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Copyright © 1972 by Edmund Wilson
Copyright 1940, renewed © 1968 by Edmund Wilson
All rights reserved
Originally published in 1972 by Macmillan, Great Britain
Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
This paperback edition, 2012
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Wilson, Edmund, 1895–1972.
To the Finland station; a study in the writing and acting of history.
With a new introd.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-374-27833-4
1. Socialism—History. 2. Communism—History. 3. History—Philosophy. I. Title.
HX36 .W5 1972
335’.009
77187695
eISBN 978-1-4668-9966-7
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The author has particularly to thank the following persons for criticism, information, or the loan of materials: Max Eastman, Christian Gauss, Franz Höllering, Sidney Hook, Robert-Jean Longuet, Mary McCarthy, Max Nomad, and Herbert Solow. He has leaned particularly hard in certain chapters on E. H. Carr’s biography of Bakúnin, Arno Schirokauer’s biography of Lassalle, and the first volume of Leon Trotsky’s biography of Lenin. He owes a special debt to Max Eastman’s book Marx, Lenin, and the Science of Revolution.
Acknowledgments are due The New Republic and the Partisan Review, in which certain sections first appeared.
The policy has been adopted in the case of all Russian names, except those that have been Anglicized or are very familiar, of marking the accented syllables in the hope of at least partially avoiding those prose-interrupting blurs which Russian names are likely to cause in an English text.
I have included (Appendix A) a little burlesque of the version of Marxism in vogue among the local followers of Stalin during the era of the “Popular Front.” It will perhaps suffice as a comment on the subject.