetskoi vlasti,” 177–226. Dzierzynski had resigned as head of the Cheka the day he was freed (July 7). Unusually, the resignation was announced in all the newspapers and posted throughout the capital. He was replaced, at least formally, by Jekabs Peterss, an ethnic Latvian, a founding member of the Cheka, and the man who had retaken the Lubyanka headquarters from the Left SR–controlled Combat Detachment. (Peterss soon bragged to a newspaper, “I am not at all as bloodthirsty as people think.”) Dzierzynski remained in Moscow over the summer, however, and the extent to which he ceded authority remains unclear. On August 22, he would be formally reinstated as Cheka head. Tsvigun, V. I. Lenin i VChK, 69, 83; Bonch-Bruevich, Vospominaniia o Lenine [1969], 316; Utro Moskvy, November 4, 1918. See also Peters, “Vospominaniia o rabote v VChK.” MChK, 77–79; Leggett, The Cheka, 251. The episode of Dzierzynski’s resignation was described, murkily, in Makintsian, Krasnaia kniga VChK. As late as June 1919, almost a year after the Left SR party’s debacle, the Moscow City Cheka confirmed two former Left SRs to its collegium, the highest decision-making body. MChK, 154.

323. Blium, Za kulisami “ministerstva pravdy,” 34.

324. Erdmann, Kurt Riezler, 715; Izvestiia, July 14, 1918: 4. Popov was sentenced to death in absentia; he was captured only in 1921. Litvin, Levye esery i VChK, 145–56 (Popov: TsA FSB, d. N-963, l. 50–5).

325. V Vserossiiskii s”ezd sovetov, 108–28; Trotskii, Sochineniia, XVII/i: 451–76; Trotskii, Kak vooruzhalas’ revoliutsiia, I: 266–74. See also Zinoviev and Trotskii, O miatezhe levykh s.r.; and Erde, “Azef i Azefshchina,” Izvestiia, July 9, 1918. Vacietis, too, would maintain that the Left SRs had attempted a coup but simply failed to act decisively: “Grazhdanskaia voina: 1918 god,” 19.

326. Litvin, Levye esery i VChK, 99 (Efretov: TsA FSB, D. n-8, t. 1, l. 177); Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks in Power, 294, 443, n48 (citing TsA FSB, no. N-8, vol. Ia: 58, and RGALI SPb, f. 63, op. 1, d. 4, l. 155 [Proshyan]); Vladimirova, “Levye esery,” 122–3; PSS, XXIII: 554–6; Makintsian, Krasnaia kniga VChK, II: 148–55. Proshyan eluded capture but soon died of typhus in a provincial hospital under a false passport. Lenin wrote him an obituary! Litvin, Levye esery i VChK, 14; PSS, XXXVII: 385.

327. Makintsian, Krasnaia kniga VChK, II: 129–30, 186; Hafner, “The Assassination of Count Mirbach,” Piatyi vserossiiskii s”ezd sovetov, 132, 208; Pravda, July 9, 1918: 1, 3; Izvestiia, July 10, 1918: 5. Pyotr Smidovich understood it was not a coup in real time: Izvestiia, July 8, 1918: 5. The Left SRs would also assassinate the German commander in chief in Ukraine (on July 30, 1918).

328. V Vserossiiskii s”ezd sovetov, 109.

329. Schapiro, Origin of the Communist Autocracy (1977), x.

330. Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, III: 305. Spiridonova blamed herself for the debacle. Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks in Power, 308 (citing TsA FSB, no. N-685, vol. 6, l. 35ob) (letter of Spiridonova from prison to the Left SR 4th Party Congress); Makintsian, Krasnaia kniga VChK, 200–1.

331. Paquet, Im kommunistischen Russland, 26. See also Erdmann, Kurt Riezler, 467.

332. Znamia truda, April 19, 1918. “We are against war, and we do not encourage the nation to resume war,” Spiridonova had said at the 3rd Left SR Party Congress in June 1918. “We demand that the Peace Treaty be torn to pieces.” Quoted in Vladimirova, “Levye esery,” 113.

333. During the confused Left SR melee, Kurt Riezler telegrammed Berlin predicting that “Through immediate ruthless action and good organization, the Bolsheviks will maintain the upper hand and, unless their own troops fail, be once again successful.” Jarausch, “Cooperation or Intervention?,” 388. Under Stalin, Spiridonova would be re-arrested in Ufa in 1937, while in exile, along with a dozen other Left SRs. The NKVD shot her and a large group in a forest outside Oryol Prison in September 1941 as the Wehrmacht approached.

334. The Bolshevik and former Bundist S. M. Nakhimson wrote to the party secretariat in June 1918 (one month before he was killed in the Left SR uprising in Yaroslavl), that “All soviet and other institutions are only auxiliary organs for the party.” Nakhimson had presided over a “trial” against the Mensheviks and SRs in Yaroslavl already in April 1918. D. B. Pavlov, Bol’shevistskaia diktatura, 3 (citing RGASPI, f. 17, op. 4, d. 91, l. 24); I. Rybal’skii, “Iaroslavskii proletaroiat na slam’e podsudimykh,” Vpered!, April 25, 1918; G. B. Rabinovich, “Kto sudit iaroslavskikh rabochikh (otkrytoe pis’mo),” Vpered!, April 27, 1918.

335. Bykov, Poslednie dni Romanovykh, 121; Sokolov, Ubiistvo tsarskoi sem’i, 266; Smirnoff, Autour de l’Assassinat des Grand-Ducs; Crawford and Crawford, Michael and Natasha, 356–61; Ioffe, Revoliutsiia i sud’ba Romanovykh, ch. 8. The murder was spearheaded by Gavriil Myasnikov, who would be expelled from the Communist party in 1921 and arrested in 1923 for belonging to the party’s Workers opposition. Mikhail Romanov’s son Georgy (Count Brasov) had been smuggled out of Russia; he died in 1931, on the eve of his twenty-first birthday, in a car crash. Mikhail’s wife Natalia Brasova died a pauper in a Parisian charity hospital in 1952.

336. George V worried that the deposed autocrat’s presence in Britain would render the house of Windsor unpopular. Rose, King George V, 211–5.

337. Pipes, Russian Revolution, 745–88; Steinberg and Khrustalëv, Fall of the Romanovs, 169–376.

338. Steinberg, Spiridonova, 195; Vechernii chas, January 12, 1918; Nashe slovo, April 13, 1918; Sovetskaia Rossiia, July 12, 1987, 4 (G. Ioffe).

339. Pipes, Russian Revolution, 763 (citing Trotsky’s diary [April 9, 1935], Trotsky archive, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS/Russ 13, T-3731, p. 110).

340. Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 257n (citing Chicago Daily News, June 23, 1920: 2 [quoting the diary of Empress Alexandra]). The book was found among the possessions of Alexandra in Yekaterinburg: Sokolov, Ubiistvo tsarskoi sem’i, 281.

341. The key original documents, with analysis, can be found in Steinberg and Khrustalëv, Fall of the Romanovs, 287–93, 310–5, 351–66.

342. No order to kill from Lenin or Sverdlov has come to light. Second-hand reports, the strongest being Trotsky’s diary entry, indicate that Lenin and Sverdlov ordered the murders. Pipes, Russian Revolution, 770 (citing Trotsky’s diary [April 9, 1935], Trotsky archive, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS/Russ 13, T-3731, p. iii). The local order to murder Nicholas II was issued the very day Sverdlov reported on the deed at the Council of People’s Commissars. GARF, f. R-130, op. 2, d. 2 (Sovnarkom meeting, July 17, 1918). After the European press prematurely reported on the execution of the ex-tsar, Lenin wrote a cable in English: “Rumor not true ex-Tsar safe all rumors are only lie of capitalist press Lenin.” A few hours later, Nicholas was killed. Pipes, Unknown Lenin, 47.

343. Izvestiia, July 19, 1918; Pravda, July 19, 1918; Dekrety, III: 22.

344. Kokovtsov, Out of My Past, 522. “Order would be re-established and these fantastic socialist ideas would be done away with,” the former tsarist prime minister Kokovtsov, who found himself in Kislovodsk, recalled. “The Volunteer Army was being formed, and rumors persisted that the country was to be saved from Bolshevik oppression. . . . Nothing certain was known, and everybody made the most incredible conjectures, such that the Germans were advancing to save Kisolovodsk. The Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna”—wife of the third son of Alexander II—“told me in all seriousness that she expected a train to come and take her to Petrograd, where everything was ready for a restoration of the old order.” Kokovtsov, Out of My Past, 496.

345. Pipes, Russian Revolution, 654–5.

346. Chicherin, Two Years of Soviet Foreign Policy, 15–17.

347. Baumgart, Deutsche Ostpolitik 1918, 244; Freund, Unholy Alliance, 252–3; Mawdsley, Russian Civil War, 42–3.

348. Pamiat’, 1979, no. 2: 43–4; Erdmann, Kurt Riezler, 112–3.

349. Some six months later, an investigation began in earnest: the Whites captured one of the former guards and dug up a great number of royal family artifacts. Their chief investigator, Nikolai Sokolov, with the help of cryptographers, established the fact and the uncommon brutality of the entire royal family’s demise. Sokolov, Ubiistvo tsarskoi sem’i, 247–53. See also Bulygin, Murder of the Romanovs; Mel’gunov, Sud’ba Imperatora Nikolaia II; Bruce Lockhart, British Agent, 303–4; Radzinsky, Ubiistvo tsarskoi sem’i; and Rappaport, Last Days of the Romanovs.

350. “Nonetheless,” Lenin assured Zetkin, “we firmly believe that we will avoid the ‘usual’ course of revolution (as happened in 1794 and 1849) and triumph over the bourgeoisie.” Leninskii sbornik, XXI: 249 (July 26, 1918).

351. Mawdsley, Russian Civil War, 49–52. See also Fischer, Soviets in World Affairs, I: 128 (citing conversations with Chicherin).

352. Viktor Bortnevski, “White Intelligence and Counter-intelligence,” 16–7; Makintsian, Krasnaia kniga VChK, II: 120; Bortnevskii and Varustina, “A. A. Borman,” I: 115–49 (at 139).

353. Baumgart, Deutsche Ostpolitik 1918, 237–8; Pipes, Russian Revolution, 656.

354. Paquet, Im kommunistischen Russland, 54.

355. Hoover Institution Archives, Nicolaevsky Collection, no. 128, box 1, file 9: Karl Helfferich, “Moia Moskovskaia missiia,” 17; Jarausch, “Cooperation or Intervention?,” 392–4; Brovkin, Mensheviks After October, 272. Helfferich spent all of nine days in Moscow before being recalled by the foreign ministry.

356. Pipes, Russian Revolution, 660–1; Helfferich, Der Weltkrieg, III: 653; PSS, L: 134–5; Baumgart, Deutsche Ostpolitik 1918, 108–10; Erdmann, Kurt Riezler, 472n; G. Chicherin, “Lenin i vneshniaia politika,” Mirovaia politika v 1924 godu (Moscow, 1925), 5; Freund, Unholy Alliance, 23–4.

357. Chicherin, Vneshniaia politika Sovetskoi Rossii za dva goda, 5; Pearce, How Haig Saved Lenin, 71; Wheeler-Bennett, Forgotten Peace, 436.

358. Dokumenty vneshnei politiki, I: 467; “Geheimzusatze zum Brest-Litowsker Vertrag,” Europaische Gesprache, 4 (1926): 148–53; Pipes, Russian Revolution, 664–5.

359. In the letter, dated August 21, 1918, to Vatslav Vorovsky in Sweden, Lenin added, falsely, that “No one asked the Germans for help, but there were negotiations on when and how they, the Germans, could carry out their plan to attack Murmansk and General Alexeev.” Volkogonov, Lenin: Life and Legacy, xxxiii; RGASPI, f. 2, op. 2, d. 122, l. 1.

360. Jarausch, “Cooperation or Intervention?,” 394.

361. Meijer, Trotsky Papers, I: 117. The Reds recaptured Kazan in early September 1918.

362. Savel’ev, V pervyi god velikogo oktiabria, 109.

363. Service, Spies and Commissars, ch. 9 (citing a memorandum by Stephen Alley given to the author by Andrew Cook). Alley, a British agent in Russia, returned to England in March 1918, where he was eventually transferred to MI5. He has also been suspected of conspiring in the murder of Rasputin. He had a Caucasus connection: before the 1917 revolutions, he had helped build the Black Sea oil pipeline.

364. Zubov, F. E. Dzerzhinskii, 187.

365. PSS, XXXVII: 83–5 (Izvestiia, September 1, 1918); Bonch-Bruevich, Pokushenie na Lenina.

366. Kostin, Vystrel v serdtse revoliutsii, 84. The substitute speaker for Lenin was the leftist V. Osinsky [Obolensky], an opponent of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty.

367. Bonch-Bruevich, Izbrannye sochinenii, III: 275–90.

368. RGASPI, f. 4, op. 1, d. 91, l. 1–3 (receipts included).

369. McNeal, Bride of the Revolution, 209.

370. Bonch-Bruevich, Tri pokusheniie na V. I. Lenina, 79–80.

371. Gil’, Shest’ let s V. I. Leninym, 23–4.

372. Golinkov, Krushenie antisovetskogo podpol’ia v SSSR, I: 188–90.

373. Orlov, “Mif o Fanni Kaplan,” 70–1; Fanni Kaplan; Leskov, Okhota na vozhdei, 75. Kaplan confessed under interrogation by Peterss. Konopleva was not implicated and joined the Communist party in 1921; she was shot in 1937.

374. Izvestiia, August 31, 1918: 1.

375. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 18, l. 3–5 (and to frontline commanders: l. 6–13).

376. Trotskii, “O ranenom,” in O Lenine, 151–6.

377. Izvestiia, September 4, 1918; Malkov, Reminiscences, 177–80; Mal’kov, Zapiski [1959], 160; Fischer, Life of Lenin, 282. The 1959 edition of Zapiski komendanta Moskovskog Kremlia is the only one to contain the detail of Kaplan’s incineration. Istochnik, 1993, no. 2: 73.

378. Because of their experiences in Soviet Russia, the Latvian Rifles, upon being repatriated, refrained from defending the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic, formed in January 1919 and overthrown in May. Swain, “The Disillusioning.”

379. Baumgart, Deutsche Ostpolitik 1918, 315–6; Pipes, Russian Revolution, 661–2.

380. Bonch-Bruevich, Vospominaniia o Lenine [1965], 376–81.

381. PSS, L: 182; Tumarkin, Lenin Lives!, 67. The first stone monument to Karl Marx was erected only on May 1, 1920. Krasnaia Moskva, 568–9 (plate between pages).

382. By 1922, more than 200 streets would be renamed. Pegov, Imena moskovskikh ulits.

383. Lev Nikulin, in Beliaev, Mikhail Kol’tsov, 162; Dimitriev, Sovetskii tsirk, 29; Von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals, 114; Tsirk. In 1920, Staniewski returned to his native Poland (then an independent country). Radunski soon followed him, but in 1925 he returned to the Soviet Union and reestablished Bim-Bom with a new Bim.

384. Zinov’ev, N. Lenin, 64.

385. Gil’, Shest’ let s V. I. Leninym, 27–8; Tumarkin, Lenin Lives!, 90.

386. Dekrety Sovetskoi vlasti, III: 291–2 (September 5, 1918); Bunyan, Intervention, 239.

387. Izvestiia, September 7, 1918: 3.

388. Berberova, Zheleznaia zhenshchina, 93. “The least opposition, the least movement among White Guards, should be met with wholesale executions,” wrote the interior affairs commissar (Petrovsky) in a directive. “Local provincial executive committees should take the initiative and set the example.” Ezhenedel’nik chrezvychainykh komissii po bor’be s kontr-revoliutsiei i spekulatsiei, September 22, 1918: 11.

389. Izvestiia, September 3, 1918: 1. See also Krasnaia gazeta, September 1, 1918.

390. Vatlin, “Panika,” 78–81.

391. Chamberlin, Russian Revolution, II: 453; Daniels, “The Bolshevik Gamble,” 334, 339.

CHAPTER 8: CLASS WAR AND A PARTY-STATE

1. Petr Struve, “Razmyshleniia o russkoi revoliutsii,” Russkaia mysl’, 1921, no. 1–2: 6 (November 1919).

2. Protokoly zasedanii Vserossiiskogo, 80. See also Trotskii, “O voennykh kommissarakh” [fall 1918], in Kak vooruzhalas’ revoliutsiia, I: 183–4.

3. Goulder, “Stalinism.” State-building has long been recognized as a principal outcome of the Russian civil war, but the specificity of that state has not been as sharply recognized. Moshe Lewin, “The Civil War: Dynamics and Legacy,” in Koenker, Party, State, and Society, 399–423; Moshe Lewin, “The Social Background of Stalinism,” in Tucker, Stalinism, 111–36 (at 116).

4. The Bolsheviks complained about their own propaganda’s ineffectiveness and confinement to the towns. Kenez, Birth of the Propaganda State 44–9, 53–6.

5. Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States; Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” 169–91.

6. One scholar correctly wrote that “the civil war gave the new regime a baptism by fire. But it was a baptism the Bolsheviks and Lenin seemed to want.” Fitzpatrick, “The Civil War,” 57–76 (at 74).

7. Fitzpatrick, “The Civil War,” 57–76.

8. PSS, XXXVIII: 137–8.

9. As one scholar correctly observed, the Petrograd coup “became a nation-wide revolution only through years of civil war.” Pethybridge, Spread of the Russian Revolution, 176–180. Another scholar has argued that the “specific forms and methods of exercising power [during revolutions] differ greatly from those practiced during ‘normal’ times,” which is true, but in the Russian revolution emergency rule was permanently institutionalized. Kolonitskii, “Anti-Bourgeois Propaganda.”

10. Holquist, Making War. Elsewhere, in the best short treatment of the war, revolution, and civil war, Holquist advances the suggestive thesis that Russia’s staus as a domestic colonial empire led it to develop counterinsurgency governing techniques, which were brought out by the violent episode of 1905–7 and then by the world war conjuncture. Moreover, he adds a sophisticated statement of the critical role of Marxist ideas. Holquist, “Violent Russia.”

11. Reginald E. Zelnik, “Commentary: Circumstance and Political Will in the Russia Civil War,” in Koenker, Party, State, and Society, 374–81 (at 379).

12. For example, Trotsky’s decree, in the name of the Soviet central executive committee, dated October 29, 1917: RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 1, l. 3.

13. He added that “every day there are 20–35 cases of typhus.” Nielsen and Weil, Russkaia revoliutsiia glazami Petrogradskogo chinovnika, 46 (March 12, 1918).

14. Gerson, The Secret Police, 147–8 (citing Ezhedel’nik VCheka, October 13, 1918: 25).

15. Raleigh, Experiencing Russia’s Civil War, 262ff.

16. See the case of Dmitry Oskin (b. 1892), a peasant from near Tula, a factory town just south of Moscow, who had volunteered for the tsarist army in 1913, earned four St. George’s crosses for bravery at the front, and rose up through the army as his superiors—syphilitics and cowards—fell to death or crippling wounds. Oskin himself lost a leg to amputation. Throughout 1917, he tacked ever leftward, like the masses generally, and by 1918 had become “commissar” at Tula. He defended “the revolution” against “counter-revolution” at all costs. When anti-Bolshevik forces closed in on the city, Oskin eagerly imposed martial law, forced the populace to dig trenches, and conducted himself like a despot. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 264–5; Os’kin, Zapiski soldata. Oskin would rise to become a high military official.

17. Pravda, October 18, 1918: 1 (Dukhovskii, an official in the interior ministry or NKVD, separate from the Cheka).

18. Gerson, The Secret Police, 195.