Was Revolution Inevitable? Turning Points of the Russian Revolution

The emergence of a rampant bureaucracy took the early Soviet state by surprise. Lenin's The State and Revolution in mid 1917 had suggested that 'any cook' could manage the affairs of state, a view reiterated by Bukharin and Yevgeny Preobrazhensky in their ABC of Communism in 1919: 'There will be no need for special ministers of state, for police and prisons, for laws and decrees ... The bureaucracy, the permanent offi­cialdom, will disappear. The State will die out.'²³ As Polan notes, this strand in Lenin's thinking stands in contrast to the rest of his works, which are mostly practical, instrumental and timely. This element is used to restore Lenin's credentials as a 'revolutionary humanist' with a 'fundamentally emancipatory intent'.²⁴ In fact, as Polan demon­strates, the text was replete with authoritarian implications because of its negation of politics as the praxis of contestation over meaning­ful alternatives. Such a space in the end was denied as much for the adherents of the revolution as for its opponents. More specifically, the problem of unbridled bureaucracy was soon identified, but no coher­ent response was ever found within the logic of soviet power. The theory of commune democracy held that bureaucracy would disap­pear of its own accord, as outlined by Marx in his study of the Paris Commune of 1870-71, The Civil War in France, while Lenin insisted it was a social problem and reflected the lack of political culture in Russia. Others argued that it was a legacy of the tsarist regime that would be overcome in time. In fact, the problem was systemic: the attempt to run the whole life of the country from a single centre gave rise to the bureaucracy and its associated stifling bureaucratism. In his Socialism: Utopian and Scientific Friedrich Engels had argued that under socialism 'the government of persons is replaced by administration of things', but this turned out to be rather more problematic than the revolutionary socialists anticipated.

As the Civil War came to an end in 1920, two interrelated but sep­arate debates challenged the Leninist structure of power. The 'party debate' focused on inner-party democracy and covered such issues as free speech within the party, the rights of party cells, the functions of the committees, and the role of leadership. The polarisation of society between the verkhi (upper tier) and the nizy (the masses) had been internalised within the party, with the verkhi now represented by higher party officials, and the nizy by the party's rank and file. As one of the eyewitnesses to the period, Alfred Rosmer, put it, 'The regime which bore the name "war communism" had been born with the war and should have died with it. It survived because there were hesitations as to the sort of organisation which ought to replace it.'²⁵ The trade union debate focused on the proper relationship between the party and the trade unions, and in general the role of the organised working class under socialism.

Moscow activists made a fundamental contribution to both the 'party' and trade union debates. The party debate raised some fun­damental questions about participation and democracy within the party. It balanced 'party revivalism' with some of the themes of the

Democratic Centralists, notably more trust in the soviets. Through the summer of 1920 the criticism of the RKP(b) Moscow Committee gath­ered strength, with the party revivalists accusing it of bureaucratism and lack of leadership, whereas the trade union debaters were more concerned with maintaining the party's class hegemony over all other political institutions. The Moscow party revivalists were led by E. N. Ignatov, a veteran of the various Democratic Centralist oppositions. He denounced the party's 'pettifogging supervision' over the district committees and condemned the repression visited upon party activists with independent views.²⁶ By late 1920 the whole party organisation in Moscow was involved in vigorous debates in the belief that the end of the Civil War would finally provide an opportunity to return to what they believed to be the genuine principles of revolutionary socialism. In other words, they appealed to some sort of idealised Bolshevism against the harsh strictures of Leninist practices as they had developed since the party had come to power. The spirit of reform affected all social organisations. The Moscow Soviet took to meeting in factories to overcome the gulf that had opened up with workers, and the trade unions also sought to shed the bureaucratic spirit.

The welter of reform proposals in the end, however, did little to over­come the deadening practices of Leninist democratic centralism. Too often responses to political problems were sought in social measures, such as the appointment of workers to key posts. The myth of some innate worker purity did little to create the conditions for genuine party pluralism. In the end, the opposite effect was achieved. The party apparatus was strengthened and the independent grass-roots renewal movement quelled. Kamenev at the head of the Moscow Soviet was one of the most enthusiastic reformers. He had bravely condemned the excesses of the Cheka and the practices of the Red Terror, and he now sought to achieve an internal metamorphosis of the practices of Soviet power. He criticised the class analysis of bureaucracy, noting that even if all the 'bourgeois specialists' were sacked, the bureaucracy would not disappear. Against such superficial views, he stressed the gulf between the poverty and backwardness of the country and the creation of a complex and ramified system of state management in the absence of the existence of the basic elements able to sustain such a structure.²⁷

However, all Kamenev's well-meaning innovations were caught in the systemic traps of the Leninist power system. As the veteran Men- shevik politician Boris Dvinov puts it, in conformity with the classic Menshevik argument that the attempt to impose 'utopian socialism' in a backward country with a tiny proletariat inevitably created a mon­strous bureaucratic mechanism:

The problem for Kamenev, and some of the other Bolsheviks who at this stage wavered in favour of 'proletarian freedom', was how to preserve the soviets as meaningful political institutions given the fact that decisions were taken elsewhere. How could serious debate take place without opposition and with the soviet simply a party fraction. Hence Kamenev's attempts to breathe some life into the soviet by creating sections, the idea of non-party deputies, and the closer links with the factories.²⁸

A rather different take on the problems of socialist governance was reflected in the 'trade union' debate. This focused on the role of worker organisations and advanced plans to curb the power of the bureau­cracy. The Workers' Opposition led by Alexander Shlyapnikov and Alexandra Kollontai insisted that more rights should be vested in the direct expression of workers' organisation. They called for a national congress of producers to take direct control of economic manage­ment. Kollontai criticised the bureaucratic regulation of all aspects of social existence, which even included attempts to instil partiinost (the 'party spirit') in dog-lovers' clubs. She urged the initiative of the workers to be encouraged, and insisted that 'wide publicity, freedom of opinion and discussion, the right to criticise within the party and among the members of the trade unions - such are the decisive steps that can put an end to the prevailing system of bureaucracy'. The pro­posed remedy was catastrophically simplistic: 'In order to do away with the bureaucracy that is finding its shelter in the soviet institu­tions we must first get rid of all bureaucracy in the party itself', and that could be achieved by 'the expulsion from the Party of all non- proletarian elements', while the democratisation of the party would be achieved through the 'elimination of all non-working class elements from all administrative positions'.²⁹ Trotsky adopted the opposite tack, and argued that War Communist practices should be taken to their logical conclusion. He called for the unions to be incorporated into the economic apparatus. Lenin ultimately took a middle path: the unions were to remain independent and act as 'transmission belts' for party policy and as educators of the working class rather than the organisers of production.

The 'party democracy' debate in the autumn of 1920 represented the last serious discussion about the need for some sort of public sphere within the party to avoid the bureaucratisation of the revolutionary government. It was rapidly, and possibly deliberately, eclipsed by the trade union debate launched by the Workers' Opposition. Although the latter raised some similar concerns to the party democratisers, above all the condemnation of bureaucracy, the addition of anti-intelligentsia (anti-specialist) themes and above all the claim that workers should run industry roused Lenin's hostility. While the party democratis- ers sought solutions at the level of political institutions, the Workers' Opposition reduced the question of political reform to the class dimen­sion. As the Democratic Centralists had argued earlier, and reiterated in the party debate, the poor functioning of Soviet institutions derived more from problems (as we would now put it) of institutional design than of petty bourgeois elements worming their way in to the ruling system in order to advance their own careers. The portrayal of politi­cal issues as a matter of class played into the hands of the Leninists, and allowed the new regime to avoid a serious self-analysis of what it had become, and certainly inhibited the creation of some sort of more pluralistic Bolshevism. When the question was couched in class terms, Lenin was unequalled; it was to political problems of autonomous rep­resentation and participation that he had no solution.

War Communism was in crisis by early 1921, with peasant revolts against forced requisitioning in the countryside and urban protests against the continuation of harsh restrictions against markets. The protests climaxed in March 1921 with the revolt of workers and sailors at the Kronstadt naval fortress in the Gulf of Finland, earlier one of the strongholds of Bolshevism. The insurgents rallied under the slogan of 'soviets without Bolsheviks', denouncing the Bolshevik usurpation of the rights of the soviets. They were savagely crushed, in a military operation led by Trotsky.³⁰ Lenin now argued that the Civil War had effectively destroyed the 'conscious' working class, reinforc­ing his belief that the party had to take up the burden of defending socialism and insulate itself from the degradation prevalent in society. In fact, there remained an active and engaged Moscow proletariat with its own ideas on how to build socialism.³¹ At the Tenth Party Congress in that month, economic concessions were balanced by the intensification of War Communist political processes. The first measures that were to lead to the New Economic Policy (NEP) were launched, and in particular forced requisitioning from the peasantry was replaced by a fixed tax-in-kind. Lenin admitted that the attempt to continue the organisation of the economy by wartime means had been a mistake. War Communism, he insisted, had been necessitated by the war and dislocation but it was not a viable long-term policy. Lenin hoped both to justify the necessity of War Communism and its repeal.

The party debate was as such never resolved. A cosmetic programme of reform under the label of 'workers' democracy' was instituted, but its effect was only to consolidate the powers of the committees and the party leadership in a process which first saw the use of the term perestroika (restructuring) in the Soviet context. The challenge to War Communist political relationships was met not by compromise but by repression. At the Tenth Congress two decrees condemned the oppositional groupings and imposed a 'ban on factions', a 'tempo­rary' measure that placed sharp limits on inner-party discussion which long remained a cardinal principle of Soviet rule. The NEP was not accompanied by a new political policy, and instead Lenin insisted that during a retreat discipline was at a premium to avoid a rout.

In the early 1920s the vestiges of non-Bolshevik parties were effectively eliminated. The trial of a group of leading Socialist Revo­lutionaries in mid 1922 presaged the show trials of the 1930s. To compensate for the real and imaginary threats to Bolshevik rule the mystique and power of the party were enhanced all the more. The NEP-style perestroika saw Bolshevik committees tighten their admin­istrative control over local party organisations. Centralisation and conformity within the party were intensified just as they were being relaxed in the economy. In April 1922 Stalin became General Secretary of the party, a post at the time regarded as no more than that of a glori­fied filing clerk. In a consummate manner he consolidated the party machine and his own power over that machine. His ability to appoint, dismiss and transfer party officials prefigured the ubiquitous nomen­klatura mechanism of later years and gave him a powerful weapon in the inner-party debates. A 'circular flow of power' was established whereby Stalin's appointments became beholden to him for their pos­itions.³² The Bolshevik tradition of open contestation was over, and in its place the deadening grip of the Leninist-Stalinist bureaucracy was intensified.

BOLSHEVIK PLURALISM IN PERSPECTIVE

This chapter has examined whether within the Bolshevik variety of revolutionary communism there was the potential for a more plural­istic institutionalisation of revolutionary power, as opposed to the strict monism of the Leninist type. Solzhenitsyn of course always argued against such a proposition, and indeed fundamentally rejected even the liberal revolution of February 1917. For Solzhenitsyn, the overthrow of the monarchy in what was effectively a coup d'etat in the February Revolution set in train a series of consequences whose inevitable denouement was the seizure of power by the most radical wing of the revolutionary movement. This is a powerful argument and it has a deep resonance to this day. However, this chapter has demon­strated that although Solzhenitsyn's overall argument may be valid, we should nevertheless not overlook the diversity within the revolution­ary movement. It is dangerously teleological to read back from history an inevitability that in practice may have been shaped by various con­tingencies. Above all, the story of Moscow suggests that in a different social and political environment, and with a different set of leaders, revolutionary socialism may have assumed more pluralistic forms, at least for its supporters.³³

A radical form of the argument would suggest that there was the potential for a more pluralistic form of Bolshevism against Lenin­ist monism. The various oppositions have been described as the 'conscience of the revolution', surviving to challenge orthodoxy and dogmatism all the way up to the final crushing of pluralism within the party in 1929.³⁴ They inherited the tradition established by Plekhanov in his critique of developments in what was to become the Bolshevik party from its establishment in 1903. The dynamic and contentious character of inner-party life in this period demonstrates that it was far from homogeneous and monolithic. It was the peculiarly narrow 'Leninist' version not only of organisational forms but above all of political practice that in the end squeezed the life out of the party, and indeed imposed this narrow and intolerant form on the country as a whole. The virulence and violence of Lenin's character became all the more evident when some of the secret archives were opened after 1991. The new documents expose in gory detail Lenin's 'terror practices'. For example, Lenin admonished the trade union leaders in May 1920 when they called for the administration of unions to be decentralised and for affairs to be run collegially. He mocked the idea but in the end conceded: 'We shall resort sometimes to the collegiate principle, sometimes to individual management', but the next sentence revealed his real views: 'We shall leave collegiality to the weak, the inferior, the backward, the undeveloped. Let them chatter, get sick of it, and stop talking.' As Richard Pipes comments: 'Lenin rarely expressed more bluntly his contempt for democratic procedures.'³⁵

Even then a degree of debate continued. In the 1920s there was more to the choices facing the Soviet Union than the struggle between Trotsky and Stalin. Nikolai Bukharin offered a considered and substantive alternative, defending the New Economic Policy as an evolutionary path towards socialism by allowing the creativity and entrepreneurialism of the masses to be unharnessed within the framework of Soviet power. By the 1930s Bukharin had become 'the last Bolshevik'. However attenuated, the Bolshevik tradition of debate continued even in this period, until Bukharin was finally put to death in 1938.³⁶ The political trajectory of Bukharin, and even to a degree of Kamenev, suggests that a deterministic view of Soviet history is mis­placed. In the final period of Soviet power the Gorbachev variant once again took up some Bukharinite themes in order to reinvigorate the tradition of reform communism.³⁷

Thus the question of alternatives and the role of Bolshevik plural­ism remains a live one to this day. The root of the question is whether Marxism itself contains the potential for more diverse political practices. In other words, was Marx responsible for Soviet authoritari­anism? The question can be posed as 'whether Soviet authoritarianism was a necessary or inevitable consequence of Lenin's attempt to fulfil what he understood as Marx's project'.³⁸ In other words, does the Marxist understanding of the transition from capitalism to socialism inevitably involve a degree of coercion? The Leninist 'dictatorship of the proletariat' subordinated law to power and ruthlessly crushed all opposition, and in the end gave way to the Stalinist dictatorship. This was challenged by Antonio Gramsci's emphasis on hegemony rather than coercion, an idea that was fruitfully developed in the Eurocom- munist challenge to Soviet-style authoritarian communism. In the 1970s Eurocommunists sought to achieve a socialist transformation of society through democratic means, in a manner reminiscent of the earlier critiques of Lenin by Luxemburg and Kautsky. It is question­able whether Eurocommunists achieved a fundamental break with 'the authoritarian traditions of Leninism'.³⁹ The Eurocommunists held the Russian context as chiefly responsible for the degeneration of the revolutionary communist ideal, just as the Left Communists and the Workers' Opposition had held social factors responsible, whereas the problem is far deeper than that. Equally, the 'Bolshevik' critics of Len­inist policies had a no less ambivalent attitude towards democracy than did Lenin himself. Even Bukharin is notorious for his statement that under socialism there would be two parties, one in government and the other in jail, and he was zealous in defending the coercive aspects of the 'dictatorship of the proletariat'.⁴⁰ Opposition was deni­grated as 'bourgeois', which became a malleable concept to describe any opponent. Marxism lacked a sustained theory of the complexity of the modern state, and instead it was reduced to an instrument of coer­cion. Although Marx was careful to delineate an independent sphere for politics, in the end for him it was an element of the 'superstructure' that was ultimately derived from the material sphere of the means of production. The Marxian tradition of revolutionary socialism lacked a developed concept of the autonomy of politics where agency and deci­sions can decisively shape historical outcomes.⁴¹

The existence of pluralistic alternatives to dogmatic and coercive Leninism repudiates the cultural determinism that suggests that com­munism could have taken no other path than the one it did because of the character of Russia. Equally, it rejects the ideological determinism, prevalent in totalitarian approaches, that suggests a straight line from Marxism to Stalinism. However, although undoubtedly the Russian Revolution was far broader than its Bolshevik instantiation, and in its turn Bolshevism in the early years of Soviet power was broader than the illiberal Leninism that predominated, they all shared a social reduc­tionist understanding of political contestation and lacked a developed theory of the role of opposition and pluralism within the revolutionary communist movement. Instead, they all shared a view of the politics of transition to socialism that was sharply at odds with the end state of freedom that they sought to achieve. The 'myth of human self-identity' in socialist thought collapsed the distinction between civil and polit­ical society. The Marxian ideal of unity was not only unattainable but it opened the way to what came to be known as totalitarianism.⁴²

The Bolshevik challenges to proto-Stalinist features of Soviet rule did not represent a considered theoretical platform that questioned the theory of Leninist dictatorship, but instead sought only to modify some of its practices. The coalition, party and trade union debates dem­onstrate that there were alternative paths not only in the revolution but also within the Bolshevik party. However, the logic of Leninism tended towards the destruction of socialist diversity and pluralism, although the rationale of that logic adapted to circumstances. In 1917-18 Lenin justified exclusivity because of the logic of political struggle; in 1919-20 because of the exigencies of the Civil War; and from 1920 because of the alleged social determinism prompted by the destruction of the working class and the economic imperative of implementing a strat­egy of economic development. Lenin's assertion that the working class was destroyed by the end of the Civil War, which justified the inten­sification of top-down managerialism within the party, was greatly exaggerated. A conscious workers' movement remained, with a sense of purpose and leadership.⁴³ Finally, in conditions of the 'retreat' of the NEP, Lenin tightened discipline within the party and with the ban on factions put an end to a whole era of debate.

Thus Bolshevik pluralism is a contradiction in terms. As long as the Soviet system remained recognisably Leninist, it would lack the conceptual basis for genuine inner-party democracy. Debates and controversies over leadership and policy continued into the 1930s, and were revived after Stalin's death, but only with Gorbachev's perestroika did the fundamental problem of pluralist democracy and civil society in the Soviet system once again come to the fore. By the early 1920s, ideas of democratic socialism and social emancipation gave way to a bureaucratised and violent reality. Compulsion in external interac­tions and suppression within the party became mutually reinforcing, giving rise to the ferociously coercive Stalinist system. This was not something visited upon the Bolsheviks from outside, as the oppos­ition within the party pointed out, but was part of an intrinsic political process. The potential existence of alternatives only demonstrates the narrowness of the path actually taken.

AFTERWORD

LENIN AND YESTERDAY'S UTOPIA

tony brenton

_T

he shadow of the 1917 revolution still looms large.

Every Russian town still has its memorial to Lenin. In Moscow his mausoleum still presides over Red Square and serves as the review­ing stand for the leadership on great national occasions. Stalin, in fact a Georgian, regularly tops or almost tops national polls on who was 'the greatest Russian'. The FSB, lineal successor to the KGB and Lenin's Cheka, still occupies its former insurance building on Lubyanka Square (and there is regular talk of re-erecting the statue of Dzerzhinsky, the Cheka's founder, in front of it). Russia's ruined agriculture and largely obsolescent heavy industry testify to the brutal lunacies of Commu­nist planning. Russia's almost instinctive grab at Ukraine in 2014, with the spate of Western sanctions that followed, testify to the survival of imperial and Cold War instincts that many had hoped were buried in 1991. And, raising our eyes from Russia itself, it is noteworthy that the world's fast rising second superpower, China, is still ruled by exactly the secretive, repressive, single-party system that it inherited from the Soviet Union and ultimately from the 1917 revolution.

And yet. Since 1917 Russia has seen what in many ways was another revolution. In 1991 the USSR collapsed, taking most of the Communist project with it. It is striking to compare the vainglorious speeches made in the Soviet Union in 1967, on the fiftieth anniversary ofwhat was then called the 'Great October Revolution', with the present Russian mood of uncertainty about what the whole experience has meant. Should the Dzerzhinsky statue be re-erected, or should Lenin's mausoleum be razed? Was Stalin indeed Russia's greatest man, or could it have been the leading dissident, Andrei Sakharov?

So what, if anything, does the 1917 revolution still have to teach us? In this afterword I approach this question first by asking whether we can indeed say anything sensible about what in the revolution was inevitable, and what was not. This leads, via consideration of the very particular role of Lenin, to a discussion of the impact of the revolution in history over the next seventy years - bringing us to 1991. While the two upheavals were of course very different there are also some telling points of comparison. And then, finally, after 1991 how much is left?

I: WHAT WAS INEVITABLE, AND WHAT WASN'T?

The chapters of this book have examined in detail a number of moments during the revolution when things might have gone differ­ently. Some contributors have identified points where a small change of circumstances could have led to a large change in trajectory. Others have concluded that at the moment they are examining there was not much that was likely to shift. Against this background, is there any­thing sensible we can say about what was, and was not, inevitable in the overall course of the revolution?

Let me focus on two key questions. Could the tsarist regime in some form have survived? And, if not, how inevitable was the Leninist regime that succeeded it?

On the first of these questions it is useful, as Dominic Lieven points out, that we have international comparators. It was not just Russia. By about 1910 all three of the great European land empires - Romanov, Habsburg and Ottoman - faced pressures that they were visibly ill- equipped to meet. The Ottomans, dubbed by an earlier Russian tsar the 'sick man of Europe', were seeing their empire erode as more vig­orous powers and upstart local nationalisms were dismembering it piece by piece. The Habsburgs, similarly, were having increasing dif­ficulty holding their ramshackle empire together in the face of growing demands for independence from a range of subject nationalities, notably Slavs. And, as we have seen, the Romanovs were struggling with the combined effects of military defeat in Japan, the destabilis­ing impact of economic modernisation (as the others were too), and widespread economic discontent.

The crucible where all this came together was the Balkan peninsula. Here all three empires had vital, and competing, interests. And the moment was the start of the First World War. As Dominic Lieven says, far too much attention has been paid to the supposed conjuncturality of the First World War. What if Gavrilo Princip had missed? And so on. In fact, the final breakdown ofAugust 1914 was simply the culmination of a century of accelerating Balkan crises. There was near-war in 1909 between Russia and Austro-Hungary, and two actual Balkan wars in 1912 and 1913, into both of which the great powers were very nearly drawn. A couple of decades earlier, one of the most perceptive readers of European politics, Otto von Bismarck, had predicted that the next great European conflagration would be the result of 'some damned fool thing in the Balkans'. To the extent that anything in history is inevi­table it is hard to avoid the conclusion that some final showdown in the Balkans involving Russia, Austro-Hungary and Turkey - with Germany almost certainly being pulled in - was it.

The war destroyed all three empires. These were pre-modern pol­ities, enjoying limited loyalty from large swathes of their populations and grappling with the unprecedented economic and mass mobilisa­tion challenges of modern war. It is possible to imagine the war coming in another form, but without some stroke of good luck (a much shorter war - unlikely given the technological superiority of defence over offence; or greater political good sense - made harder by the new phenomenon of aroused public opinion drowning out the subtle cal­culations of the diplomats) it is hard to see the political outcome being very different. At the risk of sounding deterministic (and to adapt Ian Fleming), the fall of one empire could have been happenstance, two could have been coincidence, but all three makes it look like a law of nature.

As for Russia itself, with the benefit of hindsight we can see that the signs of imperial morbidity were there in abundance. Educated and propertied Russians made clear through those they elected to the Duma their diminishing sympathy for incompetent, backward-look­ing tsarism. The supposedly more loyal 'dark people' voted when they could for expropriation of the rich, increasingly took the law into their own hands against landowners and capitalists, and served with less and less willingness and discipline in Russia's armed forces. Much of the urban proletariat was frankly revolutionary. And the revolutionary movement itself can only be compared in fanaticism and propensity to violence to today's extreme Islamists. The most able servants of the regime, Witte and Stolypin, were both driven by fears for its survival. The tsar himself was weak, petulant, mistakenly believed that he was loved by the Russian people, and was quite unrealistically attached to his own autocratic prerogatives. The weird and utterly Russian figure of Rasputin, embraced by the Romanov family in the face of the clear­est need to get rid of him, finally says it all. Literary theorists would say that the final collapse was overdetermined. The First World War merely gave the last kick to a deeply rotten edifice.

But if the fall of the old regime was indeed overdetermined, it is hard to argue that that was also true of what succeeded it. Russia between the fall of the monarchy in February 1917 and the effective imposition of Bolshevik rule in early 1918 (with, even then, a civil war still to win) feels like a rudderless vessel pushed this way and that by the winds and the tides. The Provisional Government that notionally took over from the monarchy was able to exercise significant authority in some ways (it launched a serious military offensive against the Central Powers in June). But it lacked legitimacy, faced growing chaos in the country­side, a revolutionary working class in Petrograd and other cities, and an increasingly mutinous military. It operated in uneasy tandem with the Petrograd (and other) soviets, which were deeply hostile to the old order and controlled the streets and barracks of Petrograd. The traditional Soviet narrative of the period is of power ineluctably slip­ping into the hands of the soviets, and ultimately the Bolsheviks. In fact, while the Bolsheviks undoubtedly exploited the chaos of these months to extend their grip in any way they could, there were a whole series of moments, as described in a number of the chapters above, where their advance could have stopped. What if the Duma had suc­cessfully imposed its authority in February, as Kerensky subsequently suggested, and the rising power of the soviets had been contained at that point? What if the Constituent Assembly, to which everyone was looking to take authority, had succeeded in convening before the Bol­shevik October coup, and had thus not been instantly snuffed out? What if Kerensky had avoided his catastrophic misunderstanding with Kornilov in August, and had thus retained the support of the army to confront the Bolsheviks in October? What if Lenin had been arrested on the way to the Smolny on 24 October, in which case the takeover of power would have been by all the socialists not just the Bolsheviks?

II: LENIN'S ROLE

We should pause for a moment over Lenin. It has become unfashion­able in modern history to credit much to individual personalities. It is nevertheless quite impossible to understand the course of events in these few months in Petrograd (and afterwards) without acknow­ledging the formidable impact of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. This was the situation for which he was born. A driven revolutionary from his schooldays, his relationships with his wife, his family and all those around him were completely dominated by politics. And for him pol­itics was Manichaean: he saw only acolytes or enemies - the latter to be brought down by whatever means came to hand. From very early on he dedicated himself to bringing an extreme version of Marxism first to Russia and then to the world. He saw clearly that this could not be done by popular consent; force and terror would be needed ('How can you make a revolution without firing squads?' he asked in 1917). His chosen instrument to gain power, devised by him in 1902, was a disciplined, tightly bound, 'vanguard' political party. Through intra-party intrigue he created exactly the faction he needed, the Bolsheviks, in 1903.

Unsurprisingly he spent most of his early life in exile, and expected to die there. It was the February Revolution that gave him his chance. As described by Sean McMeekin in his chapter, the Germans shipped Lenin back to Russia in the famous 'sealed train' in April 1917. He then overcame almost total opposition among his Bolshevik colleagues, and galvanised the local political scene, by setting out an extreme pro­gramme that included overthrow of the Provisional Government and an immediate end to the war. As other opposition parties gradually came to link themselves with the Provisional Government so the Bol­sheviks by their very extremism became more and more conspicuous (and popular) as leaders of the opposition. In particular their demand for peace attracted the crucial support of the Petrograd military gar­rison. After two major breakdowns of public order (the so-called 'April' and 'July' days) in which the Bolsheviks played a significant role, Lenin was forced once more into exile (and concluded at the time that his hopes for revolution were over). He returned in October and, as described by Orlando Figes, again persuaded his unwilling Bolshevik comrades firstly to launch the October coup that finally placed them in power; and then three months later to repress the long-awaited Con­stituent Assembly, which was the only immediate challenge to that power.

Lenin's centrality to the events of these months underlines how contingent the outcome was. He of course had able associates, notably Trotsky, who were crucial to carrying the Bolshevik project through. But it is striking how regularly he turns his whole party round with his single-minded insistence on taking and holding power. As Sean McMeekin points out, if the Germans had not sent Lenin back, or any of half a dozen possible accidents had happened to him once he was back, a Bolshevik-dominated outcome in Russia becomes much less likely. Lenin himself after the July Days seemed ready to acknow­ledge that all was lost and to revert to overseas pamphleteering. It was only the Kornilov fiasco that put him back in the game. Even after the October coup, not many seasoned Petrograd political observers were betting on the long-term survival of the Bolshevik regime.

The true significance of Lenin is that, having got through to achieve power, he (unlike those who fleetingly took the limelight before him - Rodzyanko, Lvov, Kerensky and Chernov) held on to it. After January 1918, there are still moments of contingency, but, somehow, with Lenin's iron grip on the tiller, the course seems more firmly set. He had an unerring eye for the weaknesses of his opponents, and a ruthless readiness to exploit them. Martin Sixsmith underlines Lenin's centrality in his comments on how radically different things could have been if Fanny Kaplan had in fact killed him in August 1918. And I am struck by the doubts among our other commentators on this later period (notably Evan Mawdsley on the Civil War and Richard Sakwa on the possibility of 'Bolshevik democracy') as to whether events by this stage could have gone very differently from how they actually did.

III: LENIN'S LEGACY

Lenin gave the world a political approach, a system and a state, all of which have been among the key drivers of world history through the twentieth century.

His approach to political action was utterly functional and unsenti­mental. All that mattered was gaining and holding power. He created the Cheka and enthusiastically encouraged the mass (and, where possible, public) murder of his opponents. He bullied his fellow Bolsheviks in 1918 into ceding vast swathes of western Russia to the Germans rather than lose power. Patriotism, compassion, truth would all be abandoned when necessary. There is no sign in Lenin's mature writings of any compunction about this. His lapidary summary of the criterion to be brought to any political judgement was 'Kto, kovo?' - who gains, who loses? This of course was not new in human history; Machiavelli had lauded the brutalities of Cesare Borgia. But it was Lenin, encouraged by Marx's own dismissal of 'bourgeois morality', who gave the doctrine its first mass twentieth-century outing. And, as Richard Sakwa makes clear, it was Lenin who irretrievably injected into the Bolshevik party its contempt for democratic procedure. The chicanery of the road to power, the savagery of the Civil War, the Red Terror, the mendacity and mass propaganda which became his regime's mode of communi­cation with its own people and the wider world; these all cleared the way for the murderous collectivisations and purges which his succes­sors inflicted on Russia. Outside Russia his approach found apt pupils in Mussolini, Hitler, Mao ... right up to Pol Pot and Ceausescu. He popularised an approach to politics that lies like a great stain across the whole twentieth century.

Lenin's second legacy was organisational. Partly by accident he arrived at one of the twentieth century's great political innovations - the one-party state. He had already set out his plans for a vanguard revolutionary party to seize the reins of power in 1902. Having done exactly that in 1917, his revolutionary party, without subsuming the Russian state, then became a monopolistic ruling party, taking all the high offices, pulling all the strings, and squeezing out all political oppo­sition. The reason for things going this way are various: there simply weren't enough Bolsheviks to replace the entire Russian bureaucracy; the Russian state at that stage was in any case seen as no more than an obsolescent structure on the way to world revolution; and it somehow suited the oblique revolutionary mentality to control the state without actually being it - so much more was deniable or blameable on some­body else.

Once invented this was a system that offered huge attractions to twentieth-century authoritarians and ideologues, and it proved immensely successful. It is no accident that the official creed of the Soviet Union became the clumsily double-barrelled 'Marxism/Len­inism'. Marxism of course, whatever the inadequacies of its actual implementation, remained a powerful insurrectionary brand, deployed by twentieth-century revolutionaries from Mao to Mandela. But Len­inism was at least as important both in managing the Soviet Union itself and in its wider repercussions. Within its first two decades Lenin's one-party state had provided an explicitly acknowledged model for Mussolini, Hitler and Franco. After the Second World War, apart from its imposition all across Eastern Europe, it spread like a plague through newly decolonised Africa, the Middle East and Asia. At its high point, from Turkey to Tanzania and from Syria to Singapore it was the system of governance of more than sixty nations.

IV: THE STATE LENIN CREATED

Lenin's third great contribution to history was the Soviet Union itself. This is not the place to run through the detailed history of the Com­munist superpower. Rather like the newly independent United States at the end of the eighteenth century, it saw itself as an unprecedentedly innovatory political order ('Novus Ordo Seclorum', as it says on US banknotes). But unlike the United States, which in fact retained most of the legal, social and economic arrangements of its colonial past, the Bolsheviks set out to wipe the slate entirely clean. In what may well have been the biggest politico-economic experiment in the history of mankind, all of society and the economy were made subject to, and in effect the possessions of, a small, ideologically driven, political clique. The population of Russia became no more than grist to the mills of those who were building socialism; and were chewed up in their tens of millions.

It is hard not to see something tragically Russian in this. Having abandoned early hopes of world revolution, the Soviet regime reverted to some deep Russian archetypes: Ivan the Terrible, who created an elite cadre, the Oprichnina, to repress and terrorise the wider boyar class; and Peter the Great, who turned the entire nobility into state servants, and built his new capital, St Petersburg, on the bones of tens of thousands of forced labourers. Indeed, Stalin revelled in compari­sons with these earlier figures. And under him the Russian tradition of autocracy was back with a vengeance. The all-embracing system of classification and control of the Soviet Union's people in the 1930s is comparable with nothing so much as the system imposed by Peter the Great 200 years earlier. Nicholas II looks positively liberal by comparison.

For a while it worked, though at an unimaginable cost in human lives. The economy was industrialised and society dragooned in time to defeat the genocidal Nazi invasion of 1941. That success, with the huge accretion in international power and influence it brought, made the Soviet Union the world's second superpower, leading a world com­munist movement which at its height governed one third of mankind. Even as late as 1956 the leader of the Soviet Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev, was able to point to Soviet technological and economic successes and say, plausibly, to the West 'We will bury you.' But stagna­tion set in. The state-run economy simply couldn't compete in terms of dynamism or innovation with late twentieth-century capitalism. And the Communist Party, as long-serving elites do, became corrupt, sclerotic and conservative. Fitful efforts at reform failed until the final reformer, Mikhail Gorbachev, inadvertently and unexpectedly brought the whole system down.

V: TWO REVOLUTIONS COMPARED

The comparison between Gorbachev's 1991 'revolution' and the 1917 revolution which is the subject of this book has a lot to say about what has and has not changed in Russia over the past century. There were of course huge differences. The 1917 revolution came from below, driven by an angry population and political class. The 1991 revolution came from above, driven by an elite effort to make the system work better. The 1917 revolution began with a dysfunctional autocracy and largely peasant economy; it ended with communist totalitarianism. The 1991 revolution began with a repressive and closed communist system; it ended with 'managed democracy' and a recognisably market economy. What then are the common features? Four leap to the eye.

A] THE FRAGILITY OF RULING RUSSIA

The first is that in both cases what looked like a well-established and enduring regime fell with remarkable speed, taking the vast major­ity of contemporaries by surprise. The Romanov regime, for all its retrospectively obvious weaknesses, had been in power for 300 years. The massive tercentenary celebrations in 1913 gave the strong impres­sion (not least to Nicholas himself) of a nation united behind its sovereign. The patriotic displays at the start of the war in August 1914 seemed to carry the same message. Until the crisis was fully upon them, the tsar, most of the ruling class and most outside observers dismissed outbursts of peasant anger, worker indiscipline and intelligentsia disaf­fection as untypical of the mass of the Russian people.

Similarly, the Soviet regime of the early 1980s felt rock solid. Cer­tainly it faced economic stagnation, a gerontocratic leadership and the loss of passionate revolutionary belief. But the tiny dissident movement was seen as unrepresentative of a Soviet people who if not enthusias­tic were at least submissive. No serious commentator was predicting collapse. What seemed to be needed was evolutionary reform, and the agent chosen for that was a true Leninist believer, Mikhail Gor­bachev. Within five years the modest stimuli he introduced, a little more market and a little less repression, ran wild and destroyed the entire system.

Plainly, one cannot draw too wide a lesson from these two examples of unexpected regime downfall. But they do suggest that, in Russia, with its particularly opaque and repressive tradition of public life, an impression of widespread public acquiescence in the way they are ruled can prove, when put to the test, startlingly shallow. Which may help to explain why Russia's present regime follows public opinion with very close attention.

B] THE INSTABILITY OF EMPIRE

The second feature common to the two revolutions is the destabilising role played by Russia's subject provinces - particularly Ukraine. In 1917 one of the immediate consequences of the fall of tsarism was an upsurge of nationalist demands, initially for autonomy but ultimately for inde­pendence, in Poland and Finland (then provinces of the empire) as well as Ukraine and the Baltic republics. These demands, backed as they were by the Germans, were among the factors that made a quick peace impossible and so broke the back of the Provisional Govern­ment. It was only by 1922, after the Germans had collapsed to defeat in the West and the Bolsheviks had won the Civil War, that Ukraine was reclaimed. But Poland, Finland and (until 1945) the Baltics became independent.

The story in 1991 was different, but the underlying centrifugal forces were the same. As Gorbachev's reforms weakened Moscow's power so, again, demands arose for more autonomy in a number of Soviet republics, most particularly the Baltics and Ukraine. It was Gor­bachev's efforts to meet these demands that provoked the fateful coup of August 1991 (conducted by hardliners intent on stopping the break­up of the Soviet Union). Even though the coup failed, it marginalised Gorbachev and so enabled the president of Russia (Boris Yeltsin) to do the deal with the president of Ukraine and others that broke the Soviet Union up into independent states.

Again, it would be a mistake to draw too wide a conclusion from these two particular cases. But plainly, and unsurprisingly, Russia's grip on its subject nationalities diminishes at a time of domestic politi­cal turmoil. This generates demands for autonomy/independence, which can add fatally to the pressures that the centre is already under. It is notable that even in post-1991 Russia one of the key challenges for Moscow has been Chechnya's demand for independence, and the destructive impact that has had on domestic security and governance.

C] THE CHALLENGE OF THE WEST

Tsarist Russia's relationship with the Western powers, even when polite, was never entirely comfortable. Many in the West saw Russia as alien and threatening. For its part, Russia, while hungry for Western modernity, mostly remembered regular Western invasions (Poles, Swedes and French, at roughly hundred-year intervals - each with the ambition of destroying Russia), and saw itself as leader of an alter­native, and superior, Orthodox and Slavic tradition. Nicholas II was personally sympathetic to some of the most extreme exponents of this view, and it helped lead Russia into the First World War.

The revolution of 1917 was intended to end the old international pol­itics. Russia was now just a station on the road to world communism, and Soviet foreign relations were initially subordinate to that objec­tive. But by the mid 1920s hopes ofworld revolution had been replaced by the grey reality of 'Socialism in One Country'. The messianism of communism accordingly mutated into the straightforward pursuit of Russian national interest (two conspicuous examples: the subjuga­tion of Soviet policy towards the Chinese communists between the wars to concerns about the Japanese threat to the USSR; and the 1939 somersault, again prompted by Soviet security concerns, from total ideological hostility to Nazi Germany to effective alliance with it). The Soviet Union until the end of its days certainly emphasised its role as leader of world communism (as Nicholas II had as leader of Ortho­doxy), but pursued a very traditional Russian foreign policy agenda: protection from the threat of Western invasion by extending as wide a sphere of influence as possible, and expansion of Soviet/Communist influence wherever opportunity offered.

In 1991, policy evolved from a different starting point, but ended up in the same place. The economic and political models that the 19 91 reform­ers set about introducing, market economics and liberal democracy, were Western models. The intention was explicitly for Russia to join the West. Gorbachev regularly spoke of the 'Common European Home'.

But again Russian patterns reimposed themselves. In the chaotic and demoralised circumstances of the 1990s, liberal democracy in Russia couldn't be made to work, and the transition to market economics was accompanied by social and material catastrophe. The result, accentu­ated by a series of Western 'humiliations' of Russia (most notably the expansion of NATO), was a sharp resurgence of Russian national­ism. The regime searched for a 'Russian' response to these pressures. It revived Orthodoxy, emphasised patriotism, and stood increasingly firmly (most notably in Georgia and Ukraine) against what it now saw as the predatory aims of the West.

Both revolutions, of 1917 and of 1991, were on behalf of universal values that ended up taking on some very traditional Russian features. In both cases Russia's foreign policy after an initial radical disturbance reverted to its familiar form. The key drivers have again become intense nationalism, fear of Western dominance and determination to protect a Russian sphere of influence. After the high hopes of 1991 the West has had some difficulty adjusting to this. One wonders if the outcome could ever have been different.

D] THE AUTHORITARIAN IMPULSE

The fourth obvious parallel between 1917 and 1991 is that in both cases a powerful social movement intent on democratising Russia led the country, via a period of chaos, back to authoritarianism. The story of 1917 has been traced in detail in the above chapters. As I have argued here, while Bolshevism was not the inevitable outcome of the chaos around 1917, the most likely alternative was not democracy but some other (probably right-wing) authoritarian regime. Russia's democratic tradition was too weak, and its democratic politicians too feeble, to be able to surmount the crisis. The perceived need for dictatorship (already being plotted even before Nicholas II fell) would almost cer­tainly have become irresistible.

In the years after 1991, like the second act of a Beckett play, the same drama played itselfout in paler form. The dissolution ofthe Soviet Union left a truncated Russia in a state of social disorder, economic collapse, civil war (in Chechnya), and with entirely untested governmental insti­tutions. One key difference from 1917 was that Yeltsin, as directly elected president, had the democratic legitimacy that the 1917 Provisional Gov­ernment had lacked. But even so he was forced into an increasingly dubious set of expedients (sending the tanks in against the Russian Parliament in 1993, 'buying' the election of 1996) in order to maintain power. The way was thus paved for the installation at the end of 1999 of Vladimir Putin (chosen in the expectation that he would be 'Russia's Pinochet') as Yeltsin's successor. What followed was the imposition of an increasingly 'managed' system of government in which the press is muffled, opposition activity hampered and elections manipulated.

One particular common feature between the 1917 and 1991 expe­riences is worth underlining. In both cases, after the upheaval the security organs of the state took on a central role in the way Russia was subsequently run. Critics of the 1991 revolution have argued that it was the lack of any 'lustration' - clean-out of the old guard - that made the eventual authoritarian outcome significantly harder to avoid. They may be right. But it is worth noting that in 1917 the lustration could not have been more thorough, and authoritarianism (to put it mildly) nevertheless followed.

It would of course be wildly premature to conclude from the 1917 and 1991 cases that Russia is in some sense doomed to authoritari­anism. But it is clear that Russia's size, unmanageability and lack of democratic traditions make it peculiarly difficult for representational government to take root and function there. Given recent Russian history, the strong Russian popular preference (regularly reiterated in opinion polls) for 'order' over 'freedom' is not hard to understand.

VI: WHAT HAVE WE LEARNT?

The 1991 revolution was a massive rejection of the inheritance of 1917. Two of its most symbolic moments were the felling by a large crowd outside the headquarters of the KGB in Moscow of the Dzerzhinsky statue, and the unexpected decision by the inhabitants of what since 1924 had been Leningrad to change the name of their city back to St Petersburg. Lenin seemed dead. The next few years, famously, saw the 'End of history' with the United States dominating world affairs, and even the handful of countries which continued to describe themselves as communist in fact beginning to liberalise their economic systems - with the expectation in many minds that political liberalisation would follow. It was possible to see the 1917 revolution as profoundly import­ant in the events it gave rise to, but, finally, one of history's great dead ends, like the Inca Empire.

Indeed, one of the key inheritances of the revolution has been nega­tive. It has taught us what does not work. It is hard to see Marxism making any sort of comeback. As a theory of history the revolution tested it, and it failed. The dictatorship of the proletariat did not lead to the communist Utopia, but merely to more dictatorship. It also failed as a prescription for economic governance. No serious economist today is advocating total state ownership as the route to prosperity. While market economics undoubtedly has its problems, and the 2008 global crash did briefly raise Karl Marx to the top of France's non-fiction best­seller list, not the least of the lessons of the Russian Revolution is that for most economic purposes the market works much better than the state. The rush away from socialism since 1991 has been Gadarene.

The verdict on political Leninism is less definitive. Certainly the one-party state is past its prime. Following the stagnation and collapse of Soviet Communism, Western-style free market democracy looked like the only show in town. Starting in the late 1970s, and sharply accel­erating after 1989, more than forty countries divested themselves of their single ruling parties. About two thirds of the world's nations are now democracies. And, in a world of vertiginously growing communi­cation, trade and travel, there can be little prospect of resurrecting the sort of hermetically closed economy and society that underpinned the Soviet system. Even North Korea is now on the internet.

Nevertheless there is a real question about how much further the deLeninisation of the world will run. The rising tide of democracy shows signs of having reached its peak. In places (notably Russia itself) it has in fact begun to recede as regimes find ways of controlling their internal political processes while still forming part of a highly intercon­nected world. The most conspicuous case is of course China, still an explicitly Leninist single-party state, which, having junked Marx for the market, is now well on the way to becoming the world's largest economy and the greatest single challenge to the West's global dom­inance. Given the key role the USSR played in creating and shaping Chinese communist rule it is hard not to see today's China as by far the world's most significant inheritance from the 1917 revolution.

Seekers of predictability in history will note that both yesterday's and today's Leninist superpowers, Russia and China, are nations with exceptionally long histories of centralised and autocratic government. But, suggestive as such parallels may be, surely one of the key lessons of the 1917 revolution is the need to view grand theories of historical inevitability, and their purveyors, with immense caution. As the chap­ters above show, the history of the revolution is littered with ironies. Even the clearest sighted and best intentioned could be blown off course by accident or misfortune. Witte's Duma became a cockpit for opposition that helped bring down the very regime it was intended to save. Nicholas's patriotic feeling that he could best serve his people at the battlefront left St Petersburg in the disastrous hands of Alexan­dra and Rasputin. Rodzyanko's efforts to get Nicholas to abdicate in favour of his son produced the unintended end of the whole dynasty. The German General Staff, by sending Lenin back in 1917, gained a temporary advantage in the First World War, but also created the communist menace that loomed over Germany for the next seventy years. The non-Bolshevik opposition, by their willingness to toler­ate Bolshevik excesses in the interests of revolutionary unity, swiftly found themselves in the 'dustbin of history'. And even Lenin, for all his amoral extremism, was driven by the Marxist vision of a fairer, gentler world. He and his successors produced exactly the opposite. They did so essentially by trying to bend reality to their ideas, rather than adjust­ing their ideas to reality.

All of this messy, bloody, unpredictable drama took place in Russia, and it is there that this book should end. Not only are individual per­sonalities at a discount among the historical profession, but so too is national character. Theorists of revolution tend to overlook the ines­capable Russianness that flavoured, and occasionally drove, much of what happened around 1917. The fanatical intelligentsia, driven to revolutionary excess by abstract theory, is laceratingly described in Dostoyevsky, just as the ineffectual bourgeoisie, unable to face up to necessary hard decisions, is portrayed by Chekhov. Nicholas II as 'Little Father' of his people, believing in a mystical bond that obviated any need for popular representation by rascally politicians, simply reflected the way Russia's rulers had always seen themselves. Rasputin is recognisably in the Russian tradition of the 'yurodiviy', the holy man who speaks truth to power.

And Russia was always an extraordinarily riven society. On one side stood her sparse, westernised, ruling class. On the other was the great mass of the 'dark people', serfs until 1861, focused on their own com­munities, suspicious and resentful of any interference from outside. It was Pushkin who wrote of the 'Russian revolt; mindless and merci­less' - the mass uprising which, coming out of nowhere, sporadically through history burned and massacred entire Russian provinces. One picture of 1917 is that it was just such an uprising that consumed the whole country, and whose shadow then hung over world history for the next seventy years. We surely owe it to the many, many victims to ask whether we could have found another way.

notes

CHAPTER 1. FOREIGN INTERVENTION: THE LONG VIEW

A. A. Kireev: Dnevnik 1905-1910 (Moscow: 1910), p. 150.

Readers interested in further exploring these themes and the evidence on which my counterfactual arguments are based should consult my new book: Dominic Lieven, Towards the Flame: Empire, War and the End of Tsarist Russia (London: Allen Lane, 2015).

CHAPTER S. THE ASSASSINATION OF STOLYPIN

Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, vol. 2: Everything She Wants (London: Allen Lane, 2015), p. 617.

In the context of this chapter, see especially, V. S. Diakin, Byl li shans u Stolypina? Sbornik statei (St Petersburg: LISS, 2002).

S. G. Kara-Murza, Stolypin: Otets russkoi revoliutsii (Moscow: Algoritm, 2002); Kara-Murza, Oshibka Stolypina: Prem'er, perevernuvshii Rossiiu (Moscow: Eksmo, Algoritm, 2011).

Monakh Lazar' (Afanas'ev), Stavka na silnykh: Zhizn'PetraArkadevicha Stolypina (Moscow: Russkii Palomnik, 2013), p. 3.

Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, vol. 2: From Alexander II to the Death of Nicholas II (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 377-9, 380.

Abraham Ascher, P. A. Stolypin: The Search for Stability in Late Imperial Russia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 13-33.

Already by late 1909, their relationship had been damaged by the Tsar's refusal to ease the legal position ofJews and by a crisis over the budget for the Naval General Staff. See Dominic Lieven, Nicholas II: Emperor of All the Russias (London: John Murray, 1993), pp. 174-6.

On obshchestvennost', see Geoffrey A. Hosking, Russia: People and Empire, 1552-1917 (London: HarperCollins, 1997), pp. 325, 332, 400-402.

Faith Hillis, Children of Rus': Right-Bank Ukraine and the Invention of a Russian Nation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), pp. 249-50.

10. P. A. Pozhigailo, ed. Taina ubiistva Stolypina (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2003).

Here I follow Richard Pipes, Revolutionary Russia, 1899-1919 (London: Collins, 1990), pp. 188-90, and Ascher, P. A. Stolypin, pp. 363-89. The leading advocate of the conspiracy theory is A.Ia. Avrekh, Stolypin i tret'ia duma (Moscow: Nauka, 1968), pp. 367-406.

Ascher, P. A. Stolypin, pp. 393-4.

From an extensive (and deeply riven) literature, see Judith Pallot, Land Reform in Russia, 1906-1917: Peasant Responses to Stolypin's Project of Rural Transformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

Geoffrey A. Hosking, The Russian Constitutional Experiment: Government and Duma 1907-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 41-55.

Peter Waldron, Between Two Revolutions: Stolypin and the Politics of Renewal (London: UCL Press, 1998), pp. 115-46.

V. V. Rozanov, Russkaiagosudarstvennost' i obshchestvo: Stat'11906-1907 gg., ed. A. N. Nikoliukin (Moscow: Respublika, 2003), p. 336, describing Stolypin's speech in the second Duma on 6 March 1907. This article appeared in the liberal newspaper Russkoe slovo under Rozanov's widely- known pseudonym, V Varvarin. He was more complimentary when writing for the conservative Novoe vremia. See, for example, Rozanov, Staraia i molodaia Rossiia: Stat'I i ocherki 1909 g., ed. A. N. Nikoliukin (Moscow: Respublika, 2004), pp. 138-40, unsigned, praising Stolypin's determination to stand above party.

Simon Dixon, 'The "Mad Monk" Iliodor in Tsaritsyn', Slavonic and East European Review, 88, 1-2 (2010), pp. 377-415.

1.1. Tolstoi: Dnevnik, ed. B. V Ananich et al., 2 vols (St Petersburg: Liki Rossii, 2010), vol. II: pp. 207-208, 6 September 1911.

A. Bogdanovich, Triposlednikh samoderzhtsa (Moscow: Novosti, 1990),

pp. 385, 387.

A. A. Kireev: Dnevnik 1905-1910, ed. K. A. Solov'ev (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2010), p. 145, 22 May 1906.

Ibid., pp. 177-78, 5 November 1906; 'gentleman' in English in the original. For a wide range of contemporary responses to Stolypin, see P. A. Stolypin, Pro et Contra, ed. I.V. Lukoianov, 2nd ed. (St Petersburg: Izdatel'stvo Russkoi khristianskoi gumanitarnoi akademii, 2014).

Osobye zhurnaly Soveta ministrov Rossiiskoi imperii: 1911 god, ed. B.D. Gal'perina (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2002), pp. 371-72, 13 September 1911. 'I mourn the untimely decease of my faithful servant, state-secretary Stolypin', the tsar scribbled disingenuously on 22 September.

chapter 3. grigory rasputin and the outbreak of the first world war

The chapter on Guseva's attack and the subsequent investigation draws chiefly on the police files in two Siberian archives: The State Budgetary Institution of the Tiumen' Region: 'The State Archive in the City of Tobolsk', Collection I-164, Inventory 1, Files 436, 437, 439; and The State Institution of the Omsk Region: 'The Historical Archive of the Omsk Region', Collection 190, Inventory 1, 1881-1917 gg., File 332. These important though little-studied files are produced in full in Sergei Fomin, 'Strast' kak bol'no, a vyzhevu ... (Moscow: 2011), pp. 378-826. Additional information is from Oleg Platonov, Zhizn'za tsaria. Pravda o Grigorii Rasputine (St Petersburg: 1996), p. 111; V. L. and M. Iu. Smirnov, Neizvestnoe o Rasputine (Tiumen: 2010), p. 66; Fomin, 'Strast", pp. 85-87, 101-05, 204; State Archive of the Russian Federation (hereafter GARF), 102.242.1912.297, ch. 2, p. 1.

Smirnov, Neizvestnoe, p. 66; Fomin, 'Strast", pp. 117-18; Russian State Historical Archive, 472.2 (195/2683), pp. 7, 8-9.

Joseph T. Fuhrmann, Rasputin: The Untold Story (Hoboken, NJ: 2013), p. 126; Fomin, 'Strast", pp. 161-62, 701-02; Platonov, Zhizn', pp. 136-37.

Fomin, 'Strast", p. 136.

GARF, 1467.1.710, p. 24.

The most authoritative and judicious of the many biographies of Rasputin are Fuhrmann, Rasputin; and Aleksei Varlamov, Grigorii Rasputin-Novyi (Moscow: 2012).

See the clippings in GARF, 102.242.1912, ch. 2; New York Times, 14 July 1914, p. 1; 15 July, p. 4; 16 July, p. 4; 17 July, p. 4.

The suggestion of some international plot involving the assassination of Jaures is absurd, but not uncommon among contemporary nationalist Russian historians. On his murder, see Harvey Goldberg, The Life of Jean Jaures (Madison, WI: 1962), pp. 458-74. As Goldberg notes, Jaures fought up to the end for peace in Europe, although he stood little chance of success.

Colin Wilson, Rasputin and the Fall of the Romanovs (New York: 1964), p. 156; Varlamov, Rasputin-Novyi, pp. 426-28; T. Groian, Muchenik za Khrista i za Tsaria. Chelovek Bozhii Grigorii. Molitvennik za Sviatuiu Rus' i Eia Presvetlago Otroka (Moscow: 2001), pp. 95-96; Iurii Rassulin, ed., Vernaia Bogu, Tsariu i Otechestvu. Anna Aleksandrovna Taneeva (Vyrubova) - monakhiniaMariia (St Petersburg: 2005).

Fuhrmann, Rasputin, p. 118; Varlamov, Rasputin-Novyi, pp. 422-23.

Fuhrmann, Rasputin, p. 115; Varlamov, Rasputin-Novyi, p. 423.

Grigorii Rasputin v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov (Moscow: 1990), pp. 71-73.

Varlamov, Rasputin-Novyi, p. 377.

Ibid., pp. 377-8.

Edvard Radzinsky, The Rasputin File (New York: 2000), pp. 188-89; W. Bruce Lincoln, In War's Dark Shadow: The Russians Before the Great War (New York: 1983), pp. 408-13; Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 (New York: 1997), p. 248.

Varlamov, Rasputin-Novyi, p. 376.

Fuhrmann, Rasputin, p. 115.

Fomin, 'Strast", p. 318.

Clipping of the Frankfurter Zeitung, 1 March 1913. Das Politische Archiv des Auswartigen Amts (Berlin), R.10897.

V Semennikov, Romanovy i germanskie vliianiia, 1914-1917gg. (Leningrad: 1929), pp. 29-30.

Lincoln, War's Dark Shadow, pp. 409-11.

Semennikov, Romanovy, pp. 28-31; Fuhrmann, Rasputin, pp. 114-15.

GARF, 1467.1.710, pp. 151-55.

GARF, 102.242.1912.297, ch. 1, p. 94.

Iurii Rassulin, Sergei Astakhov, and Elena Dushenova, eds, Khronika velikoi druzhby: Tsarstvennye mucheniki i chelovek Bozhii Grigorii Rasputin-Novyi (hereafter KVD) (St Petersburg: 2007), pp. 140-41.

N. A. Sokolov, Ubiistvo tsarskoi sem'i (Berlin: 1922; reprint Moscow: 1990),

p. 94.

KVD, p. 136.

GARF, 640.1.323, p. 2.

GARF, 1467.1.710, p. 159.

GARF, 1467.1.710, pp. 161-63. Akulina Laptinskaya (not Lapshinskaya) was a devoted follower and secretary to Rasputin. She stayed at his bedside during his recovery.

Fuhrmann, Rasputin, p. 129; Andrei Maylunas and Sergei Mironenko, eds, A Lifelong Passion: Nicholas and Alexandra: Their Own Story (New York: 1997), p. 397; Rassulin, ed., Vernaia Bogu, pp. 73-74.

Yale University, Beinecke Library, Romanov Collection, GEN MSS 313, Series 1, Box 1, Folder 100.

Yale University, Beinecke Library, Romanov Collection, GEN MSS 313, Series 1, Box 1, Folder 100; and GEN MSS 313, Box 8, Folder 111; Varlamov, Rasputin-Novyi, pp. 424-25; Fomin, 'Strast", pp. 279-81. S. V Markov, who was with Soloviev in Tobolsk in 1918, saw the letter then, though in his memoirs he implies that the empress had given it and other letters from Rasputin to him earlier for safekeeping. Pokinutaia tsarskaia sem'ia, 1917-1918 (Moscow: 2002), p. 54.

[A. A. Belling], Iz nedavnegoproshlogo: Vstrechi s Grigoriem Rasputinym (Petrograd: 1917), p. 11; Varlamov, Rasputin-Novyi, pp. 425-26.

Fuhrmann, Rasputin, pp. 128-29.

R. R. von Raupakh, Facies Hippocratica (Lik umiraiushchego): Vospominaniia chlena Chrezvychainoi Sledstvennoi Komissii 1917goda, ed. S. A. Man'kov

(St Petersburg: 2007), p. 141; Fomin, 'Strast", pp. 272-75, 313m; Fomin, Nakazaniepravdoi (Moscow: 2007), p. 493; A. Amal'rik, Rasputin: Dokumentalnaiapovest' (Moscow: 1992), pp. 163-64, 185; Dominic Lieven, Nicholas II: Emperor of All the Russias (London: 1993), p. 205.

Peterburgskii kur'er, 16 July 1914, p. 1. Austria declared war on 15/28 July.

GARF, 102.242.1912.297, ch. 1, p. 69.

GARF, 102.242.1912.297, ch. 2, pp. 83-84.

GARF, 102.242.1912.297, ch. 2, pp. 82, 204, 206-06 ob.

Lieven, Nicholas II, pp. 198-203; Robert D. Warth, Nicholas II: The Life and Reign of Russia's Last Monarch (Westport, CT: 1997), pp. 191-96; Rassulin, ed., Vernaia Bogu, pp. 73-74.

KVD, p. 141.

GARF, 640.1.323, p. 3.

GARF, 640.1.323, 3 ob.

Varlamov, Rasputin-Novyi, pp. 429-31.

KVD, p. 144.

KVD, p. 147.

Fuhrmann, Rasputin, p. 132.

Varlamov, Rasputin-Novyi, pp. 428-29.

Peterburgskii kur'er, 16 August 1914, p. 4; 18 August, p. 2.

GARF, 1467.1.710, pp. 208-09.

See, for example, KVD, pp. 147, 157, 165, 194, 219, 223, 224, 225, 240, 259, 370,

417, 427.

See the excellent William C. Fuller, Jr., The Foe Within: Fantasies of Treason and the End of Imperial Russia (Ithaca, New York: 2006).

Joseph T. Fuhrmann, ed., The Complete Wartime Correspondence of Tsar Nicholas II and the Empress Alexandra: April 1914-March 1917 (Westport, CT: 1999), pp. 373, 582-83, 593-94, 631-32, 636, 638-39; Maylunas and Mironenko, eds, Lifelong Passion, p. 473; and Rasputin's letters to the

minister of agriculture Count A. A. Bobrinsky in the Russian State Archive of Ancient Documents, 1412.3.1593.

See Varlamov, Rasputin-Novyi, p. 681; Hoover Institution Archives, Vasilii Maklakov Collection, 15-16, pp. 1-9.

Z. I. Peregudova, ed., 'Okhranka': vospominaniia rukovoditeleipoliticheskogo syska (Moscow: 2004), vol. 2, pp. 123-24.

Varlamov, Rasputin-Novyi, p. 699; Raupakh, Facies, pp. 193-94; P. N. Miliukov, Vospominaniia, p. 447; the diary of P. I. Korzhenevsky in the Russian State Library, Scientific Research Division of Manuscripts, 436.11.1, 72 ob-73.

Sergey von Markow, Wie ich die Zarin befreien wollte (Zurich: 1929), p. 145.

Poslednie dni imperatorskoi vlasti (Moscow: 2005), p. 8.

chapter 5. enter lenin

Winston Churchill, World Crisis (London: T. Butterworth, 1923-31), vol. 5,

p. 73.

Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1990),

pp. 377-78.

Lenin, Socialism and War: The Attitude of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party Towards the War (Geneva: Sotsia-Democrat, 1915).

Lyrics by Eugene Pottier.

V I. Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 23 (August 1916-March 1917) (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), p. 253. On Munzenberg and Lenin in Zurich, see Sean McMeekin, The Red Millionaire: A Political Biography of Willi Munzenberg, Moscow's Secret Propaganda Tsar in the West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), chapter 2.

The best documentary account is Werner Hahlweg, ed., Lenins Rtickkehr nach Russland 1917: Die deutschen Akten (Leiden: Brill, 1957) and, for the middleman between Lenin and the Germans, Z. A. B. Zerman and W. B. Scharlau, The Merchant of Revolution: The Life of Alexander Israel Helphand (Parvus) 1867-1924.

Munzenberg, Die dritte Front, p. 236, and 'Mit Lenin in der Schweiz', in Internationale Presse Korrespondenz 6 (27 August 1926): 1838.

Cited in Pipes, Russian Revolution, p. 393. Pipes's translation.

Cited in James Bunyan and H. H. Fisher, eds, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1918 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1934), p. 7.

10. Cited in ibid.

Cited in Leonard Shapiro, The Russian Revolutions of 1917: The Origins of Modern Communism (New York: Basic Books, 1984), p. 59.

Winfried Baumgart, Deutsche Ostpolitik, 21.

As recalled in paraphrase by Chernov in The Great Russian Revolution, trans. Philip E. Mosely (New York: Russell & Russell, 1966), p. 194.

Cited by Richard Stites in 'Miliukov and the Russian Revolution', foreword to Miliukov, The Russian Revolution, p. xii.

Pipes, Russian Revolution, pp. 257-58.

Citations in Chernov, The Great Russian Revolution, pp. 193, 200.

Oleg Airapetov, 'Na Vostochnom napravlenii. Sud'ba Bosforskoi ekspeditsii v pravlenie imperatora Nikolaia II', Poslednaia voina imperatorskoi Rossii: sbornik statei (Moscow: Tri kvadrata, 2002), pp. 241-43.

Bazili to N. N. Pokrovskii, from Stavka, 26 February / 11 March 1917, in the Archive of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire in Moscow (AVPRI), fond 138, opis' 467, del' 493/515, list' 1 (and back).

Bazili to N. N. Pokrovskii, from Stavka, 26 February / 11 March 1917, in AVPRI, fond 138, opis' 467, del' 493/515, list' 1 (and back).

Cited in C. Jay Smith, Jr., The Russian Struggle for Power, 1914-1917 (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), p. 465.

Usedom to Kaiser Wilhelm II, 16 April 1917, in the German Admiralty files in Freiburg, BA/MA, RM 40-4. Seven seaplanes: Rene Greger, Russische Flotte im ersten Weltkrieg, 1914-1917 (Munich: J. F. Lehmann, 1970), p. 61.

Bazili to Miliukov, 23 March / 5 April 1917, in the AVPRI, fond 138, opis' 467, del' 493/515, list' 4-6 (and backs).

Cited in C. Jay Smith, Russian Struggle for Power, 472.

M. Philips Price, 'Russia's Control of the Straits,' published in the Manchester Guardian, 26 April 1917. Republished in Price, Dispatches from the Revolution. Russia 1915-1918 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).

Lenin, 'The War and the Provisional Government,' first published in Pravda on 13/26 April 1917, in Collected Works (April-June 1917), vol. 24, p. 114.

As noted by Chernov, still fuming with rage over this 'mockery,' in The Great Russian Revolution, p. 200.

'Resolution on the Attitude Towards the Provisional Government,' 18 April / 1 May 1917, in Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 24, pp. 154-55; and 'Draft Resolution on the War,' 'written between 15 April and 22 April 1917,' pp. 161-66.

Citations in Pipes, Russian Revolution, pp. 403-04.

Cited in ibid., p. 413.

'Rukovodiashchiia ukazaniia General'Komissaru oblastei Turtsii, zanyatyikh' po pravu voinyi,' adjusted to comply with the Soviet's 'peace without annexations' declaration, 15/28 May 1917, in AVPRI, fond 151, opis' 482, del' 3481, list' 81-82.

Cited in Kazemzadeh, Struggle for Transcaucasia, p. 61. See also Allan Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980/1987), vol. 2, p. 141.

G. W. Le Page to Captain H. G. Grenfell from aboard the Almaz at Sevastopol, 29 April 1917, in The National Archives of the United Kingdom (PRO), ADM 137 / 940.

G. W. Le Page to Captain H. G. Grenfell from aboard the Almaz at Sevastopol, 23 May 1917, in PRO, ADM 137 / 940.

Rene Greger, Russische Flotte im ersten Weltkrieg, p. 63.

Report of Captain-Lieutenant Nusret from Constantinople after his tour of Russia's Black Sea ports, 14 April 1918, in the German Military Archive in Freiburg (BA / MA), RM 40-252.

Figures cited in A. K. Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), vol. 1, pp. 364-65.

Pipes, Russian Revolution, p. 410.

Sean McMeekin, History's Greatest Heist. The Looting of Russia by the Bolsheviks (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), esp. chapter 5 ('Brest- Litovsk and the Diplomatic Bag').

Wildman, End of the Russian Imperial Army, vol. 1, p. 372.

William G. Rosenberg, 'Reading Soldiers' Moods: Russian Military Censorship and the Configuration of Feeling in World War I', in The American Historical Review vol. 119 no. 3, 2014, 714-40, esp. fn46.

'Russian Soldiers Fleeing Germans on the Galician Front, July 1917,' from Mirrorpix (the photo archive of the London Daily Mirror).

In this account of the July Days, I have followed mostly Shapiro, Russian Revolutions of 1917, pp. 80-85, and Pipes, Russian Revolution, pp. 422-31.

Ibid., p. 431 and passim.

Citations in ibid., p. 433.

See Lucius von Stoedten from Stockholm, 20 July 1917, in the Political Archive of the German Foreign Office (PAAA), R 10080. On the Romanov treasure and Bolshevik efforts to sell it, see McMeekin, History's Greatest Heist, chapters 2 and 8.

chapter 6. the kornilov affair: a tragedy of errors

Alexander Kerensky, The Catastrophe (New York, London: 1927), p. 318.

Ibid., passim.

E. I. Martynov, Kornilov (Leningrad: 1927), pp. 33-34.

D. A. Chugaev, ed., Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie v Rossii v avcruste 1917 q: Razqrom kornilovskoao miatezha (Moscow: 1959), p. 429. This book is an excellent source of documents dealing with the Kornilov affair.

B. Savinkov, Kdelu Kornilova (Paris: 1919), p. 15.

A. F. Kerenskii, Delo Kornilova (Moscow: 1918), p. 81.

N. Avdeev et al., Revoliutsiia 1917 qoda: Khronika sobvtii, vol. 4 (Moscow: 1923-1930), p. 85.

Chugaev, Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie, p. 421.

P. N. Miliukov, Istoriia Vtoroi Russkoi Revoliutsiii, vol. 1, part 2 (Sofia: 1921), p. 178.

Ibid., vol. 1, part 2, p. 202.

Rossiia. XX vek Dokumenty, Delo Generala L.G. Kornilova, vol. 2 (Moscow: 2003), p. 195.

Chugaev, Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie, p. 428.

Rossiia. XX vek, Delo Generala L. G. Kornilova, vol. 2, pp. 196-98.

Chugaev, Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie, p. 442.

Ibid., p. 443.

Savinkov, K delu Kornilova, p. 25.

Avdeev, Revoliutsiia, vol. 4, p. 98.

Chugaev, Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie, pp. 445-46; Avdeev, Revoliutsiia, vol. 4, pp. 101-02.

Chugaev, Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie, p. 446.

Ibid., p. 464.

Rossiia. XX vek, Delo Generala L. G. Kornilova, vol. 2, p. 156. Kerensky's testimony is available in English in his The Prelude to Bolshevism: The Kornilov Rising (New York: 1919).

Novaia zhizn', no. 107/322 (4 June 1918), p. 3; Nash Vek, no. 96/120 (19 June 1918), p. 3.

E. H. Wilcox, Russia's Ruin (New York: 1919), p. 276.

Russkaia Mvsl, Book III-V (Moscow: 1923), pp. 278-79.

chapter 7. the 'harmless drunk': lenin and the october insurrection

1. S. P. Melgunov, The Bolshevik Seizure of Power (Oxford: 1972), p. 81.

Z. Gippius, Siniaia kniga (Belgrade: 1929), p. 210.

A. Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd (New York: 1978), pp. 253-54.

V Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 25 (Moscow: 1964), pp. 172-73.

Ibid., p. 310.

Ibid., vol. 26, pp. 19-21.

Ibid., pp. 74-85.

RTsKhIDNI, f. 17, op. 1, d. 33.

Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power.

RTsKhIDNI, f. 17, op. 1, d. 34, 1. 1-15.

Novaia zhizn', 18 October 1917; Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 26, pp. 216-19.

Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, pp. 290-91.

N. Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution: A Personal Record, ed. J. Carmichael (Princeton: 1984), p. 635.

Ibid., p. 294.

Vtoroi vserossiiskii s'ezd sovetov rabochikh i soldatskikh deputatov (Moscow: 1957), pp. 43-44.

RTsKhIDNI, f. 17, op. 1, d. 39.

chapter 8. the short life and early death of Russian democracy: the duma and the constituent assembly

Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations (Oxford University Press, Oxford: 2001).

Dominic Lieven, Nicholas II (St Martin's Griffin, New York: 1993), p. 105.

Nikolai N. Smirnov, 'The Constituent Assembly', in William Acton, Vladimir Cherniaev and G. Rosenberg, eds, Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution (London: Hodder Arnold, 1997), p. 323.

Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy (Jonathan Cape, London: 1996), p. 173.

Abraham Ascher, The Revolution of 1905 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 27.

Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1991), p. 34.

Ibid., p. 162.

G. A. Hosking, The Russian Constitutional Experiment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 41.

Abraham Ascher, P. A. Stolypin: The Search for Stability in Late Imperial Russia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).

Orlando Figes, Revolutionary Russia 1891-1991 (London: Pelican Books, 2014), p. 73.

Pipes, The Russian Revolution, p. 223ff.

Figes, A People's Tragedy, p. 178.

Pipes, The Russian Revolution, p. 255.

Kerensky in R. P. Browder and A. F. Kerensky, eds, The Russian Provisional Government 1917, Documents (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961), p. 43.

Figes, A People's Tragedy, p. 341.

V D. Medlin and S. L. Parsons, eds, V. D. Nabokov and the Russian Provisional Government (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 137.

Rodzyanko in Browder and Kerensky, The Russian Provisional Government 1917, p. 138.

Figes, A People's Tragedy, p. 336.

Pipes, The Russian Revolution, p. 297.

Lvov in Browder and Kerensky, The Russian Provisional Government 1917, p. 159.

Smirnov in Acton, Cherniaev and Rosenberg, Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, p. 324.

Russkia Vedomosti in Browder and Kerensky, The Russian Provisional Government 1917, p. 447.

Rech' in Browder and Kerensky, The Russian Provisional Government 1917, p. 448.

Russkia Vedomosti in Browder and Kerensky, The Russian Provisional Government 1917, p. 450.

Rech' in Browder and Kerensky, The Russian Provisional Government 1917, p. 451.

Figes, Revolutionary Russia 1891-1991, p. 135.

Pipes, The Russian Revolution, p. 537.

Smirnov in Acton, Cherniaev and Rosenberg, Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, p. 329

Pipes, The Russian Revolution, p. 551.

Ibid., p. 553.

Ibid., p. 556.

Smirnov in Acton, Cherniaev and Rosenberg, Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, p. 328.

Figes, A People's Tragedy, p. 518.

chapter 9. rescuing the tsar and his family

Emperor Nicholas II; Dnevniki, 1882-1918, GARF, f 601, op 1, ed khr 217-66.

The telegrams of V Yakovlev transferring the Tsar from Tobolsk to Moscow; GARF collection.

Alikina N; Rasskaz zaveduyushchei Permskym partarkhivom o vstrechakh s Markovym I prieme Leninym Markova posle ubiistva Mikhaila; 'Vechernyaya Perm', 3 Feb 1990.

Blok A. A.; Zapisnye knizhki; Moscow 1965.

Budberg A.; Dnevnik belogvardeitsa, Leningrad 1929.

Budberg; Dnevnik; Arkhiv russkoi revolyutsii, Vol. XIV, pp. 324-5, Berlin 1924.

Burtsev V. L.; Istinnye ubiitsi Nikolaya II - Lenin i evo tovarishchi; 'Obshchee Delo', Paris 1921.

Bykov P. M.; Poslednie dni Romanovykh; Sverdlovsk 1926.

Voinov V. M.; Iz istorii Nikolaevskoi Akadamii; Ural 1992.

Gilliard P., Tragicheskaya sudba russkoi imperatorskoi familii; Revel 1921.

Kavtaradze A G; Voennie spetsalisti na sluzhbe Sovetov 1917-20; Moscow 1988.

Lermontov M; 'Ya ne lyublyu tebya'.

Matveev P; Vospominaniya o Tobolskom zaklyuchenii tsarskoi semyi; 'Uralskii rabochii', 16 Sept 1990.

Markov A; Vospominaniya o rastrele velikovo knyazya Mikhaila; 'Sovershenno sekretno' No 9, 1990.

Markov S; Pokinutaya tsarskaya semya; Vienna 1926.

Melnik-Botkina T; Vospominaniya o tsarskoi semye i eyo zhizni do i posle revolyutsii; Belgrade 1921.

Pankratov V S; S tsarem v Tobolske; 'Byloe' No 25-26, 1924.

Plotnikov I F; Ekaterinburgskii etap deyatelnosti Akademii Generalnovo Shtaba; Kostroma 1988.

Entsiklopediya Ekaterinburga.

chapter 11. sea change in the civil war

http://mjp.univ-perp.fr/traites/ 1918armistice.htm.

Michael Carley, Revolution and Intervention: The French Government and the Russian Civil War, 1917-1919 (Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1983), pp. 108, 111; Richard Ullman, Intervention and the War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), pp. 258-84. The high-level British discussion in November 1918 is in TNA (Kew), CAB 23/8 .

For the mechanics of the coup: G. Z. Ioffe, Kolchakovskaia avantiura i ee krakh (Moscow; Mysl', 1983), pp. 141-46; Jonathan Smele, Civil War in Siberia: The Anti-Bolshevik Government of Admiral Kolchak 1918-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 104-07; Scott B. Smith, Captives of Revolution: The Socialist Revolutionaries and the Bolshevik Dictatorship, 1918-1923 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011),

p. 159.

The relevant documents have been recently published in V. I. Shishkin, ed., Vremennoe Vserossiiskoe pravitel'stvo, 23 sentiabria -18 noiabria 1918 g. Sbornik dokumentov i materialov, (Novosibirsk: RITs NGU, 2010), pp. 338-44.

V G. Khandorin, Admiral Kolchak: Pravda i mify (Tomsk: Izd. Tomskogo Universiteta, 2007), p. 81.

Much the best treatment of the SRs and their policies is Smith, Captives.

Ibid., p. 155.

On the underlying factors behind the coup see also Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2008 [1987]), pp. 143-51.

Smele, Civil War, pp. 62-71, provides the basic biographical background for Kolchak. The admiral has aroused much interest in post-Soviet Russia, and recent biographies include Khandorin, Kolchak, and I. F. Plotnikov, Aleksandr Vasil'evich Kolchak: Issledovatel', admiral, Verkhovnyipravitel' Rossii (Moscow: Tsentropoligraf, 2002). Kolchak was the subject of a feature film directed by A. Iu. Kravchuk, Admiral (2008); a version of this was broadcast in the Russian Federation in 2009 as a ten-part television series.

TNA (Kew), WO 33 962/186 (31 August 1918).

K. A. Popova, ed., Dopros Kolchaka (Leningrad: GIZ, 1925), pp. 143-44 (30 January 1920).

Jonathan Smele noted Kolchak's relationship with another Russian woman in the Far East, suggesting this lowered the priority of his return to his family in south Russia (Civil War, pp. 76-77). Smele's argument that there was, in September 1918, a better route to the Alekseev/Denikin forces than the Trans-Siberian route (p. 76) is less convincing; the Black Sea was still blocked. Smele's reference to the admiral as 'the dictator elect' already during his journey from Vladivostok to Omsk (p. 79) is difficult to substantiate.

Popova, Dopros Kolchaka, pp. 152-53. Kolchak was formally attached to Boldyrev on 30 October (Shishkin, VVP, p. 190).

Boldyrev left his command post once Kolchak came to power. At the end of the Civil War he decided to remain in Soviet Russia (where he was arrested and executed in 1933).

Smele, Civil War, pp. 92-93; TNA (Kew), WO 33/962, Knox to War Office, 7 November 1918.

Kolchak himself testified that he arrived on the 16th, the day before the coup ([Ia] pribyl [v Omsk] primerno chisla 16-go noiabria, za den' do perevorota). He also said that between the time of his return and the coup 'many officers from headquarters and representatives from the cossacks' had time to come to see him to complain about the Directory and urge him to take power - urgings that he maintained were steadfastly rejected (Popova, Dopros Kolchaka, p. 167). One authoritative Soviet-era historian stated that the admiral returned to Omsk only at 5.30 p.m. on the 17th which, he sarcastically suggested, could hardly have been a coincidence (Ioffe, Avantiura, p. 140); this was also the hour and date given by Colonel John Ward, who accompanied Kolchak on his inspection tour (With the 'Die-Hards' in Siberia, London: Cassell, 1920, p. 125). Smele has the admiral returning to Omsk at 5.30 p.m. on the 16th but remaining aboard his train at Omsk station, two and a half miles from the town centre (Smele, Civil War, pp. 100, 120).

Popova, Dopros Kolchaka, p. 169; Peter Fleming, The Fate of Admiral Kolchak (Edinburgh: Birlina, 2001 (1963)), p. 112: 'It does seem safe ... to assume that Kolchak himself was neither involved in nor aware of the plot.' Smele, in other respects a very full account, does not raise the issue of Kolchak's direct involvement on 17-18 November (Civil War, pp. 102-07).

Maurice Janin, Ma Mission en Siberie (Paris: Payot, 1933), pp. 30-31. See the discussion in Ullman, Intervention, pp. 280-81.

Ullman, Britain, p. 34. On J. F. Neilson and Leo Steveni, see especially Michael Kettle, Churchill and the Archangel Fiasco: November 1918 - July 1919 (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 11-15. Kettle quoted a 24 January 1919 typescript note, in Neilson's papers, where he apparently admitted 'having moved slightly in advance of the very halting policy, or rather lack of policy of our Government'. Peter Fleming, for his part, concluded that the two British officers 'had no part in the coup d'etat', although it is worth noting that the sexagenarian Steveni provided help in writing Fleming's book (Fate, pp. 113-16).

Ullman, Intervention, p. 281; Ullman, Britain, pp. 33-35. See Knox's brief review of an early version ofJanin's memoir; this appeared in Slavonic

Review, 3:9 (1925), p. 724. Knox noted that Janin had not been present when the coup occurred. It had also taken place 'without the previous knowledge, and without in any sense the connivance of Great Britain'. He pointed out that Janin also blamed the British for the overthrow of Nicholas II in March 1917. On the other hand Knox stated in his review, misleadingly, that the November 1918 coup was 'carried out by the Siberian Government'.

TNA (Kew), CAB 23/8.

For the conspirators see especially Smele, Civil War, pp. 90-104.

Ioffe, Avantiura, pp. 104-21. See also William G. Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution: The Constitutional Democratic Party, 1917-1921 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp. 392-95.

The Syromiatnikov letter is cited in Norman Pereira, White Siberia: The Politics of Civil War (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996),

p. 106: 'If it were not for you [i.e. Mikhailov], the Council of Ministers would never have decided to give full authority to Admiral Kolchak...'

Popova, DoprosKolchaka, pp. 104 (27 January 1920), 140 (30 January 1920).

Kettle, Fiasco, p. 13; Pereira, White Siberia, p. 102, is more cautious, but considers such communication possible.

The best sources on Kolchak in power remain Smele, Civil War, pp. 108-677, and Pereira, White Siberia. See also Mawdsley, Civil War, pp. 181-215, 317-24.

For a perceptive discussion of the failure of conservative elites in Russia, including the officer corps, see Matthew Rendle, Defending the Motherland: The Tsarist Elite in the Revolutionary Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

chapter ia. the fate of the soviet countryside

This is taken from Moshe Lewin, 'Taking Grain: Soviet Policies of Agricultural Procurements before the War', reproduced in his The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia (London: Methuen & Co., 1985), pp. 142-77.

Oliver Radkey, The Unknown Civil War in Soviet Russia: A Study of the Green Movement in the Tambov Region, 1920-1921 (Palo Alto, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1976).

Quoted in A. K. Sokolov, ed., Protokoly Prezidiuma Vysshego Soveta Narodnogo Khoziaistva. 1920 god: sbornik dokumentov (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2000), p. 3.

On the conscription of civilian labour before 1917, see Joshua Sanborn, Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War and the Destruction of the Russian Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 139-41.

Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879-1921 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), pp. 490-91. See also Leon Trotsky, The Defence of Terrorism (Terrorism and Communism): A Reply to Karl Kautsky (London: Labour Publishing Co., 1921), pp. 127-63.

Sylvana Malle, The Economic Organization of War Communism, 1918-1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 84-85.

See Leon Trotsky, Sochineniia, 21 vols (Moscow-Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo, 1927), vol. 15: pp. 27-51.

See 'Vserossiiskoe razorenie i trudovye zadachie krest'ianstva (pi'smo k Sigunovu),' in Trotsky, Sochineniia, vol. 15, pp. 14-26.

Viktor Kondrashin, Krest'ianstvo Rossii vgrazhdanskoi voine: k voprosu ob istokakh stalinizma (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2009), pp. 286-87.

See V. K. Vorob'ev, 'Chapannaia voina v Simbirskoigubernii: mify i real'nost' (Ulianovsk: Vektor -S, 2008); Kondrashin, Krest'ianstvo Rossii, pp. 127-43.

The entire exchange can be found in Viktor Danilov and Teodor Shanin, eds, Krest'ianskoe dvizhenie v Povolzh'e, 1919-1922: Dokumenty i materialy (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2002), pp. 127-28.

Trotsky later wrote that his travel to this region in 1919 was the true start of his misgivings of the regime's food procurement methods. See Leon Trotsky, Novyi kurs (Moscow: Krasnaia nov', 1924), pp. 52-53.

Ia. G. Gol'din, Commissar for Food in Tambov province, quoted in Erik Landis, 'Between Village and Kremlin: Confronting State Food Procurement in Civil War Tambov, 1919-1920', Russian Review 63 (January 2004), p. 77.

As the secretary of the Commissariat for Agriculture, V. N. Meshcheriakov, wrote: 'All that is important in the food supply commissariat is to get more grain.' Quoted in James Heinzen, Inventing a Soviet Countryside: State Power and the Transformation of Rural Russia, 1917-1929 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004), p. 35.

On the razverstka policy and its antecedents, see Lars Lih, Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914-1921 (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1990).

This comparison is against the standard set in 1913, after which declines were recorded. After 1917, however, the decline became much more severe. Malle, Economic Organization, pp. 426-31; Lih, Bread and Authority, pp. 261-62.

Iu. A. Poliakov, Perekhod k NEPu i sovetskoe krest'ianstvo (Moscow: Nauka, 1967), p. 88; Malle, Economic Organization, p. 468.

According to the Soviet economist Lev Kritsman, urban citizens depended upon the black market for up to 70 per cent of their food. See Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR (London: Allen Lane, 1969), pp. 61-62; Donald Raleigh, Experiencing Russia's Civil War: Politics, Society and Revolutionary Culture in Saratov, 1917-1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 296.

Igor' Narskii, Zhizn' v katastrofe: Budni naseleniia Urala v 1917-1922 gg. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2001), p. 280.

Translated passages are from John Channon, 'Trotsky, the Peasants, and Economic Policy,' Economy and Society 14, no. 4 (1984), pp. 518-20. The source document is in Trotsky, Sochineniia, vol. 17/2, pp. 543-44.

Lenin expressed the problem even more concisely, in specific reference to coal mining in the Donbass region: '[T]here is no bread because there is no coal, and there is no coal because there is no bread.' However, Lenin made his comments in late February 1921. See V. I. Lenin, Polnoe Sobranie Sochenenii (PSS), 55 vols (Moscow: Gos. izd. politliteratury, 1955-65), vol. 42, p. 364.

Two policy developments of note in this regard were the Communist Party subbotniki and the unrealised sowing committees project. See William Chase, 'Voluntarism, Mobilization and Coercion: Subbotniki, 1919-1921', Soviet Studies 41, no. 1 (1989), pp. 111-28; Lars Lih, 'The Bolshevik Sowing Committees of 1920: Apotheosis of War Communism?', Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, no. 803 (1990).

Vladimir Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War: Political Parties and Social Movements in Russia, 1918-1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 163-64.

Sergei Pavliuchenkov, 'S chego nachinalsia NEP ?,' in N. N. Taranov and V. V Zhuravlev, eds, Trudnye vosprosy istorii: Poiski, razmyshlenii, novyi vzgliad na sobytii i fakty (Moscow: Izd. polit-literatury, 1991), pp. 48-49; Protokoly Prezidiuma Vysshego Soveta Narodnogo Khoziaistva, p. 4.

Lenin, PSS, vol. 51, pp. 123, 405 fn. 128; Sergei Pavliuchenkov, Krest'ianskii Brest, ilipredistoriia bol'shevistskogo NEPa (Moscow: Russkoe knigoizdatel'skoe tovarishchestvo, 1996), p. 143. For Lenin's earlier words on free trade, see his speech to the Seventh Congress of Soviets (5 December 1919) in PSS, vol. 39, pp. 407-08.

Pavliuchenkov, Krest'ianskii Brest, pp. 128-29.

Ibid., pp. 143-44.

Trotsky notes this outcome in his autobiography. See My Life: The Rise and Fall of a Dictator (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1930), p. 396.

Deviatyi s'ezd RKP(b). Mart-Aprel' 1920 (Moscow: Partiinoe izdatel'stvo,

1934).

Danilov and Shanin, Krest'ianskoe dvizhenie v Povolzh'e, pp. 417-18.

For example, see Danilov and Shanin, Krest'ianskoe dvizhenie v Povolzh'e, pp. 468-72.

A. Berelowitch and V. Danilov, eds, Sovetskaia derevnia glazami VChK- OGPU-NKVD, 1918-1939, 4 vols (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1998), vol. 1, p. 298.

This perspective was spelled out in clear terms by Soviet authorities in Moscow, warning regional and provincial authorities that they would be held personally responsible for shortfalls in procurement. See Dekrety sovetskoi vlasti, 13 vols (Moscow: Gos. izd. politliteratury, 1957-1989), vol. 9, p. 241; vol. 10, pp. 239-40.

Quoted in Landis, 'Between Village and Kremlin,' p. 83.

Berelowitch and Danilov, Sovetskaia derevnia, vol. 1, p. 283.

On Tambov, see Radkey, The Unknown Civil War and Erik Landis, Bandits and Partisans: The Antonov Movement in the Russian Civil War (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008).

Danilov and Shanin, Krest'ianskoe dvizhenie v Povolzh'e, p. 760.

Berelowitch and Danilov, Sovetskaia derevnia, vol. 1, pp. 363-79.

V. I. Shishkin, ed., Sibirskaia Vandeia, 2 vols (Moscow: 'Demokratiia', 2000), vol. 2, pp. 9-11.

The official Sovnarkom instruction on preparations for the razverstka campaign in Siberia set the targets for 1920-21, and because these regions had not previously been under Soviet control, it also decreed that all surpluses from earlier harvests, before 1920, were to be delivered to state grain collection points. See Shishkin, L., Sibirskaia Vandeia, vol. 2, pp. 6-7.

Such were the words of the chairman of the Siberian Military Revolutionary Committee (I. N. Smirnov), the functioning Soviet authority in the extended region, although he was only echoing the language of the official Sovnarkom decree that announced the razverstka for Siberia in late July 1920. See Sibirskaia Vandeia, 2, pp. 6-7, 198, 241.

On the famine, see C. E. Bechhofer, Through Starving Russia: Being a Record of a Journey to Moscow and the Volga Provinces in August and September 1921 (London: Metheun & Co., 1921); Bertrand Patenaude, Big Show in Bololand: The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russian in the Famine of 1921 (Palo

Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002); Marcus Wehner, 'Golod 1921-1922 gg. v Samarskoi gubernii i reaktsiia sovetskogo pravitel'stva', Cahiers du Monde russe 38, nos. 1-2 (1997), pp. 223-42; Narskii, Zhizn v katastrofe, pp. 258-74.

Denis Borisov, Kolesnikovshchina. Antikommunisticheskoe vosstanie voronezhskogo krest'ianstva v 1920-1921 gg.(Moscow: Posev, 2012), p. 81; Narskii, Zhizn v katastrofe, pp. 254-55.

Lenin, PSS, vol. 43, pp. 18, 59.

Trotsky, My Life, p. 395.

This is described in E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923, 3 vols (London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1952), vol. 2, pp. 331-44.

Trotsky did note in his autobiography, written in 1930, that Lenin came round to the idea of the tax-in-kind only after '[t]he uprisings at Kronstadt and in the province of Tambov broke into the discussion as the last warning' (My Life, p. 397). Larin was a bit less politic with his public comments at the Communist Party Conference in May 1921, when he explained that

his earlier proposals would have helped end the Civil War sooner. See Pavliuchenkov, Krest'ianskii Brest, p. 142; Protokoly desiatoi vserossiiskoi konferentsii RKP (bol'shevikov). Mai 1921 g. (Moscow: Partiinoe izd., 1933), p. 63.

Quoted in W. Bruce Lincoln, Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), p. 90.

Joseph Stalin, Sochineniia, 13 vols (Moscow: Gos. izd. politliteratury, 1946­53), vol. 6, pp. 86-87.

The best recent literature on the NEP period is found in the fields of social and, particularly, cultural history. See Eric Naiman, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Anne Gorsuch, Youth in Revolutionary Russia: Enthusiasts, Bohemians, Delinquents (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).

Stalin's trip to the Urals and abandonment of the NEP is most recently discussed in Stephen Kotkin, Stalin. Volume 1: The Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 (New York: Penguin, 2014), pp. 662-76. On collectivisation and 'de-kulakisation', see Lynne Viola et al., eds, The War Against the Peasantry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).

chapter 13. the 'bolshevik reformation'

The decree was published in the central Soviet press only on 23 Februarys- sources often give this date rather than the date when it was signed into law.

The parallels between Soviet religious iconoclasm and those in the Reformation of the Christian Church during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are in some ways striking (see e.g. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping

of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400-c. 1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). However, the Soviet case involved a far more extreme rebellion against the architectural and artistic canons of the past, since the reformers hoped to negate religious belief in its entirety, not specific doctrines, social structures and practices within the Roman tradition of Christianity.

See e.g. the coverage in Petrogradskayapravda (henceforth PP), 26 January 1922. While recent historical research has confirmed this picture of inadequate aid efforts, it has also challenged the Soviet-era causality: V A. Polyakov's massive study, Golod na Povolzh'e, 1919-1925 (Volgograd: Volgogradskoe nauchnoe izdatel'stvo, 2007), underlines that the famine began early in 1921, well before the drought itself, and that its devastating effects were attributable to the Bolsheviks' agricultural and food distribution policies rather than natural disaster. Indeed, the American Relief Administration began aid negotiations as early as 1919 (Harold H. Fisher, The Famine in Soviet Russia, 1919-1923: The Operations of the American Relief Administration (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1927)). At the same time, recent claims that agitation about the famine was simply an instrument of repression distort reality. The Scottish-Canadian journalist F. A. Mackenzie, a resolutely anti-Soviet observer who visited Buzuluk in 1921, recorded that 'thousands were flocking in from the country and people were dying in the streets', and that the cemetery warden 'took me to the further end of the cemetery and showed me the great pits full to the top with the naked bodies of the newly dead'. (The Russian Crucifixion: The Full Story of the Persecution of Religion Under Bolshevism (London: Jarrolds, 1927), p. 23; cf. Fisher, pp. 71-72).

PP, 18 February 1922, p. 2. Vvedensky was a figure both colourful and murky. As late as 1923, he was, according to a Finnish-Swedish visitor and qualified observer of the Soviet scene, swanking about Petrograd in a carriage drawn by two 'beautiful greys', accompanied by society ladies, while himself was elegantly dressed in white silk (Boris [Leonidovich] Cederholm, In the Clutches of the Tcheka, trans. F. H. Lyon (London: George Allen and Unwin

Ltd, 1929)). An informant of Cederholm's claimed that Vvedensky was 'a cynical, unprincipled voluptary, who believes neither in God nor the devil', ibid.

See e.g. PP, 30 March 1922, p. 2.

L. D. Trotsky, letter to the Politburo, 17 March 1922, Arkhivy Kremlya, vol. 1, Politburo i tserkov', 1922-1925 gg. (Moscow and Novosibirsk: ROSSPEN/ Sibirskii poligraf, 1997) (http://krotov.info/acts/20/1920/1922_0.htm), document no. 23: 14 (henceforth AK and by document no.) On high- level planning of the confiscations, see the archive-based discussion in Jonathan Daly, '"Storming the Last Citadel": The Bolshevik Assault on the Church, 1922', in Vladimir N. Brovkin, ed., The Bolsheviks in Russian Society: The Revolution and Civil Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997),

pp. 236-59.

See e.g. the text of the law published in Krasnayagazeta (henceforth KG), 23 February 1922, p. 3.

The history of the so-called 'Renovationist' movement went back to the 1900s, and particularly to the debates preceding the Orthodox Church's Local Council, eventually held in 1917-18, but widely discussed from 1905-6. 'Renovation' attained new energy under the Bolshevik regime, since the political context encouraged clergy's own hopes of reform, and there was support among some political agents for using the reformists as a 'Trojan horse' to weaken the official church. The complicated history of all this has been the subject of several book-length studies: see e.g. Edward Roslof, Red Priests: Renovationism, Russian Orthodoxy, and Revolution, 1905-1946 (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2002).

160 poods, according to the traditional Russian system of weights and measures. AK, no. 23-42. That said, the Soviet government was under pressure from the US side to demonstrate willingness to expend its own gold resources on famine relief before external aid was provided. On 2 September 1921, President Hoover wrote to Colonel Haskell of the ARA.: 'As you are aware, it is reported here that Soviet Government has still some resources in gold and metals, and it does seem to me fundamental that they should expend these sums at once in the purchase of breadstuff's from abroad. While even this will be insufficient to cover their necessities, they can scarcely expect the rest of the world to make sacrifices until they have exhausted their own resources' (Fisher, p. 155). The US administration certainly did not anticipate the confiscations from churches, but the frantic search for precious metal supplies in the autumn-winter of 1921-22 was

related to this determination that home resources should be called upon first. The later legend that the Soviet government had been required to 'pay' for aid (in fact, the Riga agreement of 20 August 1921 required only payment for transport, storage and administrative costs) probably derives from this pressure. (See Bertrand M. Patenaude, The Big Show in Bololand: The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921 (Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 741 for the rumour, p. 746ff. for the agreement).

For instance, the press emphasised that one of the accused in the Petrograd case, Father Anatoly Tolstopyatov, chaplain of the Petrograd Conservatoire, was a former lieutenant in the Russian navy, i.e. a member of the 'officer class' (KG 20 June 1922, p. 6).

For the term 'campaign justice', see Peter Solomon, Soviet Criminal Justice under Stalin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

Zhizhilenko is quoted in the published resume of the transcript from the trial ofVeniamin and his supposed associates, Delo mitropolita Veniamina, ed. Anon (Moscow: TRITE-Rossiiskii arkhiv, 1991), http://www.krotov. info/acts/20/1920/1922_veniamin.htm. For the mockery of him, see Vysokushkin (no initials given), 'Ne tvorite muchenikov!', KG 4 July 1922, p. 5.

This can be traced in KG's coverage over the first half of 1922. Cf. Jonathan Waterlow's account of how telling jokes that had been considered harmless at the time when they were originally narrated in the early 1930s was frequently adduced as evidence of seditious behaviour in 1937-8: 'Popular Humour in Stalin's 1930s: A Study of Popular Opinion and Adaptation', D.Phil Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012.

The show trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries, also orchestrated in spring 1922, was given far more prominent press coverage (front rather than inside pages), but this represented the end of the first phase of power consolidation by the Bolshevik leadership - the crackdown on alternative political parties, rather than the beginning of the second, the move against 'hostile' or 'alien' groups that did not necessarily intend to present themselves as oppositional in political terms.

These figures (157 Orthodox churches, 'two or three Catholic and Jewish' ones) were given in a letter from the Board of Management (Upravlenie) of the Petrograd Provincial Soviet responding to representations from Jewish communities against the closure of their 'house churches'. TsGA-SPb.,

f. 1001, op. 7, d. 1,1. 310.

TsGA-SPb., f. 1001, op. 7, d. 19,1. 24.

See my Socialist Churches: Radical Secularization and the Preservation of Heritage in Petrograd-Leningrad, 1918-1988 (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2016), chapters 2-3.

G. S. Yatmanov, 'Okhrana khudozhestvennogo dostoyaniya', PP 25 May 1922,

p. 3.

On Soviet monetisation of artistic resources generally, see N. Iu. Semenova and Nicolas V. Iline, Selling Russia's Treasures: The Soviet Trade in Nationalized Art, 1917,1938 (Paris: The M. T. Abraham Center for the Arts Foundation, 2013), including good discussions of religious art by Yuri Pyatnitsky.

Mackenzie, Russian Crucifixion, p. 27.

A. A. Valentinov, ed., Chernaya kniga: Shturm nebes. Sbornik dokumentalnykh dannykh, kharakterizuyushchikh bor'bu sovetskoi kommunisticheskoi vlasti protiv vsyakoi religii,protiv vsekh ispovedanii i tserkvei (Paris: izd. Russkogo natsional'nogo studencheskogo ob'edineniya, 1925). pp. 6-16, quotation p. 7.

'O poriadke provedenii v zhizn' dekreta 'Ob otdelenii tserkvi ot gosudarstva i shkoly ot tserkvi' (Instruktsiia)', 24 August 1918, Sbornik uzakonenii i rasporiazhenii RKRSFSR. no. 62 (1918). Article 685, clause 29, p. 764. For objections to the removal of objects, see Chernaya kniga, pp. 26-9.

A. I. Vvedensky, 'Smert' religii', Sobornyi razum nos. 3-4 (1918), p. 5.

Chernaya kniga, pp. 35-44, details numerous cases, e.g. Andronik, Archimandrite of Perm and Solikamsk, who had his eyes put out and cheeks slashed before being murdered, as well as desecration of churches in areas hit by the War (pp. 29-30).

The letter later became known as 'Anathema to Soviet Power' but its original title, 'On the Unprecedented Oppression Unleashed upon the Russian Church', was less specific.

There is an enormous literature on the exposure of relics. Two excellent accounts in English are Steve Smith, 'Bones of Contention: Bolsheviks and the Exposure of Saints' Relics, 1918-30', Past and Present vol. 204 (August 2009), pp. 155-94; Robert Greene, Bodies Like Bright Stars: Saints and Relics in Orthodox Russia (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010).

See Chernaya kniga, chapter 1.

Mikhail Gorev, 'Tserkovnoe zoloto - golodayushchim', KG, 25 February 1922, p. 2. On the Eighth Section, see Smith, 'Bones.

'Sovetskaya politika v religioznom voprose', Revolyutsiya i tserkov' no. 1 (1919), p. 2.

As reported in an article published in the journal of the reformist clergy, Sobornyi razum, no. 3-4 (1918), p. 1: 'Parishes have gradually won for themselves the right to act as juridical subjects, they have de facto exercised these rights, and no-one has dared challenge these.'

As James Ryan points out ('Cleansing NEP Russia: State Violence against the Russian Orthodox Church in 1922', Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 65, no. 9 (2013), pp. 1811-12), this was part of a general shift to legalism at this point.

For example, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Southern Baptist Convention, National Catholic Welfare Council, American Friends Service Committee (Fisher, p. 163). Direct aid was also accepted from the Vatican.

See e.g. PP 16 February 1922, p. 2, 17 February 1922, p. 2.

Regional variation and agency-by-agency variation in response to the confiscations campaign were important factors, too complicated to assess here. Daly, 'Storming the Last Citadel', emphasises that Cheka officials

in Tatarstan, for example, began the confiscations before the 16 February 1922 decree; Gregory L. Freeze, 'Subversive Atheism: Soviet Antireligious Campaigns and the Religious Revival in Ukraine in the 1920s', in Catherine Wanner, ed., State Secularism and Lived Religion in Soviet Russia and Ukraine (New York: Oxford UP, 2012), pp. 27-62, underlines pockets of lassitude and resistance in this area.

See the account in Chernaya kniga, chapter 11, section 3. The meeting on 5 March (but not its sequel) was reported also in the official newspaper materials about the trial of Veniamin. The surmise about a directive from the centre seems to be borne out by the fact that, on 8 March, the Politburo held a meeting resolving to step up the confiscations campaign: AK, no. 23-2.

See the editors' introduction to AK, http://krotov.info/ acts/20/1920/1922_1.html#_Toc491501082.

Compare the hesitation and division about whether to cooperate with Islamic leaders and groups in the Caucasus at exactly this period: Jeromin Petrovig, 'Bolshevik Co-Optation Policy and the Case of Chechen Sheikh Ali Mitaev', Kritika vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 729-65.; or, on the other hand, the clear-cut ruthlessness with which, say, Socialist Revolutionaries and idealist philosophers were treated, also in 1922: 'Ochistim Rossiyu nadolgo': Repressii protiv inakomyslyashchikh (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond 'Demokratiya'/ Izdatel'stvo 'Materik', 2008), e.g. docs. nos. 3, 11, 14, 75, 82.

The letter originally came out in Vestnik russkogo studencheskogo khristianskogo dvizheniya, no. 98 (1970), pp. 54-7. In the commentary

(p. 59), Nikita Struve refers explicitly to Lenin's game plan: 'Lenin himself took care that the Church had no opportunity at all to co-operate with the government in famine relief and did all he could to make sure that the removal of church valuables touched to the quick the essence of church life - the liturgy.'

Lenin alludes to Machiavelli as 'a certain clever commentator on matters of state', since the Italian political philosopher was a somewhat startling authority for a self-declared Marxist. See the text of his letter in AK, no. 23.16. This letter is invariably cited in accounts of the church confiscations, but usually as the document that initiated policy, rather than one that reflects its drift at a specific point. For an approach closer to my own, see Ryan, 'Cleansing NEP Russia'; Natalya Krivova, 'The Events in Shuia: A Turning Point in the Assault on the Church', Russian Studies in History vol. 46, no. 2, pp. 8-38. For a meticulous, archive-based study of the first period of Bolshevik governance that emphasises contingency, see Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power: the First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).

At this stage, it was also already clear that the 1922 harvest would be abundant ('Prospect for the crop is now unusually favorable', wrote C. S. Gaskill on 12 May 1922 from Saratov; see Fisher, p. 297).

See e.g. KG, 23, 24, 28 March, 4 April, 9 April, 14 April, 11 May. On the Moscow show trial of clergy supposed to have resisted confiscation, see ibid. 10 May, on the Petrograd show trial, ibid., 10 June to 6 July, passim.

On the early history of militant atheism, see William Husband, Godless Communists: Atheism and Society in Soviet Russia, 1917-1932 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000). In fact, the militant atheist movement had limited usefulness to the central and local authorities, since its campaigns fostered social division and sometimes reproduced top-level policy and ideology in garbled form. For a detailed history, see Daniel Peris, Storming the Heavens: The Soviet League of the Militant Godless (Ithaca New York: Cornell University Press, 1998).

In comparable vein, Chernaya kniga, pp. 28-30, reported the secularisation of house churches as sacrilege, alongside defecation in church sanctuaries etc.

That said, the Church's Local Council of 1918 had conferred some limited regional powers on senior clergy, but in a context where communication with the centre was impossible because of the Civil War.

TsGA-SPb., f. 1000, op. 6, d. 266,1. 60.

46.

47­

48.

49­

50.

51­

52.

53­

54­

55­

56.

57­

58.

59-

TsGA-SPb, f. 1001, op. 7, d. 1,1. 333-5. On ordinary parishioners' defence of church treasures, see also Freeze, 'Subversive Atheism', pp. 31-3. This case was reported in KG, 20 June 1922, p. 6. The person concerned is referred to here as 'Deacon Flerov', though Flerov was actually a priest (see Delo mitropolita Veniamina), so either the title or the surname is a slip. See Point 11 of the 'Determination of the Holy Council of the Russian Church on the Preservation of Sacred Church Items from Sacrilegious Seizure and Disrespect', 30 August (12 September) 1918, Svyashchennyi Sobor Pravoslavnoi Tserkvi: Sobranie opredelenii ipostanovlenii. Part 4 (Moscow: Svyashchennyi Sobor, 1918), p. 30.

The figure was mentioned by one of the lawyers, Yakov Gurovich, who is quoted in KG 4 July 1922, p. 5.

Quoted in M. V. Shkarovsky, Peterburgskaya eparkhiya v gody gonenii I utrat, 1917-1945 (St Petersburg: Liki Rossii, 1995).

The story is cited here from John McManners, Church and State in France, 1870-1914 (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 141. There is a large literature on the history and consequences of the 1905 law. See, for example, Maurice Larkin, Church and State after the Dreyfus Affair: The Separation Issue in France (London: Macmillan, 1974), esp. pp. 133-226. See Larkin, Church and State, p. 152.

This mood permeated the discussions at the Church's Local Council of 1917-18.

This is particularly emphasised in Ryan, 'Cleansing NEP Russia'. A classic discussion is Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca New York: Cornell University Press, 1992).

There is now a significant body of work arguing that the Russian Orthodox Church's integration post-1943 was remarkably successful: see e.g. recent books and articles by Glennys Young, Tatiana A. Chumachenko, Natalia Shlikhta, Andrew Stone, and others.

Maxim Sherwood, The Soviet War on Religion (London: Modern Books n.d. [c. 1930]), p. 11, 14. The Holy Name movement was a mystical and charismatic grouping that included, for example, the distinguished Russian emigre theologian Father Sergei Bulgakov.

The figure self-identifying as believers was 56.7 per cent across the USSR, certainly an underestimate since census data was collected by means of face- to-face interview. Zhiromskaya, 'Religioznost', ibid.

TsGA-SPb., f. 7834, op. 33, d. 50,1. 98.

Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (1957) (London: Penguin, 1997), p. 59.

These denominations did come under all-out assault in 1935-8 in any case, as international relations worsened and members of ethnic minorities were increasingly targeted as 'foreign agents'.

As described in the authoritative biography by Daniel P. Todes, Ivan Pavlov: A Russian Life in Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

See Josephine von Zitzewitz, 'The 'Religious Renaissance' of the 1970s and its Repercussions on the Soviet Literary Process', D.Phil Thesis, University of Oxford, 2009.

chapter 14. the rise of leninism: the death of political pluralism in the post-revolutionary bolshevik party

Anthony D'Agostino, Soviet Succession Struggles, Kremlinology and the Russian Question from Lenin to Gorbachev (London: Allen and Unwin, 1988), pp. 4-5 and passim.

Joseph Bradley, 'Subjects into Citizens: Societies, Civil Society, and Autocracy in Tsarist Russia', The American Historical Review, vol. 107, no. 4, October 2002, pp. 1094-1123.

Anton A. Fedyashin, Liberals under Autocracy: Modernization and Civil Society in Russia, 1866-1904 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012).

Joseph Bradley, Voluntary Associations in Tsarist Russia: Science, Patriotism and Civil Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

For a critical analysis of these developments, see Thomas C. Owen, Capitalism and Politics in Russia: A Social History of the Moscow Merchants, 1855-1905 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

Robert W. Thurston, Liberal City, Conservative State: Moscow and Russia's Urban Crisis, 1906-1914 (Oxford University Press, 1987).

Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), p. 238.

G. V. Plekhanov, The Development of the Monist View of History (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974).

Richard Sakwa, Communism in Russia: An Interpretive Essay (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 43-4.

Diane P. Koenker, Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).

For an excellent comparative analysis, see S. A. Smith, Revolution and the People in Russia and China: A Comparative History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Diane P. Koenker, Republic of Labor: Russian Printers and Soviet Socialism, 1880-1930 (Cornell, New York: Cornell University Press, 2005).

Vera Broido, Lenin and the Mensheviks: The Persecution of Socialists under Bolshevism (Aldershot: Gower, 1987).

The Bolsheviks and the October Revolution: Central Committee Minutes of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks), August 1917 - February 1918 (London: Pluto Press, 1974), pp. 140-42.

Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961), p. 69.

Karl Kautsky, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (Michigan: Ann Arbor Paperback, 1964), p. 6.

For an evaluation of the emergence of Soviet foreign policy, see Richard K. Debo, Revolution and Survival: The Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia 1917-18 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1979).

N. Osinskii, 'Stroitel'stvo sotsializma', Kommunist, no. 2, 1918, pp. 68-72, in Ronald Kowalski, The Russian Revolution, 1917-1921 (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 200.

'Sobranie upolnomochennykh fabric i zavodov petrograda k aprelyu 1918', a report in Den', no. 7, Petrograd, 1918, in Nezavisimoe rabochee dvizhenie v 1918 godu: Dokumenty i materialy (Paris: YMCA-Press, 1981), p. 94.

Timofei Sapronov, Devyataya konferentsiya RKP(b), sentyabr 1920 goda: Protokoly (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatura, 1972), pp. 156-61.

1918 Constitution of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, 10 July 1918, https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/constitution/1918/ article3.htm.

Michael E. Urban, More Power to the Soviets: The Democratic Revolution in the USSR (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1990).

N. Bukharin and E. Preobrazhensky, ABC of Communism, introduction by E. H. Carr (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), p. 118.

A. J. Polan, Lenin and the End of Politics (London: Methuen, 1984), p. 11.

Alfred Rosmer, Lenin's Moscow, translated by Ian H. Birchall (London: Pluto Press, 1971), p. 116.

Richard Sakwa, Soviet Communists in Power: A Study of Moscow During the Civil War, 1918-21 (London: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 231-2.

Kommunisticheskii Trud, 19 February 1921.

B. L. Dvinov, Moskovskii sovet rabochikh deputatov, 1917-1922: vospominaniya (New York: 1961), p. 108.

Alexandra Kollontai, The Workers' Opposition in Russia (London: Dreadnought Publishers, 1923), pp. 20-21.

PaulAvrich, Kronstadt 1921 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970).

Simon Pirani, The Russian Revolution in Retreat, 1920-24: Soviet Workers and the New Communist Elite (London and New York: Routledge, 2008).

R. V. Daniels, 'Stalin's Rise to Dictatorship', in Alexander Dallin and Alan Westin, eds, Politics in the Soviet Union (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966).

For a discussion of alternatives, see Samuel Farber, Before Stalinism: The Rise and Fall of Soviet Democracy (London: Verso, 1990).

R. V. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969).

Richard Pipes, ed., The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), afterword to the paperback version, p. 179.

Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-1938 (New York: Vintage, 1975).

Stephen F. Cohen, Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).

David W. Lovell, From Marx to Lenin: An Evaluation of Marx's Responsibility for Soviet Authoritarianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. ix.

Lovell is sceptical about the possibility, From Marx to Lenin, p. 2.

Lovell, From Marx to Lenin, pp. 183-5.

For an exploration of this, see Jean L. Cohen, Civil Society and Political Theory (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 1994).

Leszek Kolakowski, 'The Myth of Human Self-Identity: Unity of Civil and Political Society in Socialist Thought', in Leszek Kolakowski and Stuart Hampshire, eds, The Socialist Idea (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974), p. 18.

Pirani, The Russian Revolution in Retreat, 1920-1924.

dramatis personae

Alexeev, Mikhail Vasilievich: General. Chief of Staff to Nicholas II from 1915. Advised Nicholas to abdicate February 1917. Served as Chief of Staff to Provisional Government. Arrested Kornilov on Kerensky's order. After October 1917 helped set up White army but died September 1918. Avdeev, Alexander Dmitrievich: Bolshevik. Commandant of the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg during the detention of the imperial family.

Bogrov Dmitry Grigorievich: Anarchist revolutionary and police agent. Assassinated Pyotr Stolypin in Kiev, September 1911. Bonch-Bruevich, Vladimir Dmitrievich: Leading Bolshevik. Personal secretary to Lenin after October 1917.

Botkin, Evgenii Sergeevich: Doctor to the imperial family. Assassinated with them, Ekaterinburg, July 1918.

Bukharin, Nikolai Ivanovich: Leading Bolshevik. Opposed treaty of Brest- Litovsk. Strongly backed NEP. Killed in Stalin's purges 1938.

Chernov, Viktor Mikhailovich: Leader of the Socialist revolutionaries. Member of the Duma. Minister in the Provisional Government. Chairman of the Constituent Assembly, and then leader of the anti-Bolshevik 'Komuch' in Samara. Died in exile.

Chkheidze, Nikolai Semyonovich: Leading Menshevik. President of the executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet through the revolution in 1917. After October fled Russia.

Denikin Anton Ivanovich: General. Led White forces in Southern Russia during civil war. After defeat went into exile.

Durnovo, Pyotr Nikolaevich: Tsarist era politician and Minister of Interior 1905-6. Effectively repressed disturbances after Bloody Sunday. Accurately predicted social revolution would follow Russian war with Germany. Dzerzhinsky, Felix Edmundovich: 'Iron Felix'. Polish by origin. Leading Bolshevik. Tasked by Lenin to establish the Cheka, December 1917. Headed the Bolshevik apparatus of terror from then until his death in 1926.

Gilliard, Pierre: Swiss tutor to the five children of Nicholas and Alexandra. Accompanied them into exile, but was not permitted to go on with them to Ekaterinburg.

Golitsyn, Nikolai Dmitrievich: Last Prime Minister of Imperial Russia, December 1916 to Feb 1917. Resigned following February revolution. Was then in and out of custody. Executed 1925.

Guchkov, Alexander Ivanovich: Conservative Russian politician and member of Duma. From 1916 on active in working for removal of Tsar. Sent to Pskov February 1917 to help persuade Tsar to abdicate. War minister in Provisional Government. Supported Whites in Civil War. Died in exile.

Guseva, Khionya Kuzminichna: Simbirsk peasant. Attempted to kill Rasputin June 1914. Declared insane. Later released on order of Kerensky. Hermogen (Georgii Yefremovich Dolganyov): Orthodox priest and Bishop. Initially an ally of Rasputin, turned against him and on one occasion struck him. On the Tsar's instructions was accordingly expelled from his bishopric. Re-established contacts with the imperial family in Tobolsk. Drowned by the Bolsheviks 1918.

Iliodor (Sergei Mikhailovich Trufanov): Monk and charismatic preacher. Hostile to Stolypin (who tried to have him rusticated) but protected by Rasputin and the Tsar. Turned against Rasputin and spread rumours he was having an affair with the Empress. Eventually defrocked and died in the US. Kamenev, Lev Borisovich: Leading Bolshevik. Opposed decision to seize power in October 1917, and sought coalition with non-Bolshevik socialists. Nevertheless held senior roles in early Soviet Union. Eventually opposed Stalin. Shot 1936.

Kaplan, Fanya Efimovna: Socialist revolutionary. Tried to assassinate Lenin August 1918. Injured but did not kill him. Shot September that year. Kerensky, Alexander Fyodorovich: Leading socialist politician and brilliant orator. Member of fourth Duma, where he launched a major attack on Rasputin's links with the imperial family. After February 1917 vice-chairman of the Petrograd Soviet and minister in the Provisional Government. Became Prime Minister July 1917 and, after sacking Kornilov, also Chief of staff. Tried to fight back after the October revolution, was swiftly defeated. Died in exile 1970. Kolchak, Alexander Vasilyevich: Admiral and military hero. Led the anti- Bolshevik cause in Siberia, eventually in effect as military dictator. Rigidly right wing and heavily dependent on Western support. After initial military success, he underwent a series of defeats, was handed over to the Bolsheviks in Irkutsk, and shot February 1920.

Kornilov, Lavr Georgievich: General. Appointed army Commander in Chief by Kerensky July 1917, but then suspected of planning a coup. Arrested September 1917 (fatally damaging Kerensky's credibility). Escaped after October to take charge of emerging White army. Killed in action April 1918.

Krupskaya, Nadezhda Konstantinovna: Lenin's wife, and a revolutionary in her own right. Accompanied him in exile and on his return in the 'sealed train'. Later Bolshevik deputy minister. Died 1939.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich: Lifetime revolutionary. Creator and leader of the Bolsheviks. After February 1917 returned to Russia with German help, persuaded Bolshevik party to take an ultraradical line which attracted growing public support and led to the seizure of power in October. Thereafter main author of all aspects of Bolshevik policy, including repressive terror. After a series of strokes died in 1924.

Lunacharsky Anatoly Vasilievich: Leading Bolshevik and supporter of Lenin. After revolution given charge of Soviet arts and education. Died 1933. Lvov, Georgy Yevgenievich: Prince, moderate politician, Duma member, civic leader. Chosen as first head of Provisional Government February 1917. After a steady loss of support replaced by Kerensky July 1917. Arrested by Bolsheviks, escaped, died in exile 1925.

Lvov, Vladimir Nikolaevich: Conservative politician and Duma member. Misleadingly intervened between Kerensky and Kornilov precipitating the arrest of the latter and eventually the fall of the Provisional Government. Martov, Yulii Osipovich: Leader of the Mensheviks. Precipitated the walkout from the Council of Soviets on 25 October 1917 which gave power to the Bolsheviks. Representative at the short lived Constituent assembly. Died in exile 1923.

Milyukov, Pavel Nikolaevich: Liberal politician. Leader of the Constitutional democrats (Kadets). Made devastating November 1916 'stupidity or treason' Duma speech attacking Tsarist regime. Foreign Minister of Provisional Government until forced out May 1917. After suppression of Kadets went into exile. Backed formation of White armies. Died 1945.

Yakovlev Vasily Vasilievich (aka Myachin, Konstantin Alexeevich): Violent revolutionary and saboteur. Member of Petrograd Soviet. Appointed March 1918 to transfer imperial family from Tobolsk to Moscow. May have intended rescue, but forced to surrender them to Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks. Later captured by Whites, fled to China, returned 1928, executed 1938.

Plekhanov, Georgy Valentinovich: Early Russian Marxist. Ideas, particularly on subordination of democracy to proletarian power, highly influential with Lenin. Nevertheless opposed the Bolsheviks and the October revolution. Died in exile 1918.

Protopopov, Alexander Dmitrievich: Politician and member of Duma. Close to Rasputin. Made Interior Minister at Empress' behest September 1916. Accused of mental instability. Survived repeated demands for his resignation. Badly mishandled popular anger in February 1917. Shot by Cheka.

Rasputin, Grigory Yefimovich: Mystic and monk. Gained deep influence with imperial family, particularly Empress, through apparent ability to cure Crown Prince's haemophiliac attacks. Fatally sapped credibility of regime as alleged co-ruler with, and lover of, Empress in Tsar's absence at front from August 1915. Murdered December 1916.

Romanova, Alexandra Feodorovna: Empress of Russia. Born a German princess. Married Nicholas II November 1894. Exercised great influence, particularly in her commitment to autocracy. Bore four daughters and a son. Fatally fell under the influence of Rasputin. Murdered, Ekaterinburg, July 1918. Romanov, Alexis Nikolaevich: Heir to the Russian Empire. Born August 1904. Suffered from haemophilia which several times nearly killed him and which apparently only Rasputin could treat. Murdered, Ekaterinburg July 1918. Romanov, Mikhail Alexandrovich: Grand Duke. Younger brother of Nicholas II and second in line to the throne (after Alexis). Military leader. Offered throne by Nicholas on his abdication. Put off acceptance. Arrested by Bolsheviks March 1918, transported to Siberia, murdered there June 1918.

Romanov, Nikolai Alexandrovich: Emperor of Russia 1894-1917. Mystically confident of his bond with the Russian people. Instinctively traditionalist. Unwaveringly committed to autocracy. Pliable, petulant and unreliable with his ministers. Caring family man, sometimes at public cost. Abdicated February 1917. Murdered, Ekaterinburg, July 1918.

Romanov, Nikolai Nikolaevich: Grand Duke, military leader, cousin of Nicholas II and influential with him. Persuaded him to accept Witte's reforms 1905. Russian supreme commander in first year of World War I until succeeded by Tsar himself. Among those who advised Nicholas to abdicate. Died in exile. Rodzyanko, Mikhail Vladimirovich: Chairman of Duma 1911-17. Took centre stage in Petrograd in February 1917. Failed to persuade Tsar to make concessions in time. Persuaded military not to intervene. Chaired Duma committee which, with Soviet, gave birth to Provisional Government. After October joined Whites. Died in exile 1924.

Ruzsky, Nikolai Vladimirovich: General. Commander Northern Front 1916-17. The only senior figure with the Tsar in Pskov 1-2 March 1917. Helped persuade him to abdicate. Later joined Whites. Captured and killed September 1918.

Rykov, Alexei Ivanovich: Leading Bolshevik moderate. Opposed Lenin in aftermath of October revolution. Nevertheless took leading roles in regime thereafter. Executed in great purge 1938.

Sakhanov, Nikolai Nikolaevich: Menshevik member of Petrograd Soviet. Participated in (and later regretted) October 1917 walkout from Congress of Soviets which handed power to the Bolsheviks.

Sazonov, Sergei Dmitrievich: Russian statesman. Foreign Minister 1910-16.

Sacked at behest of Empress. Backed Whites. Died in exile 1927.

Semyonov, Grigory Ivanovich: Socialist Revolutionary terrorist and assassin.

Organised Fanny Kaplan's attempt to kill Lenin.

Shulgin, Vasily Vitalievich: Conservative member of Duma. Helped

persuade Tsar to abdicate March 1917. Backed Whites, went into exile, but after

imprisonment died in USSR 1976.

Soloviev, Boris: Son in Law of Rasputin. In Siberia, 1917, took valuables from imperial family to help them escape, apparently as a confidence trick. Died in exile 1926.

Savinkov, Boris Victorovich: Revolutionary and terrorist. Deputy War Minister to Kornilov July-August 1917. Planned assassination of Bolshevik leadership 1918. Killed, Moscow 1925.

Stalin, Joseph Vissarionovich: Top Bolshevik leader. Initially resisted Lenin's radical approach in April 1917, but quickly fell into line. After Lenin's death, 1924, manoeuvred himself into total control of USSR, and forced principal rival, Trotsky, into exile. Bloody, totalitarian dictator. Died 1953. Stolypin, Pyotr Arkadievich: Russian statesman. Highly effective administrator. Appointed Prime minister 1906. Ruthless in suppression of disorder. Fixed franchise to ensure Duma support for his ambitious programme of reform, but lost support of Tsar. Assassinated, Kiev 1911. Sukhomlinov, Vladimir Alexandrovich: General. Minister of War 1909-15. Sacked for military failure. Charged with treason March 1916 but released at demand of Rasputin and Empress, badly damaging reputation of regime.

Sverdlov, Yakov Mikhailovich: Leading Bolshevik. Close to Lenin. Deeply involved in decisions to close Constituent Assembly, sign Brest-Litovsk treaty and execute imperial family. Died 1919.

Tikhon (Vasily Ivanovich Bellavin): Patriarch of the Russian Church November 1917. Initially stood up to Bolshevik regime, for example over murder of imperial family, but came to take more conciliatory line. Protested at seizure of church property. Arrested 1922-3, and deposed. Died 1924. Trotsky, Lev Davidovich: Bolshevik leader second only to Lenin in gaining and holding power. Played key role in October 1917 as Chairman of Petrograd Soviet. Led Red army to victory in Civil War. Endorsed and facilitated red terror. But outmanoeuvred by Stalin in power struggle after Lenin's death. Exiled 1929. Murdered 1940.

Veniamin (Vasily Pavlovich Kazansky): Metropolitan of Petrograd. Resisted state seizure of church property 1922. Tried as a counterrevolutionary and shot.

Vrangel, Pyotr, Nikolaevich: General. Led White army in Southern Russia. Disagreed sharply with fellow general Denikin. After defeat went into exile 1920. Died (perhaps poisoned) 1928.

Vyrubova, Anna Alexandrovna: Lady in waiting and probably closest confidante of Empress. Adherent of Rasputin and go-between between him and Alexandra. Arrested after revolution. Escaped to Finland. Died 1964. Witte, Sergei Yulyevich: Count and key policymaker. Built trans-Siberian railway. Prime minister 1903-6. Negotiated end to Russo-Japanese war. Persuaded Tsar to accept political reform, including establishment of Duma, after Bloody Sunday. Resigned after losing trust of Tsar. Died 1915. Yudenich, Nikolai Nikolaevich: General. Leader of White forces in NW Russia. Nearly took Petrograd before defeat in October 1919. Caught trying to escape with army funds. Died in exile.

Yusupov, Felix Felixovich: Prince. Rich, dissipated and married to Tsar's niece. Organised murder of Rasputin, December 1916. Despite wish of Empress that he be shot, merely confined to his estate. After revolution went into exile. Zinoviev, Grigory Yevseevich: Leading Bolshevik. Opposed decision to seize power in October 1917, and sought coalition with non-Bolshevik socialists. Nevertheless held senior roles in early Soviet Union. Eventually opposed Stalin. Shot 1936.

contributors

Dominic Lieven is a Senior Research Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, a Fellow of the British Academy and author of Beyond the Flame: Empire, War and the End of Tsarist Russia. His book Russia against Napoleon won the Wolfson Prize for History.

Simon Dixon is Sir Bernard Pares Professor of Russian History at UCL Chairman of the Literary Committee of the Russian Booker Prize. His critically acclaimed biography Catherine the Great was shortlisted for the Longman/ History Today Book of the Year Award.

Douglas Smith is an award-winning historian and translator, and the author of five books on Russia, including Former People: The Last Days of the Russian Aristocracy and Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs.

Donald Crawford was for twenty years the publisher of Parliamentary Brief. He is the author of several books on Tsarist Russia, including Michael & Natasha (co-authored with his wife Rosemary Crawford and soon to become a film by Russian director Andrei Kravchuk) and The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II.

Sean McMeekin is a Professor of History at Bard College. He is the author of several acclaimed works of history, including The Ottoman Endgame, which won the Arthur Goodzeit Book Award, and The Russian Origins of the First World War, which won the Norman B. Tomlinson Jr. Book Prize.

Richard Pipes is one of the world's best known historians of the Russian Revolution. He was Baird Professor of History at Harvard University and served as National Security Council adviser on Soviet and East European affairs.

Orlando Figes is Professor of History at Birkbeck, and the award-winning author of eight books, including the Wolfson Prize-winning A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924. His work has been translated into thirty-two languages.

Edvard Radzinsky is a Russian playwright, screenwriter, TV presenter and history writer. His books available in English include The Last Tsar and Stalin:

The First In-Depth Biography Based on Explosive Documents from Russia's Secret Archives.

Martin Sixsmith was the BBC's Moscow correspondent during the collapse of the Soviet Union, and is the author of several books, including the Sunday Times bestseller Russia: A 1,000-Year Chronicle of the Wild East and Philomena, the basis for the critically acclaimed movie of the same name.

Evan Mawdsley was Professor of International History at the University of Glasgow and is the author of several books, including The Russian Civil War.

Erik Landis is a Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, and Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at Oxford Brookes. He is the author of Bandits and Partisans: The Antonov Movement in the Russian Civil War.

Catriona Kelly is Professor of Russian at the University of Oxford. She has published widely on Russian history, including St Petersburg: Shadows of the Past and Socialist Churches. She has also published translations of Mayakovsky, Tsvetaeva and others and reviews for the TLS and Guardian.

Richard Sakwa is Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent, an Associate Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs and author of many scholarly works on Communist and post-Communist Russia, including Frontline Ukraine and Putin: Russia's Choice.

index

accident and sickness insurance 42 Admiralty (British) 209 Agricultural Institute, Omsk 203 Alapaevsky factory 172 Alexander II, Tsar 32, 34, 143, 144, 264 Alexander III, Tsar 32, 60 Alexander Mikhailovich, Grand Duke

('Sandro') 90 Alexandra Feodorovna, Tsarina 60 and the tsar's autocratic power 3, 46 meets Rasputin 50

and assassination attempt on Rasputin 50

and the tsar's mobilisation of his army 62

rumours about her 64, 163-4

rules Russia with Rasputin during First

World War 4, 66-7, 148, 300 detests the Duma 148 and Rasputin's murder 64-5 plots to remove her 67, 68 George V blames her for the abdication

77

in Tobolsk 167

duped by Soloviev 168-9

travels on Yakovlev's train towards

Moscow 170, 171 held in Ekaterinburg 171 see also Romanov dynasty; Romanov family

Alexandrov Gardens, Moscow 191 Alexeev, General Mikhail 68, 72, 74, 77, 90,

96, 107, 150, 210, 215 Alexis, Tsarevich of Russia haemophilia 50, 67, 75, 78, 152 Rasputin's prayers for him 50 Nicholas's abdication in his favour 4, 67, 68, 74-8, 300

Nicholas removes him from the succession 77-9, 86, 87, 90, 152, 170 All power to the Soviets' slogan 93-4, 99,

105, 126, 160, 183 All Russian Provisional Government 7 All-Russia Central Executive Committee

(VTsIK) of the soviets 268, 272 All-Russian Constituent Assembly

(Uchreditel'noe sobranie) 206 Alliluyeva, Svetlana (Stalin's daughter) 258

American Civil War 161 American Embassy, Petrograd 125 Anastasia, Princess (daughter of the king

of Montenegro) 50, 55 anti-clericalism 250, 253, 256 anti-Semitism 180

April Days (20-21 April 1917) 98-9, 107,

159-60, 289 'April Theses' 93-4 Arbatov, Ensign 172 Arkhangelsk 207-8 Armand, Inessa 93 Armenia/Armenians 25, 97, 100 Ascher, Abraham 39 Ashberg, Olof 103 Aurora (Baltic cruiser) 136 Austria-Hungary

turns on its German saviour 16 reaction to assassination of Franz

Ferdinand 17 declares war on Serbia 57, 60, 61 declares war on Russia 62 and socialism 201 Austrian Empire 24 Austro-Hungarian army 91, 102, 103, 201

POWs 205 authoritarianism 22, 270, 281, 297, 298

autocracy in periods of social and economic

change 2 and revolution 2, 293 of Nicholas II 32, 46, 74, 78, 143, 145, 287 remains the model for imperial Russia 66

autocratic authority of the tsars 142-3 and breakdown in food supply 218 monolithic 264 Avdeev, N. 173

Avksentiev, Nikolai 113, 203, 207, 210, 213

Balkan War, First (1912-13) 56, 60, 286

and Rasputin 3, 54-7 Balkan War, Second (1913) 286 Baltic region 15, 16, 40, 201, 216, 217 Baltic Sea 201, 202, 208 Baltic States 202, 294, 295 Bedny, Demyan 191 Belarus 201, 217 Belorussia 236

Benckendorff, Count Alexander 16

Berliner Tageblatt 61

Bezbozhnik (The Militant Atheist) 254

Bieletsky (ex-Minister) 192

Bismarck, Prince Otto von 33, 46, 286

Bitlis (former Ottoman vilayet) 100

Black Book, The 249, 250

Black Hundreds 14, 254

Black Princesses 50

Black Sea 101, 102, 202, 216

Blok, Alexander 65, 165

'Bloody Sunday' (9 January 1905) 2-3,

144-5, 149

Bogdanovich, Alexandra 44-5 Bogrov, Dmitry 29, 32, 36-7 Bogrov family 37

Boldyrev, General Vasily G. 203, 210, 215 Bologoe 73

Bolshevik Central Committee 94, 99, 124, 129-32, 140-41, 187 Bolshevik Military Organisation 99, 131 'Bolshevik Reformation' 244

Bolsheviks and tsarism 1 Lenin's creation of 288 influence in the Soviets 4 Lenin builds up Red Guards 4 weakening of Russian army forces 4 abortive putsch (July Days) 4-5, 104-5, 106, 109, 110, 127-8, 131, 154 Kerensky releases recently arrested

Bolsheviks 5, 106 and the Petrograd Soviet 5, 113, 126, 129, 133, 151

rumours of plans to seize power 112-15, 118, 132 size of the party 268 takeover of power see October

Revolution and Constituent Assembly elections 6,

155, 183

fights with the Whites 6

has the Romanov family killed 6

and November 1917 elections 6

opposition to 7

peasant support 7

'War Communism' 7-8, 196-7

and the Church 8

cynicism and ruthlessness 159

Jacobin 167, 168

at Ekaterinburg 170, 171

panic and fear in response to shooting of

Lenin 194 hardening in Bolshevik mentality 194,

199

seventy years of communist autocracy

199

victory in Civil War (1922) 7, 26 Bolshevism 161, 197, 275, 297

seen as offering Russia a bright new

future 1 hostility to the Church 8, 249 German toleration of 26, 27 lynching of Russian naval officers

opposed to Bolshevism 102 Justice Ministry prepares to discredit Bolshevism forever 105

and Provisional Government's treatment

of Kornilov 121-2 SRs eclipsed and destroyed by 180-81 Allies' programme 201 Kolchak's aim 204

and church valuable confiscation 254 pluralistic 263, 277, 280 Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow 112 Bonch-Bruevich, Vladimir 30 Days 175 'On Rasputin' 52-3 Borgia, Cesare 290 Bosphorus 96, 97, 101, 202 Botkin, Evgeny 167, 173 Botkina, Tatiana 167, 169 bourzhoui ('bourgeois parasites') 196 Bradley, Joseph 264

Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of (March 1918) 7, 18,

19, 26, 108, 171, 201, 206-7, 241, 270, 271 Brewster, Robert D. 59 Britain

growing detente with Berlin and distrust

of Russia by 1914 18 if Britain had been neutral in the First

World War 18 George V compelled to refuse hospitality to Nicholas 164 refuses to sign a military alliance with

France 24 support of White armies against the

Bolsheviks 187 and Kaplan's assassination attempt on

Lenin 178, 188-92 post-war Russia policy of War Cabinet 202

and Arkhangelsk government 207-8 'strong man' rule in Second World War 161

British Agent (film) 191

British Army 210

British Embassy, Petrograd 188

British Empire 17, 21-2

British intelligence 178, 188

Brusilov, General 76, 107

Buchanan, Ambassador George 77

Bukharin, Nikolai 198, 269, 270, 281, 282 Bukharin, Nikolai and Preobrazhensky, Yevgeny: The ABC of Communism 273 Buler, Baron Alexei Pavlovich von 176 Bulgaria/Bulgarians 54, 55, 56 Bulow, Bernhard von 14 bureaucracy 276-7 the tsar's distrust of 34 state 94 Petersburg 146 and the Duma leadership 150 food supply (Narkomprod) 227 rise of 272 rampant 273 Lenin on 274 Kamenev on 275 Leninist-Stalinist 279 'Burschujs' 65

Cafe du Croissant, Paris: assassination of

Jean Jaures 51 Cantacuzene, Princess 80 capitalism 197, 267, 271, 281, 293 Cathedral of Christ Redeemer, Moscow 258

Catherine Cathedral, Tsarskoe Selo 249 Catherine the Great 31, 143 Catholicism 260 Caucasus 22, 76, 202, 210, 236 Ceausescu, Nicolae 291 censorship 43, 143, 145 Central Powers 91, 98, 101, 204, 207, 209, 215, 217, 287

and Treaty of Brest-Litovsk 7, 201 Chaikovsky, Nikolai Vasil'evich 207 Chechnya 295, 297 Cheka, the 284 establishment of (December 1917) 6, 156,

269, 290 in Ekaterinburg 172 false White Guard conspiracy 174-5 myths of groups organised to liberate

imperial family 176 and questioning of Kaplan 184, 186-7

and British involvement in attack on

Lenin 188, 189, 191 Red Terror 7, 193, 198 and grain procurement 234-5 and 'raiding banditry' 236, 238 Kamenev condemns its excesses 275 Chekhov, Anton 159, 300 Chelyabinsk province 172, 237 Chemin-des-Dames mutinies (May 1917) 107 Chernov, Viktor 95, 99, 105, 107, 111, 113, 208, 213, 290 Chernov Manifesto 208, 212 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai: What Is To Be

Done? 195 China 284, 296, 299, 300 Chinese-Eastern Railway 209 Chkeidze, Nikolai 94 'church museums' 248 church valuables, confiscation of 8, 244-61 church-state relations see under Russian

Orthodox Church Churchill, Winston 91, 197 Citizen, The 60 class struggle 135 Clemenceau, Georges 202, 256 coalitionists 262, 263, 268, 269 Code of Laws 84, 85-6, 88-9 Cold War 1, 11, 30, 284 Commercial Hotel, Voloshskaya Kiev 181 Commission of Labour Duty 222 Committee of Members of the Constituent

Assembly see Komuch communism rules one third of the human race 1 stimulates the rise of Nazism 1 and the Cold War 1

put in power by the Russian Revolution 1, 8

authoritarian 281 stagnation and collapse of Soviet Communism 299 Communist Party of the Soviet Union introduction of New Economic Policy 219, 221

and collectivisation of agriculture 221

Seventh Party Congress 271

Eighth Party Congress 273

Eighth Conference (December 1919) 221-2

trade union representation 222

and Middle Volga rebellion (1919) 226

and 'kulage sabotage' 228

Central Committee 229, 232

Politburo 232 Ninth Congress 233 suppression of Tambov insurgency 238 Tenth Congress 240, 241, 278 Thirteenth Conference (1924) 241-2 becomes corrupt, sclerotic and

conservative 293 Gorbachev brings the whole system down 293 Compiegne, France: armistice (11

November 1918) 200-202 concentration camps 193, 198 Constantinople (later Istanbul), Turkey 22, 54, 202

conquest of 95, 96, 97, 108 Constituent Assembly 140 first call for (1881) 144 and 'Bloody Sunday' 144 and the Dumas 145, 146 promised in February Revolution 6, 83 central role anticipated for 152 and Michael 86-9, 152 and the Provisional Government 152-3, 155, 160, 161, 183 loss of popular enthusiasm for 154, 158 Kornilov on 112, 119 and Lenin 129, 144, 156, 183, 289 elections to the Assembly 154-5, 159, 183, 185, 207 opening postponed 156 convened 156-7, 158, 159, 183, 288 disbanded 6, 7, 157-8, 159, 183-4, 213, 269 reconstituted as 'Komuch' 158 if the elections had taken place earlier

159-62

Constitutional Democrats (Kadets) 13, 14, 41, 44, 120, 126-7, 128, 140, 155, 156, 194, 203, 210, 212

Cossacks 69, 110, 172, 175, 203 Council of Ministers 61, 81 Council of People's Commissars

(Sovnarkom) 193, 268 counterfactual history 9 countryside impoverishment and discontent 2 hunger in 144, 225, 245 breakdown in food supply 218 decline in agricultural production 218 'taking grain' (grain requisitioning) 218, 219

sustained anti-Soviet insurgencies (1920) 219 thousands killed during rebellions 219 harvest failures and famine 219, 239, 244 New Economic Policy (NEP) 219-20, 221, 231, 241 decriminalising the market 219-20, 241 collectivisation of agriculture 220-21,

230, 243

razverstka 224, 227, 228, 229, 231, 232, 233,

239-40, 241

committees of the poor 225 'Extraordinary Tax' 226 Middle Volga rebellion 226 'kulak' sabotage 220, 228, 234 tax-in-kind system 229, 231, 233, 240, 241, 278

Trotsky's four basic principles for

agricultural policy 229-31 Larin's proposals 231-2 Tambov province rebellion 235-6, 242 'raiding banditry' 236, 238 western Siberia rebellion 237-8 mounting state repressions 238-9 Crimea 80

Crimean War (1853-6) 32, 255 Criminal Code (1922) 247

Article 62 246 Cromie, Captain Francis 188, 189 Curzon, Lord 192

Czechoslovak Legion (later Corps) 170, 172, 174, 175, 176, 187, 205, 206, 207, 217

Dagestan 63

Daily Mirror 103

Daily Telegraph 164

Dardanelles 202

'Dark Forces' 64, 65

Day newspaper 52

Decree on Civil Marriage (1917) 249

Decree on Land (1917) 249

Decree on the Confiscation of Church

Valuables 244 Decree on the Separation of Church and

State and Church and School (1918) 249 deLeninisation 299 democracy 101, 121 spread of democratic ideas 2 bourgeois 6, 155

Russia's move towards Western liberal

democracy 11, 12 within the party 8-9, 272 peasant 42

and the Provisional Government 183

pluralistic 262

and Solzhenitsyn 264

German social democracy 270

and socialism 270

Soviet 272

'party democracy' debate 277 'workers' democracy' 278 inner-party 283 free market 299 liberal 296

Democratic Centralists 262, 272-3, 275, 277 Democratic Conference (14 September

1917) 128, 129 demonstrations preceding the first Duma 3 during the First Balkan War 54 patriotic demonstrations during the

First World War 3 bread shortage (1917) 149 Denikin, General Anton 163, 177, 202, 210, 214, 216, 217, 221 Deutsche Warte 61 Directoire executif 203

Directory see under Provisional All-Russian

Government Doctor Zhivago (film) 101n Don region 202, 221 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 244, 300

The Devils 175 Duma 67, 140, 287, 288, 300 creation of 3, 34, 66, 145-6 short-lived stability follows instigation 3 first Duma dissolved (1906) 13, 146 and Stolypin 41, 44, 146, 147 dissolution of second Duma ('Stolypin's

coup'; 1907) 43, 146 subservient third and fourth Dumas 147 patriotic and anti-German rhetoric 147 dismissed after criticises regime's war

conduct 148 reconvened in November 1916 148 forces resignation of prime minister 149 members protected by guarantees of

parliamentary immunity 149 'temporary committee' 70, 73 Progressive Bloc opts for Lvov as

premier 71 collapse of (28 February 1917) 70, 73,

149-51

Provisional Committee 96, 150, 151 Durnovo, Pyotr 46, 60 Dvinov, Boris 276 Dyakonov, A. 186

Dzerzhinsky, 'Iron' Felix 193, 252-3, 284, 285, 298

economy

crashes in 1905 revolution 15 Dumas demand economic reform 3 and 'War Communism' 7 razverstka 7-8 New Economic Policy 8 foreign debt 12, 14-15 Ukraine's vital economic role 20 see also countryside 'educated society' (obshchestvennost) 34 Egypt 21-2

Eighteenth Brumaire 130

Eighth Section of the Commissariat of

Justice 250 Ekaterinburg province 6, 59, 126, 170-75, 208, 223, 229, 237 elections, November 1917 6 electoral law (1907) 41, 43 Engels, Friedrich: Socialism: Utopian and

Scientific 274 Enisei River 214

Erzurum (former Ottoman vilayet) 100 Estonia 23, 24, 202 Eurocommunists 264, 281, 281-2 Evert, General Alexei 76

factory committees 96, 104, 131 factory workers

accident and sickness insurance 42 and putsch attempt ofJuly 1917 104 February Revolution (8-12 March 1917)

107, 159, 167

bread riots 4, 149

a spontaneous uprising 68

death of a police inspector 69

mutiny of Pavlovsk Guards 69

troops join the demonstrators 4, 69, 149

Liteiny Arsenal captured 70

prisoners released 70

Duma shut down 70, 73, 149-51

emergency conference 70, 71

Protopopov resigns 71

Nicholas's response to Grand Duke

Michael's proposals 72 Russia lacks a government 72, 73 Nicholas forced to change his train

journey 72-3 and the Provisional Government 181 Solzhenitsyn's argument 279-80 Fedorov, Professor Sergei 78 Fedyashin, Anton A.: 'Liberals under

Autocracy' 264 Feodorovskoe Concord of Old Believers

259

Ferguson, Professor Niall 9

Fersen, Count 165 Finland

independence issue 14, 267, 294, 295 and Stolypin 36, 38 popular German intervention 22 Lenin in hiding 104, 105, 106, 127-8, 129 Russian troops in 132n First World War causes of 17-18

Rasputin's efforts to persuade the tsar

against entering the war 3, 57-60 Russian voices for peace 60 Russia's entry (1914) 3 the tsar commands his troops (1915)

3-4, 60

and Russia's move towards democracy 11 if Britain had been neutral 18 United States brought into the war

18-19, 23, 95, 108

impact of Leninist doctrine 101-3 Mesopotamia campaign 209 'Kerensky offensive' (July 1917) 102, 103 June Offensive (1917) 103 armistice between Germany and the

Allies 200-202, 213, 214, 215 if Germany had won 18, 26-8 Flakserman, Galina 130 Fleming, Peter 211 Flynn, Errol 191 forced labour 197

Foreign Office (British) 191, 212, 215 France

Constituent Assembly election (1848) 159 and importance of Russian power 15 Britain refuses to sign a military alliance

24

and a cordon sanitaire 201 Gaullist 161

economic blockade policy against Soviet

regime 202 anti-clericalism 256 Franco, General Francisco 257, 291 Frankfurter Zeitung 55 Franz Ferdinand, Archduke 17, 51, 52 Franz Joseph, Emperor of Austria 61

Frederiks, Baron 36

French army: Chemin-des-Dames

mutinies (May 1917) 107 French empire 17 French government 96-7 French intelligence 112 French Revolution (1789-99) 2, 10, 13, 14,

16, 112n, 144, 165, 170, 203 French Royal Family 165 FSB 284

Fundamental Laws 84, 86, 145, 146 Article 87 (1906) 43

Galicia 21, 24, 98, 100, 102, 103, 107 Garsky, Viktor 181 Gatchina 70 George V, King 77, 164 George Mikhailovich, Count Brasov 84 Georgia 22, 296 German army 14, 15, 26, 201 General Staff 300 German high command 19, 107 German Empire 22, 23, 24 German Foreign Office 93, 103 German Imperial Government 93 German intelligence 102 Germany

and intervention in the 1905 Russian

Revolution 14 facilitates Lenin's return and fosters

Russian revolution 4, 25-6, 289, 300 'blank cheque' to Austria (5-6 July 1914)

17

growing antagonism between Germany

and Russia before 1914 18 growing detente with Britain by 1914 18 declares war on Russia (19 July 1914) 62 if Germany had won the First World

War 18, 26-8 opts for unrestricted submarine warfare (1916-17) 18 urgent need to win the war 22-3 atrocities in law infringements in First World War 25

empire-building in east-central Europe

19, 21-4

competition with Russia 19, 24 protection of Ukraine 20, 21 Weimar Constituent Assembly 159 reunification (1990) 19 Gestapo 194 Gilliard 168, 169 Gippius, Zinaida 125 Golitsin, Prince 70, 71, 72 Goloshchekin, Isai 171-2 Gorbachev, Mikhail 30, 195, 263, 264, 273,

281, 283, 293, 294, 296

Gorky, Maxim 132

Governor-General's Palace, Omsk, former 203

Gramsci, Antonio 265-6, 270, 281 'Great Patriotic War' 257 Great Terror (1936-8) 7 Greece 54

Grodno province 33, 34, 35 Guchkov, Alexander 45, 47, 67-8, 70, 77-82, 99-100, 107

Gulag, loss of lives in 178 Guseva, Khionya 48, 49-50, 51, 57, 61

H

Habsburg empire 17, 285-6 Habsburg monarchy 24, 25 Hamburger Fremdenblatt 60 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 10 Herald of Europe journal (Vestnik Evropy) 264

Hermogen (a patriarch) 166 Hermogen, Archbishop 166, 168, 169, 177 Herzen, Alexander 180 Higher Board of Church Management

245-6

Hitler, Adolf 28, 59, 162, 291 Hollweg, Chancellor Theobald von

Bethmann 93 Holy Land 55

Holy Name movement (Imyaslavtsy) 259 house churches 247, 251, 256 Howard, Leslie 191

Hugo, Victor: Quatre-vingt Treize 168 Hungary, Russian intervention in (1849) 16

Ignatieva, Countess Sophia 63 Ignatov, E. N. 275 Ignatov movement 262 Iliodor (Trufanov) 43, 47, 49 Imperial Guard: 'Bloody Sunday'

(9 January 1905) 2-3 Inca Empire 298 India 21-2

industrial production 222-3 Instruction on removal of religious images

from public buildings (1918) 249 intelligentsia

deeply disaffected 144, 294 and terrorism 144

spread of socialist and democratic ideas 2

battle between rival ideological

positions 11 socialist doctrines and revolutionary

socialist parties 14 conflict over Ukraine 20-21 alliance with the Kadets in Saratov 41 and local courts 42 ineffectuality of 159 flight abroad during Red Terror 196 hostility to coercive radicalism of

Bolsheviks 267 fanatical 300 'Internationale' 92, 213 internationalism 263, 267 Internationalists 137 Ioffe, Henrikh 212

Ipatiev house, Ekaterinburg 171, 172, 173,

175, 177

Iraq 21, 22 Ireland 17, 22 Irkutsk 209, 214 Islamists 287

Ispolkom see Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies: Executive Committee

Italy: adoption of an authoritarian regime 12

Ivan the Terrible 142, 292 Ivanchikov, chief of militia, Motovilikhi

Soviet 174 Ivanov, General Nikolai 72, 74 Ivanovo-Voznesentsk 126 Izvestia 120, 194

J

Jacobin Bolsheviks 167, 168 Jacobinism 266 Jacobins 203

Janin, General Maurice 211 Japan 209, 213, 296 Jaures, Jean 51 Jerusalem 55 Jews

conspiracy theory about Rasputin and

Franz Ferdinand 51 pogroms and mass exodus from Russia 180 Russian treatment ofJews in First World War 25

and Ukrainian independence 20 and German informal empire 24 and Stolypin 29, 37, 45 toleration for 44 Johnson, Brian 83, 174 July Days 4-5, 104-5, 106, 109, 110, 127-8,

131, 154, 159, 160, 289

K

Kadets see Constitutional Democrats Kaiserreich 25 Kalinin, Mikhail 131

Kamenev, Lev 94, 105, 127, 129-35, 139, 140,

262, 268, 269, 275-6 Kaplan, Fanny (Feyga Chaimovna Roitblat) background 180

becomes a Socialist Revolutionary 180 badly injured and imprisoned after

bomb plot 181, 185 meets Dmitry Ulanov while in a Crimean health clinic 181-2

eye operations 182

official story of her activities 182

intelligence gathering 184

and attempt to assassinate Lenin 6-7,

178, 179-80, 184, 195-9, 290 arrested and questioned 184-5, 186-7, 190

a possible scapegoat for others 185 and Lockhart 188, 190 execution 185, 190-91 disposal of her body 191 Kara-Murza, Sergei: Stolypin: Father of the Russian Revolution (re-issued as Stolypin's Mistake: The Prime Minister who overturned Russia) 31 Karev, I. A. 63-4 Kautsky, Karl 270, 281 Kazakhstan 236, 237 Kazan 172

Kazan cathedral, Petrograd 99 Kerensky, Alexander 107, 140-41, 290 dominant figure in the February

Revolution 73, 150 appointed justice minister 80 and Michael's abdication 82, 83, 84-5, 89 leads Social Revolutionaries 94-5 and 'peace without annexations'

declaration 98 minister of war 100-101 release of recently arrested Bolsheviks 5, 106

becomes prime minister 106 convinced of a military 'conspiracy' 109-110

leader of the Provisional Government 5, 165, 181, 207 appoints Kornilov head of the armed

forces 5, 110-111 retracts pledges to Kornilov 111 series of misunderstandings between him and Kornikov 5, 109, 112-22, 161, 288

dismisses Kornilov 5, 118-19 loss of army support for his government 5, 125

names a new cabinet (24 September 1917) 128 orders Lenin's arrest 129 and Lenin's impatience to seize power

134

arrest of his ministers 137, 139 military campaign in Petrograd and

Moscow 139 and the Constituent Assembly 161 and the Romanov family 165, 166 and All-Russian Constituent Assembly 206

'Kerensky offensive' (July 1917) 102, 103, 104

Kettle, Michael 214

KGB 156, 284, 298

Kharbin (Harbin) 209

Kharkov 182

Khorotkin, Urals General 176 Khrapovitsky, Antony, archbishop of

Volhynia 44 Khreshatitsky 176

Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeyevich 38, 198,

293

khutor(a) 40, 45 Khvostoff (ex-Minister) 192 Kienthal peace congress, Switzerland (1916) 92 Kiev, Ukraine 27

statue to Alexander II 32 nationalist movement 35 Russian royal visits 35-6 Kiev Cave Monasteries 255 Kiev Club of Russian Nationalists 35 Kiev Municipal Theatre, Ukraine:

assassination of Stolypin 3, 29, 36, 37 Kiev Okhrana 37 Kimens, Colonel R. E. 197 Kireev, General Alexander 13, 45 Knox, General Alfred 209, 211, 212, 213 Kobilinsky, Colonel 165, 167 Kochurov, Father Ioann 249 Kokovtsov, Vladimir 36, 47 Kolchak, Admiral Alexander Vasilyevich 176, 177, 216, 229, 237

naval career 208-9

restoration of discipline after mutiny 101 naval mission to United States 209 war and navy minister, PA-RG 202, 211 Council of Ministers meeting after the

Omsk coup 203 'supreme ruler' 7, 200, 204, 214, 215 proclamation (18 November 1918) 204, 213-14 military success 214 longest military retreat in modern

history 221 on trial 209, 213, 214 killed 214 Kollontai, Alexandra 276 Komuch (Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly) 217 All-Russian Constituent Assembly

reconstituted as 7, 158, 206 as the All Russian Provisional

Government 7 evolves into the PA-RG and the

Directory 206 replaced by dictatorship of Kolchak 7 Konoplyova, Lidia 187 Korea 22

see also North Korea Korf, Baroness 165 Kornilov, General Lavr 107, 167, 207 becomes head of armed forces 110-111 Kerensky retracts pledges to him 111 series of misunderstandings between him and Kerensky 5, 109, 112-22, 161, 288, 289

and the Provisional Government 110, 111, 113, 115, 118-22, 125 dismissed by Kerensky 5, 118-19 arrested 5, 120

escapes prison and co-founds Volunteer

Army 120 death 120, 121

exonerated by a commission 121 ability to crush the October Bolshevik coup 121 Kornilov movement 127, 130 Korolev house, Perm 174

Kosygin, Alexei 263

Kovno province, Russia (present-day

Kaunas, Lithuania) 33, 35 Kozlov, Frol 263

Kremlin, Moscow 106, 179, 180, 185, 187, 190, 191, 267 Krestinsky, Nikolai 232 Krivoshein, Alexander 62 Kronstadt 126 Kronstadt naval garrison sailors in April Days' riots 99 and putsch attempt (July 1917) 104, 105 uprising (1921) 8, 240, 242, 278 and struggle to take Moscow 267 Krupskaia, Nadezhda (wife of Lenin) 91,

93, 106

Krylenko, Nikolai 131

Krymov, General Alexander 113, 114, 120

Kuban region 221

kulaks 219, 220, 221, 225-8, 230, 231, 234,

242, 247

Kulyabko, Colonel; N. N. 37 Kurdish refugees 100 Kurlov, Pyotr 37, 47 Kursky, Justice Dmitry 186 Kyshtym 172

labour camps 181, 197 labour force

working conditions 144 militarisation of 222, 223, 230, 233 dwindling urban labour force 229 struggle for greater recognition in the labour process 266 Lake Baikal 221 land issue

gentry landowning 13, 14 Stolypin's reforms 29, 34, 40-41, 42 and first Duma 146 Land Settlement Commissions 34 Larin, Yuri 231-2 Latsis, Martin 195 Latvia 15, 23, 24, 201, 202 Le Page, G. W. 101

League of the Militant Godless 254 Lean, David 101n Lebedian (Tambov province) 234 Lebensraum 108 Left Communists 270, 271, 282 Left Opposition 270 Left SRs 136-7, 269 Lenin, Vladimir 30, 52, 262 perceptions of 1

arrested in Vienna as an enemy alien

(1914) 91

denounces Stolypin 30 in Zurich 91, 92, 93 attends peace congresses 92 German support 4, 93, 106, 109, 289,

300

return to Russia from exile in his 'sealed

train' 4, 25, 91, 93, 289, 300 and the Provisional Government 4, 93, 98-9, 106 revolutionary programme (April

Theses') 93-4 anti-war stance 94, 95, 97, 100, 101, 107 and putsch attempt (July 1917) 104, 105, 160

goes back into exile 5, 104, 105, 106, 109, 127-8, 289 campaigns for an immediate uprising 128-9

surreptitious return to Petrograd 5, 123, 141, 288 on civil war 128, 134, 135 convenes secret meeting of the Central

Committee 130 wants pre-emptive seizure of power

before the Soviet Congress 131-5, 137 bullies Bolshevik leadership into

immediate insurrection 5, 124, 289 Bolshevik coup d'etat 5, 11, 136 Mensheviks and SRs play into his hands

137-8

ulterior motive of the insurrection 140 and November 1917 elections 6, 156 and the National Assembly 160 and Left Opposition 270 a victorious Germany may have

tolerated his rule 27 and the Romanov family 175 assassination attempt 6-7, 178, 179-80,

184, 185, 186, 188-92, 195-9, 290 significance of his survival 185-6 the Lenin myth 186 fanaticism in Red Terror 195, 197-8 breaks his promises 196-7 confident speech on the republic's future (1919) 221-2 and Larin's proposals 232 and tax-in-kind 240, 241 on crushing religious resistance 253 first incapacitating stroke 254 and Left Socialist Revolutionaries 268-9 and bureaucracy as a social problem 274 and trade unions 277, 280 early death (1924) 7, 185, 242 his role 288-90 legacy 290-92 memorials to 284 model of state capitalism 271 the state he created 292-3 succeeded by Stalin 7 'On Compromises' 128 'Socialism and Religion' 251 Socialism and War 92 The State and Revolution 273 Lenin in 1918 (film) 179-80 Lenin in October (film) 180 Leningrad 298

see also Petrograd; St Petersburg 'Leningrad' principles 264 Leninism 102, 281, 282, 283, 291, 299

monist 263, 280 Leninist democratic centralism 275 Leninists 277 Lettish garrison 189 Libava (Liepaja), Latvia 202 liberalism 1, 121, 264 liberals

and the promise of a constitution 13 and Stolypin 44 fall of (May 1917) 100

see also Constitutional Democrats Lithuania 201 Livadia 68

local government 35, 42, 143, 264 Lockhart, Robert Bruce 188-90, 191-2, 194

Memoirs of a British Agent 188 Lockhart, Robin 191 Lomonosov, Professor Yury 89-90 Louis XVI, King of France 3 165 Lubyanka prison, Moscow 186, 189, 192 Lunacharsky, Anatoly 252-3 Lutheranism 260 Luxemburg, Rosa 270, 281 Lvov, Prince Georgy 68, 71, 79, 81-5, 151 Lvov, Vladimir Nikolaevich 114-19, 290

M

Machiavelli, Niccolo 253, 290 Mackenzie, Frederick Arthur 249 Malaya Vishera 72 Malenkov, Georgy 263 Malkov, Pavel Dmitrievich 190-91 Manchester Guardian 97 Mandela, Nelson 291 Mao Zedong 291

Maria Feodorovna, Dowager Empress 166 Maria Nikolaevna, Grand Duchess 170, 171 Marie Antoinette 165 Marie Palace, St Isaac's Square, Petrograd

70, 71

Markov, Sergei 65, 168 Martov, Julius 138, 140 Marx, Karl 129, 269, 281, 282, 299

The Civil War in France 274 Marxism 281, 282, 288, 299, 300 Marxism/Leninism 291 Marxists 92, 266, 267 Matveev, Alexei 83, 84, 85, 87 Mejan, Louis 256

Mensheviks 92, 94, 127, 128, 130, 134-40,

159, 160, 231, 267, 276 Merkel, Angela 31

Meshchersky, Prince Vladimir 60, 63 Michael Alexandrovich, Grand Duke a popular war hero 67

proposed regent for Alexis 67, 68, 71,

74-8

emergency conference 70, 71 proposes Lvov as premier 71 Nicholas ignores his proposals 72 Nicholas tries to pass the crown to him 4, 77-8, 87, 152, 164

abdication 79-90 celebration of his succession 80 and the Constituent Assembly 86-9, 152 murdered 174 middle classes 12, 22, 158, 194, 196 Middle East 22, 216, 292 Middle Volga region 205, 226 Middlesex Regiment 207, 212 Mikhailov, I. A. 212, 213 Mikhelson (Hammer and Sickle) engineering factory, Moscow (now Vladimir Ilyich Electromechanical Plant) 179, 184 Military Revolutionary Committee

(MRC) 124-5, 127, 136, 139 Militsa, Princess 50

Milyukov, Pavel 79, 80-81, 82, 89, 90, 95, 97-100, 107, 120, 163 'Ministry of National Confidence' 148 Mogilev 66, 67, 69, 72, 73, 74, 79, 90, 113,

117, 149

Molotov, Vyacheslav 197 Monarchist Congress, 4th (1907) 43 monarchy 12, 16, 25 autocratic 66

constitutional 66, 67, 75, 87 Habsburg 24 and Rasputin's murder 65 and Stolypin's reforms 38, 46 monasteries, dissolution of 250 'Mongol Yoke' 142 monism, Bolshevik 266 Montenegro 54

king of 50 Moscow

and the succession of Michael 80 Romanov crown jewels hidden in Kremlin armoury 106

social and political resistance to

Bolsheviks 267 Bolsheviks take control 6, 126 becomes the capital 6 Red Guards fight Kerensky's forces 139 Yakolev's train taking the tsar to Moscow 170

White armies 'drive to Moscow' (1919) 221

pluralistic Bolshevism 263 differences between Moscow and

Petrograd 265-6 Mensheviks in 267 Lenin's mausoleum 284, 285 Dzerzhinsky statue 284-5, 298 Moscow Security Bureau (aka Okhrana) 65

Motovilikhi 174 Motovilikhi Soviet 174 Mount Athos 55

MRC see Military Revolutionary

Committee Mudros armistice (30 October 1918) 202 Munzenberg, Willi 92, 93 Murmansk 207 Muslims 56

Mussolini, Benito 30, 43, 291 muzhiks 95

Myachin, Commissar (Yakovlev) 170-71 Myasnikov, chairman of Motovilikhi Soviet 174

Nabokov, Vladimir 84, 85-6, 89, 90

Pnin 260 Napoleon Bonaparte 21, 112n Narishkin, Zizi 165 Narkomprod 227

Collegium of 232 Narodnaya Volya 144 nation-state 257, 267

National Centre (Natsionalnyi tsentr) 212 nationalism French 14 and radicalism 16

the dominant ideology of Russian

conservatism 16 nationalist anti-German frenzy (1906­14) 16, 147

Ukrainian 20, 21 European 21 German 24 Great Russian 29 civic 32 chauvinist 44

sharp resurgence of Russian nationalism 296

Nationalist Party 46 NATO 296

nauka ('science and scholarship') 260 Nazism, Nazis

rise stimulated by the Russian

Revolution 1, 59 and Wilhelmine Germany 25 and opening of churches 257 Russian defeat of Nazi invasion (1941)

293

Soviet Union's ideological hostility to 296

effective alliance with Soviet Union 296 Neilson, Lt Colonel 211-12 Nekrasov, Nikolai 83, 84, 85, 88 NEP see New Economic Policy neprimirimost ('implacability') 261 Nerchinsk labour camps, Siberia 181 Neva River 136 Nevsky, Prince Alexander 30 New Economic Policy (NEP) 8, 219-20, 221, 229, 231, 241, 242, 243, 257, 278-9, 281 New York Times 51 Nicholas I, Tsar 55, 255 Nicholas II, Tsar 292, 295-6, 297 and Alexander II 32 autocratic status 32, 46, 74, 78, 143, 145, 287

and 'Bloody Sunday' (9 January 1905)

2-3, 144-5

forced to accept the first Duma 3 grants a constitution (1905) 13 dissolves the first Duma (1906) 13 relationship with Stolypin 33-4, 35, 46-7 expectations of a loyalist peasantry 41 and Stolypin's assassination 36 meets Rasputin 50 Rasputin persuades him not to enter

First Balkan War 3, 54-6 Rasputin tries to stop him going to war

(1914) 3, 57-60

begs the Kaiser to stop Austria going to war 61-2

goes to war against Germany (1914) 62, 147

commands his troops (1915) 3-4, 60, 66,

148, 300 and Rasputin's murder 65 response to being told of February

Revolution 4, 69 response to Grand Duke Michael's

proposals 72 sends regiments to restore order 72, 74 train journey blocked by revolutionaries

72-3, 74

enforced abdication 4, 66, 68, 74-7, 84, 85, 90, 152, 164, 168, 169-70, 287, 300 tries to pass on the crown to Michael 4,

77-8, 87, 152, 164

second abdication manifesto 78-9, 86, 87 informs Michael that he is emperor 85 arrested 164 in Tsarskoe Selo 164 taken by train to Tobolsk 165-6 in Tobolsk 59, 163, 167, 168, 169 contemplates fleeing to the Whites 168 travels on Yakovlev's train towards

Moscow 170 held in Ekaterinburg 6, 171, 173-5 'Little Father' to his people 300-301 killed with his family by the Bolsheviks

(17 July 1918) 6 see also Romanov dynasty; Romanov family

Nikolaevsky General Staff College,

Ekaterinburg 171-2, 174, 176 Nikolai Nikolaevich, Grand Duke ('Uncle Nikolasha') 55, 76, 101

Nizhny Tagilsky factory 172 nizy (the masses) 274 nobility

Baltic landowning 15 and Stolypin 33

prevention of peasant democratisation

42

and Peter the Great 292 Nolde, Baron 86, 87, 89 nomenklatura 279 North America 21 North Korea 299 see also Korea Novaia zhizn newspaper 132 Novgorod the Great 142 Novodevich'e, Simbirsk province 226 Novoe Vremya newspaper 104 novomucheniki ('new martyrs') 260 Novorossiisk 202 Novosibirsk 220, 221 Nya Banken, Stockholm 103

O

Obnovlencheskoe ('Renovationist'

movement) 246 obrashchenie (manifesto) 208 obshchestvennost (educated society) 34 October Manifesto (1905) 13, 46 October Revolution 11, 121

secret Central Committee meeting (10 October 1917) orders preparation for armed uprising 130-31 intention to form a socialist coalition government 5, 124, 127, 137, 138, 140 Lenin bullies Bolsheviks into immediate takeover of power (25 October 1917)

5, 124

MRC as the leading organisational force 125

a coup d'etat in the midst of a social

revolution 126 and Provisional Government 134, 136,

154

assault on the Winter Palace 5, 136, 137, 167

Kerensky's ministers arrested 137 Mensheviks and SR delegates walk out

of Soviet Congress 137-8 military campaign against Kerensky's

forces 139 breakdown of Vikzhel talks 139-40 seizure of power splits social movement

in Russia 140, 182 Kaplan on 185 arrests of SRs 194

promise of bringing an end to the war 201

as a number of revolutions 266-7 fiftieth anniversary 284 Octobrists 41, 45, 46, 114 Odessa 202, 216 Okhrana Kiev 37 Moscow 65 Petrograd 70 Okopnaia Pravda 102-3 Old Believers 42, 45, 265 Omsk, central Siberia 169, 171, 176, 200, 214 Omsk coup 202-214 Bolshevik-dominated 'soviet' takes charge (30 November 1917) 205 power changes hands ( June 1918) 205 creation of Komuch 206 PA-RG based in Omsk 202-3 Kolchak arrives just before the coup 211 bloodless coup (17 November 1918) 203 PA-RG Council of Ministers meeting

203-4

Kolchak becomes supreme ruler 204 Ufa State Conference 206, 207 Allied involvement in Omsk 207 right-wing death squads in 208 British involvement 211-12 the known conspirators 212 'On the Recognition as Counter­Revolutionary of All Attempts to Arrogate the Functions of Government' decree (1918) 249 one-party state model 291-2, 299 Oprichnina 292

Orenburg region 170

Orlov, Prince Nikolai Vladimirovich 59

Osinsky, N. 270, 271

otruba 40

Ottoman Empire 17, 21, 25, 54, 285, 286 Ottoman Straits 95, 96, 97

PA-RG see Provisional All-Russian

Government Palei, Princess 165 Paleologue, Maurice 63 pan-Slavism, pan-Slavists 56, 60 Pankratov, Commissar 166-7 Paris Commune/Communards 129, 274 partiinost (the 'Party spirit') 276 'Partisan Army' 236 Parvus-Helphand, Alexander Israel 93 patriotism 31, 64, 111, 257, 290, 294, 296, 300 Paul Alexandrovich, Grand Duke 165 Pavlov, Ivan 260

Pavlovich, Grand Duke Dimitri 67 'peace without annexations' declaration

(1917) 98, 100 Peasant Land Bank 34, 41 peasantry

Peter the Great makes the peasants serfs

143

emancipation of the serfs (1861) 32, 33,

34, 301

revolt of (1906) 13, 145 members of first Duma 146 determined to eliminate gentry

landowning 14 in Russian Civil War 7-8, 38 razvertska 7-8, 224, 227, 228, 229, 231,

232, 233, 239-42

in Ukraine 20

Stolypin's reforms 29, 34-5, 37-8, 40-42, 146

small-scale collectivist ideal 41 Nicholas II's expectations of their

loyalty 41 peasant court 42 peasant soldiers 126, 266

Lenin on 130 'dark people' 149, 287, 301 local Soviets 158 land seizures 158 see also kulaks Penza province 234 People's Army 206 'People's Insurgent Army' 237-8 Pepeliaev, V.n. 211, 212 perelom (transformation) 228 perestroika 263, 273, 278, 279, 283 Pereversev, Pavel 105 Perm 174

Petain, Philippe 107

Peter the Great 19, 20, 30, 32, 35, 37, 143, 292 Peters, Yakov 186-7, 192 Petersburg Gazette 56 Petrograd

St Petersburg renamed 3 Alexandra and Rasputin rule in 66-7, 300 bread riots (February 1917) 4 in February Revolution see February

Revolution Lenin returns in disguise 5, 25 storming of the Winter Palace 5, 136, 137 Kerensky's forces defeated by Red

Guards 139 closure of house churches 247 churches' 'certificates of protection' 248 differences between Petrograd and

Moscow 265-6 see also Leningrad; St Petersburg Petrograd Pravda 244, 245, 252 Petrograd garrison 103, 105, 106-7, 114,

124-5, 139, 149, 164, 289

Petrograd Museums Department 248 Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies 97, 127, 132, 255, 256 represents the Petrograd mob 151 in no position to form 'a people's

government' 73-4 and the Provisional Government 4, 5, 86,

151, 152, 153, 165 negotiations with Duma after the tsar's abdication 77

and Michael's abdication 79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 87, 90

Executive Committee (Ispolkom) 93,

94, 104, 111

Order No. 1 93, 101, 107, 111 Committee 129, 130-31 housed in Tauride Palace 104 petition demanding that it should take

power 104-5 and the army 107

and the Bolsheviks 5, 113, 126, 129, 133, 151 warns against staging an uprising before

the Soviet Congress 131 Lenin's lie that Provisional Government

overthrown 136 competes for power with the Duma

150-51

dialogue with Metropolitan Veniamin 252

retreat to a hard-line position (1922) 252 and confiscation of church valuables 255, 256 Picot, Georges 96, 100 Pipes, Richard 105, 280 Platten, Fritz 93

Plekhanov, Georgy 144, 266, 280

The Development of the Monist View of

History 266 'On Lenin's Theses and Why Deliriums Are Occasionally Interesting' 94 plenipotentiary assemblies (Sobranie

Upolnomochennykh) 271 pluralism 262, 263-4, 266, 268, 282 cultural 242 intra-party 262 Bolshevik 263, 264, 283 struggle for pluralism within the

revolution 263-4, 268 public sphere 264

pluralistic conception of politics 266 Pobedonostsev, K. P. 32 Podvoisky, N. I. 99, 136 Pokrovskoe, western Siberia 48, 49, 50, 57, 65 Pokrovsky, N. N. 96 Pol Pot 291

Polan 273 Poland

and Hermogen 166 and Stolypin 35 uprisings in 145

independence issue 14, 267, 294, 295 and a German-dominated eastern

Europe 23-4 dispute with Ukraine over ownership of

eastern Galicia 24 'reunification' 98 occupation of 201

Soviet government seeks a way out of war 218

fiasco of Western 'assistance' in 1939 and

1944-45 27 and arrest of Catholic priests 259 police, Lenin demands abolition of 94 Police Department of the Ministry of

Internal Affairs 13 political reform 3, 46, 181, 277 Poltava, Battle of (1709) 37 Poruchikov (chairman of a district soviet) 226-7

Pottier, Eugene: 'Internationale' 92 Prague Spring (1968) 263 Pravda (Bolshevik party organ) 93, 94, 98, 105, 186, 222 Preobrazhensky, Yevgeny 270, 273 Price, Morgan Philips 97, 194-5 Princip, Gavrilo 51, 286 Prolektul't 258 property rights 256, 266 proportional representation 153 Protopopov, Alexander 60, 71, 185 Provisional All-Russian Government (PA-RG) 202, 216, 217 evolution of Komuch into 206 claim to be the legitimate government of

Russia 200 executive modelled on that of French

Revolution 203 and the British Foreign Office 215 Council of Ministers (Sovet ministrov) 203, 208, 210

Directory (Direktoriia) 200, 203, 204, 206, 207, 208, 210, 211, 212, 214, 215, 217 Provisional Government

and the February Revolution 181

and the tsar's abdication 4, 287

and the Petrograd Soviet 4, 5, 86, 151, 152,

153, 165, 297

lacks legitimacy 151, 287 and Michael's abdication 79-80, 86-90 eight-point programme 152 and the Constituent Assembly 152-3, 155, 160, 161, 183 release of Khionya Guseva 50 and disintegration of Russia's armed

forces 110 and Lenin 4, 93, 95, 98-9, 106 and 'July Days' 154 and Kornilov crisis 110, 111, 113, 115, 118-22, 125 resignation of cabinet (August 1917) 118 Kerensky takes over 5 Soviets intend to replace it with a

socialist coalition 5, 124, 127 and the Soviet Congress 133 and the October 1917 Bolshevik coup

135, 136, 154, 209

and elections for the Assembly 159 Investigatory Commission 164 and the Jacobin Bolsheviks 167 and democracy 183 Pskov 73, 74, 76, 78, 79, 80, 90 Pugachev, Emelian 226 Purishkevich, Vladimir 163-4 Pushkin, Alexander 30, 301 Putilov factories 68 Putin, Vladimir 3, 31, 297 Putyatina, Princess 80, 83, 84

Radek, Karl 93, 106, 270-71

'raiding banditry' 236, 238

Rakhia, Eino 123

Raskolnikov, Fyodor 104

raspalos (collapse of government) 204

Rasputin, Grigori 3, 163, 166, 168, 287

background and early years 50 introduced to the tsar 50 advises the tsar 46-7 and First Balkan War 3, 54-7 attacked by Khionya Guseva 48-52, 57 pacifism 53

tries to stop the tsar going to war (1914)

3, 57-60

committed to victory after war declared 62-3, 64

rumours of his preparing to enlist 63-4 rumours of his being a secret agent for

Germany 64 rules Russia with the tsarina during First

World War 4, 67, 148, 300 murdered (1916) 64-5, 67 Russian views on 51 Alexandra's expectations of a 'Mighty

Host' to help her 168, 169 in the Russian tradition of the 'yurodiviy' (holy man) 301 Rasputin, Matryona 50, 57, 59 razverstka 7-8, 224, 227, 228, 229, 231, 232,

233, 239-42

Red Army 216

and reassertion of control over

borderlands (1918) 201 and Komuch forces 206 Whites become more of a threat to 217 demobilisation of 222, 238 Revolutionary Military Council of the

3rd Red Army 223 conscription 235

uses poisonous gas to smoke out rebels 238 Red Guards built up by Lenin on the streets 4 on the eve of the October Soviet

Congress 123-4 Constituent Assembly closed down

(January 1918) 6 fight Kerensky's forces in Petrograd and

Moscow 139 in Tobolsk 169 in Ekaterinburg 172

and destruction of church property 249 'Red Professorate' 258 Red Terror (1917-18) 1, 7, 141, 178, 269, 291 reprisals for attempted assassination of

Lenin 192, 195 Sverdlov announces opening of the

campaign 192-3 'troika' of secret policemen 193 murder of political prisoners 194 execution of 'class enemies' 194-5, 196 Lenin's fanaticism 195 purpose of 195 brain drain 196 attack on the workers 196 forced labour 197

Kamenev condemns practices of 275 Reilly, Sidney 188, 189, 191 'religious associations' all-out assault on 245 regarded by Soviet officials as bastions

of privilege 246 milked for financial contributions 246 denied access to state resources for

repairs 246 show trials 246, 247, 258 'religious cults' 246, 251, 260 'Renovationist' movement

(Obnovlencheskoe) 246 Revel (Tallinn), Estonia 202 Revolution and the Church (journal) 251 Riazanov, David 241 Riga, Latvia 15, 126 Right SRs 140, 188

Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai: The Tale of Tsar Saltan 36

Rodzyanko, Mikhail 54, 62, 69, 70, 71, 74-7,

79-83, 90, 150, 152, 290, 300 Rogovsky, E. F. 203 Romania 102 Romanov, Grigory 263 Romanov dynasty 285, 286, 293-4 Rasputin tries to save 64 and Rasputin's murder 65 no intent to bring it down 67 destruction of 4, 66, 90