Notes

Except for the notes to the Introduction and Postscript, material added to Serge’s own notes by the present editor appears in square brackets.

Preface to the 1938 Edition

1. Translator’s note: Serge was referring to two completed novels: The Lost Men (about pre-WWI French anarchist illegalists) and Men in the Whirlwind (about the Russian Civil War, a sequel to Conquered City). Searches for these manuscripts in the Soviet archives have so far been fruitless.

2. Serge was the Left Opposition’s rapporteur on the Chinese question, and it was the publication in France of his reports and analysis of Stalin’s failure in China that provoked his expulsion from the Russian Communist Party. See his ‘Class Struggle in the Chinese Revolution 1927–1928,’ published by Revolutionary History, http://www.marxists.org/archive/serge/1927/china/index.html.

3. See my book Russia Twenty Years After for a detailed picture and balance sheet of the evolution of the USSR from 1917 to 1937.

Foreword to the 1997 Edition

1. Although innocent, Serge was convicted along with the surviving members of the Bonnot Gang, or ‘Tragic Bandits’ of French anarchists, his youthful comrades who terrorized Paris in 1911–12.

2. Translator’s note: The POUM and anarchists were victims of the same double repression by the Stalinists (whose military police continued ‘liquidating’ revolutionary dissidents during the final retreat toward the French border in 1939) and the authorities of the French Republic which, after failing to support the Spanish Republic against Franco’s military coup in 1936, parked the defeated anti-fascist refugees in foul, disease-ridden concentration camps in 1939 and left them there to rot as foreign ‘subversives’ even after the German invasion began (refusing even to allow seasoned Spanish soldiers to fight the Nazis in France. Nonetheless, in 1944 a Spanish Republic detachment—along with some Algerian fighters—liberated Paris before de Gaulle’s French troops arrived).

3. The naval base near Petersburg where in March 1921 a rebellion of the sailors’ Soviet was brutally repressed by the Bolsheviks.

4. Translator’s note: Actually, Serge’s periodization of the evolution from Lenin to Stalin was much more complex, and he saw the ‘danger within’ from the early 20s. See his Memoirs of a Revolutionary.

5. POUM: Partido obrero de unificación marxista (Spanish Workers Party of Marxist Unification) an independent anti-Stalinist revolutionary party implanted mainly in Catalonia, fighting fascism alongside the anarchist CNT/FIA. The POUM has been depicted by George Orwell (who served as a POUM militiaman at the front) in Homage to Catalonia and more recently by Ken Loach in his film Land and Freedom, on whose scenario Wilebaldo Solano collaborated.

Translator’s Introduction

1. Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary (London, 1967), pp. 261, 263.

2. Victor Serge, De Lénine à Staline (Paris, 1937), p. 15. The English translation of this work, From Lenin to Stalin (New York, 1937), wrongly dates the composition of this passage as 1919.

3. Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, pp. 69, 71–2.

4. Quoted in Daniel Guérin, L’Anarchisme (Paris, 1965), pp. 113–14, 189. The anarchist confidant, Gaston Leval, promptly published this critical judgement of the regime side by side with Serge’s current eulogies of the Soviet state, terming the latter ‘conscious lies’.

5. See e.g. Noam Chomsky, ‘Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship’, in American Power and the New Mandarins (London, 1970); Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit, Obsolete Communism: The Left-wing Alternative (London, 1969); Paul Cardan, From Bolshevism to the Bureaucracy (London, 1966). A Social-Democratic and liberal case, tracing Stalinist institutions back to Lenin’s political theories, has of course been presented many times: see, for example, Leonard Schapiro, The Origin of the Communist Autocracy (New York, 1965), pp. 343–4, 360–61. The argument relating Leninist politics to Kautskyan Social-Democracy stems from the critique offered from the late 1920s onward by the Left Communist Karl Korsch, for example, in Marxism and Philosophy (New York, 1930); it can occasionally be found in contemporary pamphlets by far-Left groups.

6. H. R. Trevor-Roper, preface to Burnett Bolloten, The Grand Camouflage: The Spanish Revolution and Civil War, 1936–9, 2nd edn (London, 1968), pp. 2–3.

7. L. D. Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution (London, 1965), p. 1079.

8. ibid., pp. 1079–80.

9. Lionel Kochan, Russia in Revolution (London, 1970), p. 269.

10. Trotsky, op. cit., pp. 933–5.

11. Oliver H. Radkey’s analysis, in The Election to the Russian Constituent Assembly of 1917 (Cambridge, Mass., 1950), pp. 25–7, convincingly correlates the percentages of troops voting for the Bolsheviks with their relative proximity to the metropolitan strongholds of Bolshevism. By December 1917, moreover, even the armies remote from these centres, such as those on the Rumanian, south-western and Caucasian fronts, were swinging sharply from the SRs to the Bolsheviks: see Radkey, The Sickle under the Hammer (New York, 1963), pp. 343–4.

12. Radkey (The Election to the Russian Constituent Assembly, p. 53) provides the following enlightening figures on the polarization in Moscow, from the June and September municipal elections and the Constituent Assembly ballot (voting figures in thousands; figure in brackets indicates percentage of poll) :

Party June September November

SR 374.9 (58) 54.4 (14) 62.3 (8)

Bolshevik 75.4 (12) 198.3 (51) 366.1 (48)

Kadet 108·8 (17) 101.1 (26) 263.9 (35)

Menshevik 76.4 (12) 15.9 (4) 21.6 (3)

13. Radkey, The Sickle under the Hammer, pp. 283–92.

14. ibid., pp. 258–77.

15. ibid., p. 493.

16. Quoted in Stalin’s 1918 attack on the Mensheviks, ‘The Logic of Events’, in J. Stalin, The October Revolution (Moscow, 1934), pp. 20–21.

17. L. D. Trotsky, Stalinism and Bolshevism (Bombay, 1952), pp. 17–18.

18. E. H. Carr concludes, of the amalgamation between factory committees and trade unions, that ‘in practice the fusion did not prove difficult to effect (The Bolshevik Revolution 1917–1923 (London, 1966), Vol. 2, p. 74).

19. A. M. Pankratova, ‘Les Comités d’ Usines en Russie à l’Époque de la Révolution’ (partial translation of her 1923 pamphlet cited below by Serge in Chapter 7, note 38), Autogestion (Paris), No. 4, December 1967. The Sixth—and last—Conference of Petrograd Factory Committees in January 1918 was not actually ‘unanimous’ in its support of the new party line: see Paul Avrich, ‘The Bolshevik Revolution and Workers’ Control in Russian Industry’, Slavic Review (New York), 1963, Vol. 22, pp. 47–63, for a good history of the politics of the committees. But principled opponents of government policy were few among committee spokesmen.

20. Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, loc. cit.

21. Sir Paul Dukes, The Story of ‘ST 25’; Adventure and Romance in the Secret Intelligence Service in Red Russia (London, 1938), pp. 178–9; the instigators of the resolution were immediately seized, with their families, by the Cheka and shot. However, SR and Left Kadet agitation, based on several large factories and extending into units of the Red Army, was continued into March and April (ibid., pp. 360–61).

22. Propaganda on the rift between Bolsheviks and workers was especially esteemed by the interventionist British government which was then nervous of its own labour force: at a War Cabinet meeting on 14 November 1918, Lloyd George stated that ‘it was important that the public in England should know what Bolshevism meant in practice . . . Here we had a great, inflammable industrial population and it was very desirable that our industrial population should know that industrial workers had suffered equally with the rest of the population at the hands of the Bolsheviks’ (Minutes of War Cabinet meeting 507, in Public Record Office File, FO 371/3344).

23. Jean Maitron, ‘De Kibaltchiche à Victor Serge’ (a selection, with commentary, of Serge’s anarchist journalism and letters from prison, over 1909-19), in Le Mouvement Social (Paris), No. 47, 1964. The parallelism between Serge’s enthusiasms, for bandits and for Bolsheviks, was suggested to me by Richard Greeman, to whom it was originally propounded by Vlady Kibalchich (Victor Serge’s son).

24. Victor Serge, Destiny of a Revolution (London, 1937), pp. 138–9.

25. Serge would later slightly amend his anti-ideological bent: the ‘seeds of reaction’ or ‘the germ of all Stalinism’ might well be implanted within Leninist or even Socialist doctrine, but would require the soil of specific historical circumstances in which to flourish. Victorious Bolshevism was also prone to ‘a natural selection of authoritarian temperaments’. This new theoretical emphasis can be seen in his 1933 ‘political testament’ addressed to friends in France shortly before his arrest (given in his 16 Fusilles a Moscou (Paris, 1947), p. 46). It aroused the ire of Trotsky when propounded in Serge’s 1937 article ‘Puissances et Limites du Marxisme’ (see Memoirs of a Revolutionary, pp. 348–9, and also pp. 133–4); and is developed again in the last book Serge published in Europe during his lifetime, Portrait de Staline (Paris, 1940), pp. 56–8.

26. These quotations, from Trotsky’s polemics of 1904 and 1907 respectively, are reported in Jean-Jacques Marie, Le Trotskysme (Paris, 1970), pp. 11, 15.

27. The critique offered by Rosa Luxemburg was not, strictly, an attack on ‘Leninism’, a term which never enters either her 1904 articles (subsequently reprinted after her death under the incorrect title Leninism or Marxism) or her analysis of the Soviet regime—closely resembling that of Serge—written in late 1918.

28. Lenin’s advice on referenda ‘of the opinion of every member without exception, in the most important cases at any rate’ is given in his Collected Works (London, 1969), Vol. 11, p. 441, and his insistence on a clear mandating of delegates from their locals (at a St Petersburg district conference in 1907) is ibid., p. 434.

29. On Lenin’s proposal, each of the larger local Soviets in Russia was sent a summary of the two sides’ positions on the question of war or peace with Germany in February 1918, and asked to indicate which course it favoured. The results were published day by day in Izvestia as they came in. (See the notes to Lenin’s Collected Works, Vol. 27, p. 559.) So little did party discipline operate that almost half the urban Soviets voted in favour of continued war, against the Central Committee and State policy. The consultation with the Soviets was in no sense a referendum (it was undertaken just after the Council of People’s Commissars had voted for peace); but it threw Soviet official policy to the mercy of popular opinion, and remains without parallel in any country as an example of democratic opinion-sounding on a crucial question of foreign policy.

30. See, for example, Chomsky, op. cit., p. 116. A recent critique, Maurice Brinton’s The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control, 1917–1921 (London, 1970), attempts documentary justification for the view that the shifts in early Soviet industrial policy over 1917–18 were caused by the ‘monstrous aberration’ of ‘Bolshevism’, supposedly ‘the last garb donned by bourgeois ideology’. The compilation omits any treatment of (a) the breakdown of Russian industry in this period, (b) the actual politics of the Bolshevik trade-union spokesmen (who are seen as ‘Leninists’), or (c) of the demands for centralised planning that were acceptable to the factory committees themselves.

31. A useful analysis of the economic gradualism of Marx, Engels and Lenin is contained in Y. Wagner and M. Strauss, ‘The programme of The Communist Manifesto and its Theoretical Foundations’, Political Studies (Oxford), Vol. 17, 1969, pp. 470–84.

32. Didier L. Limon, ‘Lénine et le Controle Ouvrier’, in Autogestion (Paris), No. 4, December 1967, provides a clear account of the controversy on workers’ control in Russia during 1917–18 with many details of the theoretical standpoints of the contenders.

33. For the politics of the liberal tendency in the Russian Communist party at this time, see Schapiro, op. cit., pp. 73, 77–8, 86, 152. Lozovsky was actually expelled from the party in early 1918 for his constitutional deviations. Both he and Ryazanov were political liberals (voting, for example, against the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly) and industrial centralizers; Ryazanov even calling for ‘control by the State over the workers’ (Limon, op. cit., p. 106).

34. The conjunction, in Left Communist thinking, of demands for nationalization and central planning with demands for shop-floor power in factory management (see their proposals at the May 1918 Congress of National Economic Councils, summarized in Schapiro, op. cit., p. 140) identifies them as the only faction of Russian Socialism, within or outside the Communist party, whose conception of ‘workers’ control’ approximates the one which is current among the Socialist Left today.

35. The extent of S R complicity in terrorist and putschist manoeuvrings is a matter of controversy (though the guilt of the Left SR section, in the light of their behaviour in the July-August crisis, would appear undeniable). Schapiro (ibid., pp. 153–4, 164–5) emphasizes the pacifism and restraint of the Right SRs, aside from the ‘freelance activity’ of lone individuals like Kaplan and Savinkov. Radkey, on the other hand, while absolving the Right SR Central Committee from responsibility for terrorist acts, points out how the loose nature of the party opened its organization and membership to military plotters and pro-Allied jingoists in receipt of Western interventionist funds (Radkey, The Sickle under the Hammer, pp. 330–34, 452–5, 492–3).

Chapter 1: From Serfdom to Proletarian Revolution

1. [1 hectare = 2.47 acres.)

2. Pyotr Lavrov (born 1823; died in Paris, 1900) developed the Populist theory of peasant movements and edited the clandestine journal Vperyod (Forward) for the Russian underground. Author of Historical Letters, of the Essay on the History of Thought, and of works dealing with the Paris Commune and the question of the State. [Nikolai Mikhailovsky (1842–1904) developed the political theory of ‘critical populism,’ which looked to the peasant commune to provide a form of small-scale democracy in opposition to the huge impersonal institutions of industrialism. Mikhailovsky opposed both the terrorists and the Marxists; his writings had an influence in the Right wing of the SR party.]

3. [Vera Zasulich later became active in the populist ‘Black Repartition’ and then in the Russian Marxist movement. In the 1903 split she supported the Mensheviks and during the war joined Plekhanov’s patriotic Edinstvo group. She died in 1919, an opponent of the Bolsheviks.]

4. Mezentsev was executed by the writer Stepniak (Kravchinsky), the author of Underground Russia.

5. A. Rambaud, A History of Russia from the Earliest Times to 1877 (New York, 1886).

6. M. N. Pokrovsky, History of Russia (New York, 1931).

7. The liberal N. V. Chaikovsky was to end his career unfortunately. For a long time he devoted his efforts to the Russian cooperative movement. Then in 1919, during the Allied intervention in Russia, he headed the White government at Archangel. He died in emigration in 1926.

8. Yuri Osipovich Martov (Tsederbaum), a theoretician and polemical writer of great talent, was to become, throughout his life, the adversary of Lenin and the leader of Menshevism. An internationalist during the world war, he attempted for a brief period (1919–20) to maintain an attitude of loyal opposition to the Bolsheviks. He died in emigration in 1923.

9. The evolution of Pyotr Struve deserves some attention; having passed from reformism to liberalism, he later became an admirer of Stolypin. Today, Struve is one of the leaders of the monarchist emigration; he played a prominent role in the circles around Denikin and Wrangel. [Author of numerous books on Russian politics and economics, Struve died in 1944.]

10. Both belong today to the liberal emigration. In October 1917, Prokopovich succeeded Kerensky as head of the clandestine ‘government’ which directed sabotage against the revolution. [This attempt to reconstitute the ‘Provisional Government’ was short-lived. Prokopovich and his wife Kusskova went into exile and ran a Russian research institute in Prague. He died in 1955 and she in 1959.]

11. This first organ of Russian Social-Democracy had on its editorial board, along with Lenin, five future Mensheviks: Plekhanov, Martov, Axelrod, Potresov and Vera Zasulich.

12. The French Socialist Millerand joined, in 1899, a Cabinet of ‘republican defence’ where one of his colleagues was the executioner of the Paris Commune, Galliffet.

13. V. Nevsky, History of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik): A Short Outline (Istoriya R K P (B): Kratki Ocherk) (Leningrad, 1926), p. 170; Lenin intended the revolutionary organization to ‘unify the Socialist science and revolutionary experience, acquired over decades by the revolutionary intelligentsia, with the special skills of the advanced workers: knowledge of the working-class environment, and the gifts of mass agitation and mass leadership’.

14. Jordania, from 1920 to 1922, was President of the Menshevik Republic of Georgia. [After the Bolshevik invasion of Georgia he went into exile and died in 1953.]

15. See A. I. Spiridovich, The Socialist-Revolutionary Party and its Predecessors (Partiya Sotsialistov-Revoliutsionerov i ee Predshestvenniki), a work written by a police official from the documents of the Okhrana. [Not available in Russian: the first edition of 1915 was sold only to Tsarist officials, and the second augmented edition of 1917, after the opening of the Okhrana archives, was given to the Political Red Cross to sell, with a few copies for the S R party itself. Spiridovich had another edition printed on the press of the Stavka, but this was seized by the Bolsheviks. There is a French translation, L’Histoire du Terrorisme Russe, 1886–1917 (Paris, 1930).]

16. Mikhail Gotz died in 1908, and Gershuni died in Paris in 1920, following many years of bitter struggle on which he left some remarkable memoirs (available in a French translation); Breshko-Breshkovskaya, who went over to bourgeois liberalism in 1917, has become one of the ‘stars’ of the White emigration; V. Chernov, who is now in emigration, was one of Kerensky’s ministers and then Chairman of the Constituent Assembly, leading his party from the denial of its programme to political disaster. [Breshkovskaya died an exile in Prague in 1934; Chernov, after em igration in western Europe, died in New York in 1952.]

17. Statistics supplied by the Museum of the Revolution in Leningrad. Terrorist acts of purely local significance (and there were hundreds of these) are not counted in these figures. [A more recent authority gives a figure of over 4,000 lives taken by SR and anarchist terrorists during 1906 and 1907 alone: Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists (Princeton, 1967), p. 64.]

18. M. N. Pokrovsky, A Brief History of Russia (New York, 1933), Pt III; L. D. Trotsky, 1905 (Paris, 1923); N. Rozhkov, History of Russia (Istoriya Rossii) (Petrograd, 1926), Volumes 11 and 12.

19. The desyatina is about 2½ acres.

20. Gapon managed to escape and lived abroad for some while. He resumed contact with the Imperial police, took part in its schemes and was executed as an agent-provocateur in 1906 by a Socialist-Revolutionary acting under instructions from Azef.

21. [The Zemstvos were organs of rural self-government encouraged in the late nineteenth century by Tsar Alexander II: though strictly limited from above, they organized local welfare services and provided an important focus for liberal-constitutional agitation in the 1900s.]

22. The cruiser sailed under the colours of the Red Flag for eleven days. Other ships shrank from engaging in combat against her and her crew, and took refuge in Rumania once their supplies were exhausted.

23. Antonov-Ovseyenko will appear again in our story when we come to the October Revolution.

24. The initiative in the pogroms was taken by the police and by the ‘Black Hundreds’ (Union of True Russians), an ultra-reactionary organization under the patronage of the authorities. Nearly 4,000 Jews were killed and 10,000 injured in 110 separate towns and localities; 500 perished in Odessa alone.

25. In 1905 the Bolshevik party had twelve or thirteen thousand members and, though including a large number of intellectuals, exercised its influence over the straightforwardly proletarian elements of society. The Mensheviks numbered about 15,000 members: their influence was chiefly among the petty-bourgeoisie, the artisans, and sometimes (in Georgia particularly) sections of the peasantry. The Russian proletariat amounted to some three million workers at this time. The two fractions of Russian Social-Democracy thus organized only one per cent of this total between them. See Nevsky, op. cit., Chapter 11. [Serge’s estimate of the influence of the two fractions of Social-Democracy among the Russian working class is a considerable over-simplification. Both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks had a working-class base in the main cities, even though their proletarian membership was relatively small. For a detailed presentation see J. L. H. Keep, The Rise of Social Democracy in Russia (Oxford, 1963), pp. 165–82, 230, 274. A recent careful statistical study does tentatively distinguish between the firmer working-class base of the Bolsheviks and the greater petty-bourgeois and national-minority composition of Menshevism over 1905–7: David Lane, The Roots of Russian Communism (Assen, 1969), pp. 44, 49–51, 209–13.]

26. ‘On Guerrilla Warfare’ (30 September 1906); N. Lenin, Collected Works (London, 1969), Vol. 11, pp. 213–14.

27. M. N. Pokrovsky, ‘How Did the War of 1914 Begin?’, in Proletarskaya Revoliutsiya, 7 (30), 1924.

28. The assassination at Sarajevo was committed at the instigation of the Russian General Staff; see Victor Serge, ‘La Verité sur l’Attentat de Sarajevo’, in Clarté, No. 74, 1 May 1924. [The evidence implicating the Tsarist General Staff is examined in V. Dedijer, The Road to Sarajevo (London, 1967); Dedijer rejects the incrimination of the Russians.]

29. [Emile Vandervelde: leader of the Belgian Socialist party and a prominent figure in the Second International; fervent supporter of the Allied cause from the outset of the war, when he joined the Belgian government.]

30. [2 August marked the day when the French Socialist party voted for ‘national defence’. 4 August was the day when the German Social-Democratic party voted unanimously for the war-credits in the Reichstag.]

31. Nevsky, op. cit., p. 386. [Probably an attempt by Serge to vindicate Trotsky’s war-time position by citing a recent and reputable party history.]

Chapter 2: The Insurrection of 25 October 1917

1. ‘Speech of Comrade Bukharin at the Commemorative Evening in 1921’, in Proletarskaya Revoliutsiya, No. 10, 1922. After relating this incident, Bukharin concludes, ‘We could have seized power in Petrograd even at this time. We decided not to do so, since we had to depend on winning decisive victories in the provinces as well.’

2. I. Flerovsky, ‘Kronstadt in the October Revolution,’ in Proletarskaya Revoliutsiya, ibid.

3. L. D. Trotsky, The Russian Revolution (London, 1918) [included as The History of the Russian Revolution to Brest-Litovsk, in The Essential Trotsky (London, 1963)].

4. Victor Serge, Lénine 1917 (Paris, 1923), p. 55.

5. [V. P. Nogin: People’s Commissar in the first Soviet government; supporter of a broad coalition with the Mensheviks. Died in 1924.]

6. Serge, op. cit., p. 45.

7. K. Grasis, ‘October in Kazan,’ Proletarskaya Revoliutsiya, No. 10 (33), 1924.

8. [The Maximalist party was a small direct-action group which had split from the Socialist-Revolutionary party to engage in spectacular acts of terrorism against the Tsarist regime.]

9. V. Bonch-Bruyevich, ‘From July to October,’ in Proletarskaya Revoliutsiya, No. 10, 1922. The author of this article was one of Lenin’s close associates.

10. My sources for these facts are the ‘reminiscences of the fighters of October’ published by Proletarskaya Revoliutsiya in 1922, and a little book Moscow in October 1917 (Moskva v Oktyabre 1917) [N. Ovsyannikov, ed.] (Moscow, 1919). The argument of the comrades who opposed the insurrection is given and magisterially refuted in Lenin’s ‘Letter to the Comrades’ of 16–17 October 1917 (Collected Works (London, 1969), Vol. 26, pp. 195–215).

11. [In Italy, during 1920, over two million workers came out on strike in a wave of militant action in the major industrial cities, culminating in the factory occupations of the spring and autumn; throughout the south, and especially in Sicily, peasants seized the estates. No political leadership of the movement came from the Italian Socialist party, and the decline of the revolutionary wave heralded the consolidation of Mussolini’s fascist squads. (See Angelo Tasca (A. Rossi), Naissance du Fascisme (Paris, 1967), pp. 95-107, 438–40). Serge’s invocation of the German ‘missed opportunity’ of 1923 is much less apt: revolutionary militancy in the German working class was very localized and sporadic even in this critical year, and the failure of the revolution to materialize cannot be laid to the account of the KPD and Comintern tacticians, clumsy as these were. Werner T. Angress’s Still-Born Revolution: The Communist Bid for Power in Germany, 1921–23 (Princeton, 1963), provides a full and fair analysis of this complex battleground. For the variations of Serge’s own attitude to the 1923 German events, see below, note 30.]

12. Numerous documents which have been recently included in Volume 21 of Lenin’s Collected Works (new Russian edition) seem to indicate that a substantial Right-wing trend was taking shape within the party, to which it would have liked to assign the role of a powerful proletarian Opposition inside a parliamentary democracy. Not only did this tendency fail to comprehend that the question of democracy was an irrelevancy (Russia having only the choice between two dictatorships); it was also the victim of the most dangerous illusions conceivable.

13. ‘The question is not what this or that proletarian, or even the whole of the proletariat at the moment, considers as its aim. The question is what the proletariat is, and what, consequent on that being, it will be compelled to do’ (Karl Marx in The Holy Family).

14. The personal predictions of Lenin in 1914—15 (in Against the Stream) and on the Russian revolution in September 1917 (Letters from Afar) should be compared with President Wilson’s hopes in 1918–19: the illusions of Wilsonism formed a powerful contribution to the victory of the Allies, in which they served political ends diametrically opposed to those of their propounder. Lenin’s clear vision and effective action can be compared also with the blindness and ineffectuality of the statesmen of the modern bourgeoisie: the leaders of German imperialism in relation to the catastrophe of Germany; Clemenceau and the Versailles treaty; Poincaré and Cuno and the Ruhr conflict of 1923.

One must at once distinguish between the intentions of President Wilson who advocated national self-determination, freedom of the seas and the League of Nations, and the social role played by Wilsonism, the final ideology of the Allied war; personally Wilson appears not to have wanted to produce the result that he actually achieved, i.e. that of serving the cause of one imperialist coalition against another.

15. A satisfactory French translation of these works, unfortunately without explanatory notes or a historical introduction, has been published by La Librairie de l’Humanite. I have provided a detailed analysis of these writings of Lenin in Lénine 1917.

16. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 26, pp. 22–3.

17. [From the article ‘Insurrection,’ in the New York Daily Tribune of 18 September 1852, signed by Marx but actually written by Engels (and later published in the collection Germany: Revolution and Counter-Revolution).]

18. Trotsky was still interned in a concentration camp at Amherst in Canada at the time when Lenin arrived in Russia, and only reached Petrograd in the first days of May. The articles on the Russian revolution that he wrote in America strike a note similar to those by Lenin in the same period. After 5–6 May, he was in close contact for common activities with the editorial board of Pravda and the Bolshevik Central Committee. At this time he was a member of the so-called ‘Inter-District’ organization of Social-Democrats, which also included Volodarsky, Lunacharsky, Manuilsky, Karakhan, Yoffe and Uritsky, and which fused with the Bolshevik party in July 1917.

Trotsky addressed the Petrograd Soviet for the first time on 5 (18) May,the day after his arrival from America. He urged it first, to challenge the bourgeoisie; second, to put its own leaders under control; third, to have confidence in its own revolutionary strength. ‘I believe’, he concluded, ‘that the next action on our agenda will place power in the hands of the Soviets.’

19. An engineering worker from the Bolshevik emigration, Shlyapnikov undertook illegal activity in Petrograd in the last months of Tsarism, on which he has written some interesting memoirs: The Eve of 1917 (Kanun Semnadtsatogo Goda) (Moscow, no date). He became one of the organizers of the Russian Metal Workers’ Union and then, in October 1917, Commissar for Labour. In 1921 he was one of the leaders of the ‘Workers’ Opposition’ in the Russian Communist party. [He capitulated to Stalin in 1926, was expelled from the party in 1933, was sent to an ‘isolator’ in 1935, and died obscurely in 1943.]

20. G. Georgievsky, Essay on the History of the Red Guard (Ocherki polstorii Krasnoi Gvardii) (Moscow, 1919).

21. The way the insurrection was carried out reconciled the two theses. It took place on the day of the Soviet Congress, but began in the early morning; the Congress began its deliberations only in the evening, while the shooting could still be heard going on. Lenin proved mistaken on another point at this time. In the early days of October he wrote to the Central Committee that ‘Victory is certain in Moscow: nobody will resist us there. At Petrograd we can afford to wait: it is not necessary to begin with Petrograd.’ In fact, of course, the victory was safe in Petrograd, where the insurrection had a painless triumph, while in Moscow it encountered fierce resistance. [Serge’s comments at this point relate to the controversies in Russian party history, from 1924 onwards, which enrolled the differences between Lenin and Trotsky (on the timing of the insurrection) into the current polemic against Trotsky. Trotsky (in his book Sur Lénine in 1924) had justified his own timing of 1917 as against Lenin’s; this in turn was made much of by Stalin (in his speech ‘Trotskyism or Leninism?’ of November that year). Serge is here content to state the legitimacy both of Trotsky’s and Lenin’s position on the insurrection.]

22. [Cavaignac and Galliffet: French generals who were the military saviours of the bourgeoisie against the workers, in 1848 and 1871 respectively.]

23. [Actually a mistaken reference by Serge; the witness for the scene was N. N. Sukhanov: The Russian Revolution’ (London, 1955) pp. 584–5.]

24. Flerovsky, op. cit.

25. N. Podvoisky, a member of the Bolshevik party for many years, was one of the founders of the party’s military organization. Later he became People’s Commissar for War of the Russian Socialist Federation of Soviet Republics, then of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. Subsequently, he devoted himself to the tasks of military training among youth and physical education generally. [Disappeared from public view in the 1930s; died in 1948.]

Antonov-Ovseyenko, a former officer and journalist who had been in political emigration, was active in Paris during the war in producing the internationalist journals, Golos, Nashe Slovo and Nachalo. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1917 and became a Red Army leader in the civil war. He headed the Political Directorate of the Red Army in 1923, and then the Soviet mission to Czechoslovakia. [A lapsed Trotskyist, Antonov-Ovseyenko steered the GPU terror against revolutionary dissidents in the Spanish civil war, was recalled to Moscow and shot without public trial in 1938.]

Lashevich, an old Bolshevik militant, later became a member of the Revolutionary War Council in Petrograd (1919–20) and in Siberia (after the fall of Kolchak). He became Commissar for War in 1926 and died in 1928. [Lashevich had been a supporter of the Zinoviev opposition of 1925–7, and capitulated with it; his death was apparently by suicide.]

26. S. Mstislavsky, Five Days (Pyat Dnei) (Berlin, 1922).

27. A. Schlichter, ‘Memorable Days in Moscow’, Proletarskaya Revoliutsiya, No. 10, 1922; Boris Voline, ‘The Moscow Soviet before October’, ibid.

28. N. Norov, ‘On the Eve,’ in N. Ovsyannikov (ed.), Moscow in October 1917 (Moskva v Oktyabre 1917) (Moscow, 1919). See also Victor Serge, ‘La Révolution d’Octobre à Moscou’, Bulletin Communiste, 1 September 1921.

29. Ilya Noskov, ‘The Kremlin Massacre’, in Ovsyannikov, op. cit.

30. [This characterization of the 1923 Hamburg rising misses any consideration of its most important defects: firstly, the isolation of the insurrection itself from any concurrent action in the rest of Germany (since Hamburg was the only town to fail to receive the order calling off a nation-wide rising originally projected by the German Communists); secondly, the isolation of the few hundred Communist shock-troops in the city from the rest of the working class. Victor Serge’s maturer reflections in Memoirs of a Revolutionary (London, 1967), pp. 171–2, exhibit this double isolation quite clearly, and the eulogy of the ‘new type’ of revolution here simply seems to be making the best of a job for which Serge himself, as a Comintern emissary in Germany in the early 1920s, may well have shared some responsibility.]

31. Larissa Reissner, Hamburg auf den Barrikaden (Berlin, 1925).

Chapter 3: The Urban Middle Classes Against the Proletariat

1. N. Lenin, Collected Works (London, 1969), Vol. 26, p. 256.

2. John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World [London, 1967].

3. The war-aims of the Allies were expressed, through the Versailles treaty, in the dismemberment of Austro-Hungary, the annexation of all the German colonies (2,950,000 square kilometres containing 12,400,000 inhabitants), the annexation of 70,000 square kilometres of German territory (with 6,500,000 inhabitants), and the imposition on Germany of a war-damage reparations payment which was at first fixed at 172,000,000,000 gold francs. The principal war-aims of the Central Powers were: the annexation of the French colonies and of the Briey coal-fields, the annexation (open or concealed) of Belgium, Serbia and Salonika, and territorial expansion in the east (against Poland and the Baltic states). The treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest mirror these aims most precisely.

4. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 26, pp. 260–61.

5. L. D. Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution to Brest-Litovsk [(London, 1918) reprinted in The Essential Trotsky (London, 1963)].

6. ‘In the Allied and bourgeois circles of Petrograd, hope for the swift crushing of the revolutionaries has been born again. . . . All long ardently for the triumphal return of Kerensky and Savinkov. From the latter, merciless repression is anticipated.’ Letter from Jacques Sadoul to Albert Thomas, 27 October (9 November) 1917 [Notes sur Ia Révolution Bolchévique (Paris, 1919)].

7. From the report of the trial of the Right SRs in Moscow in 1922 [given in Pravda for June and July of that year].

8. N. Podvoisky, ‘The Military Organization of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party’, in Krasny Arkhiv, Nos. 7–8, 1923.

9. S. A.’ Piontkovsky, Documents on the History of the October Revolution (Khrestomatiya polstorii Oktyabrskoi Revoliutsii) (Moscow, 1925).

10. According to Krasnov’s own testimony.

11. Krasnov himself, had he proved victorious, would not have hesitated to shoot or hang his enemies. His call to arms on 28 October 1917 announced merciless measures of repression. We shall see later on the kind of acts he perpetrated in the Don territory. At the outset of a revolution, the greatest humanity lies in the utmost rigour : magnanimity costs too much.

12. A. R. Gotz, one of the leaders and founders of the SR party, had participated in its terrorist activities in 1906–7 and was a wanted man under the Tsarist regime. He suffered exile in Siberia: became a sponsor first of the Kerensky government, then of armed resistance to the Soviets. He was condemned to death in the Moscow trial of SRs in 1922 [but was reprieved; released in 1927, he worked for many years in the State Bank before being liquidated in 1937 in the Great Purge]. N. D. Avksentiev, another prominent leader of the same party, later became a member of the Siberian ‘Directorate’ that was deposed by Kolchak. He went into exile [and died in 1943].

13. ‘I was incensed. It was a rotten disavowal: Gotz had participated in the preparation of the rising and Avksentiev had signed the order . . . ’: thus the deposition of the SR Rakitin-Brown, read out at the SR trial in Moscow in June 1922. The indictment presented by Krylenko against the defendants, which was widely publicized at the time, is full of overwhelming documentation on all these facts.

14. Rabochaya Gazeta (Workers’ Gazette), official organ of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour party (Menshevik), for 5 (18) November 1917, cited by Ilya Vardin, ‘The Mensheviks after the October Revolution’, in Five Years (Za Pyat Let) (Moscow, 1922). Abramovich and Dan, now émigrés, still sit as representatives of Russian Social-Democracy in the Executive of the Socialist International.

15. [Jules Guesde (1845–1922) had been an ardent, verbally insurrectionary Socialist and internationalist, and (like Plekhanov) a supporter of a ‘hard’ opposition to Revisionism and opportunism in the Second International. The outbreak of the world war saw him rally to the patriotic cause, and he joined the ‘Cabinet of National Defence’.]

16. Jacques Sadoul, letter of 18 October, in Notes sur la Révolution Bolchévique, p. 47. We are aware of the fact that Plekhanov’s widow, after years of silence, in 1922 issued a partial denial of the account related by J. Sadoul. But our comrade’s notes on the revolution, apart from their other evident general qualities of sincerity and veracity, on this point accord only too fully—unfortunately for Plekhanov’s memory—with the facts and the texts.

17. Novaya Zhizn, 28 October 1917, cited by A. Anishev in Sketches of the History of the Civil War (Ocherky Istorii Grazhdanskoi Voiny) (Leningrad, 1925).

18. Aniushkin, ‘Last Days of the Municipal Duma,’ in N. Ovsyannikov (ed.), Moscow in October 1917 (Moskva v Oktyabre 1917) (Moscow, 1920).

19. From Bogdanov’s account in the ‘Reminiscences of the Fighters of October’, Proletarskaya Revoliutsiya, No. 10, 1922.

20. From S. Petrovsky’s account, ibid.

21. A slogan offered by Lenin (in a very precise sense) ever since March 1917.

22. In Proletarskaya Revoliutsiya, No. 10, 1922.

23. See L. D. Trotsky, Sur Lénine (Paris, 1926), Chapter 5 (‘Government Power’).

24. Reminiscences of Kozlovsky and Bonch-Bruyevich, in Proletarskaya Revoliutsiya, No. 10, 1922.

25. V. Antonov-Ovseyenko, Reminiscences of the Civil War (Zapiski o Grazhdanskoi Voine), Vol. I (Moscow, 1924).

26. I. Dimitriev, ‘October at Orsha’, Proletarskaya Revoliutsiya, No. 10, 1922.

27. This is the Marxist historian, D. Ryazanov, who today directs the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. [Ryazanov was arrested after the ‘Menshevik Centre’ trial of 1931, and died in deportation in 1938.]

28. [Serge was to modify this enthusiasm for Bolshevism’s brand of ‘patriotism’: in Memoirs of a Revolutionary (London, 1967, p. 245) he recognizes that this very ‘party patriotism’ helped in the intellectual crippling of the Communist oppositions.]

29. Jacques Sadoul’s Notes sur la Révolution Bolchévique, op. cit., give some interesting side-lights on these events (pp. 74–80).

30. The proletarian dictatorship hesitated for a long time before suppressing the enemy press. Immediately after the insurrection, the only bourgeois papers to be suppressed were those openly advocating armed resistance to ‘the Bolshevik usurper’, ‘bloodthirsty anarchy’ and ‘the coup d’état of the Kaiser’s agents’. It was only in July 1918 that the last organs of the bourgeoisie and the petty-bourgeoisie were closed down. The legal press of the Mensheviks only disappeared in 1919; the press of the anarchists hostile to the regime, and the Maximalists, appeared down to 1921; that of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, later still. [Serge’s chronology of the suppression of the press is only formally correct: it was, for example, only the press of the pro-Soviet fractions of the Left SRs that was allowed to appear. See L. Schapiro, The Origin of the Communist Autocracy (London, 1955), pp. 163, 179–82, 192–3, for a detailed account.]

31. Collected Works, Vol. 26, pp. 285, 288, 292.

32. ibid., p. 297.

33. This pithy formula is offered by L. Kritsman in his remarkable work analysing the phase of ‘War Communism’: The Heroic Period of the Great Russian Revolution (Geroicheskii Period Velikoi Russkoi Revoliutsii) (Moscow, 1925).

34. The French ravaged Kabylia with fire several times during their conquest of Algeria. We may recall, too, the techniques of warfare and control used by the British in India; the sacking of the Winter Palace in Peking by European troops in 1900; the atrocities of the Italians in Tripolitania, of the French in Indochina and Morocco, of the British in the Sudan. And in no war of modern times were the vanquished treated with such ferocity as those defeated in the Paris Commune of 1871.

Chapter 4: The First Flames of the Civil War: The Constituent Assembly

1. Elisée Reclus [the theoretician of anarchism], in his writings on the Russian revolution, remarked in 1905, in an analysis whose penetration might almost be termed prophetic: ‘Russia will be shaken from corner to corner, down to the remotest cabin in the land. But inevitably, in addition to the class question, another problem will erupt: that of the peoples with different languages and distinct national cultures. What is termed Russia is in fact an immense tract of conquests within which twenty enslaved nationalities are penned. . . . ’ This is a remarkable page to read over (Reclus, Correspondance, Vol. 3 (Paris, 1912)).

2. According to the 1897 census. Obviously the population increased appreciably over the next twenty years, but on the whole its composition will not have varied.

3. G. Lelevich, October at the Stavka (Oktyabr v Stavke) (Moscow, 1922).

4. N. Lenin, Collected Works (London, 1969), Vol. 26, p. 312.

5. ibid., p. 318.

6. V. B. Stankevich, Memoirs (Vospominaniya), Pt III (Berlin, 1920).

7. ‘The cavalrymen, exhausted, confused by events and deeply upset, said that they had done their utmost and were still as loyal to the general as in the past. But—“Ah, boyar!” they asked their officers. “What else could we do when all Russia has gone Bolshevik?”‘ (A. Denikin, Sketches of the Russian Turmoil (Ocherki Russkoi Smuty) (Paris and Berlin, 1921–5).

8. Alexeyev had been in supreme command of the Russian army during the imperialist war, in his capacity of Chief of Staff of the Tsar-Generalissimo.

9. Denikin, op. cit.

10. G. Safarov, The National Question and the Proletariat (Natsionalny Vopros i Proletaryat) (Petrograd, 1922).

11. [Bessarabia: the territory between the Dniester and the Pruth, formerly a Russian province, annexed by Rumania after the First World War; incorporated into the Soviet Union as the Moldavian SSR in 1940.]

12. The Rumanian boyars formed a sort of landlord nobility: they had suppressed the 1907 peasant rising, killing 15,000 peasants.

13. The following figures will give an idea of what the Sfatul Tării represented. The elections to the Constituent Assembly were held at the same time at which this false ‘national parliament’ established itself. 600,000 persons, or a quarter of the population, took part in the vote, with the results: Soviet list, 200,000; SRs, 229,000; Jewish minority, 60,000; Kadets, 40,000; ‘National Moldavian Party,’ 14,000. Thus the party which dominated the Sfatul Tării received only 2.3 per cent of the votes; it did not gain a single seat in the Constituent Assembly.

14. On the annexation of Bessarabia, see Chapter 6, p. 208.

15. S. V. Denisov, Memoirs (Vospominaniya) (Constantinople, 1921).

16. N. Krichevsky, ‘In the Crimea,’ in Archives of the Russian Revolution (Arkhiv Russkoi Revoliutsii), Vol. III (Berlin, 1924) (an émigré publication).

17. Mstislavsky in Brest-Litovsk: The Armistice Negotiations [no other reference given].

18. Moonsund or Muhuis is a channel between the Estonian islands of Dagoe [Hiiu Maa] and Oesel [Saare Maa] and the coast of Estonia.

19. The Tsarist hierarchy designated by Peter the Great in 1722 was made up of the civil class, the ecclesiastical class, the military, the naval, that of the Court and that of the sciences. The civil hierarchy, for example, contained fourteen grades, from ‘State Chancellor’ (corresponding to the rank of General and Field-Marshal in the army) and ‘Trusted Secret Counsellor’ to ‘Collegial Registrar’ (a civil rank corresponding to the military grade of Second Lieutenant). Both in conversation and in correspondence, persons had to be addressed according to their rank: Your Nobility, Your High Nobility, Your Most High Nobility, Your Excellency, Your High Excellency, etc.

20. Such was the leniency of the Soviet government that Purishkevich, one of the main instigators of Russian anti-semitism, later regained his liberty and was able to go abroad. He died in exile. His book on How I Killed Rasputin is well known.

21. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 26, p. 354.

22. In a broadsheet of 18 November. See ibid., pp. 323–5.

23. See ibid., pp. 341–6.

24. See L. D. Trotsky, Sur Lénine (Paris, 1926), Chapter 4.

25. The seriousness of this error (very characteristic of their politics) committed by the Left SRs must be emphasized. Separated by an unbridgeable gap from the Right SRs, but attached to a common tradition, to the party’s old name and to old illusions about majority decisions, they presented common electoral lists. Their popularity redounded to the credit of the SRs of counter-revolution.

26. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 26, pp. 379–83.

27. Actually more than 600 deputies were returned, bvt over 150 did not have time to get to Petrograd.

28. N. Sviatitsky, ‘The Elections to the Constituent Assembly,’ in One Year of Russian Revolution (God Russkoi Revoliutsii) (Moscow, 1918), cited in Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 30, pp. 253–61. The author’s statistics take in Russia and Siberia, with the exception of certain regions (Olonetz, Estonia, Kaluga, Bessarabia, Podolia, Orenburg, Yakutia and the Don). [For a full analysis of the Constituent Assembly election, bearing out the urban-rural split between Bolsheviks and the rest, see Oliver H. Radkey, The Election to the Russian Constituent Assembly of 1917 (Cambridge, Mass., 1950). Serge’s conclusions pay little attention to the great importance of the vote attracted by the highly centrifugal national-minority parties: it is misleading to lump in the vote of the Ukrainian and Moslem SRs with that of the Russian Right SRs, since the latter were hostile to the decentralizing national aspirations of the former. Radkey in The Sickle under the Hammer (New York, 1963), pp. 456 ff., even calculates that the Right SRs could not have mustered a majority in the Assembly against the Bolsheviks, Left SRs, Ukrainian SRs and smaller SR nationalist groups: ‘ . . . on the opposite extreme [to the Bolsheviks] a sentence of death was hanging over the ill-fated assembly, as certain as Lenin’s if less immediate’.]

29. Trotsky, op. cit.

30. Boris Sokolov, ‘The Defence of the Constituent Assembly’ in Archives of the Russian Revolution (Arkhiv Russkoi Revoliutsii) (Berlin, 1924), Vol. 3. The author of this article remained a believer in the Constituent Assembly.

31. Boris Sokolov admits that most of the demonstrators came from sections of the population (bourgeois or middle-class) who were motivated much more by hatred of Bolshevism than by any sympathy for the authority of the Assembly. These actual reactionary elements were already rallying instinctively, as the first important battles of the civil war would soon show, behind the SRs and the Constituent Assembly. Sokolov’s admission is to be noted.

32. The biography of Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov is that of a dauntless revolutionary. Born of an artisan family in Nizhni-Novgorod, a pharmacist by profession, Sverdlov was a Bolshevik militant, working in illegality, ever since 1903. Five times arrested, condemned first to 21/2 years in fortress confinement (a sentence he served to the full), then to four years’ exile in the remote icy region of Narym, he was placed under the most rigorous conditions there after a demonstration of exiled prisoners and nearly died of cold and hunger: he survived only by a miracle of endurance. Five attempts to escape, two successful escapes at the risk of his life. He returned in 1912 to Petrograd to organize the party’s clandestine network and was delivered to the authorities by the agent-provocateur Malinovsky. He was again exiled, this time to the Turukhansk region inside the Arctic Circle, where he stayed three years until the fall ofTsarism. On the news of the revolution he made a journey of 5,000 miles by sledge over the Yenisei, at the risk of being caught by the thawing of the ice, and influenced the Krasnoyarsk Soviet in a Bolshevik direction; he then returned to Petrograd, where he became one of the most valued organizers of the party. After the government crisis at the beginning of November he replaced Karnenev as Chairman of the All-Russian Soviet Executive Committee. He died in 1919, of tuberculosis, at the age of thirty-four.

33. [Zimmerwald was the venue, in Switzerland, of the international conference of anti-war Socialists in September 1915, which repudiated all the trends of Socialism who supported the war and looked to the foundation of a new International. A follow-up conference was held at Kienthal in April 1916.]

34. [V. V. Rudnev, a Right SR and Mayor of Moscow between the fall of Tsardom and the Bolshevik revolution.]

35. F. F. Raskolnikov, a Bolshevik militant from the days of illegality, member of the party’s military organization, a naval officer in the Baltic fleet during the war, a leader of the Kronstadt Soviet in 1917, jailed under Kerensky following the July days, and a fighter in October. Later represented the USSR in Afghanistan and elsewhere. [Author of a notable ‘open letter’ denouncing Stalin as a traitor to the revolution, published in 1939; died in exile in 1943.]

36. Quoted from S. Mstislavsky, Five Days (Pyat Dnei) (Berlin, 1922).

37. Decree of the Assembly’s dissolution, drafted by Lenin.

38. On the Constituent Assembly, see further: the stenographic transcript of the first day of the Assembly’s proceedings (Petrograd, 1918); Mstislavsky, op. cit.; Trotsky, op. cit.; Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 26.

39. [cf. Radkey (The Election to the Russian Constituent Assembly, p. 2): ‘while the democratic parties heaped opprobium upon him [Lenin] for this act of despotism, their following showed little inclination to defend an institution which the Russian people had ceased to regard as necessary to the fulfilment of its cherished desires. For the Constituent Assembly . . . no longer commanded the interest · and allegiance of the general population which alone could have secured it against a violent death.’ W. H. Chamberlin also remarks that ‘the dissolution of Russia’s first and sole freely elected parliament evoked scarcely a ripple of interest and protest, so far as the masses were concerned’ (The Russian Revolution, 1917–1921 (London, 1935), Vol. I, p. 370).]

40. ‘Article 2: Workers’ control is exercised by all the workers of a given enterprise through their elected bodies (factory committees, etc.) . . . representatives of the employees and of the technical staff are included in these bodies. . . . Article 7: The organs of workers’ control have the right to control all business correspondence. Commercial secrecy is abolished. The owners are obliged to submit to the organs of control all books and accounts, both for the current year and for past years. Article 8: Decisions of the control organs are obligatory for owners of enterprises and may be cancelled only by the decision of the higher organs of workers’ control. . . . Article 10: Owners and the representatives of workers and employees, elected to carry out workers’ control, are responsible before the State . . . ’

The employers were granted three days’ grace in which to appeal against the decisions of the lower organs of control to the higher organs. Local Councils of Workers’ Control were instituted, with the task of summoning an All-Russian Congress: their activity was centralized by an All-Russian Council of Workers’ Control.

41. See L. Kritsman, The Heroic Period of the Great Russian Revolution (Geroicheskii Period Velikoi Russkoi Revoliutsii) (Moscow, 1925) and G. Tsyperovich, Trade Unions and Trusts in Russia (Sindikaty I Tresty v Rossii) (Moscow, 1920).

42. A. G. Shlyapnikov, ‘Reminiscences’, in Proletarskaya Revoliutsiya, No. 10, 1922.

43. A. Anishev, Sketches of the History of the Civil War (Ocherky Istorii Grazhdanskoi Voiny) (Leningrad, 1925).

44. Shlyapnikov, op. cit.

45. A. Schlichter, ‘Memorable Days in Moscow’, Proletarskaya Revoliutsiya, No. 10, 1922.

46. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 26, pp. 388–90.

47. On this point it is worth quoting some reflections by L. Trotsky in a short book written in 1918 [The History of the Russian Revolution to Brest-Litovsk, reprinted in The Essential Trotsky (London, 1963)]: ‘On what support could a ministry formed by such a majority of the Constituent Assembly depend? It would have had behind it the rich of the villages, the intellectuals and the old officialdom, and perhaps would have found support, for the time being, among the middle class. But such a government would have been completely deprived of the material apparatus of power. In the centres of political life, like Petrograd, it would have met at once with an uncompromising resistance. If the Soviets had, in accordance with the formal logic of democratic institutions, handed over their power to the party of Kerensky and Chernov, the new government, discredited and impotent, would have only succeeded in temporarily confusing the political life of the country, and would have been overthrown by a new rising within a few weeks.’

Chapter 5: Brest-Litovsk

1. [On this point Serge is too crude; Sir George Buchanan was in contact with Duma circles opposed to the Tsar during January 1917, but the extent of his conspiratorial activity was exaggerated by ultra-Right commentators. Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution (London, 1966), p. 91, discounts the story of a ‘palace revolution’ scheme involving the British Ambassador. Buchanan, indeed, seems personally to have been devoted to the Tsar. See M. Paléologue, An Ambassador’s Memoirs (London, 1925), Vol. 3, pp. 129–30, and Bernard Pares, The Fall of the Russian Monarchy (New York, 1961), pp. 422–4.]

2. There was, for instance, only a very small volume of capital exports to China.

3. V. Nevsky, History of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik): A Short Outline (Istoriya RKP (B): Kratki Ocherk) (Leningrad, 1926). See on this topic the interesting little book by N. Vanag, Finance-Capital in Russia (Finanzovy Kapital v Rossii) (Moscow, 1925). At the outset of the March 1917 revolution, Lenin observed that ‘Russian capitalism is no more than a branch office of the world-wide firm which manipulates hundreds of billions of roubles, and whose name is Britain and France.’

4. In spite of her rapid economic growth between 1890 and 1901 Russia remained a distinctly backward country through a variety of factors: the falling-off of growth after this burst, the backward state of her agriculture, the preponderance of agriculture over industry, the expansion of her population (which outstripped the growth of production), and the small scale of industry relative to population (Russia had 10.2 per cent of the world’s population before the outbreak of war, and only 6.2 per cent of the world’s iron output).

5. See M. L. Pavlovich, Balance-Sheet of the World War (Itogi Mirovoi Voiny) (Moscow, 1924).

6. [Courland was the name of a Baltic province of the old Russian Empire; its territory is now divided between Latvia and Lithuania.]

7. ‘The Germans believe that they can capture Calais and Paris if peace is concluded with Russia. If Germany refrains from any annexations, the Entente will accept an honourable peace’: thus Czernin in his memoirs, in a note dated 17 November. In the same book by the same author, the following observation can be culled for the sake of light relief: ‘I have been sent some trustworthy information about the Bolsheviks. Their leaders are nearly all Jews, with ideas of the purest whimsy’ (0. Czernin, In the World War (London, 1919)).

8. This fact is reported by M. N. Pokrovsky, in Russia’s Foreign Policy in the Twentieth Century (Veshnaya Politika Rossii v 20 Veke).

9. L. D. Trotsky, preface to A. Yoffe (ed.), Peace Negotiations at Brest-­Litovsk (Mirnye Perogovory v Brest-Litovskve) (Moscow, 1920). Both these pages and the whole of this little book are of great interest.

10. Trotsky, ibid.

11. ‘The victorious proletariat . . . having expropriated the capitalists and organized Socialist production in its own country, would stand forth against the rest of the capitalist world, calling to its side the oppressed classes of the other countries, encouraging them to rise against the capitalists, and intervening where necessary by force of arms against the exploiting classes and their States’ (from ‘The United States of Europe Slogan’, in the Zürich Sotsial-Demokrat of 23 August 1916: see the collection of N. Lenin and G. Zinoviev, Against the Stream (Protiv Techeniya) (Leningrad, 1925).)

12. N. Lenin, Collected Works (London, 1969), Vol. 24, p. 175.

13. Quoted from material in the Military Academy by A. Anishev, Sketches of the History of the Civil War (Ocherki Istorii Grazhdanskoi Voiny) (Leningrad, 1925).

14. See the Appendix by N. Ovsyannikov, ‘The CC of the RCP and the Brest-Litovsk Peace’, to Vol. 15 of the first Russian edition of Lenin’s Collected Works.

15. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 26, pp. 442–50.

16. V. Sorin, The Party and the Opposition. 1: The Fraction of Left Communists (Partiya i Oppozitsiya. I. Fraktsiya Levykh Kommunistov) (Moscow, 1925).

17. Trotsky, Sur Lénine (Paris, 1926), Chapter 3.

18. A scrap of dialogue between Count Czernin and Baron von Kühlmann may be noted here. KÜHLMANN: ‘The only choice the Russians have is what sauce they’ll be eaten with.’ CZERNIN: ‘That’s just the choice we’ve got’ (Czernin, op. cit.).

19. E. Ludendorff, My War Memories, 1914–1918 (London, 1919), Vol. 2. Emperor Charles of Austria, several weeks after the Homburg decision, still resisted implementing the offensive into the Ukraine, and authorized the collaboration of Austrian troops only under the pressure of famine.

20. Article 5 of the decree reads: ‘Shareholders of banks who fail to hand in their securities, or to provide a list of their certificates, within fifteen days of the publication of this decree, shall be punished by the confiscation of all their property.’

21. George Vassilevich Chicherin came from aristocratic origins and began a career in the diplomatic service, which he abandoned in 1905 in order to go into emigration as a professional revolutionary. He belonged to Menshevik organizations until the war broke out. An internationalist during the war, he was jailed by the British government until the end of 1917. Since the Brest-Litovsk treaty he has been in charge of Soviet Russia’s foreign policy. [He was succeeded by Litvinov in 1930 and died in 1936.]

22. [Serge here omits any reference to the only one of the Allied negotiating agents in Russia who had any official standing or any direct access to his government: Britain’s R. H. Bruce Lockhart, who at this point was a warm advocate of Soviet-Allied cooperation for the war effort. Lockhart’s subsequent involvement in anti-Soviet conspiracy and intervention plans (see notes 10, Chapter 9, and 33, Chapter 10) may well have caused Bolshevik writers, including Serge, to doubt (wrongly) the genuineness of his earlier efforts to secure military cooperation with the Soviets.]

23. [Details of these approaches to Japan, with extracts from the British and United States government archives, are given in R. H. Ullman, Intervention and the War (Princeton, 1961), pp. 93–103, 129–30.]

24. [Recent historians of this episode have tended to doubt whether the Bolsheviks could ever have committed themselves seriously to seeking aid from the Allies against Germany; e.g. G. F. Kennan, Russia Leaves the War (Princeton, 1956), pp. 471, 497–8; Ullman, op. cit., pp. 119–27; A. B. Ulam, Lenin and the Bolsheviks (London, 1969), p. 540. However, Lenin seems to have undergone genuine moods of vacillation before agreeing finally to ratify the peace with Germany; and Trotsky’s measures for Allied cooperation, e.g. in the Murmansk landings (see p. 229 and note 24 to Chapter 7, p. 396) and in his plan for having US officers sent to the front to remove military stocks, were constructive and specific. See the account in I. Deutscher, The Prophet Armed (London, 1954), pp. 385–6, 397–8.]

25. Until 31 January 1917, Russia used the Julian calendar, which was thirteen days behind the Gregorian calendar that had been adopted from the end of the sixteenth century by all other European countries. Up till now we have. given dates in Old (Julian) Style, sometimes with dates in Gregorian style following on in brackets. Thus, the Bolshevik insurrection took place in Russia on 25 October, and (for Europe) on 7 November. A decree of the People’s Commissars made the use of the Gregorian calendar compulsory from 31 January; but thirteen days had to be telescoped to achieve this, so that February actually began on the 14th. This shifting of the calendar must be kept in mind, or the naive reader may receive the illusory impression that the march of events has slowed down.

26. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 26, pp. 522, 523.

27. The voting was: for Lenin’s proposal (of immediate peace), Lenin, Smilga, Sverdlov, Sokolnikov, Stalin, Trotsky, Zinoviev. Against: Uritsky, Yoffe, Lomov, Bukharin, Krestinsky, Dzerzhinsky. One abstention: Helena Stasova. The Central Committee of the Left SRs, when informed of the position, refused to accept the treaty. See N. Ovsyannikov’s appendix to Volume 15 of Lenin’s Collected Works (first Russian edition).

28. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 27, p. 557n.

29. The voting was as follows. For: Lenin, Stasova, Zinoviev, Sverdlov, Sokolnikov, Smilga, Stalin. Against: Bukharin, Bubnov, Uritsky, Lomov. Abstentions: Trotsky, Dzerzhinsky, Yoffe, Krestinsky.

30. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 27, pp. 19, 22, 27, 29.

31. ibid., p. 38.

32. ibid., p. 41.

33. ibid., pp. 63, 65.

34. Trotsky, Sur Lénine, Chapter 3. See also Victor Serge, ‘Un Portrait de Lénine par Trotski’, Clarté, No. 75, June 1925.

35. [i.e. the French Socialist party (SFIO) formed in 1905 from the unification of the rival currents of the 1890s.)

36. It may be useful to add some points concerning the attitude of Socialists abroad at this juncture. At the end of January 1918, a number of members of the parliamentary group of the Parti Socialiste Unifié were still occupying ministerial posts in the Clemenceau government, with the approval of their fellow-deputies! See P. Louis, Histoire du Socialisme en France (Paris, 1925), Chapter 11. The Russian revolution was still defended within the working-class movement by a feeble, if growing, minority. As for the German Social-Democrats, we know from their declarations at the Magdeburg trial in January 1925 that they entered the strike-committee movement of 1918 only as antagonists to this ‘weakening of national defence’ and in order to speed its termination, i.e. to sabotage it. At this time their influence was still powerful.

37. Quoted by Trotsky in his preface to [A. Yoffe (ed.),] Peace Negotiations at Brest-Litovsk (Mirnye Peregovory v Brest-Litovske).

38. ibid.

39. But will we ever know how temporary it might have been? Once he has left the party or been rejected by it, even the best proletarian militant is more likely to lose his way than to return to it. It requires an exceptionally developed theoretical consciousness, as welt as a rather uncommon control over the emotions, to continue to serve the party side by side with the party.

40. Ludendorff was only broken when his soldiers followed the example of the Russians and refused to fight. His realization that it was the beginning of the end came when the troops going up into action were met by those withdrawing into the trenches with cries of ‘Black-legs! Streikbrecher!’ (Ludendorff, op. cit., Vol. 2).

Chapter 6: The Truce and the Great Retrenchment

1. Evgenia Bosch’s book A Year of Struggle: The Struggle for the Regime in the Ukraine (God Borby: Borba Za Vlast Na Ukraine) (Moscow, 1925), forms a remarkable contribution to the history of this epoch. Antonov-Ovseyenko’s Reminiscences of the Civil War (Zapiski o Grazhdanskoi Voine) (Moscow, 1924–9), are also of interest.

2. Kikvidze, a Maximalist Socialist-Revolutionary released from jail by the February revolution, was at the age of twenty-three one of the architects of the October Revolution on its western front. A partisan leader, then head of a division of the Red Army, he became one of the revolution’s most talented generals. He fought against Krasnov, and was wounded thirteen times. He was killed at the age of twenty-five, in the Don district, on 11 January 1919.

3. An indefatigable militant, a Bolshevik founding member, who experienced both Siberian exile and emigration abroad, Evgenia Bosch performed a role of the first importance in the Ukrainian revolution, where she directed the work of Soviet organization and the resistance to the German invasion. Exhausted, ill and condemned to inactivity, she took her own life at the beginning of 1924. She was one of the great figures of the Russian revolution, now practically unknown. [As Serge’s discussion of Bosch’s suicide in his Memoirs of a Revolutionary (London, 1967) makes clear, her memory was deliberately suppressed because of her sympathy with the opposition.)

4. ‘Let us not forget,’ wrote Lenin from Zürich on 11 (24) March 1917, ‘that we have, adjoining Petrograd, one of the most advanced countries, a real republican country, Finland, which from 1905 to 1917, under the shelter of the revolutionary battles in Russia, has developed its democracy in conditions of relative peace, and won the majority of its people for Socialism. . . . The Finnish workers are better organizers than us and will help us in this field; in their own fashion they will form a vanguard pressing towards the foundation of the Socialist Republic’ (Third Letter from Afar, before Lenin’s return to Russia).

5. The author of these lines, O. W. Kuusinen, rallied to Communism during the Finnish revolution. The quotation above is from his remarkable pamphlet The Finnish Revolution: A Self Criticism (Revoliutsiya v Finlandii: Samokritika) (Petrograd, 1919). [A slightly abridged version of the English translation published in London, 1919, is given in Labour Monthly, February and March 1940.] O. W. Kuusinen belongs today (1929) to the Executive Committee of the Communist International. [He died in 1967, having played an obsequious role in all the turns of Moscow’s international policy, including a spell as ‘Prime Minister’ of the ‘Finnish Democratic Republic’ set up briefly as a cover for Stalin’s invasion of Finland in 1939–40.]

6. Edvard Torniainen, The Workers’ Revolution in Finland [no other title available] (Moscow, 1919).

7. C. D. Kataya, La Terreur Bourgeoise en Finlande (Petrograd, 1919). [Published in French by the section of the Communist International’s administration which Serge was put in charge of on his return to Russia in 1919.]

8. M. S. Svechnikov, Revolution and Civil War in Finland, 1917–18 (Revoliutsiya i Grazhdanskaya Voina v Finlandii 1917–18) (Moscow and Petrograd, 1923).

9. We are continuing to quote from C. D. Kataya. Most of these facts have become notorious from other sources, and the description of them given by our comrade is certainly an under-statement.

10. The bourgeois press in all countries kept silence about these facts but spoke at length on ‘the crimes of the Reds’. It seems instructive here to cite the figure for the Reds’ victims given by a pro-White author, Lars Henning Söderhjelm, in a book translated from Swedish into English and intended for propaganda consumption abroad: The Red Insurrection in Finland in 1918 (London, 1919). Soderhjelm calculates that ‘over a thousand’ persons perished behind the lines of fighting under the blows of the Reds; however, the statistics he gives indicate only 624 persons.

11. Finland has practically no illiterates.

12. S. Shaumyan, ‘The Baku Commune of 1918’, Proletarskaya Revoliutsiya, No. 12 (59), 1926.

13. D. Oniashvili, speech to the Sejm of Tiflis, 22 April 1918, in the collection of official documents produced by the Menshevik government of Georgia: Documents and Materials on the Foreign Policy of Trans-Caucasia and Georgia (Dokumenty i Materialy po Vneshnei Politike Zakavkazya i Gruzii) (Tifiis, 1919).

14. See M. Amya, The Paths of the Georgian Gironde [no Russian reference available] (Tifiis, 1926); Y. Shafir, The Georgian Gironde (Ocherki Gruzinskoi Zhirondi) (Moscow, 1925); L. Trotsky, Russia Between Red and White (London, 1924). [The Georgian Mensheviks’ support for Denikin was in fact soon clouded by the latter’s determination to enrol the Caucasian states by force into a united ‘Greater Russia’, and the British government (which regarded the prospect of a strong Russia, even under the Whites, with some suspicion) intervened to prevent the outbreak of war between Denikin and his Menshevik allies. See R. H. Ullman, Britain and the Russian Civil War (Princeton, 1968), pp. 219–20.]

15. In order to avoid interrupting the story of the Baku events, we shall be anticipating, in these pages, material from the later chapters.

16. [A slight paraphrase from Major-General L. Dunsterville’s The Adventures of Dunsterforce (London, 1920), p. 192: ‘I was in touch with Baku by almost daily messengers, and our friends the Socialist-Revolutionaries seemed likely to be able to bring off shortly the coup d’état which was to throw out the Bolsheviks, establish a new form of government, and invite British assistance.’ Dunsterville’s book was printed by the Bolsheviks in a Russian translation (retitled Britanskii Imperializm v Baku i Persii) in 1920, and Serge has probably quoted from this edition.)

17. Today (summer of 1927) People’s Commissar of Trade in the USSR. [Mikoyan became a member of Stalin’s inner circle: a full Politburo member from 1935, he was active in the Great Purge. He sided with Khrushchev in the de-Stalinization measures of 1956 and 1961 against the Molotov ‘anti-party group’; played a leading role in the Russian intervention against the 1956 Hungarian revolution; has now retired from politics.]

18. [The case of the executed commissars of the Baku Commune was to become a cause célèbre in Anglo-Soviet relations: Stalin issued a denunciation of ‘the shooting of the twenty-six comrades by the agents of English imperialism’ in April 1919, and the atrocity was frequently recounted (often with added detail, as in I. Brodsky’s famous painting showing British officers directing the actual firing-squad) in popular Soviet histories of the civil war. (Shaumyan was one of those few Bolshevik leaders whose early demise during the revolution rendered them suitable for hagiographical treatment during the Stalinist re-writing of party history, a fact which may partly explain the distortion in the later treatments.) Serge’s account is free from these subsequent accretions; but the early Bolshevik version is contested, not only in the British official reply to Soviet accusations of complicity, but in the work of recent historians of British intervention in the Trans-Caspian region. Correspondence on the incident between the British and Soviet governments during 1922 is printed in HM Government White Paper on Russia, No. 1, Cmd 1846 (London, 1923); the affair is analysed, with conclusions favouring the British case, in C. H. Ellis, The Trans-Caspian Episode (London, 1963), pp. 57–61, and in R. H. Ullman, Intervention and the War (Princeton, 1961), pp. 320–24. (Ellis, a member of the British Mission to Trans-Caspia at the time of the shootings, discusses the question also in his contribution to St Antony’s Papers, No. 6: Soviet Affairs (D. Footman, ed.) (London, 1959).)

The precise measure of British involvement in the executions turns on the evidence of two witnesses, both of whom have an evident interest in their particular version of the story: Funtikov, the head of the Ashkhabad ‘Directorate’ immediately responsible for the shootings, whose statement, turning the main responsibility on the British Mission, was gathered by a journalist (and fellow SR), V. Chaikin, apparently during Funtikov’s spell in Ashkhabad jail during early 1919; and Captain Teague-Jones himself, whose personal history of the incident was collected by the British ‘government during the 1922 correspondence with the Soviet Foreign Office, and accepted by them as the correct version. (Teague-Jones’s statement on the affair, dated 22 November 1922, is given in Cmd 1846, pp. 7–11; it demands repudiation by the Soviet government of Chaikin’s allegations, and adds ‘that I reserve to myself the right to institute proceedings for libel against Vadim Chaikin, and against any or all of the newspapers who have published any of the charges against me, at such time as there shall be a civilized and responsible government in Russia’.)

Certain features of the episode are not in doubt:

(1) The commander of the British forces, Major-General W. Malleson, who throughout the affair was in Meshed, Persia (100 miles from Ashkhabad and 600 from Krasnovodsk, where the prisoners were) was notified of the capture of the commissars on 17 September (two days after their arrest on landing in the port). On the following day he asked the Ashkhabad government ‘to give me Bolshevik leaders’ names for dispatch to India’ (i.e. in order that the leaders themselves should be dispatched, under British auspices, to India); Malleson’s reason for this measure was that the commissars’ ‘presence in traus-Caspia is most dangerous, as at least half the Russians are ready to turn their coat once more at the slightest sign of enemy success’. See Malleson’s telegram to commander-in-chief, India, MD 00538, dated 18 September 1918, repeated in Foreign Office memo of 26 September, Public Record Office, File FO 371/3336; Malleson’s own statement of his motivation differs from that given by Ellis (The Trans-Caspian Episode, p. 59) who says only that the commissars were to be kept in India as hostages for the British citizens held under arrest in Moscow and Petrograd.

(2) Teague-Jones, who had been informed of Malleson’s request to Ashkhabad, was present at the meeting of four members of the Trans-Caspian government which had the task of discussing the fate of the commissars (evening of 18 September).

(3) On the following day, Teague-Jones wired Malleson with the news that it had been decided to shoot the prisoners.

(4) On 23 September, Malleson wired to commander-in-chief, India, with the news of the executions, of whose actual occurrence he had been informed by the Meshed representative of Funtikov’s government (ibid., p. 61). The telegram (MD 581, Meshed, 23 September 1918; repeated by commander-in-chief, India, telegram 76707, 25 September: Milner MSS, Box 115, File H-3) comments: ‘Apart from question of justice as to which I can express no opinion, politically this alleged execution . . . means that Ashkhabad government have burnt their boats as regards Bolsheviks.’ (This appears to be a declaration, favourable rather than hostile in tone, of the anti-Bolshevik credentials of Funtikov and his colleagues; that is, as Malleson went on to say, they could no longer use the lives of the commissars as a bargaining-counter to save their own skins.) The message ended: ‘Ashkhabad Committee are anxious it should be kept secret.’

(5) The British government acceded to this request of the Ashkhabad regime. The world discovered the fate of Shaumyan and his colleagues only in March 1919, when Chaikin published his report on the affair in a Baku newspaper (Ullman, Intervention and the War, p. 323). Even when the unsuspecting Chicherin asked for the safe return of the Baku commissars from captivity, as a condition of the release of British hostages held by the Soviets, the Foreign Office, in cabling its ambassador in Holland (the intermediary for the negotiations on hostages) with a draft reply to Chicherin, added the news of the shooting solely ‘for your [i.e. the ambassador’s] private information’, in a postscript headed Secret. (Chicherin’s message, sent on 19 September, is summarized in Ullman, ibid., pp. 293–4; the Foreign Office instruction, dated on 27 September, is in the Public Record Office, File FO 371/3336.)

The testimonies of Ellis (based in part on interviews with other members of the British Military Mission) and of Teague-Jones contain much that goes beyond this. In particular, Teague-Jones relates that he left the fateful meeting of the Ashkhabad ministers before a decision on the shooting was finally reached. The possibility had been debated in his presence; Funtikov had told the meeting that General Malleson had proved reluctant to take the prisoners and had said to the Ashkhabad representative in Meshed that the Trans-Caspian government ‘must make its own arrangements’. (Malleson’s telegrams of course establish that, on the contrary, he had been keen to have the commissars sent as prisoners to India; yet Teague-Jones, who knew this at the time, does not indicate that he tried to contradict Funtikov.) Ellis (The Trans-Caspian Episode, p. 61) reports that Malleson, when informed of the executions, was ‘horrified at the action taken’. (The telegram to his chief in India, quoted above, contains no word of regret, still less of horror.) The British complicity may well, therefore, have been minimal; even though, as Ullman suggests (Intervention and the War, p. 324), if Teague-Jones ‘had chosen to make an issue of the fate of the twenty-six commissars, Funtikov and his colleagues would have found it difficult to refuse the British request’, since they were so dependent on British military support. However, it may well have been more than minimal: Teague-Jones’s statement (the only evidence we have from him, since according to Ullman he refused to discuss his experiences in Trans-Caspia—and even changed his surname in order to avoid any publicity) was after all drawn up more than four years after the events it recounts. And any reservations about the executions that were felt by Britain’s local representatives, or by their superiors elsewhere, were not serious enough to prevent the continuation of British military and financial support for Funtikov’s government, at least until it was replaced (in November) by a new committee headed by the local police chief and enjoying the approval of the British Military Mission (ibid., pp. 325–7).]

19. V. Chaikin, On the History of the Russian Revolution (K Istorii Rossiskoi Revoliutsii) (Moscow, 1922).

20. Funtikov was tried and shot in Baku in 1 926.

21. N. Lenin, Collected Works (London, 1969), Vol. 26, pp. 455, 459, 461, 463, 466, 468, 470, 471–2, 514.

22. These figures, given by Karl Radek to the First All-Russian Congress of Economic Councils, were taken up by Milyutin, who stressed that, since part of the Ukraine’s coal and manufacturing output was consumed in the Ukraine itself, the loss of actually available resources was appreciably less than stated. This specious reasoning, however, only underlined the gravity of the economic amputations undergone by the Republic.

23. From the stenographic report of the discussion at the First All-Russian Congress of Economic Councils (26 May-4 June 1918) (Moscow, 1918).

24. From Sokolnikov’s report, ibid.

25. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 27, pp. 74, 75.

26. Today Kingisepp, on the Estonian frontier.

27. ibid., pp. 89, 90, 91, 95, 98, 101,104, 105, 106, 110.

28. V. Sorin, The Party and the Opposition. 1: The Fraction of Left Communists (Partiya i Oppozitsiya. I. Fraktsiya Levykh Kommunistov), preface by N. Bukharin (Moscow, 1925).

29. K. Radek in Soc. Dem. Brest-Litovsk {no fuller reference available].

30. Editorial in Kommunist, No. 1.

31. Kommunist, No. 4.

32. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 27, 129–30, 131, 133, 135, 136, 137.

33. On events in Bessarabia, see Chapter 4 (‘The Tragedy of the Rumanian Front’), pp. 117–19. On 26 (13) January the Rumanians, who had several times been checked by the revolutionary forces, at last captured Kishinev. The Russian General Shcherbachev announced that the city had now been purged of Bolsheviks. A few days later the Sfatul Tării, the national representative body subservient to the Rumanian invader, proclaimed the independence of the Moldavian Republic while all dissidents were being hunted down and shot. It was the first step towards a disguised annexation. The People’s Commissars replied by ordering the arrest of the Rumanian ambassador to Petrograd, M. Diamandi: following protests by the diplomatic corps, he was promptly released. On the other hand, the Soviet government seized the gold reserves of Rumania which had been deposited at the Russian State Bank. The reserves were declared ‘inaccessible to the Rumanian oligarchy’ and ‘to be handed over only to the Rumanian people.’ On 21 (8) February, France, Italy and Britain proposed an amicable settlement of the Russo-Rumanian conflict. Negotiations began at Odessa between Rakovsky and General Averescu, and peace was concluded on 5 March. Rumania undertook to evacuate Bessarabia within two months. However, the Germans invaded the Ukraine, and the Sfatul Tării (on 27 March} proclaimed the union of autonomous Moldavia with Rumania. The treaty just signed proved to be no more than a scrap of paper in the hands of the Rumanians, who were listening to French advice. In April a Rumanian politician declared: ‘Bessarabia was occupied by our troops . . . in accordance with an agreement between M. Bratianu and the French General Berthelot. The French General Vuillemin headed the occupation troops in Kishinev . . . ’ (Statement of M. Antonescu to La Victoire (Paris), 14 April 1918). The Soviet Republic has never recognized this seizure of a country.

34. ‘Preamble: The old army was a weapon in the hands of the bourgeoisie for oppressing the toiling masses. The transfer of power to the toiling and exploited classes necessitates the creation of a new army, which will be the bulwark of the power of the Soviets, will prepare in the near future for the replacement of a permanent army by the nation in arms, and will serve to assist the impending Socialist revolution in Europe. Article 1: Clause 1: The Red Army of Workers and Peasant.s is formed from the most conscious and organized elements of the toiling masses. Clause 2: Admission to the army is open to whoever is ready to die for the conquests of the October Revolution, the Soviets and Socialism. References for each entrant are required from military committees, democratic organizations constituted on a Soviet basis, parties or trade unions: or at least from two members of such organizations. Collective enrolment will be taken on the basis of a roll-call in which each reply for all, as all for each.’

The establishment of local Military Commissariats through a decree of 8 April marked the beginning of a systematic manpower policy. Up till then the orgamzation of the Republic’s forces had been undertaken by M. D. Bonch-Bruyevich, whose plan for successive levies of men, on the western front, then in central Russia, then in the Volga region, had proved a complete failure.

Chapter 7: The Famine and the Czechoslovak Intervention

1. The meat requirements of the army’s quartermastering department rose in 1917 to 50,281,000 poods; only 26,700,000 poods were available, a deficit of forty-seven per cent.

2. The Russian word kulak forms an expressive image, for its literal meaning is ‘fist’.

3. V. Kayurov, ‘My Encounters and Work with V. I. Lenin in the Year of the Revolution’, Proletarskaya Revoliutsiya, No. 3 (36), 1924.

4. The anarchists were in occupation of the villa of the ex-minister Durnovo [which they converted into a workers’ rest centre]: the Provisional Government tried in vain to dislodge them.

5. Just before the October Revolution, Golos Truda, the anarcho-syndicalist weekly edited by Voline, A. Shapiro, Y. Grossman-Roshchin and others, had expressed its disapproval of an uprising which could terminate only in establishing a new authority: adding, however, that it would . . . follow the masses. [Declaration printed in V. Voline, La Révolution Inconnue (Paris, 1947), p. 193.] In the same period Kropotkin’s disciple Atabekian, stationed in Moscow, was deploring ‘the horrors of the civil war’. Old Kropotkin himself, loyal to the Allies and his own illusions of 1914, viewed the Bolsheviks as ‘agents of Germany’, a position he firmly maintained right down to his death.

6. Vsevolod Volin (Voline) or Eichenbaum, the anarcho-syndicalist militant, had lived for some years in America: he was later to become one of the leaders of the libertarian movement in the Ukraine known as Nabat (Tocsin) which supported Makhno and tried to provide him with an ideology (1919-20). He was banished from the Soviet Republic in 1921. [Voline engaged in relief-work abroad for the persecuted Russian anarchists and published important work on anarchist history; he died in Paris in 1945.]

7. Of the Gordin brothers, one has since become the proponent of an international language of monosyllables, written in signs, the Ao language: the other, having in 1920–21 founded the original doctrines of Anarcho-Universalism (which seemed to be about to lead him rapidly towards Communism), has now, I think, retired from political life. [Actually both of the Gordin brothers were arrested for brief periods in the early 1920s: both then emigrated to the United States, one becoming a Protestant missionary and the other a settler in Israel.]

8. Alexander Gay, an Anarchist-Communist, had lived in Switzerland for many years as a revolutionary exile. He was a member of the All-Russian Soviet Executive Committee. During an illness, he had to go for his health to the Caucasus, where he participated very vigorously in the civil war. He defended Pyatigorsk and Kislovodsk and was one of the organizers of the Red terror in the Terek region. The Whites caught him in January 1919 at Kislovodsk, where he was confined by typhus, and sabred him to death in his bed. A few days later, they hanged his wife, Xenia Gay.

9. Jacques Sadoul, Notes sur la Révolution Bolchévique (Paris, 1919), letter to Albert Thomas dated 8 Apri11918.

10. [Victor Serge’s treatment of this whole incident is somewhat evasive. Despite his insistence that no ‘well-known’ or ‘ known’ anarchist (aucun anarchiste connu) was killed in the actual fighting, a leading anarchist worker named Khodunov, who had been elected to a Moscow Soviet from his factory and had fought in the October Revolution, was shot by the Cheka while in their custody following the raid (G. P. Maximov, The Guillotine at Work (Chicago, 1940), pp. 388–9); of the other anarchists killed (on the number of which our sources are vague), it is an arbitrary judgement to declare that none was ‘known’. And while Anarkhiya did re-appear on or about 21 April, its appearance was subject to harassment from the government drive against anarchist publications. See Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists (Princeton, 1967), pp. 184–5, and Maximov, op. cit., p. 410. Anarchist groupings were in fact broken up severely in this period.]

11. Karlis Goppers, Four Defeats (Četri Sabrakumi) (Riga, 1920).

12. See A. Vetliugin, Adventurers of the Civil War (Avantiuristy Grazhdanskoi Voiny) (Paris, 1921).

13. [For a full description of the various trends of Russian anarchism, several of which were neither pro-Bolshevik nor ‘anti-Soviet’, and which found, contrary to Serge, great difficulty in keeping open ‘their press, their organization and their clubs,’ see Avrich, op. cit., Chapters 7, 8 and Epilogue.]

14. V. Sorin, The Party and the Opposition (Partiya i Oppozitsiya) (Moscow, 1925).

15. Lenin, Collected Works (London, 1969), Vol. 27, pp. 235–77.

16. Sorin, op. cit.

17. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 27, pp. 333, 334, 336, 339. [It should be noted that ‘State capitalism’ here, in both Lenin’s and the Left Communists’ usage, refers to the State-controlled private sector (‘grain monopoly, state-controlled entrepreneurs and traders, bourgeois co-operators’ in the listing. given by Lenin on ibid., p. 336); it does not reflect the more common usage of later years, when ‘State capitalism’ was applied to a Russia now devoid of a private sector (i.e. in Stalin’s day and subsequently), with the State itself being conceptualized as the capitalist.]

18. [F. W. Taylor, the American industrial expert (author of Principles of Scientific Management, 1911), pioneered the use of the stop-watch in industry, both as a tool for managerial efficiency and as a means of extracting intensified labour from workers.]

19. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 27, pp. 238, 241, 244, 245, 246, 247, 259, 265, 267–8, 268–9, 275.

20. Lenin had to defend his theses at the All-Russian Soviet Executive both against Bukharin and against the anarchist Alexander Gay, who even declared that the proletariat of the West was too deeply corrupted for the revolution. . . . Lenin also spent time justifying the slogan ‘Steal back the stolen’, which had been attributed to him and was still occupying the mind of the whole press. ‘But it’s a very good slogan’, he remarked.

21. Evening News, Life, The Fatherland; People’s Word, People’s Friend, Land and Liberty.

22. The bread-ration laid down by the Petrograd Soviet was, as of 29 May:

(1) For workers performing heavy physical labour, 200 grams;

(2) For workers engaged in persistent physical labour, 100 grams;

(3) For clerical workers, 50 grams;

(4) For capitalists and rentiers, 25 grams.

The unemployed are classified according to their previous employment, within the above categories.

23. See Chapter 5, pp. 160–63, on ‘The Allies and the Cancellation of Debts.’

24. [The cooperation between the local Soviet authorities at Murmansk and the British forces under Kemp and Poole was encouraged or permitted by Moscow from 1 March to the end of June. Trotsky notified the Murmansk Soviet that they must ‘accept any and all assistance from the Allied missions’—an order which, in the light of the Murmansk Soviet’s subsequent break with Moscow and crossing over to the Allied forces (in early July), provided ample scope for Stalinist historians who wished to accuse Trotsky of folly or treason. Serge may here be discreetly repudiating the early stages of this anti-Trotsky campaign on the Murmansk epidsode. See R. H. Ullman, Intervention and the War (Princeton, 1961), pp. 116–17, 181–5.]

25. “From the testimony of René Marchand, in Pourquoi Je Me Suis Rallié à la Formule de la Révolution Sociale (Paris, 1919). On the attitude of the Allies in this period, Sadoul’s Notes sur la Révolution Bolchévique form a document of the first importance.

26. David R. Francis, Russia from the American Embassy, April 1916-November 1918 (New York, 1921).

27. A. Argunov, Between Two Bolshevisms (Mezhdu Dvumia Bolshevizmami) (Paris, 1919).

28. The duplicity of the SR party is blatantly evident in the motion concerning Allied intervention adopted by a National Council meeting of 7–14 May 1918. ‘Democracy can in no case rely, for the restoration of the power of the people, upon a foreign armed force, even one in alliance . . . ’; however, the independence of Russia can be retrieved only through ‘the immediate liquidation of Bolshevik power and the installation of a government legitimized by universal suffrage. . . . This government could permit the entry of Allied troops on to Russian territory, for purely strategic purposes and on condition of the non-intervention of these governments in the internal affairs of Russia’ (!!).

29. Boris Savinkov was one of the most forceful characters of the SR party. Born in 1879, a militant since his youth, he became a member of St Petersburg’s first Marxist groups, along with Lenin and Martov. He went into exile, and became a member of the Socialist-Revolutionary party, whose terrorist organization he directed from 1903 onwards along with the agent-provocateur Azef. Savinkov organized or took part in almost all the SR terrorist acts between 1904 and 1906 (notably the execution of the minister von Plehve and the Grand Duke Sergei), was condemned to death, and managed to escape. A talented novelist and occasional poet, the author of a set of remarkable memoirs, Boris Savinkov was a dilettante, complex spirit: audacious and practical, but tormented by mystical doubts, and with no belief in anything but personal strength and individual heroism. A patriot during the war, he became during the Kerensky period one of the most passionate advocates of a strong, dictatorial authority, which indeed he felt a vocation to exercise. He took part in Kornilov’s abortive coup, and subsequently became one of the most active adventurers of the counter-revolution. In 1924 he was arrested on Soviet soil, where he had returned illegally, and confessed, before the Revolutionary Tribunal in Moscow, his error and crime in having misunderstood and opposed the revolution. After being sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, he committed suicide in 1925.

30. [See Editorial Postscript: ‘The Allied Part in the Czechoslovak Intervention.’]

31. Evidence of ex-Lieutenant P. Pascal at the trial of the Right SRs in Moscow in 1922. His testimony is in complete accord with what is admitted by SR writers like Lebedev and Savinkov.

32. P. S. Parfenov, Lessons of the Past : The Civil War in Siberia, 1918, 1919, 1920 (Uroky Proshlogo: Grazhadanskaya Voina v Sibiri, 1918, 1919, 1920) (Harbin, 1921). [W. H. Chamberlin points out (The Russian Revolution, 1917–1921 (London, 1935), Vol. 2, p. 23) that Parfenov cites no source for his statement incriminating the British and French Missions in planning the Czechoslovak rising together with Moscow counter-revolutionaries; he also argues that Lavergne in particular could not have been involved in such a move, in view of the general’s undeniable efforts, at this time, to work out methods of cooperation with the Soviet government. 14 April does seem, on the evidence of Lockhart’s dispatches, a date several weeks too early for any definite anti-Soviet moves, involving the Czechs, to be concerted. On the other hand, it is precisely in this period that Lockhart’s contacts with the White organizations in Moscow become intensified (Ullman, op. cit., pp. 163–4); some meeting of the kind mentioned by Parfenov may well have taken place, even if the Czechoslovak action (especially in the form it actually took, later in May) can hardly have been on the agenda in any detail.]

33. L. Kritsman, The Heroic Period of the Great Russian Revolution (Geroicheskii Period Velikoi Russkoi Revoliutsii), 2nd edn (Moscow, 1926). It is a matter for regret that this remarkable economic analysis of the Russian revolution has not been translated in the West.

34. The Russian State had been the owner of the railways, etc.

35. On 21 November 1918 came the expropriation of commercial capital (with the decree on the nationalization of domestic commerce); then the expropriation of small-scale industry (nationalized on 29 November 1918); then of the cooperatives (nationalized in November-December).

36. [‘Workers’ control’ in the Russian context thus has an entirely different significance from the slogan of workers’ control in Western labour and Socialist movements. In the latter, the concept of the control of an industry by its workers is not applicable to a temporary phase before the actual expropriation of the employers: it relates to forms of industrial democracy which are to be practised within nationalized or socialized economic structure. The weakness of the Bolshevik category of ‘workers’ control’ has its roots in the relative absence of a syndicalist tradition in the Russian labour movement: Golos Truda, the anarcho-syndicalist organ, was only set up in Russia during 1917 itself, when most of its editorial team arrived from exile in the United States. (See Avrich, op. cit., pp. 137–9, 142, 148.)]

37. A. Rykov’s speech to the First Congress of Economic Councils (26 May-4 June 1918).

38. Quoted by A. Pankratova in The Factory Committees of Russia in the Struggle for the Socialist Factory (Fabzavkomy Rossii v Borbe Za Sotsialist-icheskuiu Fabriku) (Moscow, 1923).

39. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 27, pp. 392–3, 395, 396, 397–8.

40. ibid., pp. 425, 430, 434, 435, 436, 469, 475, 476–7.

41. ibid., p. 536.

42. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 36, p. 489.

43. Lenin’s style, as the guide of the revolution, may be seen here in these few details. He warned the recipients of his telegram: ‘You are personally responsible for the prompt and rigorous application of these measures. . . . Make an appeal to the population explaining them. . . . Keep me informed on the progress of the operations, by telegrams sent to me at least, I repeat at least, every two days.’ See Proletarskaya Revoliutsiya, No. 3 (26), 1924.

44. A few figures may be useful. The textile centre of Ivanovo-Voznesensk assembled twenty-three detachments (2,243 men in all) who, from September to 1 December 1918, secured almost 2,500,000 poods of grain. In the same period, Moscow received from its own detachments 322 wagon-loads of foodstuffs; previously, only a small number of wagons had got through to the city in some weeks. In three months, 30,000 workers moved from the non-agrarian to the grain-producing provinces. (From the Food Commissariat’s report on its activity during 1918–19.)

45. Gukovsky’s report to the All-Russian Soviet Executive, 11 April 1918.

46. ibid.

47. Tsuriupa’s report to the All-Russian Soviet Executive, 9 May 1918.

48. The chair at Vee-Tsik’s debates was usually taken by Sverdlov, and the Communist fraction there was headed by Sosnovsky, its usual spokesman. The most frequent speakers, apart from Lenin and Trotsky, who tended to present official reports, were Bukharin (for the Left Communists), Karelin, Trutovsky and Kamkov (Left SRs), Alexander Gay and Apollon Karelin (anarchists), Lozovsky (Internationalist Social-Democrat), Kogan-Bernstein (Right SR) and Martov and Dan (Mensheviks).

49. In these circumstances, the position of the Menshevik Social­-Democrats was utterly false. The right SRs took up arms for the same practical programme (Constituent Assembly, restoration of democracy) that the Mensheviks wanted: but the latter refrained from resorting to arms, limiting themselves (as they said) to agitation and action among the working class, in the hope of becoming the party of the labour opposition within the democracy still to come. They were accused—and with reason—of being the accomplices of the Whites and the Czechoslovaks. These ‘slanderous accusations’ they denied, and ‘insisted on the truth’—which was, for instance, that the Menshevik workers were declaring themselves neutral as the Red Guards were battling against the Czechoslovaks or Savinkov’s squads.

50. The texts of these different decrees were written by Trotsky and voted on his proposal. The decree on military training begins with these words: ‘To liberate mankind from militarism and from the barbarism of bloody struggles between the peoples: such is one of the cardinal aims of Socialism.’

51. L. D. Trotsky, How the Revolution Armed Itself (Kak Vooruzhalas Revoliutsiya) (Moscow, 1923), Vol. I, ‘Documents of April-June 1918’.

52. [Pichegru was a general in the French revolution who joined a plot against the Consulate and was executed in 1804.]

53. [Trotsky’s judgement on Shchastny was not shared by the Soviet government’s naval commissar, Dybenko, who went so far as to publish a protest against the verdict, and the circumstantiality of the evidence, in Moscow’s anarchist newspaper (Maximov, op. cit., pp. 73–4). The sentence and trial actually evoked widespread protests in Russia, more so than the hundreds of summary executions conducted by the Cheka; it even moved Martov to write his pamphlet, Down with the Death Penalty. See E. H. Carr, A History of Soviet Russia: The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917–1923 (London, 1950), Vol. I, pp. 163–4.]

Chapter 8: The July-August Crisis

1. Jacques Sadoul, Notes sur la Révolution Bolchévique (Paris, 1919). This book contains a number of fine portrayals of the men of the Russian revolution: they are strikingly faithful portraits, though a little hasty.

2. ‘Trotsky proclaims aloud with superb style and, more importantly, with complete sincerity, that Lenin is the uncontested head of the Russian revolution.’ Lenin and Trotsky form, for all who see them at close quarters, an example of the most confidential unity and of the most fertile collaboration’: Sadoul, ibid., letter of 11 May 1918. So close a collaboration, in a complete community of thought and action, is bound to recall that of Marx and Engels. [Sadoul, by the time Serge wrote these lines, had become an unflinching Stalinist: he was to repay this embarrassing reminder of his early enthusiasm for Trotsky by denouncing Serge (whom he had known well in the French Communist colony in Petrograd) as a terrorist during the latter’s campaign in 1936 against the Moscow trials.]

3. [Dzerzhinsky died suddenly in 1926, having collapsed in a Central Committee session in which, apparently, he had been fulminating against the Left opposition. In his Memoirs of a Revolutionary (London, 1967), Serge quotes another assessment by Radek: ‘Felix died just in time. He was a dogmatist. He would not have shrunk from reddening his hands in our blood.’]

4. See the biographical note in Chapter 4 (note 32, p. 385) giving a biography of Y. M. Sverdlov.

5. [Zinoviev, at the time that this reference to him was published, was in disgrace both with the Stalin wing of the Russian Communist party (he had been expelled in 1927 for leading the united opposition along with Trotsky) and with the residual Left opposition itself (for he had recanted his dissident views). Hence, perhaps, a certain circumspection in Serge’s language about him. Expelled again in 1932 and 1934 from the party, he recanted ever more abjectly down to his ‘confession’ in the Moscow trial of 1936, where he was sentenced to death.]

6. [Rakovsky was still, at the time of publication, an intransigent Left oppositionist evolving, in his exile and disgrace, one of the first ‘new class’ theories of the Stalinist bureaucracy. He capitulated to Stalin in 1934, confessed in the 1938 Moscow trial to having been a British spy since 1924, and was sentenced to imprisonment for twenty years, three of which he managed to survive.]

7. In 1906 while still a young student, a member of the SR party even then, Maria Spiridonova executed the governor of Tambov province, who had put down peasant disturbances with signal cruelty. She was arrested, and brutalized by the police: she then spent eleven years in the Siberian convict-prison of Akatui, where the regime was so harsh that suicide became the political inmates’ final form of protest. Liberated by the 1917 revolution, Maria Spiridonova became the Left SR party’s leader. An irreconcilable foe of the Bolsheviks, she was later detained for many years. [Spiridonova was named in the 1938 Moscow trial in connection with the tale of a conspiracy, between Left Communists and Left SRs, to kill Lenin in 1918: she did not appear as a witness in the trial, perhaps because she had already been executed.]

8. N. Lenin, Collected Works (London, 1969), Vol. 27, p. 527.

9. I have elsewhere published in Vie Ouvrière, around the end of 1921, the detailed story of this assassination as it was related to me by one of the terrorists concerned, Y. G. Blyumkin, who had become a Communist after having twice miraculously escaped death in attempts committed against his person in the Ukraine by his ‘activist’ Left SR comrades who objected to his closer ties with the Bolsheviks. [Blyumkin had joined the Trotskyist opposition and been executed by the GPU just before Serge published this book.] His companion in the assassination, Andreyev, later fought alongside Makhno and was killed.

10. [Vatsetis resigned from his post as the Red Army’s commander-in-chief in early 1919, following disagreements on strategy in which his unsuccessful advocacy of a switch to the southern front was supported also by Trotsky. He retained high responsibility in the Red Army in Stalin’s era until 1937–8, when he perished in the massacre of army commanders.]

11. On the Left SR rising, see the following: Y. Peters, ‘Reminiscences of a Cheka Worker in the First Year of the Revolution’, Proletarskaya Revoliutsiya, No. 10 (33), 1924; L. D. Trotsky, Collected Works (Moscow and Leningrad, 1926), Vol. 17, Pt I; and Dzerzhinsky’s report on the incident.

12. See Trutovsky’s speech to Vee-Tsik, 20 May 1918.

13. Karelin’s speech, same session.

14. In 1917, the Left SRs opposed Kerensky and Chernov, without going to the length of splitting the party they shared with them. In October, when the insurrection was being prepared, they refused formally to give it any support; once the revolution had taken place, they applauded it. Even then, they refused to participate in the first Soviet government and advocated instead a broad Socialist coalition. In the end, they joined the government; they soon left it in order to criticize it more freely, while practising a policy of support towards it; they finished up with an attempt to govern alone.

15. With a dozen deaths as the result. The Left SR, Cherepanov, who until then had led an excellent revolutionary career, was one of the authors of this killing. He was shot by the Cheka.

16. [The ‘Two-and-a-Half International’, or Vienna Union, uniting thirteen moderate internationalist parties (including the British ILP, the German USPD, most of the French SFIO and the Swiss Social-Democratic party) was founded in 1921, and dissolved into the more Right-wing Labour and Socialist International (‘Second International’) in 1923.]

17. Perkhurov resumed fighting on the Czechoslovak front. Taken prisoner later by the Reds, he re-entered the service of the Red Army and was arrested only in 1921, at Ekaterinburg, at the moment when he was preparing a new coup. He appeared before the Revolutionary Tribunal, and was shot in 1922.

18. See Sixteen Days: Materials on the History of the White Revolt at Yaroslavl (Shestnadtsat Dnei: Materialy po Istorii Yaroslavskogo Be/ogvardeiskogo Myatezha) (Yaroslavl, 1924).

19. [Lockhart’s report to the War Cabinet on his return home (‘Memorandum on the Internal Situation in Russia’, 1 November 1918, copy in Public Record Office, File FO 371/3337, the relevant section of which is summarized in R. H. Ullman, Intervention and War (Princeton, 1961), p. 231) confirms this part of Savinkov’s testimony in great detail, down to the sum of two and a half million roubles donated by the French and to Noulens’s false information about the Allied landing.]

20. Průkopnik Svobody, the organ of the Czech Communists in Russia, revealed in its issue of 28 June 1918 that the National Council which stood over the Czechoslovak troops in Russia had, between 7 March and the beginning of their campaign against the Bolsheviks, received 11,188,000 roubles from a French consul and £70,000 from a British consul. Průkopnik Svobody provided in its report (Lockhart, in his report to the British government (‘Memorandum on the Internal Situation in Russia’, op. cit.), lists the Czech National Council as one of the ‘various counter-revolutionary organizations in Moscow’ with whom ‘I began to strengthen my relations’ after the failure of his hopes for joint Allied-Soviet cooperation. He adds: ‘The French commenced to finance and support these organizations before I did.’]

21. ‘It was precisely because the intervention, which M. Noulens constantly presented as the firm policy of the Entente powers, had in fact run up against the most serious objections, that our ambassador was led—in order to overcome the resistance he had encountered (which hurt his pride) and in order to give some force to his arguments—to prove through events themselves that he had fully prepared the ground, so that it needed only a minimum effort to overthrow the Bolshevik government and secure the installation of a national Russian government’ (René Marchand, Pourquoi Je Me Suis Rallié à Ia Formule de la Révolution Sociale (Petrograd, 1919).) Sadoul’s letters for July 1918 several times use expressions like ‘M. Noulens, who has inspired the insurrection now going on in Yaroslavl’ (Sadoul, op. cit., p. 99).

22. A. Argunov, Between Two Bolshevisms (Mezhdu Dvumia Bolshevizmami) (Paris, 1919).

23. Cited by I. Maisky, The Democratic Counter-Revolution (Demokraticheskaya Kontr-Revoliutsiya) (Moscow, 1923).

24. A message, ‘To All, To All, To All’, published on 11 July under the signatures of the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, N. Lenin, and the War Commissar, L. Trotsky, had stated: ‘The former commander-in-chief on the Czechoslovak front, the Left SR Muraviev, is declared a traitor and an enemy of the people. Any honest citizen who crosses his path is instructed to kill him on the spot.’

25. [Tukhachevsky was to play a prominent part in Soviet military history. In his twenties he commanded armies on several civil war fronts, including the attack on Poland in 1920 where failures of coordination between him and Stalin led to the Red Army’s defeat and some subsequent enmity between the two men. At first an advocate of ‘the military opposition’ which emphasized militias and guerrillas as against Trotsky’s centralizing plans for the Red Army, Tukhachevsky later led the modernizing team that re-organized the USSR’s armed forces. One of the first Marshals of the Soviet Union to be appointed (in 1935), he was executed after a secret trial in 1937 following the Gestapo’s planting of forged documents incriminating him as a German agent.]

26. The present constitution of the USSR follows that of 1918 in its main outlines, with additions on the rights of the federated republics and the Union’s central institutions. [The later constitution of 1936, with its guarantees of civil rights and its replacement of indirect by direct election, was of course even more solely ‘the plan for an ideal proletarian democracy.’]

27. Cited in A. Anishev, Sketches of the History of the Civil War (Ocherki Istorii Grazhdanskoi Voiny) (Leningrad, 1925).

28. Yakovlev was to go over to Kolchak in October 1918.

29. V. Milyutin, ‘Pages from a Journal’, Prozhektor, No. 4, I 924. See also P. M. Bykov, The Last Days of the Romanovs (Poslednie Dni Romanovykh) (Sverdlovsk, 1926); and local publications in the Ural area.

Chapter 9: The Terror and the Will to Victory

1. Admiral Kolchak subsequently drew on this gold reserve, stolen from the Russian nation, as follows: to the French, 876 poods (one pood=approximately thirty-six pounds avoirdupois); to the British, 516; to the Anglo-French jointly, 698; to the Japanese, 1,142 (total: 3,232 poods). Deposited with Japan as security for a loan, 1,500 poods; as security with an Anglo-American finance trust, 3,397; purchases of American rifles, 100; purchase of Remington rifles, fifty; purchase of Colt machine-guns, fifty; total out-goings 5,637 poods. Deposited at Shanghai, 375. Grand total: 9,244 poods (S. Piontkovsky, ‘Material on the History of the Counter-revolution,’ Proletarskaya Revoliutsiya, No. 1, 1921).

2. See the reference on p. 268.

3. Or Condeau. We have transliterated the name from the Russian.

4. See I. Maisky, The Democratic Counter-Revolution (Demokraticheskaya Kontr-Revoliutsiya) (Moscow, 1923).

5. It would fall to less than 750,000 inhabitants in 1919–20.

6. [Makhno’s armies liberated large tracts of the Ukraine in the battles of 1919 against Denikin and of 1920 against Wrangel. In the latter offensive the Red Army cooperated with the anarchist forces, despite the harrying of anarchism that was official Bolshevik policy. However, once Wrangel was defeated, the Reds turned against Makhno, surrounding his troops and executing his lieutenants who had gone in to parley with them. Makhno fought his way to the Rumanian frontier with a handful of men; he died in exile in Paris, a demoralized, alcoholic factory-worker, in 1934.]

7. M. S. Uritsky, the son of a Jewish small-trading family in Kiev, and former law student, had undergone three sentences of exile in Yakutia and northern Russia, and several terms of imprisonment. This professional revolutionary, riddled with tuberculosis, knew no private life. He had joined the Bolshevik party at the same time as Trotsky, and was on its Central Committee.

Fanny Kaplan and Kanegisser were shot. The background to these killings was revealed later, at the trial of the Central Committee of the SR party in June and July 1922, held in Moscow, when the main terrorists of the organization had gone over to Bolshevism. The Central Committee members persisted in their denial of any responsibility for these acts, but it was established that they had knowledge of their preparation; that one of them (Donskoi) had met and talked with Fanny Kaplan; and that the terrorist organization was providing them with money from the proceeds of ‘expropriations’ and had been instructed by them to blow up a gold train on its way to Germany. The SR party wanted to gain the benefit of the assassinations, but not to take too heavy a responsibility for them, the outcome being so uncertain. Donskoi suggested to the terrorist Semyonov that a squad of ‘Black Mask’ activists be formed, in the style of the anarchists. . . . Fanny Kaplan had been an anarchist terrorist: she had been arrested in Kiev in 1906 and given life imprisonment. In the Akatui convict prison, where she spent ten years, she became an SR. ‘I fired at Lenin’, she declared, ‘because I consider him a traitor to Socialism, because his very existence discredits Socialism. I am unconditionally on the side of the Samara government and the struggle against Germany, side by side with the Allies.’

8. Testimony at the Moscow trial of SRs, hearing of 28 June 1922.

9. [Cromie, the Naval Attaché of the British Embassy, had been left in Petrograd as the senior embassy official after the Allied diplomats’ departure for Vologda: he was entrusted specifically with the task of blowing up what remained of the Russian Baltic fleet in the harbour of the city. Already in early May, the War Cabinet in London had authorized his preparations, and allocated a sum of £300,000, the sum required by Cromnie for ‘payment to be made for services rendered’ (War Cabinet ‘A’ Minutes, Minutes 408A and 409A of meetings dated 10 and 11 May 1918; Public Record Office. File Cab. 23/14). At this stage Cromie’s destruction of the fleet was to be conditional upon a sudden German descent on Petrograd, and the somewhat chimerical proviso was added: ‘Care should be taken not to antagonize unnecessarily the Soviet government.’ However, later in the month Lockhart cabled London urging the synchronization of Cromie’s explosions with a massive anti-Soviet intervention in the north and at Vladivostok (on Lockhart’s intervention plan see Postscript, p. 373, and R. H. Ullman, Intervention and the War (Princeton, 1961), pp. 186–8; his message linking Cromie’s scheme with the intervention against the Soviet government was sent as telegram 219, dispatched 25 May 1918; in Milner MSS, Box 110, File C-1). In the press after Cromie’s death, and in subsequent British accounts, the captain was presented as something of an ordinary diplomat going about his innocent business and foully slain by an intemperate Cheka. Even Ullman remarks: ‘At the time of his death his plans for this destruction were far advanced, but there was nothing specifically counter-revolutionary about them. They were wholly connected with Britain’s war against Germany.’ But, even if the Bolsheviks could be expected to appreciate this distinction, it is invalidated by Lockhart’s 25 May telegram, which states: ‘If however we are to intervene without Bolsheviks as now seems probable, it will be absolutely necessary for us to destroy Baltic fleet. I have had several conversations with Captain Cromie to this effect.’

Cromie, according to the memoirs of Paul Dukes (a British Secret Service agent active in Petrograd later in 1918), had also been working with a reactionary cabal of Russian monarchist ex-officers in the city (Sir Paul Dukes, The Story of ‘ST 25’: Adventure and Romance in the Secret Intelligence Service in Red Russia (London, 1938), pp. 41, 79). Since one of these, on Dukes’s account, was a Cheka double-agent, neither the raid on the British Embassy nor Cromie’s death, in the exchange of fire that followed, can be considered as an ill-considered or bloodthirsty action by the Cheka, especially in the siege conditions of the time.]

10. [Accounts of the ‘Lockhart affair’ are given in: N. Reilly, Sidney Reilly, Britain’s Master Spy: A Narrative Written by Himself, Edited and Completed by his Wife (London, 1931); G. A. Hill, Go Spy the Land: Being the Adventures of IK8 of the British Secret Service (London, 1932); R. H. Bruce Lockhart, Memoirs of a British Agent (London, 1932); Robin Bruce Lockhart, Ace of Spies (another biography of Reilly) (London, 1967). All deny that Lockhart had any part in the Kremlin conspiracy. The memoirs of Hill, an agent involved with Reilly in the ‘Lettish plot’, are of particular interest: Hill, who had been working as a liaison officer with the Reds’ own military intelligence service, was deputed officially for anti-Bolshevik work in Moscow, with Reilly and de Vertemont, after the departure of the Allied missions (Hill, op. cit., p. 212; Reilly, op. cit., p. 30). The Soviet version implicating Lockhart as the main instigator of the assassination plot was repeated with testimony from a Cheka agent-provocateur among the Lettish participants, in the Moscow paper Nedelya in March 1966; an English translation is given as an appendix in Lockhart, Ace of Spies.]

11. [De Vertemont and Kalamatiano were the heads respectively of French and United States Intelligence in Moscow (Hill, op. cit., pp. 236, 246). Kalamatiano was shot after being found guilty by the Revolutionary Tribunal in the ‘Lockhart conspiracy.’]

12. [The Western accounts are at pains to deny this. ‘Rather than execute them, Reilly intended to de-bag the Bolshevik hierarchy and, with Lenin and Trotsky in front, to march them through the streets of Moscow bereft of trousers and underpants, shirt-tails flying in the breeze. They would then be imprisoned.’ (Lockhart, Ace of Spies, p. 76; see also, Reilly, op. cit., pp. 25–8; Hill, op. cit., p. 238, who adds that Reilly’s aim was solely ‘to kill them by ridicule’.)]

13. [According to Lockhart (Memoirs of a British Agent, p. 316), he provided the Letts only with a letter on official British paper, signed by himself, to enable them to pass through the lines of the northern front and defect to General Poole’s forces. All the Western published sources deny any personal participation by Lockhart in Reilly’s plot to seize the Bolshevik leadership in the Kremlin. Lockhart’s own memoirs state that he, Grenard and Lavergue were told by Reilly of his projected coup, and warned him not to proceed with it (loc. cit.). Serge’s account of Lockhart’s role in the whole intrigue is relatively restrained: and Lockhart’s very lenient treatment at the hands of the Cheka (he was interned in the Kremlin, allowed visits from his Russian woman-friend, and visited several times by Karakhan for chats about diplomatic matters) raise the question of how seriously the Bolsheviks took his guilt, despite the death-sentence passed on him in absentia following his repatriation to England. On the other hand, the possibility cannot be excluded that there was a conscious division of labour in the conspiracy between him and Reilly. The account of Lockhart’s son (Ace of Spies, pp. 70, 73–5, 90, 98) reveals an extremely close and confidential relationship between the two, both in anti-Bolshevik intrigue in Moscow (Lockhart’s subsidization of the White underground was channelled through Reilly) and in the pro-interventionist social circle, including Secret Service agents and senior Intelligence and diplomatic officials, who frequented Reilly’s rooms in the Albany from 1918 on (see note 35, Chapter 11). Lockhart Jr reproduces a photograph (op cit., opposite p. 96) of an inscribed cigar-box presented by Reilly to Lockhart. The inscription reads: ‘To R.H. Bruce Lockhart, HBM’s Representative in Russia in 1918 (during the Bolchevik Regime), in remembrance of events in Moscow during August and September of that year, from his faithful Lieutenant, Sidney Reilly.’ And two very friendly personal letters to Lockhart from his ‘lieutenant’, dated 23 and 25 November 1918, and discussing the struggle against Bolshevism, are preserved in Milner MSS (Box 110, File C-2). In the first Reilly writes advocating the formation of an ‘LDC (League of the Defence of Civilization)’ to withstand ‘the great cataclysm relentlessly approaching’. (‘Next year we will have civil war all over the world. You will find me on the side of the “White Guards” who are bound to lose.’) Reilly asks his old colleague to ‘do something’ to support the approaches he was making through the Secret Service and Foreign Office to find ‘a half-way decent job’ in order to ‘continue to serve . . . in the question of Russia and Bolshevism’. ‘I should like nothing better,’ Reilly concludes his plea, ‘than to serve under you.’]

14. Only very few details have been published about the Lockhart affair. We have drawn on the communiques of the Vee-Cheka that appeared in the newspapers of the time, and on the reminiscences of Peters in No. 10 (33) of Proletarskaya Revoliutsiya, 1924.

15. A. Morizet, Chez Lénine et Trotski (Paris, 1921). This book includes a very interesting interview with the head of the Red Army.

16. Larissa Reissner, The Front (Front) (Moscow, 1918). The author, the daughter of a Socialist professor, fought at Sviazhsk and in the Volga flotilla. Her little book, of which a German translation has been published, is a psychological document and historical testimony of the first importance. [An English translation of Larissa Reissner’s narrative, ‘Sviazhsk’, was published in Fourth International (New York), June 1943; reproduced in Leon Trotsky: The Man and His Work (J. Hansen and others) (New York, 1969).)

17. [Arkadi Rosengoltz subsequently joined Trotsky’s opposition to Stalin. He soon capitulated, and was appointed first ambassador to London and then Commissar for Foreign Trade. He was arrested in late 1937 and appeared as a major defendant in the Bukharin-Rykov Moscow trial the following year; executed March 1938. Ivan Nikitich Smirnov was known as ‘the Lenin of Siberia’ through his part in establishing Bolshevik rule there after the revolution. He lost his post in the Soviet government after his membership of the Trotskyist opposition, was exiled in 1927, but capitulated after Stalin’s ‘Left turn’. Arrested in 1933 and given a ten-year sentence, he was put on trial again with the ‘Trotskyite-Zinovievite Centre’ in August 1936 and shot with all the other defendants.)

18. S. I. Gusev, ‘The Days of Sviazhsk’, in Proletarskaya Revoliutsiya, No. 2 (25), 1924. [This is a very barbed reference by Serge, since Gusev, an old military rival of Trotsky’s from the eastern front dispute of 1919, had become a prominent writer, or rather re-writer, of military history from a Stalinist viewpoint: his brochure, Our Military Disagreements, had condemned the ‘severe methods’ of Trotsky which he had endorsed in the passage cited by Serge.)

19. Speech at the Kazan Theatre, 11 September.

20. M. Tukhachevsky, ‘The First Army in 1918’, in Revoliutsiya i Voina, No. 4–5, 1921.

21. The worker Blyukher became one of the Red Army’s best strategists; see M. Golubykh, The Partisans of the Ural [no Russian title available) (Ekaterinburg, 1924). [Blyukher, after a mission to the Kuomintang as their chief military adviser, became Red Army Marshal to the Far Eastern army; in this command he inflicted a decisive defeat on the Japanese at Lake Hassan in the summer of 1938. He died in November that year, having been arrested and severely tortured in theNKVD purge of the army.]

22. [Kovtyukh continued his military career: he reached the rank of Army Corps Commander and was shot, probably in July 1938, in Stalin’s massacre of army leaders.]

23. The 6,000 workers of Ivashchenko rose as the Red Army approached the city, but prematurely; the Reds did not reach Samara until a week later.

24. In the present work we will be unable to follow the events taking place in the Far East. Ever since the beginning of the year, a ‘Russian government’ had been in residence at Harbin in Manchuria, under the presidency of ‘General’ Horvat, the manager of the Chinese-Eastern Railway. Mr Putilov [former owner of the famous Works] played a prominent role in it. It was this government that first proposed the formation of the National Army to Admiral Kolchak; the Admiral had to visit Tokyo to seek the agreement of the Japanese government. The real master of the Far East was the Japanese General Nakashima. Ataman Semyonov was battling against the Reds, at the head of powerful bands of some 1,800 Chinese, Mongols, Buryats, Japanese, Serbs and Trans-Baikal Cossacks. His de facto chief of staff was one Captain Kuroki, the son of the Japanese marshal who distinguished himself in the Russo-Japanese war. A Siberian government, headed by the SR Derber, was trying to function at Vladivostok. This town was being disputed between the Bolshevik workers on the one side and the Czechs and White Russians on the other. The Americans landed there in September; a Japanese marshal, Otani, took the supreme command of all the Allied forces in Siberia; and the Aliies formed a council of High Commissioners, on which Britain was represented by Sir Charles Eliot, a former diplomat in Petrograd, and France by M. Regnault, their ambassador to Tokyo. This Council brutally disarmed the Russian officers who were suspected of revolutionary tendencies. In the meantime, the Czech General Gajda was capturing Chita; along the length of the Trans-Siberian Railway he was arranging mass shootings and floggings of the peasants, and proclaiming himself as Generalissimo of the Russian and Czechoslovak armies (September). General Stepanov wrote to General Alexeyev: ‘It appears that Japan, which lacks iron resources, will take: 1. Our Siberian coast, which is rich in iron ore; 2. Our part of the Chinese-Eastern Railway; 3. The port of Vladivostok and the Usuri territory.’ Japan’s designs still encountered the resistance of the US A. A. Denikin, Sketches of the Russian Turmoil (Ocherki Russkoi Smuty) (Paris,” 1921–5), Vol. 3.

25. M. Y. Latsis, The Extraordinary Commissions for Struggle Against Counter-Revolution (Chrezvichainye Komissii po Barbe s Kontr-Revoliutsiei) (Moscow, 1921).

26. A decree of 2 November regularized the structure of the Extraordinary Commissions. The All-Russian Central Commission (Vee-Cheka) was charged with the task of unifying and controlling all the local commissions, whose decisions it was empowered to quash. Its members were appointed by the Council of People’s Commissars; its chairman was a member of the Collegium of the Interior; and representatives to it were delegated directly from the Commissariats of the Interior and of Justice. Its principal members, apart from Dzerzhinsky, its chairman, were Latsis, Peters and Ksenofontov.

The local Chekas were constituted by the Executives of the local Soviets and remained subordinate to them, though the appointment of their chiefs had to be sent for approval.

27. Latsis, op. cit.

28. In all, 12,733 persons were executed in 1918, 1919 and 1920, over the whole of Russia. These official Cheka figures, which are admitted to be an under-estimate, can serve only as an indication of the true picture. Evidently they summarize only the organized, controlled and systematized activity of the Commissions. It must also be realized that the civil Revolutionary Tribunals also applied the death-penalty. [W. H. Chamberlin (The Russian Revolution, 1917–1921 (London, 1935), Vol. 2, pp. 74–5) discusses the figure of 12,733, which must be a gross under-estimate even of ‘organized ‘ Cheka activity; he concludes that a total of 50,000 killed would be more probable for the Red terror in the civil war period of 1918–20.]

29. A. Mathiez, La Révolution Française (Paris, 1922), Vol. 3, p. 88, on the terror.

30. A figure given by M. Aulard. A reactionary historian, M. Jacques Bainville, concludes, despite his bias, that ‘Regardless of its atrocious follies and its ignoble executants, the terror was an expression of the nation. It enlarged the energy of France in the time of one of the greatest dangers she has ever known’ (Histoire de la France (Paris, 1924)).

31. In reality, the terror has been going on for centuries. From the Middle Ages till the coming of the bourgeois revolution it was the normal regime imposed by the possessing classes on the poor. According to Thomas More, 70,000 thieves, big and petty, were executed in England under Henry VIII. Under Queen Elizabeth vagabonds were being hung at the rate of 300 to 400 a year. In France ‘under Louis XVI (ordinance of 13 July 1777) any fit man aged between 16 and 60 who lacked means of support and had no profession could be sent to the galleys.’ (See Marx’s Chapter 24, ‘On Primitive Accumulation’, in Capital.) The French law currently in force considers vagabondage (defined as the state of being without lodging, work or the means of support) as an offence punishable, if repeated, by ‘relegation’ to a penal colony, i.e. by a life-long penalty scarcely distinguishable from forced labour. See Victor Serge, ‘The Problem of Revolutionary Repression’, in Les Coulisses d’une Sûreté Générale (Paris, 1923).

32. See the memoirs of Roman Gul, Icy Marches (Ledyanoi Pokhod) (Berlin, 1922).

33. L. Trotsky, Sur Lénine (Paris, 1926), Chapter 5.

34. N. Lenin, Collected Works (London, 1969), Vol. 27, p. 344.

Chapter 10: The German Revolution

1. E. Ludendorff, My War Memories, 1914–1918 (London, 1919), Vol. 2.

2. Extracts from telegrams sent by GHQ to the government: 1 October 1918, 1300 hours: ‘ . . . Urgently requested to propose peace forthwith. The troops are still holding but impossible to foresee what may happen tomorrow. Signed: Lersner.’ 1 October, 1330 hours: ‘If Prince Max of Baden is charged with forming a government at 7 or 8 this evening, I am willing to wait until the morning. Otherwise, I shall feel it necessary to issue a statement to the governments of the world this very night. Signed: Hindenburg.’ 1 October (dispatched 2 October, at 0010 hours): ‘General Ludendorff has told me that our peace proposals must be transmitted immediately from Berne to Washington. The army cannot wait another 48 hours. Signed: Grunau.’ Such was the terror inspired by the army in the breasts of the General Staff! Paul Fröhlich, The German Revolution [a version of Fröhlich’s: Zehn Jahre Krieg und Bürgerkrieg, Berlin, 1924] (1926), Chapter 13.

3. [Ebert actually became Reich Chancellor, but a legal fiction of continuity between him and his predecessor as Chancellor and Regent, Prince Max, was maintained so that the officials of the Imperial authorities could recognize the legitimacy of the new government without violating their oaths to the Emperor (E. Waldman, The Spartacist Uprising of 1919 (Milwaukee, 1958), p. 89).]

4. N. Lenin, Collected Works (London, 1969), Vol. 28, pp. 101–3.

5. Long years afterwards, in 1924 [i.e., when Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev were accumulating every scrap of fact hinting at a divergency between Lenin and Trotsky], these words have been interpreted as the sign of a disagreement between the two leaders. It is enough to refer to the text of Lenin’s remarks to see that both leaders were expressing the same idea. In any case, Trotsky was speaking in the name of the party’s Central Committee. All we have here is a loose formulation let drop by the speaker, if not a stenographic error of the kind that is so abundant in the transcribed reports of the time. At this point there is only one line of thought, that of the party; on this common basis one can find only a slight nuance of difference, in that the emphasis in Lenin’s speech is upon the danger of war with the imperialist Entente, whereas Trotsky is concluding (in his speech of 30 October, at Vee-Tsik) that the Republic enjoys a new respite up to the coming spring, since it is too late for large-scale operations to be commenced this year (a view which would be soon confirmed by events); his whole thought turns now on the offensive to be waged by the revolution in the West. We may discern here, perhaps, either the natural effects of the division of labour between the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars and the Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council; or the display of two different temperaments, one inclined to prudence and the other more towards the offensive.

6. From ‘Strange and Monstrous,’ Lenin’s reply to the Left Communists, 28 February 1918 (Collected Works, Vol. 27, p. 72).

7. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 28, pp. 65–6. A year later the Soviet Republic was to show itself to be inspired by these same principles when Lenin and Trotsky, in a joint telegram of 18 April 1919, urged the Soviet government of the Ukraine to take the offensive in the direction of Czernovitz (Bukovina) in order to establish a link with Soviet Hungary.

8. ibid., pp. 116, 117, 123, 124. These observations were self-evidently addressed to those Communists who would have liked to force the pace of events in the Ukraine by means of an armed intervention.

9. K. Kautsky, The Road to Power (Chicago, 1909).

10. See Les Partis Social-Démocrates (a set of monographs put out by the Bureau d’Édition et de Diffusion) (Paris, 1925); also G. Y. Yakovin, The Political Development of Contemporary Germany [no Russian title available] (Leningrad, 1927).

11. [i.e. after its failure to mobilize a large working-class base in the events of 1923.]

12. [Liebknecht actually voted with the rest of the SPD parliamentarians in August 1914; and when he did break discipline he was not joined by Ruhle till March 1915.]

13. [Wilsonism: i.e. the principles of post-war settlement propounded by the US President.]

14. [Albert Ballin was a Hamburg shipping magnate, Klöckner, Krupp, Thyssen and Hugenberg were Ruhr industrial houses, Hugo Stinnes was an empire-building entrepreneur controlling many newspapers, and Walter Rathenau was the brilliant Jewish capitalist and politician assassinated by Right-wing thugs in 1922.]

15. [Sir George Buchanan and Maurice Paléologue were respectively British and French ambassadors to the Tsarist Imperial Court and Provisional Government; Albert Thomas was the French Socialist leader and Minister of Armaments in the Clemenceau cabinet who visited Russia in the days of Kerensky in an attempt to keep her in the war.]

16. [The German designation of the government, Rat der Volksbeauftragten, is a virtual translation of Lenin’s ‘Council of People’s Commissars’; ‘Commissaries’ is given as the translation of Serge’s term Mandataires, which he uses here rather than Commissaires.]

17. It is true that any consent to negotiate on their part would have been reluctant. But the experience of the Allied troops sent into Russia has shown that the Entente was in no position to wage a victorious war against revolutionary countries. On their first contact with the proletarian revolution, the troops became rapidly disaffected. The revolution would not have stopped at the Rhine. Foch and Wilson would have had to be much more accommodating before a combined Russian and German revolution than von Kühlmann and Hoffmann were at Brest-Litovsk before an isolated Russian revolution.

18. General Groener, Ludendorff’s successor at the Supreme General Command, declared at the Munich trial of 1925: ‘We [i.e. the High Command and the Social-Democrats] concluded an alliance against Bolshevism. . . . I was in touch with Ebert every day. My aim was to take the power away from the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils. We were planning for ten divisions to enter Berlin. Ebert was in agreement with us. . . . The Independents and the Soviets demanded that the troops should go in unarmed; Ebert agreed with us that they should go in well-armed. We drew up a detailed plan of action for Berlin: the capital was to be disarmed and purged of the Spartacists. Everything was worked out jointly with Ebert. . . . After this, a strong government was to be established. The troops did arrive in December, but as they were set on getting back to their homes, the plan was never implemented . . . ’

19. [It appears that, although Yoffe was indeed conducting revolutionary propaganda in Germany, these particular leaflets were ‘planted’ in the diplomatic luggage by the Prussian police (Waldman, op. cit., pp. 66–7).]

20. From the Moscow Izvestia, 18 or 19 December 1918.

21. [Novo-cherkassk was the capital of the Don territory.]

22. [The Terek region in the Caucasus borders on the river of the same name, which runs into the Caspian Sea.]

23. The name of the consul Hainaut has been transcribed from the Russian, and the spelling may be wrong.

24. The same applies to the name Hochain.

25. [Poole’s reports back to the War Office, extracted from the Cabinet papers, are summarized in R. H. Ullman, Britain and the Russian Civil War (Princeton, 1968), p. 49: they recommended large-scale assistance to Denikin (including tanks, aircraft and British troops) to stop the Bolshevik terror from ‘depopulating large tracts’ and ‘destroying civilization’.]

26. Today Stalingrad. [Since 1961, Volgograd.]

27. [Budyonny became a loyal military supporter of Stalin; he was made Marshal of the Soviet Union in 1935 and survived the army purge; he played no serious role in the Second World War.]

28. I. Maisky, The Democratic Counter-Revolution (Demokraticheskaya Kontr-Revoliutsiya) (Moscow, 1923).

29. [Brigadier-General Alfred Knox, during his spell as Military Attaché to the British Embassy in Petrograd, had in 1917 backed Kornilov’s coup against Kerensky; in the following year he tried to have Lockhart recalled (during the latter’s pro-Soviet phase) and campaigned ardently for the unleashing of Japan upon Siberia (R. H. Ullman, Intervention and the War (Princeton, 1961), pp. 11–12, 131, 197–8). General Maurice Janin, the titular commander-in-chief of the Allied force in Siberia, was in practice Knox’s subordinate (Ullman, Britain and the Russian Civil War, p. 35); his presence at Vladivostok was the expression both of the French stake in Allied intervention (he had long experience in pre-revolutionary Russia and had headed the French Military Mission to St Petersburg in 1916) and of the Czechoslovaks’ bargaining for political recognition. The Czech connection had been established when he commanded the Czechoslovak forces fighting in France prior to his arrival in Siberia.]

30. [There is considerable controversy over the precise measure of the support given by the various Allied representatives to the Kolchak coup. General Janin claimed later that the British had ‘installed’ Kolchak to secure ‘a government of their own’ which would yield them economic concessions in Turkestan. Ambassador Noulens and two of Janin’s staff officers made similar charges; General Knox was alleged to have made the necessary arrangements for the coup at the end of October 1918. The Czechoslovak Legion publicly protested against the overthrow of the Directorate; even before it had taken place, they were on bad terms with Kolchak. The British government itself was highly embarrassed by the coup, since it had just given de facto recognition to the Directorate as the government of Russia. The activities of Colonel J. F. Nielson, a member of Knox’s Military Mission in Omsk, were investigated by Whitehall as tending to suggest British complicity in the Kolchak take-over; he was cleared, although he and his colleagues in the Mission admittedly had prior knowledge that the coup might take place at any moment. Captain Steveni, the other of Knox’s adjutants implicated in the charges, was a reactionary pro-Tsarist whose participation in the actual plot is, according to Ullman, ‘not inconceivable’. The assistance rendered to the plotters by the machine-guns of Colonel Ward’s 25th Middlesex Battalion is not in doubt. See Ullman, Intervention and the War, pp. 279–84 and Britain and the Russian Civil War, pp. 33–4, and P. Fleming, The Fate of Admiral Kolchak (London, 1963), pp. 112–16.]

31. On the Jassy conference, see M. Margulies, A Year of Intervention (God Interventsii) (Berlin, 1923). [Margulies was a participant in the conference.]

32. Since General Franchet d’Esperey did not come to Russia, the intervention plan involving him was abandoned soon afterwards. [Serge is, of course, wrong in thinking of Janin as a possible effective ‘controller’ of Kolchak: see note 30 above.]

33. [The Revolutionary Communists and Narodnik Communists were two small splinter parties which separated from the Left S Rs after the attempted Left SR rising in July 1918. The Narodnik Communists dissolved their party and entered the Russian Communist party in November that year, and the ‘Party of Revolutionary Communism’ (which published its own press with an interesting theoretical position supporting the Soviets but denying the need for a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’) dissolved itself into the Bolshevik ranks in late 1920.]

34. [These were all Bolshevik speakers: Y. M. Steklov was the editor of Izvestia, D. I. Kursky was People’s Commissar of Justice and V. Avanesov was the secretary of Vee-Tsik.)

35. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 28, pp. 138, 139, 142, 143, 150, 151, 154, 160, 163–4.

36. The Directorate’s first proclamation stated that the propertied classes (the capitalists and big landlords) had dishonoured themselves through their greed, their anti-national egoism and their subservience to the foreigner.

37. [G. L. Pyatakov became one of the ablest of Soviet administrators (he was one of the tiny circle of top Bolsheviks singled out for cautious praise in Lenin’s ‘Testament’ of December 1922). After being a leading member of the Trotskyist Left opposition, he capitulated in 1928 and worked as Commissar for Russian heavy industry, being re-instated into the party’s Central Committee in 1934. He was arrested in late 1936, confessed to a variety of conspiracies for assassination and sabotage in the ‘Trial of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Centre’ in January 1937, was sentenced to death and shot.)

38. In 1919 the Ukraine, now entirely occupied by Denikin’s White army, was lost to the Soviet Republic. Denikin’s offensive against Tula and Moscow was broken by the Red Army and by peasant uprisings in his rear. The revolution finally managed to reconquer the country in 1920. Throughout this succession of struggles Rakovsky continued to head the Soviet government of the Ukraine.

39. G. Noske, Von Kiel bis Kapp (Berlin, 1920).

40. [Emil Eichhorn (1863–1925) had headed the German SPD’s press office from 1908 to 1917 ; he then ran the USPD’s press service. In his capacity as Polizeipräsident of the city during the revolution, he had reported regularly to the Berlin Executive of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils, encouraged the armament of the workers and established a revolutionary militia, the Sicherheitswehr. He joined the KPD in 1920 (G. Badia, Le Spartakisme (Paris, 1967), pp. 247, 251, 420).]

41. [He had been appointed by the USPD and the Berlin Executive of the Councils; the latter body was swayed by the government after the ebb of the revolutionary wave in the city, and actually endorsed his dismissal (6 January) ; Waldman, op. cit., pp. 165–6, 180.]

42. These lines are taken from a letter by Karl Radek to the Central Committee of the KPD dated from Berlin on 9 January. Working clandestinely in the capital, Radek saw accurately and clearly. He warned the party against the danger of submitting to provocation. This letter is a model of political foresight and revolutionary firmness. If Radek’s advice had been heeded, the German proletariat would probably have escaped the irreparable defeat of January, preserved its leaders, Karl and Rosa, frustrated the designs of Ebert, Wels and Noske and kept the future open. See K. Radek, In the Service of the German Revolution (Na Sluzhbe Germanskoi Revoliutsii) (Moscow, 1921); German translation, 1921. It is to be regretted that this remarkable book, which condenses the experience of a year of decisive struggles in central Europe, has not been translated into French.

43. The Tiergarten is a vast park situated at the centre of Berlin.

44. From an article which appeared in Rote Fahne [actually by a nother hand, during January 1920, though it closely followed Rosa’s own thinking in her article, ‘Was Machen Die Führer ?’ in the issue of 7 January 1919: see Waldman, op. cit., pp. 177–8, 188–9].

45. Noske, op. cit.

46. [V. E. Orlando was the Prime Minister of Italy.]

47. [Serge’s analysis of the va rying policies of the Allied ministers, and of their motivation, is broadly correct. Ullman’s account, drawn from the minutes of the British Empire Delegation and of the leading ‘Council of Ten’ at the Paris Peace Conference, relates the lengths to which Lloyd George went to ask each participating government how many troops it could provide to crush Bolshevism; the answer, in each case, was ‘none’ (as the British Prime Minister had doubtless guessed before he asked). Lloyd George was formally opposed to a cordon sanitaire against Bolshevism; but both he and President Wilson continued the policy of blockade against the Soviet Republic, jointly with the other Allies, until late 1919. Wilson was the first to disengage from the naval encirclement of Russia’s foreign trade, and then on the purely legalistic grounds that (though he was in sympathy with the aims of the blockade) he could not order the US Navy to take action unless Congress had declared war against the blockaded nation. The British Cabinet rose to the occasion by deciding, on 4 July, that ‘In fact, a state of war did exist between Great Britain and the Bolshevist government of Russia’, so that ‘our naval forces in Russian waters should be authorized to engage enemy forces by land and sea, when necessary.’ But the formal conclusion of the Versailles treaty some days later, and the prospect of the opening of large-scale trading relations between Russia and Germany (and the neutrals), raised a further question-mark over the usefulness and legitimacy of the blockade. In practice, however, it was continued: Russia’s external trade was almost non-existent in 1919 as well as in 1918 (Ullman, Britain and the Russian Civil War, pp. 104–8, 287–91.)]

Chapter 11: War Communism

1. 1 pood = 36 pounds avoirdupois.

2. During the civil war (1918–21), the following were destroyed, according to official figures: 3,672 railway bridges, 3,597 ordinary bridges, 1,750 kilometres of railway-line, 381 railway depots and workshops and almost 180,000 kilometres of telegraph and telephone lines.

3. Production will continue to fall until the end of the civil war and the institution of the New Economic Policy. For 1920, the following indices are given as a percentage of output in 1913: coal, twenty-seven per cent; cast-iron, 2.4 per cent ; linen textiles, thirty-eight per cent. The production of the Donetz basin fell to zero in 1921.

4. Though they were conspicuously outstripped in the Germany of 1923.

5. The corresponding figures of 1921 were: currency in circulation, 1,638,600,000,000 roubles; decline in the value of the rouble, by a factor of 26,533; real value of the money in circulation, 44 million roubles.

6. And, for 1919–20, at 253 million roubles. See E. Preobrazhensky, ‘Finance and Monetary Circulation’, in Five Years (Za Pyat Let) (Moscow, 1922).

7. 1920 was the year which brought Russia closest to the total abolition of money. All public services were free; rent was abolished; theatre tickets were distributed free among the workers by the unions and factory committees; the post and (in some towns) the tram service were also free. Free meals for children were introduced in 1919.

8. State agricultural production was not begun until the beginning of 1919. The large farming estates had vanished by two thirds; they had lost nine tenths of their horses and were very short of implements. By 1927, large-scale working had been restored only to a slight degree through the operations of State farming and the agricultural communes.

9. At the end of 1920 they had fallen by forty per cent.

10. In European Russia, sixty-four per cent of all urban premises were expropriated. In Moscow the proportion was ninety-five per cent, in Petrograd 98.3 per cent.

11. This followed from the fact that they grew corn for sale on the market: consequently they formed part of the system of commodity production.

12. See the debates of the Fifth Congress of the Communist International (1924) on the question of the programme: contributions of Bukharin, Thalheimer and others.

13. L. Kritsman, The Heroic Period of the Great Russian Revolution (Geroicheskii Period Velikoi Russkoi Revoliutsii) (Moscow, 1926). This remarkable work is the only book which undertakes a serious analysis of War Communism.

14. N. Lenin, Collected Works (London, 1969), Vol. 28, pp. 212–13.

15. ibid., pp. 190, 191.

16. ‘It is a truth long known to every Marxist that in any capitalist society the only decisive forces are the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, and that all the social elements which occupy a position between these classes, within the economic category of “the petty-bourgeoisie” inevitably oscillate between these two forces’ (‘Valuable Admissions of Pitirim Sorokin’, ibid., p. 186). But, beginning with the spring of 1919, the Republic found itself faced with difficulties, which grew in September and October; the loss of its power appeared imminent. Once again the middle classes suffered a change of heart, resting their hopes on the return of the bourgeoisie (except, that is, in the regions where the peasants had had first-hand experience of bourgeois rule).

17. ibid., pp. 207, 211, 215, 214, 212 (Speech to the Moscow party workers’ meeting of 27 November, section 1: ‘Report on the Attitude of the Proletariat to the Petty-Bourgeois Democrats’).

18. Alexander Blok was also responsible for the idea of the regeneration of the world by the barbarians of Asia—the ‘Scythians’—who would bear with them a new culture, more profound and truly human than that founded in the West on the basis of technological progress. Like Byely, he belonged to the literary circles that were close to the Left SR party.

19. The work of Russia’s great writers, yesterday’s ‘revolutionaries’ now turned counter-revolutionary after the seizure of power by the proletariat, are filled with such execration, such horror at ‘Sovdepia’ [a nickname abbreviation meaning ‘land of the Soviet deputies’] that they belong to the realm of social pathology. Andreyev, from exile in Finland, issues his pamphlet S.O.S., an appeal to all the interventions against ‘the assassins of the fatherland.’ Zinaida Hippius, a talented poet whose literary salon has been the most influential in Petrograd, with a ‘mystical anarchism’ as its chief trend, looks forward in her verses to the day when ‘we shall hang them in silence’.

20. [A. V. Lunacharsky, a Bolshevik from 1903 who had broken with Lenin to join Gorky’s ‘God-followers’, rejoined the party in 1917 and held the Commissariat of Education until 1929. He died in 1933 shortly after being appointed Ambassador to Spain.]

21. We cannot give any figures, since the available statistics begin only in 1919. With the arrival of the New Economic Policy over 1921–3, a number of these hastily founded educational establishments disappeared.

22. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 31, p. 336.

23. Lenin makes a special point of saying ‘April’, doubtless in order to recall, with the hint of an illusion, the fact that before his memorable April theses the Bolshevik party was still taking its position of 1905, which considered the Russian revolution to be a bourgeois one.

24. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 28, p. 299.

25. ibid., p. 343.

26. ‘Misery cannot be socialized!’ wrote Charles Rappoport at the end of 1917, in the Journal du Peuple, putting the view of the whole Socialist-petty-bourgeoisie of the West in the French labour press. Since the Socialism of misery was impossible, all that could be done was to allow the bourgeoisie to organize the workers’ misery for its own profit, upon the pile of ruins left by the war. Such was the feeble logic of reformism. Rappoport, dreaming of a parliamentary democracy for Russia, appealed to the Bolsheviks to ‘save the revolution by convoking the Constituent Assembly’. [Another deliberately unkind reference by Serge, since Rappoport had subsequently joined the French Communist party as an orthodox supporter of the Moscow line.]

27. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 28, p. 300.

28. ibid., pp. 112, 113.

29. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 27. p. 232.

30. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 28, p. 348 (Speech of 11 December to the First Congress of the Committees of the Poor Peasants).

31. ibid., p. 381 (Speech of 19 December to the Second Congress of Economic Councils).

32. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 31, pp. 124, 125.

33. [General Alexander P. Rodzyanko headed the field command of the White army which advanced upon Petrograd in May 1919, backed by Estonia, Britain, the United States and the counter-revolutionary emigration in Finland. (See, for Rodzyanko and Yudenich, John Silverlight, The Victors’ Dilemma: Allied Intervention in the Russian Civil War, London, 1970, pp. 305–8.) He was the nephew of M. V. Rodzyanko, the 1917 Duma leader and anti-Bolshevik politician.]

34. [N. N. Yudenich, who had been the Tsar’s Chief of Staff from 1913, commanded the White army in the Baltic region after the October revolution. In October 1919 he led a final abortive offensive against Petrograd. He died an exile in France in 1933.]

35. [British government files for 1918 provide many examples of the ‘vast designs’ for intervention on whose precise nature Victor Serge could only speculate. Even before the world war ended, a new anti-Bolshevist geo-politics becomes visible in the official memoranda. Thus, a submission of 22 September 1918 from the Director of Military Intelligence, Major-General Thwaites, endorsed the analysis of the Military Attaché in Stockholm, Brigadier-General H. Yarde Buller: ‘I am informed—I do not know if correctly—that Bolshevism was originated by a small nucleus of men in the United States, consisting of not more than six, of whom some were of the Jewish persuasion. Be this as it may, there can be no doubt that it is a fever that is spreading, the germs of which are latent among many people of all nations, and it is of the utmost importance for the future tranquillity of the world that every endeavour be made to stem it.’ A prompt anti-Soviet intervention was advocated, with the agreement of Britain’s enemies in the war: ‘an agreement might be come to with the Central Powers (who are strongly opposed to the Bolshevist movement) by which we could have free use of the Baltic’ (Public Record Office, File FO 371/3344).

In the same file R. A. Leeper, head of the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office, submitted a report on ‘The Growing Danger of Bolshevism in Russia’, dated 14 October 1918: ‘As the military power of Germany is being gradually crushed, Germany ceases to be the greatest danger to European civilization, while a new danger—no less deadly—looms up in the near future. That danger is Bolshevism.’ ‘In the event of the continuation of the war and the intensification of the unrest in Germany, Bolshevism may spread, first to the Russian border provinces and then to the Central Powers, thus becoming a force that would seriously threaten Europe.’ Leeper wanted the menace ‘dealt with now’: a comparatively small army coming from the Urals might advance on Moscow and put it down by force. Meanwhile Leeper’s opposite number at the Home Office, Sir Basil Thomson of the Directorate of lntelligence, was already circulating, in 1918 as in 1919, a ‘Monthly Review of Revolutionary Movements Abroad’ (in Public Record Office; PID File 371/4382) which indicates the official anxiety, if little else. (Thus, Report No. 10, for August 1919, contained a summary of developments in some thirty-five countries in its few pages: ‘The unrest in Portugal continues’, etc.)

With the ending of the war, the various ad hoc justifications for intervention (in the cause of the military front against Germany or of this or that pro-Allied Russian element) had to be dropped, and the ideological note becomes more sustained. Lockhart’s ‘Memorandum on the Internal Situation in Russia,’ delivered to the Foreign Office on the first anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution (Public Record Office, File FO 371/3337) notes that ‘Our victories over Germany have removed our original pretext for intervention.’ He advanced various justifications to replace the ‘pretext’: the risk of revolution in other countries, loyalty to the committed counter-revolutionary forces, ‘humanitarian grounds’ and others more material. ‘A successful intervention will give the Allies a predominant economic position in Russia. It will be more than paid for by economic concessions. . . . By restoring order in Russia at once, not only are we preventing the spread of Bolshevism as a political danger but we are also saving for the rest of Europe the rich and fertile grain districts of the Ukraine.’ Massive intervention, requiring at least 100,000 Allied soldiers, mostly from the United States but with British and French participation, was to be mounted on a ‘proper scale’, strengthening the existing Allied fronts in Siberia and north Russia, and joining Denikin’s forces in the south, in a concerted movement to take Moscow. (R. H. Ullman, Intervention and the War (Princeton, 1961), pp. 296–300, provides a summary of the report.) A similar memorandum was tabled, in less lurid strategic detail, by J . D. Gregory, the head of the Foreign Office Russian Department (in Public Record Office, File FO 371/3344).

By 1919, the most ardent Bolshevik-eater in British government circles would be a member of the Cabinet: Winston Churchill, the incoming War Secretary, who would advocate massive intervention in Russia to ‘break up’ Bolshevik power. In Churchill’s early statement of his position, the Allies must engage themselves in Russia ‘thoroughly, with large forces abundantly supplied with mechanical appliances’. (These proposals, and the opposition they encountered from Lloyd George, are recorded in R. H. Ullman, Britain and the Russian Civil War (Princeton, 1968), pp. 90–98; the pre-Churchillian Cabinet debate on intervention is ibid., pp. 10–14.) In February 1919 Churchill would enter into his close relationship with Sidney Reilly, now working in a freelance capacity for MI1C, the espionage department of Churchill’s new ministry. Meanwhile, at the end of the “Year One”, following his return to England in November 1918, Reilly had set up a confidential social circle of anti-Bolshevists in the Intelligence and political departments, some of whom were Secret Service agents in the field, others senior Whitehall officials. Piquant details of this social round are given in the biography of Reilly by Robin Bruce Lockhart (himself a former Intelligence officer with access to much information in this area): Ace of Spies (London, 1967), pp. 84, 90–91, 98. Almost without exception, all of the authors of the memoranda for anti-Soviet action quoted earlier were intimates of Reilly in these months and subsequently. On 12 November, Reilly gave a party at the Savoy for Lockhart, Leeper and their wives; on the following day Lockhart organized a theatre and supper outing for Reilly, Gregory and Captain Hill, Reilly’s Secret Service aide in Russia. Among the callers at Reilly’s expensively furnished flat in the Albany was Sir Basil Thomson of the Home Office Intelligence department. And Reilly was also active in a select club uniting leading members of Britain’s espionage and diplomatic services in an annual ‘Bolo Liquidation Dinner’ where those attending would drink a toast each year to ‘the liquidation of the Bolos’—the latter being a nickname for the Bolsheviks. (A menu for one of these functions is given as an illustration in Lockhart’s biography of Reilly; it is signed by Leeper, Gregory, Reilly, Hill, Paul Dukes and other agents who had been working in Russia.)

These were only the most articulate and explicit supporters of an anti-Bolshevik crusade (and it may be noted that Dukes, Leeper and Lockhart were to be knighted in the course of their careers, with Leeper going on to be British Ambassador to Greece during the civil war of 1944 and Lockhart returning to the Foreign Office as an Intelligence and psychological warfare director). Less militantly, Sir George Buchanan (the former Ambassador to the Tsar), presented a memorandum on 20 October 1918 arguing for a very drastic intervention but insisting that ‘I do not for a moment advocate a crusade against Bolshevism.’ The comment on this paper by Lord Robert Cecil (on 31 October) is revealing of the nature both of the proposal and of the standard British attitude on intervention : ‘I am afraid that Sir George Buchanan’s policy of occupying Moscow and taking in hand the reconstruction of Russia is impracticable’ (Public Record Office, File FO 371/3344).

Another interesting exchange occurs in the same file between the young E. H.Carr, then a fairly junior official in the Foreign Office, and Cecil. Carr advocates ‘some sort of understanding with the Bolsheviks’, on the basis of recognizing Soviet power in the vastly truncated area of European Russia controlled by the Reds: ‘we should remain at Archangel and Murmansk where the inhabitants have renounced Bolshevism and in Siberia where the majority also appear to be opposed to it’. The Soviet government would also have to give up any hopes of recovering the Ukraine, Poland, Estonia and possibly White Russia. This mild proposal for controlled co-existence on the basis of the territorial spoils of intervention was turned down by Carr’s chief; Cecil insisted that there must be no recognition of the Soviet government on the ground that ‘Now that our enemies are defeated the chief danger to the country is Bolshevism.’

Thus, even before the arrival of Winston Churchill in his role of intervener-in-chief, the terms of anti-Soviet military activity by Britain were set. Despite the heated argument at Cabinet level over the extent and purpose of the interventionist action there was an ideologically motivated commitment to war against the Bolsheviks (even though a ‘crusade’ might be abjured), limited by sundry considerations of what was ‘impracticable’. The vast geopolitical designs were curbed by inter-Allied rivalry, tactical subtlety, the post-war demobilization, plain incompetence and often the sheer difficulties of geographical access. For, as Peter Fleming points out (The Fate of Admiral Kolchak (London, 1963), p. 30), the common characteristic of all the theatres of Allied intervention against Bolshevism is ‘accessibility; the Allies intervened in Russia wherever it was physically possible for them to do so’.]