The Whisperers

* The Provisional Government was formed by liberals and moderate socialists to steer the country through to the end of the First World War and the democratic election of a Constituent Assembly. Its political authority soon collapsed, however, as workers, peasants and soldiers formed their own local revolutionary committees, the Soviets in particular, to carry out a radical social revolution. It was in the name of the Soviets that Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917. The Bolsheviks, who numbered about 350,000 members on the eve of their insurrection, represented the revolutionary arm of the Social Democratic (Marxist) Party, whose moderate wing, the Mensheviks, supported the Provisional Government. In March 1918, the Bolsheviks renamed themselves the Russian Communist Party.

†There were plenty of examples to choose from, such as Aleksandr Fadeyev (the father of the future writer), who left his wife and three children to dedicate himself to the ‘people’s cause’ in 1905, or Liuba Radchenko, who left her husband and their two young daughters because, as she put it in her diary, ‘it was the duty of the true revolutionary not to be tied down by a family’ (RGAE, f. 9455, op. 3, d. 14, l. 56).