Eyewitnesses, Memoirs and Primary Voices
W. Astrov, A. Slepkov and J. Thomas, An Illustrated History of the Russian Revolution, two volumes (1928). Dated and rather obscure, but full of wonderful photographs and reportage – including the full captivating tale of Lieutenant Sinegub’s wanderings in the Winter Palace, of which only a snatch could be retold above.
Bessie Beatty, The Red Heart of Russia (1918). Sometimes florid to the point of comedy (within the book’s first two short paragraphs Petrograd is a forest in the silver twilight and is also strange, mysterious, inscrutable, compelling, and a candle – drawing moths, of course) but, or as a result, oddly engaging.
Louise Bryant, Six Red Months in Russia (1918). A vivid and exciting telling by a radical journalist.
Jonathan Daly and Leonid Trofimov (eds), Russia in War and Revolution, 1914–22: A Documentary History (2009). A wonderful compendium of primary texts, ranging from various official and semi-official declarations to anonymous letters and recollections.
Eduard Dune, Notes of a Red Guard (1993). The reminiscences of Dune’s days as a teenager, a politically developing activist with the Bolsheviks, and an armed militia member. The book includes vivid memories of the urban fighting in Moscow in October.
Sheila Fitzpatrick (ed.), In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War (2000). Life stories from a wide range of women bringing powerfully up close the lived realities of these days.
Michael Hickey (ed.), Competing Voices from the Russian Revolution: Fighting Words (2010). A large and extraordinarily useful collection of primary texts, arranged by theme.
A. F. Ilyin-Genevsky, From the February Revolution to the October Revolution 1917 (1931). A charming and moving memoir from a man later as well- or better-known as a chess master as he was as a Bolshevik revolutionary.
Mark Jones (ed.), Storming the Heavens: Voices of October (1987). More focused and shorter than the Hickey, Pitcher or Steinberg, but no less invaluable in the pieces it contains.
Dimitri Von Mohrenschildt (ed.), The Russian Revolution of 1917: Contemporary Accounts (1971). Valuable memoirs and firsthand accounts edited by the remarkable later spy and anti-Soviet Cold War warrior, who died aged 100 in 2002.
Harvey Pitcher (ed.), Witnesses of the Russian Revolution (2nd edition, 2001). The testimonials collected here, unlike those in most collections, are not by Russians, but by visitors to the country during the revolutionary year: Americans and Britons. They include among others Arthur Ransome and Morgan Philips Price, both of whose invaluable writing on the subject is collected in dedicated volumes.
F. F. Raskolnikov, Kronstadt and Petrograd in 1917 (1925). The vivid recollections of one of the key figures among the Kronstadt revolutionaries.
John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World (1919). A justly celebrated committed journalist’s account.
Mark D. Steinberg (ed.), Voices of Revolution, 1917 (2001). A compendium of powerful primary texts separated into three chronological sections, each introduced with a useful essay. It is from this book that soldier Kuchlavok’s letter is excerpted. It is an extraordinary piece of writing that deserves to be read in full – as do many of the achingly powerful soldiers’ letters.
Nikolai Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution of 1917: A Personal Record (1984). It is impossible not to be caught up with the vivid, thoughtful, honest and meticulously observed reminiscences of one of history’s very great observers, Sukhanov.
Other
Boris Dralyuk (ed.), 1917 (2016). A captivating collection of poetry and prose from the revolutionary year.
Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii (eds), Interpreting the Russian Revolution (1999). This collection includes many excellent essays on the revolution’s political culture.
Murray Frame, Boris Kolonitskii, Steven G. Marks and Melissa K. Stockdale (eds), Russian Culture in War and Revolution, 1914–22. Book 1: Popular Culture, the Arts, and Insitutions (2014), and Book 2: Political Culture, Identities, Mentalities, and Memory (2014). Two from Slavica’s multi-volume series, containing essays by a large number of scholars on political representation, memory and heritage, among an enormous range of cultural issues.
Mary Hamilton-Dann, Vladimir and Nadya: The Lenin Story (1998). A curious but intriguing telling of the lives of the revolutionary couple, which fills out various details most others mention only in passing. As does the same author’s obscure but engrossing Lenin in the Recollection of Finns (1979).
Marianne Kamp, ‘Debating Sharia: The 1917 Muslim Women’s Congress in Russia’ (2015), in Journal of Women’s History, volume 27, number 4. A rare resource on this fascinating and important event.
David C. King, Red Star over Russia: A Visual History (2009). The aged monochrome of most contemporary photographs notwithstanding, the visuals of the revolution are absolutely compelling, both in deliberate iconography and in chance conjunctions – as the images here illustrate.
Adele Lindenmeyr, Christopher Read and Peter Waldron (eds), Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914–22. Book 2: The Experience of War and Revolution (2016). This book in Slavica’s series contains essays on an extraordinary variety of topics from the Russian revolution, including philanthropy, drunkenness, drugs, gardening, monasticism, and the representation of Jews.
Anatoly Lunacharsky, Revolutionary Silhouettes (1923). A captivating series of reminiscences by Lunacharsky, of various revolutionaries of his acquaintance.
Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (1989). For the most part Stites’s classic text focuses on the early years of the revolutionary regime itself, but it is included here via the excuse of the precursor utopianism it outlines because it is such a thoroughly transfixing, moving, sometimes hilarious exposition of the avant-garde in everyday life.
Ian D. Thatcher, ‘The St Petersburg/Petrograd Mezhraionka, 1913–1917: The Rise and Fall of a Russian Social Democratic
Workers’ Party Unity Faction’ (2009), in Slavonic and East European Review, volume 87, number 2. One of the very few sources on the small, intellectually and politically scintillating group, associated in particular with Trotsky. Of all the various not-yet-written books on the Russian Revolution, a volume on and selected translations from this ‘Interdistrict group’ clamour most loudly for existence.
Acknowledgements
This book, more than anything else I have written, has not merely benefitted from, but relied on, the engagement and insights of readers and interlocutors. I am more grateful than I can say for their patience and generosity, and for their trenchant and thought-provoking help, feedback, suggestions and criticisms.
I owe an immense debt to all the enormous number of writers from whose work I have learned during my research. I have also been privileged to have received thoughtful and detailed responses to drafts of this manuscript from leading researchers on the topics it touches, who in many cases even shared as-yet-unpublished work. I extend my deepest gratitude to Gleb Albert, Barbara Allen, Clayton Black, Eric Blanc, Lars Lih, Kevin Murphy and Ronald Suny. October is immeasurably better for their generous help.
I am profoundly grateful, too, to many other readers. Their detailed thoughts and responses have been quite invaluable. My thanks to Mic Cheetham, Maria Headley, Frank Hemmes, Susan Powell, Jord Rosenberg and Rosie Warren.
In Russia, I was very fortunate to benefit from the hospitality of and conversations with Boris Kolonitskii, Artemy Magun, Yoel Regev, Alexander Reznik, Alexander Skidan and Elizaveta Zhdankova.
I am deeply grateful to the Rockefeller Bellagio Center, Italy, for granting me a residency fellowship for the writing of this book. I am also thankful for their invaluable support and help, in various ways, to David Broder, Valeria Costa-Kostritsky, José – Gurru – Corominas, Cassia Corominas-Miéville, Indigo Corominas-Miéville, Boris Dralyuk, Brian Evenson, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Stuart Kelly, Jemima Miéville and Paul Robbins.
For their solidarity
and friendship, and for being constant sources of political and intellectual inspiration, I thank my fellow founding editors of Salvage: Jamie Allinson, Richard Seymour and Rosie Warren.
My thanks also to all at Verso, especially Mark Martin, Anne Rumberger, Sarah Shin and Lorna Scott-Fox, for copy-editing above and beyond the call of any duty. Finally, in particular, I am grateful to Sebastian Budgen, my editor and friend. This book came about from his suggestion, and I owe him an immense intellectual and political debt.
Index
Adamovich, Elena, 62
Aiollo, Grigori, 91
Aleichem, Sholem, 21
Alexander II, tsar, 7–9
bomb thrown at, 9
Alexander III, tsar, 9–10
plot against, 10
Alexandra Fedorovna, tsarina, 15, 44, 47, 71
and Nicholas II’s abdication, 83
and Rasputin, 35–6, 38
Alexeev, General Michael, 36, 66, 71–2, 76–7, 80–2, 89, 136, 194, 214, 228, 231, 233, 238
begs tsar to abdicate, 72
Alexeeva, Ekaterina, 267–8
All-Russian Conference of Bolshevik Military Organisations, 155
All-Russian Congress of Soviets, 105, 110, 145, 147, 149, 152, 159, 161, 253–5
Second Congress, 258, 267, 269, 272, 287, 290, 293–7, 300, 304, 306, 315
opening of, 293–4
All-Russian Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, 105, 142–3, 170, 271, 276
Allies, 117, 123, 129, 135, 154, 158, 311, 314
Amur (armoured ship), 291
anarchism, 144–6, 157–8, 168–9, 172, 177, 210, 244
anti-war efforts, 33–4, 55, 91, 101–2, 109, 118, 123, 136, 149, 164–5, 168, 315
Lenin, 33–4, 86–7, 109, 118, 123, 164–5, 309
Petrograd Soviet, 102
soldiers and
literature for, 168
low morale of, 136–7, 162, 164, 200, 209, 265
protests of, 169, 259
Antonov-Ovseyenko, Vladimir, 270–1, 273–4, 276, 302–3, 307
April Days, 115, 120–3
Armand, Inessa, 103
army. See military; soldiers
artists, 28
Asnin, Shlema, 144, 157
Assembly of Russian Factory and Workshop Workers, 18
Astoria Hotel, 60
Aurora (armoured ship), 284, 291–3
map of, ix
authorities, authority of, 257
Avksentiev, Nikolai, 151, 259, 288
Azef, Evno, 10
Bagratuni, Jaques, 272, 275, 290, 292
Bakunin, Michael, 8
Balabanoff, Angelica, 31, 128
Beatty, Bessie, 295, 300
bicycle units, 187, 274–5, 278, 291
Biulleten (newspaper), 162
Black Hundreds, 20–1, 107, 151, 172, 186, 257
mass murder of Jews, 21
Blagonravov, Geogy Ivanovich, 291–3
Blanquism, 114
Bleikhman, Iosif, 144, 169, 174
Blok, Alexander, 92
Bloody Sunday (1905), 19, 40
Bochkareva, Maria, 207
Bogdanov, Boris, 52–3, 111, 150, 152, 156, 273, 275
denounces Lenin, 111
Bogoslovskaya, Nina, 186
Bolsheviks, 24, 55, 62, 91, 154, 197, 240, 300, 302, 309–13, 315–6
anti-war call, 164–5, 168
appropriated house as headquarters of, 110
arrest of, 189, 191, 201
Bolshevisation of Russia, 241
call to suppress their pursuit of power, 149–52
and coalition government, 130–1, 133, 138–9, 242
and counterrevolution, 206, 222, 227, 229, 231, 310–1
arm the workers, 226
death of, 315
and democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants, 30
at Democratic State Conference, 246, 249, 251
disintegration of, 191
and Dual Power, 133
and Duma elections, 212
at Duma, secret meeting, 266–8
and First World War, 32–4
focus on workers, 53
Fourteenth Congress, 313
and insurrection, 262, 264–70
vote in favour of, 268
isolation of, 310
Kerensky’s assault on, 275–7
and Kornilov, mobilisation against, 223
in Latvia, 192
and Lenin, 111–3
and Lenin’s ‘Letters from Afar’, 98–9
masses waiting for, 267
meaning of, in Russian, 17
membership, 27, 197
and Mensheviks, 104, 110
counter-counterrevolutionary partnership, 206
Lenin on coalition between, 212
and military, 95–6, 140, 148–50
Military Organisation (MO), 95, 118, 140, 142, 144–6, 168, 173, 175, 178, 265, 267, 269
All-Russian Conference of Bolshevik Military Organisations, 155, 160, 162
avoiding insurrection, 270
and Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC), 269, 273
surrender, 187–8
and Moscow State Conference, 205–7
officially named Russian Social-Democratic Workers Party (RSDWP), 122
Petersburg Committee, 31, 46, 86, 111, 122, 144–5, 148, 151, 161, 170, 188, 215, 222, 240, 257–8, 265, 276
call to overthrow Provisional Government, 120
newspapers, debate over, 170
Russian Bureau, 79, 87, 97
Petrograd City Conference, 114, 118, 168, 170–1
and Petrograd Soviet, 187, 243, 253
and power, 189, 197, 246, 258, 261, 269
on power to soviets, 170
and protests, 155–6, 173–5, 184, 186–7
and Provisional Government call to overthrow, 118–20
dismissal of, 124, 223, 236–7
transfer of power to (March), 66–7, 69, 79–80
and rebellion, 259–60
and revolution, international export of, 105–6
revolutionary planning, 284
Riga Bolshevik Committee, 91
Second Congress, 294
Sixth Congress, 161, 196, 198, 222, 237
slogan of, 198
and soldiers, 101, 210
Tenth Congress, 313
‘Trench Bolshevism’, 101
triumph of, 156
‘we will see’, 172
on worker-led revolution, 23
and workers, 151, 191
See also Russian Social Democratic Workers Party (RSDWP)
Bonch-Bruevich, Vladimir, 166, 170, 174–5, 286
‘The Armed People’, 100
bourgeois:
capitalism, 13
counterrevolution, 230
disrepute of, 107
government and democratic revolution, 66–7
nationalism, 154
revolution, 69, 104, 126
state, 204
bourgeoisie:
abandons Petrograd, 257, 260
‘Complete Liquidation of the Dictatorship of the Counterrevolutionary Bourgeoisie’, 198
and Democratic State Conference, 246, 248–51
Lenin on, 143, 204
and Mensheviks, 30
no compromise with, 299
and peasantry, 183
Petrograd in danger of, 272
and power, 104, 188, 261
and power struggle, 67, 69
Provisional Government as representative of, 79–80
and revolution, 14, 29–30, 113, 132, 180, 262
revolutionary ‘defencism’ as tool of, 110
and Soviets, 58–9
Trotsky decries, 130
workers irreconcilable with, 26
Breshno-Breshkovskaya, Catherine, 10, 31, 128, 259
bridges in Petrograd, 277–9, 284
British Daily News (newspaper), 167
Broido, Mark, 259–60, 263, 265
Bronstein, Olg
a (Trotsky’s sister), 96
Brusilov, General, 136, 165, 194
Bryant, Louise, 252, 318
Bublikov, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich, 60, 64, 207
Bubnov, Andrei, 222–3, 265–6
Buchanan, George, 43
Bukharin, Nikolai, 315
Burnasheva, Zahida, 121–2
Burstein, Z., 185
Bykhovsky, Naum, 296
capitalism, 13–4, 28–9
hatred of, 26
soviet power as transition away from, 240
and war, 33
Chamberlin, William, 90, 311
Cheremisov, General, 200
Chernov, Viktor, 10, 31, 103, 111, 125–6, 129, 137–8, 152, 179–80, 196, 199
surrounded by protesters, 179–80
Trotsky saves, 180
Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, 8
What Is to Be Done?, 305–6
Chkheidze, N. S., 52, 54–5, 72, 78, 94, 99, 116, 125, 156, 173, 185, 205, 207
denounces Milyukov, 117
denounces protesters, 181
and military demonstration, 147
and new cabinet of Provisional Government, 76
welcome speech for Lenin’s return, 109
Chudnovsky, 269, 273, 292
Churchill, Winston, on Bolshevism, 311
citizen, 71
City Militia, 100, 256, 264
class struggle, 310
coalition government. See Dual Power; Provisional Government
Colletti, Lucio, 204
Committee for Struggle Against the Counterrevolution, 226, 228–9, 231, 239
Committee of Public Safety, 215, 217, 280, 283
commune, 8
communism, 13
Congress of the Nationalities, 242
Constitutional Assembly of the All-Russian Peasants Union, 23
Cossacks, 43–5, 232, 280, 285, 292
charge at Kronstadt sailors, 181
and counterrevolution, 227, 230, 271
counterrevolutionary thuggery of, 186
hunt for Lenin, 201–2
shoot at police, 46
and strikes, 44–5
counterrevolution, 186–7, 191, 197, 215, 224–31
and Bolsheviks, 206, 222, 227, 229, 231, 310–1
collapse of, 231
Committee for Struggle Against the Counterrevolution, 226, 228–9, 231, 239
and Kerensky, 307
Lenin on, 212, 231