Notes

B. I. Nicolaevsky: The Formative Years

1. The most important single written source for this biographical article is a long manuscript of some one hundred pages which Nicolaevsky dictated to a journalist friend in 1953. Also helpful are shorter autobiographies, written at various times and for various purposes; letters to his old friends; and interviews which Boris Ivanovich recorded in the early 1960s with Professor Leopold Haimson, Director of the InterUniversity Project on the History of the Menshevik Movement. Still, I have learned most about his general outlook from Nicolaevsky himself while I was Associate Director of the Menshevik Project (1959-64), and then when I, like him, moved to Stanford to work in the archives of the Hoover Institution (1964-66). It was during this latter period that 1 began to collect material for a festchrift in his honor. Copies of all the above mentioned sources are deposited with the Nicolaevsky Collection in the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and I am grateful to Anna M. Bourguina, the Curator of the Collection, for helping me in my research. A brief biography of Nicolaevsky was published shortly after his death (see Ladis K. D. Kristof, “Boris I. Nicolaevsky, 1887-1966,” Russian Review, 25, No. 3 (July, 1966), 324-27.

2. One brother, Vsevolod, died in his teens and one, Mikhail, who became a doctor, sympathized with the revolutionary movement but remained politically uncommitted. One sister, Alexandra, the oldest (born 1885) and closest to Boris Ivanovich, was a Socialist Revolutionary and switched later, in the post-1905 period, to the anarchists among whom her husband, Nikolai P. Fedoseev, was quite prominent in the Urals. The other sister, Natalia, was a Social Democrat with Menshevik orientation. The second oldest brother, Vladimir (born 1889), began his revolutionary career in 1905 in Ufa as a Bolshevik but later, partly under the influence of Boris Ivanovich (with whom he was in exile in Arkhangelsk gubemiia), became a Menshevik; he was married to a sister of the Bolshevik leader A. I. Rykov who was to succeed Lenin as Prime-Minister of the Soviet Union. He lived with Rykov in Moscow after 1920 and was protected by him until the two were arrested and perished together in 1938 during the Great Purges. The youngest brother, Viktor (born 1898), joined the Bolsheviks upon graduation from high school in 1917, made a career in the Red Army, and was a staff officer, but died in his early thirties. Whatever their political differences, the members of the Nicolaevsky family remained on good terms with one another.

3. The Tatars were much more accepted than the Chuvash but even so the children of Russian parents and those of Tatar parents tended to engage in quite rough games of war against each other on the streets of Belebei. Boris Ivanovich remembered it as something rather unusual that he occasionally “went over” to the Tatar side of the “front” to rescue some lonely Tatar boy against whom several Russian boys had ganged up.

4. Lev Nikolaevich Kremer (Kreiner?) was also to join the revolutionary movement but died around 1905. He was the son of a railroad official who himself had been involved in some illegal political activities. He lived with his divorced mother who, while she apparently had a low opinion of the revolutionaries and their propaganda literature, encouraged her son and his friends to read the writings of the so-called revolutionary democrats whom she appreciated as serious authors.

5. On the whole, Boris Ivanovich’s friends tended to be of somewhat higher social origin than he and certainly better off materially than he was after his father’s death.

6. “K istorii Bolgar” was Boris Ivanovich’s first publication. As far as he remembered, three issues of the mimeographed Podsnezhnik came out, all of them in the first half of 1903. He contributed only to the first one.

7. He was not greatly impressed by it, which was rather characteristic given his temperament and intellectual outlook.

8. Six years later Boris Ivanovich was to share a prison cell and become good friends with a Socialist Revolutionary, Mikhail Vedeniapin, and to learn that it was he who had authored the leaflet while a student at Samara Teachers’ College. In 1922 Vedeniapin was among the accused in the famous Moscow trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries while Boris Ivanovich was among those making frantic efforts to mobilize socialist public opinion in Western Europe to intervene with the Bolsheviks and save the lives of the defendants.

9. Boris Ivanovich often mentioned that one of the most self-defeating of the tsarist policies for suppressing the revolutionary movement was that of exiling the activists into the four corners of the Empire. Indeed, nothing promoted the spread of subversive ideas from the capitals and universities into the farthest, quietest, and most loyal provincial towns so much as this policy of banishing into their midst professional political agitators whose every word carried the weight of authority attributed to anybody who had arrived from the main cultural centers of Russia.

10. When V. P. Artsybushev died in 1917 Boris Ivanovich published a fairly long, unsigned biography of him in Rabochaia gazeta.

11. See B. I. Nikolaevskii, “75 letie la. M. Dzhemsa,” Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, November, 1943.

12. Iakov Markovich Lupolov, a native of Kostroma, first fled Russia in 1891 and settled two years later in the United States where, under the name of James, he became active in the Boston, and later New York, socialist movement. In 1900 he returned to Russia for illegal party work, was active in Perm, worked as a correspondent for Iskra, etc. Between 1900 and 1907 he was repeatedly in and out of Russia, three times falling into the hands of the tsarist police. In 1907 he was an organizer of the illegal passage through Finland of the delegates going to the London Party Congress. After that Lupolov returned to New York but remained an active party (Menshevik) worker.

13. Boris Ivanovich was aware at this point of the basic differences between the Social Democrats and the Socialist Revolutionaries, and he had close friends among both groups. Thus his choice was based on a definite preference, however limited the knowledge upon which that preference was based.

14. The Ufa Social Democratic group was centered in the local zemstvo administration. Among its leaders was Petr N. Grigor’ev.

15. Boris Ivanovich’s school bench mate, Vasilii Gorelov, the son of a railway conductor and with no contacts with the movement prior to his recruitment into the circle, was to become a local revolutionary hero when, together with another member of Ufa’s Social Democratic “fighting organization,” Mikhail Kadomtsev, he held up a train and took 300,000 rubles.

16. Mikhail Kozlov was the son of “Nadezhda” Kozlov in whose private library Boris Ivanovich had been studying populist literature. The father was a respected old time revolutionary and the son was himself an SR and thus familiar with, and bound by, the code of secrecy. Why then did young Kozlov readily admit to the police that he had received the proclamation from Boris Ivanovich and that he had heard the latter acknowledge its authorship? Why did he not simply say that he had found the proclamation? Boris Ivanovich never quite overcame the grief which this incident caused him, not so much because of the consequences which he had to suffer, but because it dishonored and raised all kinds of doubts about a revolutionary, one whom he knew personally and would have regarded as above suspicion.

17. Actually it was a whole series of articles which Chernov published in 1900 in Russkoe bogatstvo on the subject of the capitalist versus agrarian type of evolution. The articles were published under a pseudonym and Boris Ivanovich did not know at the time the true identity of the author.

18. Aleksei Fedorovich Ogorelov, born about 1881, was then (1904) a Bolshevik but like Boris Ivanovich he was to switch to the Mensheviks in the post-1905 period. After the 1917 Revolution he was for a time mayor of Vladivostok. Later he worked for the Soviet Government as an economist yet when he came once to Berlin he talked at length and freely with Boris Ivanovich.

19. This activity in the rural areas was, however, something quite new for the Social Democrats. The Socialist Revolutionaries had far more solid ties in this milieu. “Wherever we would go into the villages,” Boris Ivanovich recalled, “we would find that the Socialist Revolutionaries had preceded us and already established agents. The teacher, the fel’dsher, often the more intelligent shopkeeper as well as the zemskii functionary, and the doctor, these were the pillars of the Socialist Revolutionaries.”

20. The other Samara newspaper, the Samarskaia gazeta, was the mainstay of the Socialist Revolutionaries. Since it was an old and well-established paper, Boris Ivanovich first went there to look for a job but was refused because his Social Democratic sympathies were already known at the time. The Marxist Samarskii vestnik had been shut down several years before.

21. The situation here described was characteristic not only for Samara, or the Volga-Urals region, but for all Central Russia and Siberia. In fact, to a large extent it was the same all over Russia and contrasted sharply with the situation in the emigration. Echoes of the deep divisions and animosities within the party which developed abroad immediately after the Second Congress were noticeable in Russia in the 1903-1905 period only in the centers of old anti-Iskra sentiment (i.e., mainly in a few towns of southwest Russia) and where the influence of the emigre leadership was more direct (i.e., in St. Petersburg and Moscow) or where the influence of the Bund was strong. This geographical pattern of varying intensity in the Bolshevik-Menshevik animosities largely maintained itself also in the period 1906-17 as the split within the party became increasingly deep and open. The further east, the further away from the emigration, the capitals and the western and southern fringes of the Empire inhabited by national minorities, the less intense was the struggle between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Despite the influence of colonies of exiles who imported their quarrels with them, some Social Democratic organizations in Siberia remained united as late as the second half of 1917.

22. The only two members of the Central Committee in Russia who escaped arrest were L. B. Krasin and A. I. Liubimov. Both of them (and especially Krasin) were at the time “conciliators” (primirentsy) but Lenin succeeded finally in persuading them to support the idea of a purely Bolshevik Third Party Congress, in which they participated. Later Liubimov was to lapse once more into the conciliatory attitude, and by 1917 he was completely alienated from Bolshevism and had become a follower of Plekhanov.

23. The leader of the Samara Social Democratic Committee was Boris Pavlovich Pozem (known as “Zapadnyi”), son of a wealthy local pharmacist. He was quite a prominent Bolshevik who later became an aide of Kirov. He was shot during the Great Purges.

24. That demonstration, which followed a noisy eruption into a public meeting about local educational matters, was organized by I. A. Konovalov (“Nikolai”) who was to become a police agent in the ranks of the St. Petersburg Bolsheviks. The townspeople complained bitterly at the time that the revolutionaries had broken up the meeting at which there was a unique chance to ventilate grievances against the school system. In retrospect, Boris Ivanovich admitted that they were right, but at the time the revolutionaries were too youthful, and too impatient for action to ponder the consequences of these actions.

25. Petr Voevodin, a few years Boris Ivanovich’s senior, can still be seen in photographs in Pravda when the oldest party members are feted. He is listed as a “party member since 1898.”

26. Boris Ivanovich pointed out that the Samara organization of the Union of Liberation, which was considerably to the left of the broad spectrum of those who called themselves liberals, had within its ranks an impressive number of intellectuals who also occupied respected social positions. The Samara Social Democratic Committee, on the other hand, had only two men, the above mentioned B. P. Pozern and V. M. Pototskii, who were in this category, and since the political activities in which they engaged were considered criminal they had to lead a double life.

27. The Black Hundreds in Samara were attempting to capitalize on the discontent caused by widespread unemployment which had followed the summer railroad strike. They blamed the Jews, the intelligentsia, and the revolutionaries in general for this unemployment. The Social Democrats were able to counteract this propaganda through the contacts they had established among the workers’ teenage sons.

28. After the revolution was crushed, the reactionaries took revenge on Colonel von Galin. He was court martialed, stripped of his rank, and sent to prison for four years.

29. The mood, activity, and in general the whole course of the 1905 Revolution was affected by the youth of the participants. In Samara the average age of the Social Democratic activists was probably only slightly above that of Boris Ivanovich (who became eighteen in October). A few were in their mid-twenties (I. F. Dubrovinskii, the ranking Social Democrat of Samara was twenty-eight) and from all those whom Boris Ivanovich could recall not more than one or two were over thirty. Even the very youthful contemporary revolutionary movements of Latin America, Africa, and Asia seem to be older in terms of the age of most of the activists.

30. There was in Samara a small separate Menshevik organization headed by Vladimir Trapeznikov, a physician and a Social Democrat since the 1890s.

31. V. I. Lenin, “O sovremennom polozhenii i blizhaishikh zadachakh sovetskoi vlasti,” Sochineniia, 3rd ed. (Moscow, 1932) 24, pp. 357-58. Boris Ivanovich’s speech, “Chto takoe kolchakovshchina?” was given in the Polytechnical Museum of Moscow on July 3, 1919.

32. From among the Menshevik leaders, besides Boris Ivanovich only R. A. Abramovich and D. Iu. Dallin supported the League. Boris Ivanovich also strongly advocated the drawing of the new Soviet emigration towards Menshevism. To the end of his life he considered that that was the only chance of revitalizing Menshevism and its press, even if only in emigration for the time being. But most of his party colleagues were either cool or downright opposed to the idea because they were suspicious of the background and motives of these Soviet emigres. Boris Ivanovich considered such an attitude unfair towards people who had grown up under the totalitarian Soviet system, had had to survive somehow the era of terror of the “Ezhovshchina” and were finally confronted with the necessity of making at least an outward choice between Stalin and Hitler while caught in a crossfire of propaganda, perhaps never in their whole lives having had access to any objective source of information. He was not ready to dismiss or even suspect out of hand the sincerity or integrity of an emigre merely because he had been a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, joined the Vlasov units, published some articles, or the like.

33. “Organic work,” which was favored by the Mensheviks, especially the likvidatory, meant day-to-day practical party work among the masses with emphasis on organization and the so-called “small deeds,” whether economic or political, which were understandable and of immediate concern to the workers and with which they themselves could deal. Its aim was to build up a network of grassroots workers’ organizations managed and led by the workers themselves which in turn would build up their class consciousness and self-confidence and make them independent of the intelligentsia.

34. Boris Ivanovich recalled how he used to contrast the power and effectiveness of the strike to that of acts of terror. The former was awesome, virtually irresistible because it reduced the opponent-the state-to powerlessness. Moreover, it could be rationally planned, its consequences foreseen, and thus used purposefully. Terror, on the other hand, was a puny weapon that was at the same time capable of causing unforeseen consequences. Briefly, it was an irrational weapon wholly incompatible with Marxism and its attempt to control and rationalize the historical process.

35. Actually, Boris Ivanovich’s pro-Georgian sympathies preceded his arrival in Transcaucasia. Reading about the Guriia Uprising in 1904, he was impressed by the fact that the Georgian peasants had turned en masse into Social Democrats and unanimously adopted their resolutions; nothing could have been more important to Boris Ivanovich than the idea that somehow the peasantry and Social Democracy could be brought together.

36. Boris Ivanovich was for all practical purposes the center from which the party organization was rebuilt. He formed a new Social Democratic Committee, which, to the great chagrin of Lenin, became Menshevik dominated. In April, 1912, as leader of the Baku Social Democratic Committee, he founded a small weekly, Nashe slovo, of which seven issues appeared. He was aided in editing the journal by Anshlius, a Menshevik, and Stepan Iakushev, a Bolshevik primirenets. Boris Ivanovich also wrote one or two reports on the situation in Baku for Zvezda, which he signed Likvidator.

37. When Boris Ivanovich was arrested the police knew nothing of his activities; the only thing they had against him was that he was not Grigorii Nikolaevich Golosov, whose passport he was using, since the real owner had declared it invalid. After admitting his identity, Boris Ivanovich was sent back to the north to complete his original term of exile without any additional punishment.

38. Incidentally, it was in the Vologda jail that Boris Ivanovich first heard that Malinovskii, who was just then (July, 1912) running as a Social Democratic candidate to the Fourth Duma with the support of both factions, was suspected of being a police agent. V. G. Chirkin, who lived in exile in Vologda, came to see Boris Ivanovich and told him about these suspicions which dated back to 1910, when he (Chirkin) and a group of others, among them Malinovskii, were arrested in Moscow; all were sent into exile except Malinovskii who inexplicably was promptly released.

39. He remained a primirenets even after his Transcaucasian experience (e.g. in 1913-14 when he worked in St. Petersburg with the Social Democratic fraction) though he gradually became less and less sanguine. In any case he never passed blanket judgments and even after 1917, there were individual Bolsheviks (e.g., Riazanov, Rykov, Liutovinov, etc.) who for various reasons commanded his respect and friendship.

40. This is not to imply that on principle he preferred to collaborate with the Bolsheviks rather than with the Plekhanovites; quite to the contrary, but it simply happened that he had no contact among the Plekhanovite group while he did have a friend among the Bolsheviks, Enukidze, and this was reason enough for him to seek affiliation with the latter’s organization.

41. Boris Ivanovich was also convinced that members of Stalin’s old squad of kochi from Baku were instrumental in Kirov’s assassination.

42. Boris Ivanovich failed to secure any hard evidence against Stalin and the trial ended (even before Boris Ivanovich returned from his trip) inconclusively with both sides claiming victory.

43. The “Letters” were published under the signature Iv.

44. Babel visited Western Europe at that time and had a series of secret meetings with Boris Ivanovich. Whether the G.P.U. found out about these meetings and, if so, whether this contributed to the decision to liquidate Babel a few years later is unknown.

45. It should be mentioned here that Soviet sources are mistaken when listing Boris Ivanovich as a delegate to the London Party Congress of 1907. Whoever participated in that congress under the name of Volosov or Golosov was not Boris Ivanovich.

46. Boris Ivanovich remembered writing speeches for Tuliakov and reports for Rabochaia gazeta about meetings with constituents during the summer of 1913 for Iagello, Khaustov, Man’kov and Tuliakov.

47. Malinovskii, it must be recalled, was a very close collaborator of Lenin and the main instrument of his Duma policy. Without him Lenin would probably not have succeeded in splitting the Social Democratic fraction.

48. The police were attempting at that time to provoke the Social Democrats into extreme statements and actions in order to discredit them in public opinion as an irresponsible element and justify their complete elimination from public life at a future date. Thus in various direct and indirect ways the police supported the radicals, namely the more extreme Bolsheviks, banking on the proposition that they would dig the grave of the whole movement. Most Mensheviks agreed with this analysis.

49. In his later years, Boris Ivanovich admitted that probably not all of the Mensheviks’ suspicions at this time were justified.

50. For several months, in spring and summer, 1917, Martov was on the left flank of, and in opposition to, the majority (led by Tsereteli, Dan, Chkheidze, etc.) within the Menshevik party and was toying with the idea of splitting off his group of Menshevik Internationalists.

51. Boris Ivanovich pointed out that many an underground party activist was shocked when he went abroad for a brief visit to discuss the revolution with party leaders and found them living in conditions of relative well being and/or steeped in various un-revolutionary intellectual pursuits. Martov generally evoked sympathy because he often lived in poverty; but he, too, had broad intellectual interests which distracted him from total devotion to party affairs.

52. In Boris Ivanovich’s opinion Martov was at least able to generate warm feelings and deep attachment among those with whom he had face to face contacts. Dan, on the other hand, was not really liked personally even within inner party circles, Martov included, though he was respected and appreciated as a hard and efficient party worker.

53. This is not to imply Boris Ivanovich withdrew from party activity. In 1920 he became a member of the Central Committee.

54. In the Soviet Union, however, Boris Ivanovich remains persona non grata. Thus in Literaturnaia gazeta of April 19, 1967, there was an article on Gorkii in which a long passage described sympathetically Boris Ivanovich’s correspondence with Gorkii and other writers. A few issues later (no. 24/1967) the same paper printed a letter with a rebuke for having called Boris Ivanovich a well-known historian of Social Democracy when in fact he was an enemy of the Soviet Union.

55. Friedrich Adler, “Das Apriori des Sozialismus,” Neues Forum, 13, No. 154 (October, 1966), 604-605.

Boris Nicolaevsky: The American Years

1. Louis Fischer, rev. of Power and the Soviet Elite, by B. I. Nicolaevsky, New York Times Book Review, November 21, 1965, p. 3.

2. Fritz T. Epstein, “The Nikolaevskii Collection at Indiana,” Indiana Library News Letter, 1, No. 4 (April, 1966), 1-2.

3. Anna M. Bourguina, Russian Social Democracy: The Menshevik Movement: a Bibliography, Hoover Institution Bibliographical Series, No. 36 (Stanford, 1968).

4. Boris I. Nicolaevsky, Power and the Soviet Elite: “The Letter of an Old Bolshevik” and Other Essays, ed. Janet D. Zagoria (New York, 1965).

Russian Youth on the Eve of Romanticism:
Andrei I. Turgenev and His Circle

1. Serious study of the Society was started only after the archives of the Turgenev family (in Paris until the first years of the twentieth century, when they were turned over to the Russian Academy of Sciences) were made available to scholars. The first detailed account was in A. N. Veselovskii, V. A. Zhukovskii (Poeziia chuvstva i “serdechnogo voobrazheniia”) (St. Petersburg, 1904). See also M. Sukhomlinov, “A. S. Kaisarov i ego literaturnye druz’ia,” Otdelenie russkogo iazyka i slovesnosti Akademii Nauk, Sbornik, 65, No. 5 (1897), 1-33; A. Fomin, “Andrei Iv. Turgenev i Andrei Serg. Kaisarov-novye dannye o nikh po dokumentam arkhiva P. N. Turgeneva,” Russkii bibliofil, January, 1912, pp. 7-39; “Andrei Sergeevich Kaisarov (Novye materialy dlia biografii i dlia kharakteristiki ego literaturnoi deiatel’nosti iz arkhiva P. N. Turgeneva),” ibid., April, 1912, pp. 5-33. In the two decades preceding and following the Russian Revolution, V. M. Istrin made an extensive study of the Turgenev archives in preparation for their publication. See V. M. Istrin, Zhurnal Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia (cited hereafter as ZMNP), n.s., 26 (March, 1910), 1-36; 28 (July, 1910), 80-145; 28 (August, 1910), 273-307; 32 (April, 1911), 205-37; 44 (March, 1913), 1-15. Istrin gave an overall account and interpretation of the Turgenev circle in the long introduction to Pis’ma i dnevnik Aleksandra Ivanovicha Turgeneva gettingenskogo perioda (1802-1804) i pis’ma ego k S. A. Kaisarovu i brat’iam v Gettingene (1805-1811), Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh, vypusk 2 (St. Petersburg, 1911). The same source was summarized by V. I. Rezanov, Iz razyskanii o sochineniiakh V. A. Zhukovskogo, vyp. 2 (Petrograd, 1916). During the next two and one-half decades there were no further sources or monographs published on the Turgenev circle. A revival of interest in it occurred in the 1950s as reflected in e.g. Iu. M. Lotman, “Andrei Sergeevich Kaisarov i literaturno-obshchestvennaia bor’ba ego vremeni,” Uchenye Zapiski Tartuskogo gosudarstvennogo Universiteta [Tartu Riikliku Ülikooli Toimetised], vyp. 63 (Tartu, 1958), and in his Puti razvitiia preddekabristskoi obshchestvenno-politicheskoi mysli, Diss. 1961 (Leningrad University). Although some material quoted below is cited in works referred to in this note, we shall give references to the originals because our viewpoint and interest differ in many ways from that of previous scholars and the excerpts quoted do not quite overlap.

2. The fullest account of Turgenev’s life is in Istrin, Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh, vyp. 2.

3. E. I. Tarasov, “K istorii russkogo obshchestva vtoroi poloviny XVIII st.-mason I. P. Turgenev,” ZMNP, n.s., 51 (June, 1914), 129-75.

4. Akademiia Nauk, Institut istorii russkoi literatury (Pushkinskii Dom), Leningrad, Arkhiv Turgenevykh, fond 309 (hereafter cited as F 309). Additional materials are to be found in the Rukopisnyi otdel, Gosudarstvennaia publichnaia biblioteka imeni Saltykova-Shchedrina, Leningrad, Arkhiv V. A. Zhukovskogo, F 286. Individual items may also be found in the fondy of the main participant literary figures such as Voeikov, Merzliakov.

5. F 309, No. 271, Journal entry 22.XI.1799, p. 10 (“Do good according to your ability, do your duty, act for the good of others and your own, exhaust yourself in activity . . .”); No. 272, Journal entry 14.III.1802, p. 40 (“To what purpose is now the main striving of my spirit: to be known in literature?”)· Also his letter to Zhukovskii, 19.VIII.1799, quoted by Veselovskii, V. A. Zhukovskii, p. 64, and the last lines of his poem, “I vetkhomu poddevicheskomu domu A. F. V[oeiko]va,” in Iu. M. Lotman, ed., Poety nachala XIX veka, Biblioteka poeta, malaia seriia, izdanie tret’e (Leningrad, 1961), p. 261 (hereafter cited as Poety nachala).

6. F 309, No. 1239, Journal entry 16/28.IX. 1802, p. 13 (“Activity, it seems, is higher than liberty. For what else is liberty? Activity endows it with all its value. . . . Put chains on man and leave him a free spirit and a clean conscience, he will not stop being active in his mind. . . . Activity is the stairway to perfection.”); F 309, No. 840, Letter to Andrei S. Kaisarov, no pl., n.d. (from Vienna?), (“If idealisieren means to make oneself ideals for future life, i.e., make plans, and if one is not to expect their fulfillment, then man has also another goal, the most virtuous and useful for him and for others: he can be active, he must be active. For what is the use of sleep without tiredness and of entertainment without work? As for contemplation that has no influence on the activity of life, it is nothing but an empty condition of the soul-it brings neither labor nor tiredness. Look how philosophical I have gotten!”).

7. For example, Utrenniaia zaria (Trudy vospitannikov Universitetskogo blagorodnogo Pansiona), Bk. 1 (1800), 193-211 (Rech’ o liubvi k otechestvu); Bk. 2 (1803), 235-50 (Rech’ o tom kakov dolzhen byt’ blagorodnyi vospitannik); Bk. 3 (1805) (Rech’ o istinnykh dostoinstvakh blagovospitannogo cheloveka); Bk. 5 (1807), 5-81 (O vospitanii); P. S. Zheleznikov, ed., Sokrashchennaia biblioteka v pol’zu gospodam vospitannikam pervogo kadetskogo korpusa, 2 (St. Petersburg, 1802), 241 ff; 3 (1804), 381.

8. F 309, No. 542, Letter of I. P. Turgenev to Andrei Turgenev, 1.X.1793 (“. . . a dedicated striving to please God and serve men will open the world to you . . .”); also a curious book given as a present to Nicholas Turgenev by his father for good progress in studies: L’Ami de I’Enfance ou Contes moraux à la portée des enfants et des adolescents de l’un et l’autre sexe, Du Laurent (Paris, 1795), F 309, No. 549. Cf. also first writing exercise of Alexander Turgenev, March-May, 1790, Gosudarstvennaia publichnaia biblioteka im. Saltykova-Shchedrina, otdel rukopisei, Bumagi V. A. Zhukovskogo, F 286, No. 316 (hereafter cited as Zhukovskii, F 286).

9. F 309, No. 271, Journal entry 9.XI.1799, pp. 5, 7 (sight of peasant woman and three children); entry of 3.XII.1799, pp. 23-24 (sight of soldiers dragging away drunk man); No. 745 (Nekotorye chuvstva i mneniia moi), entry 28.VIII.1799, p. 5 (sight of old procuress and young prostitute); F 309, No. 271, entry for 3.XII.1799 tells the story of a non-commissioned officer whose wife was seduced by an officer and who had to accept this outrage, which reminds him of the plot of Kabale und Liebe (“This flaming, sensitive heart-crushed and tortured by the hand of despotismdeprived of all rights! . . . Oh, if I could only express all that moves my heart. If I could only describe this silence!”).

10. F 309, No. 271, entry 15.II.1800, p. 36 (Daydreams about living alone, independent, with modest income without having to serve); No. 272, entry of 14.III. 1802, p. 40 (daydreaming about family bliss on voyage to Vienna). We are reminded of Alexander I’s daydreaming that he would retire on the banks of the Rhine in quiet private family bliss.

11. F 309, No. 272, entry 25.1.1802, p. 38; entry 14.III.1802, p. 40 (“With such lively feelings [of love for Catherine Sokovnin] I will not be able to occupy myself with literature and poetry”); entry 10.V.1801, p. 6 (“I shall live in the past, I shall weep over the past, I shall revive [the past] with renewed strength in my memory.”); No. 840, Letter to A. S. Kaisarov 26.XII.[ 1802] 7.1.1803.

12. The mood is well summarized in his poem “I v dvatsat’ let uzh ia dovol’no ispytal,” Poety nachala, p. 263. Characteristic of this mood is the design of Andrei Turgenev’s seal: a flower on a short leafy stalk with the motto: “jusqu’à son retour.” F 309, No. 276, entry for September, 1799, p. 33; entry for June, 1797, p. 59-60 (draft of a poem: “I net otrady mne ni v chem”); entry for 15.VIII.1797, p. 73 (“Liubvi minuta est’ nagrada / Za god unyniia i slez”); No. 272, entry for 10.V.1801, p. 5. See also the poems “Uma ty svetom ozaren” and “Moi drug! Kol’ mog ty zabluzhdat’sia,” Poety nachala, pp. 262, 274; journal entries of Zhukovskii, Zhukovskii, F 286, I No. 1 b, p. 5 (“Ach das dort ist niemals hier!”).

13. The theme is given poetic form in his Elegy, the most significant of his literary efforts, Poety nachala, pp. 267-70; also F 309, No. 272, pp. 41-42.

14. F 309, No. 272, pp. 16-37 (dated 13.XII. 1801) contains copies of letters of Catherine, the following pages contain many references to the affair, expressions of regret, hesitations, etc. The affair is summarized (with a different interpretation) by Istrin in Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh, vyp. 2; see also the interesting parallel to Evgenii Onegin’s Tatiana drawn by Veselovskii, V. A. Zhukovskii, p. 82.

15. Catherine died unmarried in 1809.

16. F 309, No. 840, Letter to A. S. Kaisarov from Vienna, no date, and No. 1239, entry for 10/22.1.1803.

17. And which, mutatis mutandis, would also hold true of the German scene about two generations earlier, when the traditional Protestant and authoritarian framework was called into question.

18. For example the literary works on which Andrei Turgenev’s generation was reared, Detskoe chtenie dlia serdtsa i razuma (Moscow, 1785-89); Detskii sovetnik prepodaiushchii iunoshestvu Pravila, kak blagorazumno v svete postupat’, la. Beliavskii, ed. (St. Petersburg, 1789); Sokrashchennaia biblioteka, 3 (1804), 370-81.

19. Detskoe chtenie dlia serdtsa i razuma, 1 (1785), 8 ff (“Povest’ o Seleme i Ksamire”), 3 (1785), 8-16 (“O podrazhanii roditeliam”). The theme is strongly emphasized in Ivan P. Turgenev’s own book, Kto mozhet byt’ dobrym grazhdaninom i vernym poddannym (Moscow, 1796), pp. 1-28 passim.

20. Was this not the burden of the lesson which Radishchev drew from his experiences and which impelled him to write his Journey?

21. It had also become clear that the nobility did not (or perhaps could not) take advantage of the opportunities for useful local life as paved by the acts of 1775 and 1785. This also explains the bitter sarcasm with which the average provincial nobleman and his way of life were satirized by this generation. The irony is more cutting than the smiling ridicule of eighteenth century satire; it presages Griboedov, the gloomy picture of Gogol’, and the angry outbursts of Saltykov-Shchedrin, cf. examples in E. G. Ermakova-Bitner, ed., Poety satiriki kontsa XVIII-nachala XIX v. (Leningrad, 1959) and A. Fomin’s attribution of “Brakosochetanie Karamzina” to A. S. Kaisarov (Russkii bibliofil, January, 1912, pp. 30-39). There were exceptions, of course, but they were few, which explains the admiration which was heaped on a man like I. V. Lopukhin.

22. See Andrei Turgenev’s diary in Vienna, F 309, No. 1239 with his plans for study and excerpts from historical books, also his letters to parents from St. Petersburg and Vienna, F 309, Nos. 1231, 1238 passim, in which he announces his new objects of study (English, reviewing of Latin, etc.). No doubt, a similar point of view accounts for the orientation towards technical training as preparation for meaningful service which we note in Alexander and Nicholas Turgenev’s letters and diaries from Goettingen.

23. F 309, No. 544, Letter to his friend Vasilii Stepanovich (?) 9.XI.1794, from Selo Turgenevo.

24. F 309, No. 840, Letter from 7.IX.1799. On the reaction to Andrei’s death see the full documentation by V. Istrin, “Smert’ Andreia Iv. Turgeneva,” ZMNP, 26 (March, 1910), 1-36.

25. F 309, No. 271, entry for 1.XII.1799. The most significant stanzas in this context are: “. . . Bruder!/ Bruder, nimm die Brüder mit,/ Mit zu deinem alten Vater,/ Zu dem ewgen Ozean,/ Der mit ausgespannten Armen/ Unser wartet,/ Die sich, ach! vergebens ӧffnen,/ Seine sehnenden zu fassen . . .” and “Und so trägt er seine Brüder,/ Seine Schätze, seine Kinder/ dem erwartenden Erzeuger/ Freudebrausend an das Herz.”

26. F 309, No. 840, Letter 1.X.1799. See also the allusively revealing remark by Catherine Sokovnin in a letter, 26.XII. 1801: “Il ne faut pas se sacrifier tout à fait aux autres, mais nous leur devons des ménagements. Osobenno vy vashemu batiushke. Il a des droits bien forts sur vous.” (F 309, No. 272, p. 32). Cf. also his long description of the relationship between Prince Kozlovskii and his father, from whose clutches he wants to free him, F 309, No. 1231, letter of 25.XII.1801.

27. We need only compare F 309, Nos. 840 (to Kaisarov) and 1231, 1238, 1237 (to parents).

28. See the curiously revealing entry in Turgenev’s Diary, 8.IV.1802 (F 309, No. 272, p. 46): “My mother’s character has a great deal of influence on mine, on my morality, and on my happiness. She confines my soul. How frequently did she not permit the development of some joyful, elevated feeling; how often she smothered that which already was there. If it had not been for her, my soul would have been freer, more joyful, more enterprising, and consequently better, nobler. . . .”

29. The expressions of a sense of incompleteness and futility pervade all the writings of Andrei Turgenev and his friends. His poetry is the best introduction for it. Most frequently in diary for the Vienna period, F 309, No. 1239. Andrei’s youngest brother, Sergei explained more fully the social-political dimensions of this feeling of futility in his diary for 1814: “Denn ich zweifle sehr ob das Vaterland oder der Mensch Nummer eins ist. Das hӧchste Ziel des Menschen ist sein Glück, der Staat ist ein Mittel zur Erreichung desselben; und das Vaterland scheint nur eine Folge des Staates zu sein [. . . illegible] haben kein Staat und kein Vaterland. Und was bekümmert mich ein Staat wo ich kein Burger bin, und ein Vaterland welchem ich nicht dienen kann ohne sich [illegible] manches gefallen zu lassen, was der Würde des Menschen zuwider ist . . .” (No. 16, pp. 75-76).

30. There are no elaborate descriptions of friendship in general terms in Andrei Turgenev’s papers. The sentiment is reflected in his poetry. A more general definition is given by Zhukovskii in a letter to Alexander Turgenev, remembering the early circle of friends (quoted by Sukhomlinov, Sbornik, 65, No. 5 [1897], 1-2): “Our friendship, yours, mine, Merzliakov’s, Kaisarov’s, was based on imagination . . . . Brothers, let us be friends; we’ll do much more. . . . Even now I am not very active, but at any rate I see the necessity of being higher, higher: for this I demand the help of my friends. Brothers, together, together let us go to everything that is good! It is not an enthusiast, childish and fiery, who speaks this, but cold reflection. . . . We must be inspired by one thing, supported by one thing! In a word, our life must be cause commune.” An elegiac expression of the same feeling was given by Andrei Turgenev in a letter to Zhukovskii (Fomin, Russkii bibliofil, January, 1912, p. 12 note): “. . . I would wish that on the festive days [of our Society] -1 or 7 April, the other I don’t remember-each one of us would celebrate it, wherever he may be. This would be pleasant to many of us; others might do it out of consideration to the others. Imagine that one of us would be in Paris, the other in London, the third in Sweden, the fourth in Moscow, the fifth in St. Petersburg, and that on these days they are together in spirit. Each one will know that . . . every one of his spiritual friends is thinking of him. This thought is worth something.” A. F. Merzliakov gave a comprehensive and accurate expression to this conception of friendship in several of his poems, Stikhotvoreniia, Iu. M. Lotman, ed. (Leningrad, 1958), pp. 198, 229.

31. The entire correspondence between Andrei Turgenev and Andrei Kaisarov illustrates this, F 309, Nos. 840, 50. The only clear reference to a homosexual attachment among members of this generation encountered by this writer is the case of A. Kh. Vostokov. Cf. “Zametki A. Kh. Vostokova o ego zhizni,” Sbornik statei chitannykh v otdelenii russkogo iazyka i slovesnosti Akademii Nauk, 70 (St. Petersburg, 1901).

32. F 309, No. 840, Letter 15.VI. 1797(?); “I found on the road wonderful forget-me-nots, your favorite flower. I picked them and put them in my pocket, and as soon as I saw them I remembered you, and then later also S[andunova?].” Also No. 50 (5.V.1802).

33. Cf. the frequent reference to the lines from Schiller’s An die Freude: “Wem der grosse Wurf gelungen,/ Eines Freundes Freund zu sein.”

34. F 309, No. 840, 15.VI.1797(?); ibid, from Moscow, New Year’s eve, 1800. Even more dramatic are the self-doubts of Kaisarov, who waits with trepidation for Andrei’s letters as a sign that he still loves him, without him he is “an orphan” (F 309, No. 50).

35. The revealing confession of their friend I. F. Zhuravlev that he slept with a prostitute (or courtesan) in Vilno, F 309, No. 1213, 31.VII.1798.

36. F 309, No. 840, Letter to A. Kaisarov, 2.IX.1799. (“For example, I determined that you have a good heart, tender and kind, which makes those whom it loves happy, and that it loves me.”)

37. F 309, No. 50, Letter of A. Kaisarov to Andrei Turgenev, 8.V.1802. No. 276, entry for 14.VIII.1799, p. 34.

38. For example, Kabale und Liebe and Die Verschwӧrung von Fiesko.

39. The practice of organizing societies for the pursuit of cultural and social goals (largely to make up for the inadequacies of educational, religious, and government institutions) became popular in the second half of the eighteenth century, particularly as a result of the efforts of the freemasons. A. Prokopovich-Antonskii sponsored the organization of a society for literary and cultural pursuits among the pupils under his care at the Noblemen’s Pension of the University of Moscow. Of course, the Corps of Cadets had set a precedent for this kind of activity in a private school for children of the nobility. But Prokopovich-Antonskii’s foundation had a much more purposeful moral and didactic orientation, consonant with the sentimental religiosity and philanthropy of the late eighteenth century. It helped give a new institutional framework to Russian cultural life, which conveniently replaced the traditional associations based on family, church, and class solidarities.

40. The works of Istrin, Lotman, and Rezanov are the best introduction to the history of the society. See also Iu. M. Lotman, “Stikhotvorenie Andreia Turgeneva ‘K otechestvu’ i ego rech’ v ‘Druzheskom literaturnom obshchestve’,” Literaturnoe nasledstvo, 60, pt. 1 (Moscow, 1956), 323-38. The members were as follows: A. F. Merzliakov, A. I. Turgenev, M. S., A.S., and P. S. Kaisarov, V. A. Zhukovskii, Alexander I. Turgenev. S. E. Rodzianko and A. Ofrosimov joined the group later. The rules of the Society have been published by N. Tikhonravov, “Zakony Druzheskogo literatumogo obshchestva,” Sbornik obshchestva liubitelei rossiiskoi slovesnosti na 1891 g. (Moscow, 1891), pp. 1-14.

41. F 309, No. 618, “Rechi druzheskogo obshchestva 1801” (hereafter cited as “Rechi”). This is not a transcript but a copy (incomplete) of the speeches (probably from the final drafts submitted by the authors). Not all speeches have titles.

42. “Rechi,” 19.I.1801, pp. 11-24.

43. Ibid., 27.II.1801; with stress on the closeness of friendship to love, a theme that he repeated in his speech, “On Passions,” 12.IV.1801(?), 75-77. Also note the significant statement of Andrei Turgenev: “Even a criminal can fall in love. But to feel friendship, this only a virtuous heart can do.” F 309, No. 271 (entry for 30.VII.1800, p. 63).

44. “Rechi,” 15.III.1801(?), “O tom, chto esli by chelovek s samogo rozhdeniia ostavlen byl na neobitaemom ostrove; to mog li by on otlichat’ v posleduiushchee vremia porok ot dobrodeteli?” pp. 60-63.

45. Ibid., 1.VI.1801, “O tom, chto mizantropov nespravedlivo pochitaiut bezchelovechnymi.”

46. Ibid., “O tom, chto liudi po bol’shei chasti sami vinovniki svoikh neschastii i neudovol’stvii sluchaiushchikhsia v zhizni,” pp. 115-18.

47. Ibid., 22.IV.1801, pp. 83-89, echoed by M. Kaisarov, 26.1.1801, “O tom, chto voobrazhenie dostavliaet nam bol’she udovol’stvii nezheli sushchestvennost’,” pp. 31-35.

48. Ibid., 26-30, not dated. The most recent scholar on the subject, lu. M. Lotman, has argued strongly that the speech was a direct allusion to the reign of Paul I (by contrast) on the basis of the hypothetical date of January 19 on which it may have been delivered. True or not, the point is of no essential consequence.

49. The language best known in the Turgenev circle was German. Andrei Turgenev refers to his readings of German literature from the earliest diary entries. (See also E. Bobrov, Literatura i prosveshchenie v Rossii v XIX v. [Materialy issledovanniia i zametki], 2 [Kazan’, 1902], p. 120 [letter of G. P. Kameneva, Nov. 26, 1800, relating visit with I. P. Turgenev].) He played the major role in introducing Schiller to the group, and his and his friends’ writings are filled with references or quotations (often incorrect and not very varied) from Schiller. What M. Malia says about the appeal of Schiller for the generation of the 1830s could apply also to the Turgenev circle, perhaps even more so. It seems to us that Malia is underestimating the dynamic role of the early vogue for Schiller (“Schiller and the Early Russian Left,” Russian Thought and Politics, H. McLean, M. E. Malia, and G. Fischer, eds., Harvard Slavic Studies, 4[1957], pp. 169-200; cf. also Hans-Bernd Harder, Schiller in Russland-Materialien zu einer Wirkungsgeschichte (1789-1814). Frankfurter Beiträge zur Germanistik 4, Bad Homburg-Berlin-Zürich, 1969.

50. Zhukovskii, F 286, 2, No. 327.

51. F 309, No. 272, entry for 24.V.1802; No. 840, letter to Kaisarov, 27.III.1803.

52. “Rechi,” 5.IV.1801(?), “O poezii i o zloupotreblenii onoi,” pp. 71-74; 19.IV.1801, “O russkoi literature,” pp. 78-82.

53. Note the parallelism to Schiller, although I could find no evidence of their being acquainted with his philosophic and aesthetic essays. For a recent study of Schiller which brings out very well those aspects of the poet’s work that would appeal to Andrei Turgenev and his generation, see Emil Staiger, Friedrich Schiller (Zurich, 1967), especially the chapters, “Fremde des Lebens” and “Freiheit.”

54. Andrei Turgenev noted, for instance, in his diary, 15.VIII. 1797 (F 309, No. 276), p. 75: “Il n’y a plus aujourd’hui de Français, d’Allemands, d’Espagnols, d’Anglais même, quoiqu’on en dise, il n’y a que des Européens.”

55. See Andrei Turgenev’s draft of a speech on patriotism, Literaturnoe nasledstvo, 60, pt. 1 (1956), 334-36. It may be worth pointing out that in the language of the time, reference was to otechestvo (neuter, derived from otets, father) when speaking of the country Russia. The current term rodina (feminine) was used only with reference to the specific place or region of birth. The hunt for psychoanalytical interpreters is open!

56. Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh, vyp. 2, p. 198 and passim.

57. F 309, No. 1238, letters of 8/20.VI. 1802 (the play was Das Mädchen von Marienburg) and 29.VI.1802 (the name of Czech scholar is torn off): “I spoke to him as it behooves a Russian to speak about the Russians, praised to him our epic poems, mentioned Derzhavin and [illegible] poets, did not forget also Karamzin, Dmitriev and mentioned Izmailov, finally I promised to send him Russian tea and took my leave. . . .”

58. The most readily available introductions to this society are V. Orlov, Russkie prosvetiteli 1790-1800kh godov (Moscow, 1950), and V. Bazanov, Uchenaia respublika (Moscow-Leningrad, 1964).

59. See Lotman’s biography of A. S. Kaisarov mentioned in note 1 above; also Iu. M. Lotman, “Pokhodnaia tipografiia shtaba Kutuzova i ee deiatel’nost’,” in 1812 god-K stopiatidesiatiletiiu Otechestvennoi voiny (Moscow, 1962), pp. 215-32, and R. E. Al’tshuller and A. G. Tartakovskii, eds., Listovki Otechestvennoi voiny 1812 goda, Sbornik dokumentov (Moscow, 1962).

60. Edward J. Brown, Stankevich and His Moscow Circle 1830-1840 (Stanford, 1966). Incidentally, the kruzhok is one form of “adolescent society” as we know it in the West today, and the two have a similar causal dynamics, i.e., the problem of identification with the father. See Kenneth Keniston, The Uncommitted-Alienated Youth in American Society (New York, 1960), and, more generally, the theoretical discussion of the need to take into account the particular historical and total social contexts in Erik H. Erikson, Identity-Youth and Crisis (New York, 1968).

61. See Veselovskii, V. A. Zhukovskii, p. 95; the vast amount of evidence in Istrin, ZMNP, n.s., 26 (March, 1910), pp. 1-36, and this confession of Alexander Turgenev: “I am becoming an empty man. The more I reflect on the fate of my brother, the more cause I find to envy him. He died at the very moment of life when we stop being enthusiastic, enjoying life, and when there approaches that emptiness which unavoidably must fill the second half of our life.” (F 309, No. 1210, letter of 25(?).VI. 1805 to Sergei A. Kaisarov). Still later, Kaisarov was to write to Sergei Turgenev, 8.VII. 1810 (F 309, No. 386, p. 4): “Sometimes he [Andrei Turgenev] would lighten my ills by his affectionate kindness, but now I am completely alone . . . and it seems as if I am condemned to spend the whole life alone, far from everything that is dear to me and loving.”

62. On Russia’s “pedocracy” see the very suggestive, albeit overly critical, remarks of A. S. Izgoev, “Ob intelligentnoi molodezhi-Zametki ob ee byte i nastroeniiakh,” Vekhi, Sbornik statei o russkoi intelligentsii, 3rd ed. (Moscow, 1909), pp. 97-124.

Voluntarism, Maximalism, and the Group for the
Emancipation of Labor (1883-1892)

1. I. Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography (London, 1961), pp. 28-29 (first published 1949).

2. S. M. Schwarz, “Populism and Early Russian Marxism on Ways of Economic Development of Russia,” in E. J. Simmons, ed., Continuity and Change in Russian and Soviet Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 1955), pp. 40-62; R. Pipes, “Russian Marxism and Its Populist Background,” Russian Review, October, 1960, pp. 316-37.

3. Russian Review, October, 1960, p. 322.

4. In Simmons, ed., Continuity and Change, p. 53.

5. J. L. H. Keep, The Rise of Social Democracy in Russia (Oxford, 1963), pp. 22-26; S. H. Baron, Plekhanov: the Father of Russian Marxism (London, 1963), pp. 112-16.

6. F. Bystrykh, “Ob agrarnoi programme gruppy Osvobozhdenie Truda’,” Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, No. 5 (88) (1929), pp. 60-94; V. Rakhmetov, “K voprosu o men’shevistskikh tendentsiiakh v gruppe ‘Osvobozhdenie Truda’,” ibid., No. 9 (80) (1928), pp. 26-56, 33.

7. V. Vaganian, G. V. Plekhanov: opyt kharakteristiki sotsial’no-politicheskikh vozzrenii (Moscow, 1924).

8. Keep, The Rise of Social Democracy, p. 23.

9. Baron, Plekhanov, p. 115.

10. V. I. Nevskii, “Gruppa ‘Osvobozhdenie Truda’” in Nevskii, ed., Istorikorevoliutsionnyi sbornik, 2 (Leningrad, 1924), p. 45.

11. “Polemicheskaia bespomoshchnost’, ili serdit, da ne silen,” in Plekhanov, Sochineniia, ed. D. Riazanov (Moscow, 1923-27), 19, p. 242; (hereafter referred to as Sochineniia).

12. N. Riazanov (pseudonym of D. V. Gol’dendakh), Materialy dlia byrabotki programmy (vyp. 2: Proekt programmy “Iskry”) (Geneva, 1903), pp. 4-12, 100-104.

13. “Programma sotsial-demokraticheskoi gruppy ‘Osvobozhdenie Truda’” (1884), in Sochineniia, 2, p. 361.

14. “Proekt programmy russkikh sotsial-demokratov” (1884) in B. Nikolaevskii, “Programma pervogo v Rossii s.-d. kruzhka,” Byloe, No. 13 (1918), p. 48. In a letter to Plekhanov and his comrades, the Blagoevtsy contrasted their own basically negative attitude to political assassination with that of the Group which, they wrote, “unswervingly declares its sympathy for the terrorist campaign against the government.” (Ibid., p. 49.)

15. “Vtoroi proekt programmy russkikh sotsial-demokratov” (1885?), in Sochineniia, 2, pp. 402-403. The dating of this, the second draft program produced by the Group, has caused some difficulty. First published in 1888 and sent to the press in 1887, it was apparently written in 1885 in response to a request from the Blagoevtsy. See N. Sergievskii, “Kogda i po kakomu povodu byl napisan Plekhanovym Proekt programmy russkikh sotsial-demokratov,” Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, No. 1 (72) (1928), pp. 85-101.

16. Plekhanov, Sochineniia, 2, pp. 360-61 (italics here and throughout are those of the source quoted).

17. Nikolaevskii, Byloe, No. 13 (1918), pp. 46-47.

18. “Ot izdatelei,” Rech’ P. A. Alekseeva (Geneva, 1889), p. v.

19. Plekhanov’s introduction to Pervoe maia: chetyre rechi rabochikh (Geneva, 1892), p. viii.

20. Plekhanov’s introduction to Vademecum dlia redaktsii “Rabochego Dela” (Geneva, 1900), p. xxxiii.

21. P. B. Aksel’rod, K voprosu o sovremennykh zadachakh i taktike russkikh sotsial-demokratov (Geneva, 1898), pp. 9, 15.

22. In Nikolaevskii, Byloe, No. 13 (1918), p. 51.

23. Plekhanov, Sochineniia, 2, pp. 360-61.

24. Ibid., p. 402.

25. Plekhanov, “O sotsial’noi demokratii v Rossii” (1893) in A. Tun, Istoriia revoliutsionnykh dvizhenii v Rossii (Geneva, 1903), p. 279.

26. Nikolaevskii, Byloe, No. 13 (1918), p. 46.

27. Plekhanov, Sochineniia, 2, p. 402.

28. In Literatura sotsial’no-revoliutsionnoi partii “Narodnoi voli,” p. 885.

29. “Mezhdunarodnyi rabochii sotsialisticheskii kongress v Parizhe, 14-15 iulia 1889,” Sotsial-Demokrat, 1 (1890), p. 29.

30. “Pis’mo k tovarishcham” (1884) in N. Sergievskii, “Gruppa ‘Osvobozhdenie Truda’ i marksistskie kruzhki,” Istoriko-revoliutsionnyi sbornik, 2, p. 181. For the identification of P. B. Aksel’rod as the author, see L. G. Deich, “V mesto bibliografii,” Gruppa Osvobozhdenie Truda, 3 (Moscow, 1925), pp. 354-55.

31. P. B. Aksel’rod, Zadachi rabochei intelligentsii v Rossii (Geneva, 1893), p. 11 (first published 1889).

32. Aksel’rod, “Politicheskaia rol’ S.-D. i poslednye vybory v germanskoi reikhstage,” Sotsial-Demokrat, 4, pt. 2 (1892), p. 26 n.

33. Plekhanov, “Polemicheskaia bespomoshchnost’,” Sochineniia, 19, p. 236.

34. Plekhanov, “Komediia oshibok (otvet i sovet A. Martynovu),” ibid., p. 54.

35. In Plekhanov, ed., Vademecum, pp. 38, 53.

36. A. Martynov (pseudonym of A. S. Pikker), “Kto likvidiroval ideinoe nasledstvo?” Golos sotsial’demokrata, No. 18 (1909), p. 9.

37. E.g. N. L. Sergievskii, Partiia russkikh sotsial-demokratov i gruppa Blagoeva (Moscow, 1929), pp. 113-15.

38. Plekhanov’s introduction to Vademecum, p. xlii.

39. Marx-Engels, Selected Works (Moscow, 1962), 1, p. 46.

40. Plekhanov, “Polemicheskaia bespomoshchnost’,” Sochineniia, 19, pp. 233-34, 240.

41. Ibid., p. 247.

42. “Otvet P. B. Aksel’roda na pis’mo I. P. Prisetskii” (December, 1881) in Istoriko-revoliutsionnyi sbornik, 2, p. 84; “Pis’mo k tovarishcham,” ibid., p. 176.

43. Plekhanov, “Sovremennye zadachi russkikh rabochikh” (1885), Sochineniia , 2, p. 372.

44. N. Riazanov, Materialy, p. 237.

45. Arkhiv K. Marksa i F. Engel’sa, ed. D. Riazanov (Moscow, 1924), 1, p. 269.

46. Plekhanov, Sochineniia, 2, p. 86.

47. V. Zasulich’s introduction to F. Engel’s, Razvitie nauchnogo sotsializma (Geneva, 1884), p. v.

48. “Nashi raznoglasiia” (1884), in Sochineniia G. V. Plekhanova (Geneva, 1905), pp. 511-12.

49. The introduction by Marx and Engels to the Russian edition (1882) of the Communist Manifesto quoted by Plekhanov in “Sotsializm i politicheskaia bor’ba,” Sochineniia, 2, p. 47.

50. Ibid.

51. Plekhanov, “Sotsializm i politicheskaia bor’ba,” Sochineniia, 2, p. 86.

52. Marx-Engels, Selected Works, 1, p. 65.

53. “Nashi raznoglasiia,” Sochineniia G. V. Plekhanova, p. 512.

54. Sochineniia, 2, p. 86.

55. V. Zasulich’s introduction to Engel’s, Razvitie, pp. iii-iv.

56. Ibid., p. v.

57. “Sotsializm i politicheskaia bor’ba,” Sochineniia, 2, p. 86.

58. Plekhanov, Sochineniia, 2, pp. 361-62.

59. “Sotsializm i politicheskaia bor’ba,” Sochineniia, 2, p. 77.

60. L. Tikhomirov, “Chego nam zhdat’ ot revoliutsii?” Vestnik Narodnoi voli, No. 2 (1884), p. 237.

61. “Nashi raznoglasiia,” Sochineniia G. V. Plekhanova, p. 428.

62. Plekhanov, “Polemicheskaia bespomoshchnost’,” Sochineniia, 19, pp. 233-34.

63. “Nashi raznoglasiia,” Sochineniia G. V. Plekhanova, pp. 475, 482-83.

64. Ibid., p. 475.

65. V. Zasulich’s introduction to F. Engel’s, Razvitie, pp. v, vii.

66. “Nashi raznoglasiia,” Sochineniia G. V. Plekhanova, pp. 524-25. Lenin, of course, advanced similar views in 1902 during the debate among the editors of Iskra about the draft Party Program.

67. V. Zasulich, “Revoliutsionery iz burzhuaznoi sredy,” Sotsial-Demokrat, 1, pp. 68, 72.

68. “Nashi raznoglasiia,” Sochineniia G. V. Plekhanova, p. 487.

69. E.g. Plekhanov, “Kak dobivat’sia konstitutsii” (1890), Sochineniia, 3, pp. 21-23.

70. Plekhanov, O zadachakh sotsialistov v bor’be s golodom v Rossii (Geneva, 1892), pp. 76-77, 87-88.

71. Ibid., p. 86.

72. F. Bystrykh, “Ob agrarnoi programme gruppy ‘Osvobozhdenie Truda’,” Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, No. 5 (88) (1929), p. 82.

73. Marx-Engels, Selected Works, 1, p. 112.

74. Plekhanov, Sochineniia, 2, pp. 402-403.

75. Quoted in Vaganian, G. V. Plekhanov, p. 377.

76. Perepiska G. V. Plekhanova i P. B. Aksel’roda, eds., P. A. Berlin, V. Voitinskii, and B. I. Nikolaevskij (Moscow, 1925), 1, p. 44.

77. N. Riazanov, Materialy, pp. 288, 295.

78. Lenin, “Chto takoe ‘druz’ia naroda’” (1894), Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 1 (Moscow, 1960), p. 299.

Russian and Jewish Social Democracy

1. General accounts of the Jewish movement, although not very satisfactory for our purposes, may be found in V. Akimov, Materialy dlia kharakteristiki razvitiia rossiiskoi sotsial-demokraticheskoi rabochei partii (Geneva, 1905), N. A. Bukhbinder, Istoriia evreiskogo rabochego dvizheniia v Rossii (Leningrad, 1925), and Materialy k istorii evreiskago rabochego dvizheniia (St. Petersburg, 1906). The data used in this article are primarily from memoir accounts, many of which are included in the important collection, Revoliutionnoe dvizhenie sredi evreev (Moscow, 1930), edited by S. Dimanshtein. Hereafter this work will be referred to simply as Dimanshtein. By far the most informative full-length recollections are those of Iulii Martov, Zapiski sotsialdemokrata (Berlin, 1923) and P. A. Garvi, Vospominaniia sotsial-demokrata (New York, 1946).

2. The best account of the origins of the Vilna Social Democratic group is that of Kopel’zon in Dimanshtein, pp. 65-80.

3. Kopel’zon reports the entreaties of the P.P.S. representative, Joseph Pilsudski (later the founder of the Polish republic), to adopt Polish as their operating tongue and states that he “threatened us with pogroms against Jews by the Polish masses” if the Russifying policy were not abandoned. (Ibid., pp. 72-73.)

4. The best treatment of the cultural and social development of Russian Jews is still S. M. Dubnow’s History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1916-20). A more recent, but less detailed work is Salo Baron, The Russian Jew under Tsars and Soviets (New York, 1964). Understandably such treatments focus primarily on the Jewish traditions rather than on the phenomenon of assimilationism. See Dubnow, 2, pp. 209-11, 221, and passim.

5. Dimanshtein, p. 71.

6. See the memoir fragment by Sponti in the collection S. I. Mitskevich, ed., Na zare rabochego dvizheniia v Moskve (Moscow, 1932), pp. 41-47.

7. See Martov, Zapiski, pp. 221-22.

8. Ob agitatsii (Geneva, 1897), pp. 9, 16.

9. Martov states this unequivocally in Zapiski, p. 233. The best accounts of the introduction of agitation in Vilna are ibid., pp. 224-54, and S. N. Gozhanskii in Dimanshtein, pp. 81-95.

10. See S. I. Mitskevich, Revoliutsionnaia Moskva (Moscow, 1940), pp. 147-48.

11. Garvi, Vospominaniia, p. 76.

12. See Martov, Zapiski, pp. 252-53.

13. Martov’s long list of Vilna products who were later active in the Russian Social Democratic movement (pp. 196-212, 250-54) is supplemented by another participant of the following period, V. Tsoglin (David Kats) in Dimanshtein, p. 135.

14. See accounts of Ginzburg and Vilenskii in Dimanshtein, pp. 96 and 131 ff., and more detailed versions in the collection, M. A. Rubach, ed. Istoriia ekaterinoslavskoi sotsial-demokraticheskoi organizatsii (1889-1903) (Ekaterinoslav, 1923), pp. 78-92, 141-168 (cited hereafter as Rubach).

15. On Ioffe’s career, see the police report reprinted in “Delo kharkovskogo rabochego soiuza,” Letopis’ revoliutsii, No. 4 (1923), pp. 206-207, and Garvi, Vospominaniia, pp. 101-103.

16. Rubach, p. 150.

17. A. Notkin’s recollections in V. I. Nevskii, ed. K dvadtsatipiatiletiiu pervogo s”ezda partii (1898-1923) (Moscow, 1923), p. 161.

18. Grigorii Aronson, Revoliutsionnaia iunost’: Vospominaniia 1903-1917, Inter-University Project on the History of the Menshevik Movement (New York, 1961), p. 11.

19. See Garvi, Vospominaniia, pp. 3-18.

20. For two years he participated in underground Menshevik committees in Russia, finally becoming one of the chief organizers of the Moscow uprising of December, 1905. Thereafter, he was a prominent “liquidator” and trade union leader and an internationalist during the war. After February, 1917, he adhered to the majority line in the Menshevik Party and was active in emigre Menshevik circles from 1923 until his death in 1946.

21. In surveying the composition of the Ekaterinoslav Committee from 1896 to 1903, one finds that the Jewish contingent always constituted at least half, and at times virtually the entire organization. Jewish Social Democrats were even more in evidence in the subordinate activities, handling the manifold practical tasks such as propaganda, communications, transport, printing leaflets, and maintaining secret quarters. The materials in Rubach make possible such a survey for Ekaterinoslav from the early 1890s to 1903. The less complete sources for Kiev, Rostov, Kremenchug, and Kharkov give the same impression.

22. Cited by Tsoglin-Kats in Dimanshtein, pp. 143-44.

23. Ibid., p. 444.

24. See Martov, Zapiski, pp. 244-47 and L. I. Gol’dman, Organizatsiia i tipografiia “Iskry” v Rossii (Moscow, 1928), pp. 4-5. Gol’dman was one of Martov’s model pupils who was denied entrance to Russian schools and was forced to learn the printer’s trade (his brother, “Gorev,” gained entrance to the university). Criticizing Martov for his concessions to “nationalism,” Gol’dman later operated a secret press for Iskra in Kishinev (1901-1902); another brother Mikhail (Liber) by 1903 was one of the leaders of the Bund and defended the Jews’ rights to “national autonomy” at the Second Congress where his chief adversary was Martov. To Martov’s embarrassment his speech of 1895 was printed by emigre Bundists in 1900 to justify their turn toward national particularism (Povorotnyi punkt v evreiskom rabochem dvizhenii [Geneva, 1900]).

25. On the founding of the Bund and its role in the First Congress of the RSDRP see Kremer, “Obosnovanie Bunda,” Proletarskaia revoliutsiia. No. 2 (1922), pp. 50-56, and the article “Pervyi s”ezd Bunda,” by Tsoglin-Kats in Dimanshtein, pp. 131-48.

26. See Dimanshtein, p. 137 and passim.

27. See the decisions of the Congress in Dimanshtein, pp. 157-58. Tsoglin-Kats was a delegate at the First Congress and discusses it in illuminating detail. Other accounts of the First Congress are V. Akimov, “Pervyi S”ezd,” Minuvshie gody. No. 2 (1908), pp. 128-68 and B. L. Eidel’man, “K istorii vozniknoveniia r.s.-d.r.p.,” Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, No. 1 (1921), pp. 26-66.

28. See Dimanshtein, p. 147.

29. See Ginzburg’s account in Rubach, pp. 155-60.

30. See “K istorii Belostokskoi konferentsii 1902 g.,” Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, No. 101 (June, 1930), pp. 132-48. Here a coded letter of Dan to Iskra headquarters reporting on the conference is reproduced.

31. Letter of June 22, 1903 in V. I. Lenin, Sochineniia, 3rd ed. (Moscow, 1936), 28, p. 140.

32. P. N. Lepeshinskii, Na povorote (ot kontsa 80-kh godov k 1905 g.) (Leningrad, 1925), p. 128.

33. The pertinent excerpts from Iskra from the Bund’s Posledniia Izvestiia are reprinted in Vtoroi S”ezd R.S.-D.R.P.-Protokoli (Moscow, 1959), pp. 726-29.

Marxist Revolutionaries and The Dilemma of Power

1. Boris Nicolaievsky and Otto Maenchen-Helfen, Karl Marx, Man and Fighter (London, 1936), especially Chs. 10-15.

2. John Plamenatz, German Marxism and Russian Communism (London, 1954), p. 211; E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923, 1 (London, 1950), p. 41.

3. Wilheim Weitling to Moses Hess, March 31, 1846, in Edmund Silberner, ed., Moses Hess, Briefwechsel (The Hague, 1959), p. 151.

4. [Pavel Annenkov], “Eine russische Stimme über Karl Marx,” Neue Zeit, Erster Jahrgang (Stuttgart, 1883), pp. 238-39; also see Max Nettlau, “Londoner deutsche Kommunistische Diskussionen, 1845,” in Carl Gruenberg, ed., Archiv fuer die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung, 10 (Leipzig, 1922), pp. 368-70, 380, 382-83.

5. Moses Hess, Sozialistische Aufsätze 1841-1847, Herausgegeben von Theodor Zlocisti (Berlin, 1921), pp. 229-30; Edmund Silberner, Moses Hess, Geschichte seines Lebens (Leiden, 1966), pp. 278-80.

6. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke, 4 (Berlin, 1959), p. 314.

7. Ibid., pp. 338-39.

8. Ibid., p. 339.

9. Ibid., p. 392.

10. See also Ibid., pp. 49, 51.

11. Ibid., pp. 502-503.

12. Nicolaievsky and Maenchen-Helfen, p. 171.

13. See Werke, 5, pp. 6-7, 22-24.

14. Ibid., pp. 96-97, 249, 282-83.

15. Ibid., p. 456; 6, p. 152.

16. Ibid., 6, p. 109.

17. Ibid., 5, p. 457.

18. Ibid., 6, pp. 124, 206, 217, 504-506.

19. Ibid., pp. 233, 257.

20. Ibid., p. 528.

21. Ibid., pp. 584, 588.

22. Ibid., 7, pp. 245-500.

23. Ibid., pp. 253-54.

24. Whatever claims Engels and later “orthodox” Marxists may have made for “scientific socialism” by analogy with and in imitation of the exact sciences, Marx himself provided a more modest definition of his scientific socialism in his notes on Bakunin’s Staatlichkeit und Anarchie. He insisted he had used the term “only by contrast with Utopian socialism which wants to foist new fantasies on the people instead of confining its science [Wissenschaft] to the cognition of the social movement made by the people itself” (Werke, 18, pp. 635-36); in other words, Marx used “scientific” in the broad, inclusive German sense of the word Wissenschaft, i.e., rigorous study of objective conditions.

25. Werke, 7, pp. 440, 514; 8,, pp. 590-91.

26. Ibid., 8, p. 598.

27. Ibid.

28. Ibid., pp. 598-99.

29. Ibid., 7, p. 563.

30. Ibid., 8, p. 599.

31. Ibid., p. 600.

32. Ibid., p. 461.

33. Ibid., p. 600.

34. Ibid., 7, pp. 400-401.

35. Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence (Moscow, 1965), pp. 468-72.

36. Ibid., pp. 471-72.

37. Ibid., p. 472.

38. Werke, 18, pp. 556-57.

39. Ibid., p. 557.

40. Ibid., p. 634.

41. Ibid., pp. 476-77.

42. Ibid., pp. 492-93.

43. Ibid., 36, pp. 54-55.

44. Ibid., 8, pp. 589-90.

45. The relevant documents in English are available in Paul W. Blackstock and Bert F. Hoselitz, eds., Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: The Russian Menace to Europe (London, 1953), pp. 203-41, 273-84.

46. Ibid., p. 284.

47. Werke, 18, pp. 633-34.

48. Knowing how anxious Plekhanov was for Engels to come out against populist maximalism, Vera Zasulich is said to have played a practical joke on Plekhanov, breaking the news to him that a letter from Engels to that effect had arrived. Interview with Lydia O. Tsederbaum-Dan, New York, 1962.

49. G. V. Plekhanov, Izbrannye filosofskie proizvedeniia, 1 (Moscow, 1956), pp. 100, 101, 105, 106-107, 110.

50. Ibid., pp. 100, 107.

51. Ibid., p. 127.

52. Ibid., pp. 164, 216, 345-46.

53. Ibid., p. 353.

54. Ibid., p. 375; both points, the terrorist struggle and the seizure of power, were omitted in the second draft of 1887.

55. Ibid., p. 421; while the wording of the passage is somewhat different in the first draft of the speech (see ibid., p. 419), the emphasis is the same.

56. Pervyi s”ezd RSDRP, Dokumenty i materialy (Moscow, 1958), p. 80.

57. Leninskii sbornik, 2 (Moscow-Leningrad, 1924), pp. 18-19, 60-61, 64.

58. Ibid., pp. 85-87.

59. P. Aksel’rod, “Ob”edinenie rossiiskoi sotsialdemokratii i eë zadachi,” Iskra, No. 55, December 15, 1903; No. 57, January 15, 1904.

60. N. Trotskii, Nashi politicheskie zadachi (Geneva, 1904), pp. 101-107.

61. Ibid., p. 107.

62. “Otvet na pis’mo Ts. O. predstavitelei Ufimskogo, Sredne-Ural’skogo i Permskogo komitetov,” supplement to Iskra, No. 63, April 1, 1904. Boris Nicolaevsky identified the author of the Ural Manifesto as M. A. Trilisser who later became a leading Chekist and had ample opportunity to practice what he had preached.

63. Quoted in A. Martynov, Dve diktatury (Geneva, 1905), p. 4, and dated December, 1903.

64. Martynov, Dve diktatury, p. 4; Trotskii, Nashi politicheskie zadachi, p. 106.

65. Martynov, Trotskii, and Plekhanov used it for that purpose; Plekhanov in his critique of the Ural Manifesto (“K voprosu o zakhvate vlasti,” Iskra, No. 96, April 5, 1905) took issue with the “dictatorial” propensities of the Ural Bolsheviks but ignored entirely their commitment to the seizure of power.

66. Dve diktatury was written at the end of 1904 and published early in 1905; it was republished in a revised edition in 1917.

67. Martynov, Dve diktatury, pp. 10-11.

68. Ibid., pp. 53-57.

69. Martynov, “Revoliutsionnye perspektivy,” Iskra, No. 90, March 3, 1905; No. 95, March 31, 1905; L. Martov, “Na ocheredi. Rabochaia partiia i ‘zakhvat vlasti’ kak nasha blizhaishaia zadacha,” Iskra, No. 93, March 17, 1905; Plekhanov, “K voprosu o zakhvate vlasti (Nebol’shaia istoricheskaia spravka),” Iskra, No. 96, April 5, 1905; Martynov, “V bor’be s marksistskoi sovest’iu,” Iskra, No. 102, June 15, 1905; No. 103, June 21, 1905.

70. Martov, Iskra, No. 93, March 17, 1905.

71. Martynov, Iskra, No. 95, March 31, 1905.

72. Martov, Iskra, No. 93, March 17, 1905.

73. Ibid.; Martynov, Iskra, No. 95, March 31, 1905.

74. Plekhanov, “K voprosu o zakhvate vlasti,” Iskra, No. 96, April 5, 1905. Plekhanov paraphrased Engels’ letter thus: “And after victory it would be extremely dangerous (‘Questo é il pericolo piú grande’),” says Engels, “if socialists entered the government.” Yet the burden and emphasis of Engels’ warning referred specifically (certainly in the Italian version available to Plekhanov published in Critica Sociale, February 1, 1894) to the acceptance of “minority” status in the “new government” à la Louis Blanc.

75. Martynov, “V bor’be s marksistskoi sovest’iu,” Iskra, No. 102, June 15, 1905.

76. See Pervaia obshcherusskaia konferentsiia partiinykh rabotnikov, Iskra, No. 100, May 15, 1905, appendix, pp. 23-24.

77. Plekhanov, “K voprosu o zakhvate vlasti,” Iskra, No. 96, April 5, 1905.

78. See L. M.[artov], “Na ocheredi. ‘Boikot’ Dumy i revoliutsionnoe samoupravlenie naroda,” Iskra, No. 109, August 29, 1905.

79. See Martov, “Chernomorskoe vosstanie,” Iskra, No. 104, July 1, 1905; also his “Voennaia sila na sluzhbe revoliutsii,” Sotsial’demokrat, No. 8, June 24, 1905.

80. Pervaia obshcherusskaia konferentsiia partiinykh rabotnikov, p. 21.

81. See J. L. H. Keep, The Rise of Social Democracy in Russia (Oxford, 1963), pp. 214-15.

82. See Martov, Iskra, No. 109, August 29, 1905, and ibid., No. 104, July 1, 1905.

83. See Martov, “Das russische Proletariat und die Duma,” Arbeiter Zeitung (Vienna) No. 233, August 24, 1905, for a more detailed discussion of the Mensheviks’ scheme of dual parliament; also Israel Getzler, Martov, A Political Biography of a Russian Social Democrat (Melbourne and Cambridge, 1967), pp. 107-109.

84. Pervaia obshcherusskaia konferentsiia partiinykh rabotnikov, p. 21.

85. Martov to Aksel’rod, end of October, 1905, Pis’ma P. B. Aksel’roda i Iu. O. Martova 1901-1916 (Berlin, 1924), p. 146; also see D. Sverchkov, Na zare revoliutsii (Moscow, 1922), p. 92; Oskar Anweiler, Die Rätebewegung in Russland 1905-1921 (Leiden, 1958), p. 85.

86. N. Trotskii, Do deviatogo ianvaria, s predisloviem Parvusa (Geneva, 1905), pp. 11-12.

87. Ibid.

88. N. Trotskii, Nasha revoliutsiia (St. Petersburg, 1906), pp. 244-45.

89. T.[rotskii], “Politicheskie pis’ma,” Iskra, No. 93, March 17, 1905, reprinted in L. Trotskii, Sochineniia, 2, pt. 1 (Moscow-Leningrad, 1925), p. 236.

90. N. Trotskii, “Sotsialdemokratiia i revoliutsiia,” Nachalo, No. 10, November 8/25, 1905.

91. Ibid.

92. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, Trotsky 1879-1921 (London, 1954), p. 159.

93. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 10 (Moscow, 1960), pp. 12-13.

94. Ibid., p. 18.

95. Ibid.

96. Ibid., 11, p. 16.

97. Quoted in Martynov, Iskra, No. 95, March 31, 1905.

98. See Trotskii, Nasha revoliutsiia, pp. 245-46; Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, Trotsky 1879-1921 (London, 1954), p. 154; Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 10, pp. 8, 130, 134.

99. Franz Mehring, “Nepreryvnaia revoliutsiia,” Nachalo, No. 10, November 25, 1905.

100. See Kautsky’s letter to M. N. Lyadov, published in Iskra, No. 66, May 15, 1904, under the heading “Kautskii o nashikh partiinykh raznoglasiiakh.”

101. For the text of the questionnaire, see Lenin, Sochineniia (Moscow, 1935), p. 494. Kautsky’s reply is in his “Triebkräfte und Aussichten der russischen Revolution,” Neue Zeit, Jahrgang 1906/7, 1 Band, pp. 331-33.

102. Neue Zeit, Jahrgang 1906/7, 1 Band, pp. 331-33. Martov’s critique of Kautsky’s views, “K. Kautskii i russkaia revoliutsiia,” Otkliki, 11 (1907), pp. 3-24, adds little to the 1905 debate.

103. “Mneniia zapadno-evropeiskikh sotsialistov o sovremennom obshchestvennom dvizhenii v Rossii,” Sovremennaia zhizn’, November, 1906, pp. 206-25.

104. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 10, pp. 8, 238-39.

105. L. Trotskii, Sochineniia, 3, pt. 1 (Moscow, 1925), p. 108; also see ibid., p. 251.

106. Tsereteli’s speech of May 7, 1917 at the All-Russian Conference of the RSDRP in Petrograd is quoted in full in V. L. L’vov-Rogachevskii, Sotsialisty o tekushchem momente; Materialy velikoi revoliutsii 1917 g. (Moscow, 1917), pp. 197-200.

107. Ibid., pp. 198-99.

108. Ibid., p. 199.

109. See Martov’s speech at the “Unification Congress” of the Menshevik party in August 1917, Novaia zhizn’, No. 107, August 22, 1917.

110. See Lenin to A. M. Kollontai, March 17, 1917, and Lenin to A. V. Lunacharskii, March 25, 1917, Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 49, pp. 402, 411.

111. Viktor Chernov, Rozhdenie revoliutsionnoi Rossii (Paris-Prague-New York, 1934), p. 237.

The All-Russian Railroad Union

1. J. L. H. Keep, The Rise of Social Democracy in Russia (Oxford, 1963), p. 218.

2. P. A. Garvi, Vospominaniia sotsial demokrata (New York, 1946), pp. 555-56.

3. Kommunisticheskaia akademiia, Pervaia russkaia revoliutsiia: Ukazatel’ literatury (Moscow, 1930).

4. A. M. Pankratova, ed., Revoliutsiia 1905-1907 gg. v Rossii: Dokumenty i materialy (Moscow, 1955-). Two volumes deal with the October general strike: L. M. Ivanov, ed., Vserossiiskaia politicheskaia stachka v oktiabre 1905 goda (1955).

5. A brief summary of Soviet writings on the 1905 Revolution appears in I. F. Ugarov and N. N. Iakovlev, “Pervaia russkaia revoliutsiia 1905-1907 gg. v sovetskoi istoriografii” in M. B. Nechkina et al., eds., Ocherki istorii istoricheskoi nauki v SSSR (Moscow, 1966), 4, pp. 411-27. More prominent among the recent works pertinent to this paper are the following: F. D. Kretov et al., eds., Bol’sheviki vo glave pervoi russkoi revoliutsii 1905-1907 gg. (Moscow, 1956); G. D. Kostomarov, ed., 1905 v Moskve (Moscow, 1955); A. M. Pankratova and G. D. Kostomarov, eds., Ocherki istorii SSSR: Pervaia russkaia burzhuazno-demokraticheskaia revoliutsiia 1905-1907 gg. (Moscow, 1955); I. V. Spiridonov, Vserossiiskaia politicheskaia stachka v oktiabre 1905 g. (Moscow, 1955); V. Kirillov, Bol’sheviki vo glave massovykh politicheskikh stachek v period pod”ema revoliutsii 1905-1907gg. (Moscow, 1961); A. V. Piaskovskii, Revoliutsiia 1905-1907 gg. v Rossii (Moscow, 1966); L. K. Erman, Intelligentsiia v pervoi russkoi revoliutsii (Moscow, 1966).

6. It should be noted that at an earlier date some Soviet historians considered the October days to be the high point of the 1905 Revolution; contemporary Soviet interpretations, however, view the Moscow December uprising as its peak. See brief discussion in Ugarov and Iakovlev, pp. 415-18.

7. The figures on railroad mileage are taken primarily from P. I. Liashchenko, Istoriia narodnogo khoziaistva SSSR, 4th ed. (Moscow, 1956), 2, pp. 120-21, 130-31, 152, 412-13; also from “S”ezd predstavitelei promyshlennosti i torgovli, dekabr’, 1906 g.,” Kratkii otchet o rabotakh proizvedennykh Sovetom s”ezdov po zheleznodorozhnomu voprosu (St. Petersburg, 1907), pp. 17-18, 20-23; see also J. N. Westwood, A History of Russian Railways (London, 1964), p. 143 and Appendix 2, p. 304; Appendix 7, pp. 308-309.

8. This figure is from Statisticheskii sbornik Ministerstva putei soobshcheniia, No. 89, table xii, p. 11, cited in I. M. Pushkareva, “Zarabotnaia plata zheleznodorozhnikov nakanune revoliutsii 1905-1907 gg .,” Istoriia SSSR, No. 3 (July-August, 1957), p. 159; see also A. G. Rashin, “O chislennosti i territorial’nom razmeshchenii rabochikh v period kapitalizma,” Istoricheskie zapiski, 46 (1954), pp. 129-32.

9. On the question of wages of railwaymen see M. B. [M. Bogdanov], Ocherki po istorii zheleznodorozhnykh zabastovok v Rossii (Moscow, 1907), pp. 5-6; Pushkareva, Istoriia SSSR, No. 3 (1957), pp. 160-164, 168; K. A. Pazhitnov, Polozhenie rabochego klassa v Rossii, 2nd ed. (Leningrad, 1925), 3, pp. 10, 47, 52; Kratkii otchet, p. 50; also see S. G. Strumilin, Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Moscow, 1964), 3, pp. 318 ff. In addition to wages permanent employees were covered by pension funds. Their operation is discussed by V. V. Sviatlovskii, Professional’noe dvizhenie v Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1907), pp. 42-47. Inadequacy of the pension plans is summarized by A. D. Pokotilov, Chairman of the Railroad Pension Congress, in Novoe vremia, September 23, 1905, p. 4.

10. A. El’nitskii, Istoriia rabochego dvizheniia v Rossii (Kremenchug, 1924), 2, p. 7.

11. L. Martov, “Razvitie promyshlennosti i rabochee dvizhenie s 1893 do 1903 g.,” Istoriia Rossii v XIX veke (St. Petersburg, 1907-1911), 8, pp. 125-26.

12. V. N. Pereverzev, “Pervyi vserossiiskii zheleznodorozhnyi soiuz 1905 goda,” Byloe, No. 4 (32) (1925), pp. 38-39. See also N. Rostov, “Zheleznodorozhniki v pervoi revoliutsii,” in Proletariat v revoliutsii 1905-1907 gg. (Moscow, 1930), pp. 131 ff.

13. M. B., Ocherki, pp. 19-20; also Pereverzev, Byloe, No. 4 (32) (1925), p. 39.

14. Text of regulations is in N. Trusova et al., eds., Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie v Rossii vesnoi i letom 1905 goda: aprel’-sentiabr’ (Moscow, 1957), 1, pp. 866-69, note 25; also p. 871, note 47, from the series A. M. Pankratova, ed., Revoliutsiia 1905-1907 gg. v Rossii: Dokumenty i materialy.

15. Ibid., p. 874, note 68; enacted as law on December 14, 1905. Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii, sobranie 3-e, Vol. 25, 1905, Otdel 1, No. 27043 (St. Petersburg, 1908), pp. 887-89.

16. M. B., Ocherki, pp. 21-22.

17. Pereverzev, Byloe, No. 4 (32) (1925), p. 39.

18. M. B., Ocherki, p. 25; Pereverzev, Byloe, No. 4 (32) (1925), p. 40; also V. Romanov, “Dvizhenie sredi sluzhashchikh i rabochikh russkikh zheleznykh dorog v 1905 g.,” Obrazovanie, No. 11 (1906), p. 26.

19. See D. Kol’tsov, “Rabochie v 1905-1907 gg.,” in Obshchestvennoe dvizhenie v Rossii v nachale XX-go veka, L. Martov et al., eds. (St. Petersburg, 1909), 2, pt. 1, p. 230.

20. S. I. Mitskevich, Revoliutsionnaia Moskva (Moscow, 1940), pp. 357-63; see also Pereverzev, Byloe, No. 4 (32) (1925), pp. 40-41.

21. Pereverzev, Byloe, No. 4 (32) (1925), pp. 42, 45; Romanov, Obrazovanie, No. 11 (1906), pp. 29-30.

22. For an enumeration of the railroads attending this first congress see Romanov, Obrazovanie, No. 11 (1906), p. 28, and No. 6 (1907), p. 23, n. 2.

23. The text of the program is in Pereverzev, Byloe, No. 4 (32) (1925), p. 42; see also Romanov, Obrazovanie, No. 11 (1906), pp. 32-34; M. B., Ocherki, pp. 25-28.

24. A prominent Bolshevik, A. Shlikhter, was one of the Social Democratic representatives, and he seems to have been their principal voice. He chaired some of the meetings and played an important role in the proceedings. Since the leadership of the union showed “liberal bourgeois” tendencies, both factions often acted in common and issued joint declarations. For example, in Iskra, No. 109 (1905), the Mensheviks express their solidarity with Bolshevik views on the Railroad Union and praise the speech of the Bolshevik representative at the congress.

25. See Garvi, pp. 519 ff; a brief summary of the activity of the Social Democrats in Moscow is in David Lane, The Roots of Russian Communism (Assen, 1968), pp. 94-132.

26. “Chto delat’?” in V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th ed., 6, pp. 39-40.

27. “Professional’noe dvizhenie i sotsial-demokratiia,” Proletarii, No. 8 (July 4/17, 1905).

28. V. Vorovskii, “Pervye shagi professional’nogo dvizheniia,” Proletarii, No. 11 (July 27-August 9, 1905); also see Erman, Intelligentsiia v pervoi russkoi revoliutsii, pp. 89-90.

29. M. Borisov, “O professional’nom dvizhenii i zadachakh sotsial-demokratii,” Proletarii, No. 21 (October 4/17, 1905).

30. For discussions of the difference in attitudes between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, see Keep, pp. 188-91; E. Mil’shtein, “Politicheskie techeniia v rossiiskom profdvizhenii 1905-1907 gg.,” in Proletariat v revoliutsii 1905 g., pp. 443-70; and S. M. Shvarts [Schwarz], Bol’shevizm i men’shevizm v ikh otnosheniiakh k massovomu rabochemu dvizheniiu (Inter-University Project on the History of the Menshevik Movement), published in an English version as The Russian Revolution of 1905: The Workers’ Movement and the Formation of Bolshevism (Chicago, 1967).

31. Romanov, Obrazovanie, No. 11 (1906), p. 29.

32. Ibid., p. 31; Romanov says that five members were elected, and then soon after, five more were co-opted. By the Second Congress, the Central Bureau consisted of twenty persons. Pereverzev (Byloe, No. 4 [32] [1925], p. 43) says that seven were elected; however, in an earlier account, Zheleznodorozhniki v 1905 g. (Moscow, [early 1920’s]), p. 9, he also stated that the elected number was five. See also Rostov, Proletariat, pp. 136-37.

33. Pereverzev, Byloe, No. 4 (32) (1925), p. 43.

34. Mitskevich, p. 391. Rostov (Proletariat, p. 157) calls Pereverzev a Socialist Revolutionary.

35. M. I. Vasil’ev-Iuzhin, “Moskovskii sovet rabochikh deputatov v 1905 godu,” Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, No. 5 (40) (1925), p. 114.

36. Mitskevich, p. 391. The party affiliation of Romanov is questionable; in his own account, he expresses himself against the Social Democrats’ attitude towards the union. He remained a stalwart supporter of the union. Nonetheless, in many subsequent works he is referred to as a Bolshevik, e.g., Rostov, Proletariat, p. 137.

37. Pereverzev, Zheleznodorozhniki v 1905 g., p. 9.

38. Pereverzev, Byloe, No. 4 (32) (1925), p. 47; also Romanov, Obrazovanie, No. 6 (1907), p. 29.

39. The text of the leaflet appears in Listovki moskovskikh bol’shevikov v period pervoi russkoi revoliutsii (Moscow, 1955), Doc. 56, p. 128.

40. N. N. Mandel’shtam, “Iz proshlogo,” in the collection, Piatyi god, ed. S. Chernomordik (Moscow, 1925), p. 78.

41. Ibid.

42. L. K. Erman, “Uchastie intelligentsii v oktiabr’skoi politicheskoi stachke,” Istoricheskie zapiski, 49 (1954), p. 363.

43. Mandel’shtam and Kotliarenko in Piatyi god, pp. 83, 95.

44. Garvi, pp. 523, 547.

45. Romanov, Obrazovanie, No. 11 (1906), pp. 39-41, 43, and Pereverzev, Byloe, No. 4 (32) (1925), p. 43.

46. Mandel’shtam, Piatyi god, pp. 83-84.

47. Pereverzev, Byloe, No. 4 (32) (1925), p. 46.

48. Ibid., p. 42; see also Mandel’shtam, Piatyi god, p. 83.

49. Romanov, Obrazovanie, No. 11 (1906), pp. 42-43.

50. Ibid., No. 7 (1907), p. 70.

51. Agenda for the meeting and the constitution prepared by the Central Bureau, as well as several other documents pertaining to the union, are in Chapter IX of A. Kats and lu. Milonov, 1905: Professional’noe dvizhenie, from the series 1905: Materialy i dokumenty, ed. M. N. Pokrovskii (Moscow-Leningrad, 1926).

52. Romanov, Obrazovanie, No. 11 (1906), p. 43.

53. Ibid., No. 7 (1907), p. 66, contains a complete list of railroads attending the congress.

54. Ibid.

55. The Social Democratic position is summarized in Iskra, No. 109 (August 29, 1905), p. 3.

56. The Socialist Revolutionary position is summarized in Revoliutsionnaia Rossiia, No. 73 (August 15, 1905), pp. 24-25.

57. Romanov, Obrazovanie, No. 7 (1907), p. 70. A writer in Iskra (No. 109) asserts that the decisions on the strike were “thrust upon” (naviazany) the congress by the Social Democrats.

58. Ibid., pp. 70-71.

59. Ibid., p. 72; the text of the proposed constitution is on pp. 81-83; see also Pereverzev, Byloe, No. 4 (32) (1925), pp. 48-49; M. B., Ocherki, pp. 28-30. For the constitution of the union see V. Ivanovich, Rossiiskie partii, soiuzy i ligi: Sbornik program, ustavov . . . (St. Petersburg, 1906), pp. 227-29.

60. Romanov, Obrazovanie, No. 7 (1907), p. 74; Iskra, No. 109.

61. Romanov, Obrazovanie, No. 7 (1907), pp. 75-78; Pereverzev, Byloe, No. 4 (32) (1925), pp. 48-49; Iskra, No. 109; Erman, Istoricheskie zapiski, 49 (1954), p. 363; Mitskevich, p. 391.

62. From a police report in Kats and Milonov, 1905: Professional’noe dvizhenie, p. 254; also cited in Erman, Istoricheskie zapiski, 49 (1954), p. 361. Although most sources indicate that the party union withdrew from the Railroad Union, several authors claim that the Social Democratic Union remained a member; see Rostov, Proletariat, p. 146; Piaskovskii, p. 123.

63. Romanov, Obrazovanie, No. 7 (1907), p. 78.

64. Ibid., No. 6 (1907), pp. 51-52; No. 7 (1907), pp. 72-73.

65. For example, see Erman, Istoricheskie zapiski, 49 (1954), pp. 369 ff.

66. Mitskevich, p. 391; Romanov, Obrazovanie, No. 7 (1907), pp. 72-74, 78.

67. Rostov, Proletariat, p. 147.

68. G. Khrustalev-Nosar’, “Istoriia Soveta rabochikh deputatov,” Istoriia Soveta rabochikh deputatov (St. Petersburg, date unk.), p. 56.

69. Rostov, Proletariat, p. 149.

70. Vserossiiskaia politicheskaia stachka, 1, Doc. 60, pp. 85-86. See also Garvi, pp. 547-48.

71. L. Trotskii, “Stachka v oktiabre 1905 g.,” in Revoliutsiia i RKP(b) v materialakh i dokumentakh, M. Vasil’ev-Iuzhin, ed. (Moscow, 1926), 3, p. 272; also Romanov, Obrazovanie, No. 7 (1907), p. 85.

72. Pereverzev, Byloe, No. 4 (32) (1925), p. 49; Romanov, Obrazovanie, No. 7 (1907), p. 84.

73. Pereverzev, Byloe, No. 4 (32) (1925), p. 50, and Zheleznodorozhniki v 1905g., p. 10. See also A. Shestakov, “Vseobshchaia oktiabr’skaia stachka 1905 goda,” in M. N. Pokrovskii, ed., 1905: Istoriia revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia v otdel’nykh ocherkakh, Vol. 2: Ot ianvaria k oktiabriu (Moscow-Leningrad, 1925), p. 277. J. L. H. Keep (p. 221, n.1) is incorrect in assuming that the Mensheviks represented the Social Democrats in these negotiations. The evidence clearly indicates that the representatives were Bolsheviks.

74. Rostov, Proletariat, p. 151.

75. Pereverzev, Byloe, No. 4 (32) (1925), p. 50.

76. Vserossiiskaia politicheskaia stachka, 1, Doc. 333, p. 415, and note 193, p. 678. See also Akademiia nauk SSSR, Istoriia Moskvy (Moscow, 1955), 5, ed. A. M. Pankratova, L. M. Ivanov, and V. D. Mochalov, p. 138; A. M. Pankratova and G. D. Kostomarov, eds., Ocherki istorii SSSR: Pervaia russkaia burzhuazno-demokraticheskaia revoliutsiia 1905-1907 gg. (Moscow, 1955), p. 147. Another author says that the Moscow Committee issued an appeal for a general strike on October 2; L. M. Ivanov, “Vserossiiskaia oktiabr’skaia stachka i sovety rabochikh deputatov,” in Akademiia nauk SSSR, Doklady i soobshcheniia Instituta istorii (Moscow, 1956), 9, p. 12. The role of other parties and unions in calling for a general strike at this time is not clear, but at least one author maintains that it was the Socialist Revolutionaries that tried to start such a strike but failed; Rostov, Proletariat, p. 151.

77. L. Trotskii, 1905 (Moscow, 1922), pp. 89-90; Khrustalev-Nosar’, Istoriia Soveta rabochikh deputatov, p. 55; Mitskevich, p. 390, and Garvi, pp. 553-56.

78. Vserossiiskaia politicheskaia stachka, 1, Doc. 69, p. 98; see also Docs. 330, 331, pp. 409-13 for official figures on strikers.

79. Extracts from minutes of the meeting of October 4 in Materialy po professional’nomu dvizheniiu rabochikh, No. 1 (February, 1906), p. 15. The “Council of Representatives of Five Professions” was formed on October 2 to coordinate the strike activities among printers, workers in mechanical production, tobacco workers, carpenters, and the Railroad Union.

80. Pereverzev, Byloe, No. 4 (32) (1925), p. 51; M. B., Ocherki, pp. 31-32.

81. Vserossiiskaia politicheskaia stachka, 1, secret Okhrana report, Doc. 332, p. 414.

82. Pereverzev, Byloe, No. 4 (32) (1925), p. 51; Rostov, Proletariat, p. 152. Also see the leaflet issued by the union calling for the strike in Vserossiiskaia politicheskaia stachka, 1, Doc. 134, pp. 201-202; and Russkie vedomosti, No. 263 (1905).

83. Vserossiiskaia politicheskaia stachka, 1, Docs. 140, p. 210; 144, p. 217; and 394, p. 488.

84. Ibid., Docs. 140, p. 210; 394, p. 488; Rostov, Proletariat, p. 152.

85. Vserossiiskaia politicheskaia stachka, 1, Doc. 196, p. 268; Doc. 394, p. 488; Doc. 195, p. 267; Doc. 197, p. 270.

86. For example, see ibid., Doc. 140, pp. 210-13; Doc. 144, pp. 217-20. (Doc. 144 gives a day-by-day account of the strike’s progress from October 6 to 16.)

87. Ibid., Doc. 134, pp. 201-202.

88. Ibid., Doc. 135, p. 202.

89. For example, see ibid., Doc. 197, p. 270.

90. A. Shestakov in 1905: Materialy i dokumenty, 2, p. 290.

91. Erman, Istoricheskie zapiski, 49 (1954), p. 367.

92. G. D. Kostomarov, ed., 1905 god v Moskve (Moscow, 1955), p. 84.

93. Account of N. N. Mandel’shtam in Piatyi god, p. 85.

94. Mitskevich, p. 389; account of B. A. Breslav in Piatyi god, p. 158.

95. Piatyi god, p. 158.

96. Mitskevich, p. 392.

97. Garvi, p. 556.

98. This was a widely held version, and most Menshevik writers ascribed the beginning of the strike to this. For example, see L. Martov, et al., Obshchestvennoe dvizhenie v Rossii v nachale XX veka, Vol. 2, pt. 2, pp. 78, 232.

99. Zheleznodorozhnik, No. 127 (1905), (Biulleten’ Pervogo vserossiiskogo delegatskogo s”ezda zheleznodorozhnykh sluzhashchikh, No. 10).

100. Vserossiiskaia politicheskaia stachka, 1, Doc. 136, pp. 203-206. See also Rostov, Proletariat, p. 154.

101. Ibid., Doc. 135, p. 202.

102. Syn otechestva. No. 207 (October 12, 1905); Zheleznodorozhnik, No. 127 (1905), p. 8.

103. Orekhov, Zheleznodorozhniki v 1905 g., pp. 10-15, contain his account of the interview with Witte.

104. Letter of the St. Petersburg Governor-General, D. F. Trepov, to the Minister of Education concerning the meeting of October 11 on the premises of St. Petersburg University in Vserossiiskaia politicheskaia stachka, 1, Doc. 285, p. 355.

105. On this see Schwarz, The Russian Revolution of 1905, pp. 138-40.

106. Text in Vserossiiskaia politicheskaia stachka, 1, Doc. 137, p. 207.

107. Rostov, Proletariat, p. 156.

108. Amal’rik, Istoricheskie zapiski, 52 (1955), p. 148 and table 29, p. 178f.

109. Pereverzev, Byloe, No. 4 (32) (1925), p. 63; also P. V. Kokhmanskii, ed., Moskva v dekabre 1905 g. (Moscow, 1906), pp. 10-11; Rostov, Proletariat, pp. 163-65.

110. Vasil’ev-Iuzhin, Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, No. 5 (40) (1925), pp. 114-15.

111. Rostov, Proletariat, pp. 166-68. For specific examples, see V. Vladimirov, Karatel’naia ekspeditsiia otriada leibgvardii Semenovskogo polka v dekabr’skie dni na Moskovo-Kazanskoi zheleznoi doroge (Moscow, 1906), p. 159.

The Social Democratic Movement in Latvia

1. The following works deal with the history of the Social Democratic movement in Latvia: F. O. Ames, The Revolution in the Baltic Provinces of Russia, A Brief Account of the Activity of the Latvian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (London, 1907); J. Aberbergs, Latvijas Sociāldemokratiskā Strādnieku Partija (Riga, 1929); B. Kalniņš, Latvijas Sociāldemokratiskã Strādnieky Partijas, 50 gadi (Stockholm, 1956); B. Kalniņš, “Lettlands Sozialdemokratie,” in Sozialdemokratie in Europa, ed. H. Wehner (Hannover, 1966). From the Bolshevik point of view, the history of Latvian Social Democracy is commented upon in the collective work, V. Miške, ed., Latvijas Komunistikās partijas vestures apcerējumi, 1, 1893-1919 (Riga, 1961), published in both Latvian and Russian. The subject is also treated in the volume of essays, LKP-25 gadi (Moscow, 1929).

2. Jānis Rainis (1865-1929), an outstanding Latvian poet and ideologist of Latvian independence, later became a member of the Central Committee of the LSDSP, a delegate to the Constituent Assembly, a member of the Latvian Parliament, and Minister of Education.

3. J. Rainis, Dzīve un darbi, 9. sējums (Riga, 1925), p. 14.

4. For detailed information on Rainis’ activity in the “New Current” see the essay by B. Kalniņš, “Rainis kā brīvības cinitajs,” in J. Rainis, Darbi, 17 (Västerås, 1965). See also the memoirs of other members of the “New Current,” such as Klara Kalnips (1874-1964), Liesmainie gadi (Stockholm, 1964), and J. Klava (1876-1956), Der Rebell, Das Leben eines lettischen Bauersohnes (Aarau, 1958). Information concerning the “New Current” may also be found in the manuscript “Obzor vazhneishikh doznanii proizvodivshikhsia v zhandarmskikh upravleniiakh za 1897 god” (St. Petersburg, 1902), pp. 68-155, a copy of which is in the B. I. Nicolaevsky Collection, Hoover Institution, Stanford, California.

5. A complete collection of Auseklis may be found at the Public Library, Boston, Massachusetts.

6. Jānis Ozols (1878-1968), graduated from the Faculty of Economy of the Technical College in Riga. He was an alert conspirator and organizer, a member of the Second Duma and secretary of its Social Democratic fraction, and a Menshevik. When the Second Duma was dissolved, Ozols emigrated to the United States where he received a Ph.D. from Harvard University.

7. Dr. Pauls Kalniņš (1872-1945), graduated from the Medical School of Dorpat (Tartu) University. In 1903, in order to avoid imprisonment, he left for Switzerland, where he remained until 1907. In the years of tsarist reaction he was a member of the Central Committee of the SDL and the editor of party publications. A Centrist at first, he later became a Menshevik. One of the founders of the Latvian Republic in 1918, Kalniņš was the Presiding Officer of the Parliament for many years and became a leader of the democratic resistance during World War II. A memorial volume to Kalniņš, Tautai un brīvībai, was published in Stockholm in 1952.

8. J. Ozols (J. Zars), Brīvība, No. 52-53 (Stockholm, 1954).

9. Jānis Jansons (1872-1917). A student of the Faculty of Law at Dorpat University, he became one of the leaders of the “New Current,” the best known leader of the revolution of 1905, and a publicist and editor of party publications. In the years of reaction he was a member of the SDL Committee in Brussels as a Centrist. Jansons was the author of several works on history and politics.

10. Voldis Rikveilis (1874-1940) was a worker (painter) and a member of the Central Committee of the SDL for many years. An excellent organizer and conspirator, he was frequently arrested; he later became one of the leaders of the Latvian Menshevik “Liquidators.”

11. For more details see B. Kalniņš, Latvijas Sociāldemokratiskā, pp. 42-43.

12. Sociāldemokrats, No. 27 (Berne, 1904), pp. 1-10.

13. This was also admitted by Lenin (Sochineniia, 2nd ed., 14 [Moscow, 1935], p. 339) and by L. Martov (“To the Jubilee of Cīņa,” Cīņa, No. 100, 1910). See also J. L. H. Keep, The Rise of Social Democracy in Russia (Oxford, 1963), pp. 41, 257-58, 267.

14. The complete text of the appeal is in Latvijas sociāldemokratisko organizāciju lapiņas pirmās revolūcijas laikā (Riga, 1955), pp. 25-26. This volume contains 74 of the 2000 leaflets issued in the years of the revolution (1905-1907).

15. All facts and quotations of the decisions of the Second Congress are according to Paziņojums par LSDSP otro kongresu (Berne, 1905).

16. See the series of articles on relations with the RSDRP in Cīņa, June, September, and November, 1905.

17. Iskra, Nos. 88, 110 (1905).

18. Latvijas komunistiskās partijas vēstures apcerējumi, 1, p. 103.

19. F. O. Ames, Revolution, p. 22, and B. Kalniņš, Latvijas Sociāldemokratiskā, pp. 90-91.

20. B. Kalniņš, “The Latvian Trade Union Movement,” in Labor in Exile (Paris), No. 11 (1966), and No. 1 (1967).

21. For more details on the role of the LSDSP in the revolution of 1905 see J. Jansons, Baltijas revolūcija (Brussels, 1912); P. Kleinberg [Pauls Kalniņš], “Aus der Geschichte der lettischen Arbeiterbewegung,” in Neue Zeit (Berlin, 1905), pp. 85-90, 116-25; P. K. [Pauls Kalniņš], Revoliutsionnaia sotsial-demokratiia v Pribaltiiskom krae (St. Petersburg, 1906); B. Kalniņš, Latvijas Sociāldemokratiskā, pp. 48-132; 1905, gads Latvija (Riga, 1966); Revoliutsiia 1905-1907 gg. v Latvii, Dokumenty i materialy (Riga, 1956). The communist point of view is given by la. P. Krastynsh, Revoliutsiia 1905-1907 gg. v Latvii (Moscow, 1952).

22. Petr Stučka (1865-1932); counselor at law; 1894-1906 a national Social Democrat, later theorist of the Latvian Bolsheviks. In 1917-1918 Soviet Commissar of Justice. In 1919 head of the Soviet Government in Latvia. In 1923-31 President of the Supreme Court of the RSFSR in Moscow and a member of the Control Commission of the Communist International.

23. Cīņa, No. 32 (1906), and a special pamphlet, Kā apvienoties Krievijas sociāldemokratikjai? (Berne, 1906).

24. Ansis Buševics (1874-1943), counselor at law, was one of the leaders of the revolution of 1905 in Latvia. In 1906-1914, he was a moderate Menshevik and member of the Central Committee of the LSDSP. During the period of Latvian independence he was a member of Parliament and Minister of Finance. In 1940 he joined the Bolsheviks. Vilis Dermanis (1875-1938), a teacher, was one of the first Latvian Mensheviks. In 1908 he was sentenced to four years in a labor camp. In 1914 he fled from Siberia to the United States and returned to Latvia in 1920. He became a member of the Central Committee of the LSDSP and of the Constituent Assembly, but he left the LSDSP and was sent to the USSR where he became a Communist (1921). Dermanis was shot in 1938. His biography is described from the Bolshevik point of view in J. Kipurs un M. Sacs, Kvēlais tribūns (Riga, 1964).

25. Protokoly ob”edinennogo s’ezda RSDRP (Moscow, 1926), pp. 285-92.

26. Cīņa, No. 47 (1906).

27. Ibid., Nos. 48, 50, 60 (1906).

28. Ibid., Nos. 76, 77 (1907).

29. Golos sotsial-demokrata, No. 15 (1909).

30. Der Tätigkeitsbericht der Sozialdemokratie Lettlands pro Jahre 1907-1909 (Brussels, 1910).

31. Stalin, Darbi (Riga, 1947), p. 138.

32. A confidential report of the Police Department to F. A. Zvein, Governor General of Finland (August 19, 1911) and a secret report of the chief of the St. Petersburg Provincial Headquarters of the Gendarmerie, dated September 1, 1911. These documents may be found in the State Archives of Finland in Helsinki. The provocateur was the congress delegate “Dakters,” who was shot in 1919. Later, this congress was designated an unofficial one.

33. Kristaps Eliass (“varc,” “Socius,” and “Čipus”) was a member of the LSDSP from 1903 and took an active part in the revolution of 1905. Elected a member of the Central Committee of the LSDSP at its Third Congress in 1906, Eliass was arrested in December, 1906, and sentenced to life banishment in the province of Irkutsk. In 1907 he fled to Belgium, where he became editor of Cīņa, and a member of the Foreign Committee of the LSDSP (1908-1914). At this time he was the principal leader and publicist of the Latvian Mensheviks. After the Revolution of 1917 he returned to Latvia and became a member of the Riga Soviet and Iskolat (Executive Committee of all the Soviets of Latvia). From 1918 to 1934 he was editor of the Sociāldemokrats in Riga and a member of all the democratic Latvian Parliaments. In 1949 he was arrested by the MVD, sentenced to 10 years in a concentration camp, and sent to the Province of Irkutsk for the second time. He was set free after the amnesty of 1955 and returned to Riga, where he died in 1963 at the age of 77.

34. More details on the trade union movement in Latvia can be found in Bruno Kalniņš articles in Labor in Exile, No. 11 (1966), No. 1 (1967).

35. la. N. Netesin, Rabochee dvizhenie v Rige v period stolypinskoi reaktsii (Riga, 1958), p. 172.

36. The present author was a correspondent of Rabochaia gazeta and other Menshevik newspapers in Riga (1913-15). His articles were published under the pen name “Tangens.”

37. Dzlves Balss (Riga), December 5, 1913.

38. Cīņa, No. 120 (1912).

39. Ibid., Nos. 122, 123 (1912).

40. Latvijas komunistiskās partijas vēstures apcerējumi, 1, p. 201.

41. Voldemars Caune (1890-1944) was a member of the military organization from 1906 to 1913 and in 1910-13 one of the leaders of the legal associations and a member of the Central Committee of the SDL. He published his articles in the Menshevik press under the pen name “Ant.” In 1914 Caune was banished to Narym Province. One of the leaders of the Latvian Menshevik Organizations in Russia in 1917-18, he returned to Latvia in 1918. Due to illness he was only a member of the Control Commission of the LSDSP and chief of the party archives.

42. Cīņa, No. 109 (1911).

43. Pravda (Vienna), No. 21 (1911).

44. Netesin, Rabochee dvizhenie v Rige, p. 174.

45. Ibid.

46. The resolution of the Central Committee of the SDL on Lenin’s Prague Conference was printed in Latvian and Russian in March, 1912. A French translation was given to the International Bureau of the Socialist International. At present it is in the archives of C. Huysmans.

47. Pravda (Vienna), No. 23 (1911), and the notification (Izveshchenie) about the conference by the organizations of the RSDRP (Vienna, 1912), p. 3.

48. Cīņa, No. 122-123 (1913).

49. Die Lage der Sozialdemokratie in Russland (Berlin, 1912), pp. 21-22.

50. Rudolfs Lindiņš (1887-1944), the son of a peasant, was a journalist and propagandist for the SDL. He was banished to Northern Russia in 1913-15. During the period of Latvian independence he was a member of the Constituent Assembly, a member of Parliament, and deputy Minister of Agriculture. He was deported in 1941 and died in a Stalinist concentration camp.

51. Cīņa, No. 119 (1912).

52. Roberts Eiche (1890-1941), took an active part in the revolution of 1905 at Jelgava. In exile from 1908 to 1911, he became a member of the Central Committee of the SDL in 1914. In 1915 Eiche was sentenced to exile in Siberia. In 1917 he again became a member of the Central Committee of the SDL and in 1919 was made commissar in charge of provisions and a member of the Soviet Government in Latvia. Later he became USSR Commissar of Agriculture and in 1935 a candidate member of the Politbureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. He was arrested in 1937 and executed in 1941.

53. Jānis Bērziņš (1881-1939), a teacher, was a party member from 1902. In 1903 he was banished to the Olonets Province. In 1907 he became a member of the St. Petersburg Committee of the RSDRP. He emigrated to Paris in 1908 and was in contact with Lenin. In 1917 he became a member of the Central Committee of the RSDRP(b) and in 1919 was made a secretary to the Communist International. Berziņš served in the diplomatic service from 1920 to 1932 and then became editor-in-chief of Krasnyi arkhiv. He was arrested in 1937 and executed in 1939.

54. Latvijas komunistiskās partijas vēstures apcerējumi, 1, p. 208.

55. Lenin, Sochineniia, 2nd ed., 29 (Moscow, 1933), p. 51.

56. A. M. Volodarskaia, Lenin i partiia v gody nazrevaniia revoliutsionnogo krizisa, 1913-1914 (Moscow, 1960), p. 259.

57. Lenin, Sochineniia, 29, p. 51.

58. In 1914 Augulis became one of the most important agents of the tsarist police. So as not to reveal his activities, he had contact only with the Liepāja Gendarmerie Captain Dmitriev. Valuable information concerning the role of Augulis was obtained from the Archives of the Secret Police at the Hoover Institution. See also Konspirātora pieztmes (Riga, 1931) by V. Caune, a delegate to the Fourth Congress of the SDL; letter of August 28, 1965, written to the present author by B. I. Nicolaevsky; Laikmetno mainā (Stockholm, 1961), 1, p. 385, by F. Cielens who participated in the Congress and who was subsequently Minister of Foreign Affairs of independent Latvia. Communist historians evade the role of Augulis. Only in a few cases do they mention that he had turned provacateur. In 1919 Augulis was shot by Soviet authorities during the Civil War in Latvia.

59. The works of Bolshevik historians never mention Malinovskii’s presence at the congress.

60. Put’ pravdy. No. 62 (1914); also Lenin, Sochineniia, 2nd ed., 17 (Moscow, 1932), pp. 318-19.

61. F. Menders [F. Weiss], “S’ezd latyshskikh marksistov,” Nasha zaria, No. 4 (1914).

62. A. Ezergailis, “The Bolshevization of the Latvian Social Democratic Party,” Canadian Slavic Studies, 1 (1967), pp. 238-52.

63. Istoricheskii arkhiv, No. 6 (1958), p. 11.

64. Volodarskaia, Lenin i partiia, p. 343.

65. Lenin, Sochineniia, 5th ed., 48 (Moscow, 1964), p. 321.

66. F. Weiss [F. Menders], Die baltische Frage im Weltkrieg (Berne, 1917).

67. U. Gērmanis, “The Idea of Independent Latvia and Its Development in 1917,” in Res Baltica (Leyden, 1968), pp. 27-87.

68. For more details on the activity of the LSDSP during Latvia’s independence see B. Kalniņš, Latvijas Sociāldemokratijas 50 gadi, pp. 210-57; the memoirs of V. Bastjanis, member of the Central Committee of the LSDSP, Demokratiskā Latvija (Stockholm, 1966); F. Menders, “Die Probleme der Arbeiterbewegung in den baltischen Staaten,” Der Kampf 24 (Vienna, 1931).

69. For more details on this period see V. Bastjanis, Gala sākums (Stockholm, 1964).

70. Fricis Menders, born in 1885, Doctor of Law and Economy, graduated from the University of Berne. He joined the party in 1904, participated actively in the Revolution of 1905 in Riga, and was later active in the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party in Kazan. In 1906 Menders was sentenced to life banishment in Turukhansk. From there he fled abroad in 1907. He became a member of the Foreign Committee of the SDL and was the leader of the Mensheviks at the Brussels Congress in 1914. During World War I as a Menshevik-Internationalist, he worked in Switzerland together with L. Martov. They returned to Russia after the Revolution of 1917. In 1917 Menders was a member of the Executive Committee of the Riga Soviet and of Iskolat. After the party split in 1918 he became a permanent member of the Central Committee of the LSDSP and was elected President of the party in 1929. Menders was a member of the National Council of Latvia which proclaimed the independent Republic of Latvia in 1918 and a member of the Constituent Assembly and of all four democratic Latvian Parliaments (1920-34). He was president of the Social Democratic faction of the parliament. In 1929 he became a member of the Executive Committee of the Socialist International. Menders was an excellent orator and publicist and was the author of several works on politics and economy written in Latvian and German. Menders took an active part in the democratic resistance during the Nazi occupation (1942-45). During the second Soviet occupation he was arrested and sentenced by the Ministry of the Interior to ten years in the concentration camp at Mordovlag. The Socialist International interceded on his behalf and he was set free after the amnesty in 1955, although not permitted to emigrate. Subsequently, Menders, a sick man, resided in Riga under the constant supervision of the KGB. In 1961 the KGB confiscated his memoirs (some 3,000 pages). In November, 1969, the eighty-four year old Menders was sentenced to five years imprisonment in a labor camp for “anti-Soviet propaganda” and deported from Latvia.

Stalin’s Revolutionary Career Before 1917

1. A. Bubnov, Osnovnye voprosy istorii R. K. P. Sbornik statei (Moscow, 1924). V. I. Nevskii, Istoriia RKP(b). Kratkii ocherk (Leningrad, 1926), and Ocherki po istorii rossiiskoi kommunisticheskoi partii, 2nd ed., 1 (Leningrad, 1925). A brief biographical sketch of Stalin did appear, however, in a collection of official biographies of twelve Bolshevik leaders: Boris Volin, Dvenadtsat’ biografii (Moscow, 1924).

2. N. S. Khrushchev, The Crimes of the Stalin Era: Special Report to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (New York, 1962), p. S57.

3. Stalin, Sochineniia (Moscow, 1946-52), 6, pp. 52-54.

4. Leon Trotsky, Stalin (New York, 1967), pp. 48-49. The force of Trotsky’s reasoning is not diminished by his possible error in dating Stalin’s arrival at the place of exile in January, 1904. According to the official chronology in volume one of Stalin’s Sochineniia, he arrived in the village of Novaia Uda, Irkutsk guberniia, on November 27, 1903, and escaped on January 5, 1904.

5. Bertram D. Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution (New York, 1948), p. 426. Particularly noteworthy is the further fact that the Lenin document was published by the Siberian Social Democratic Union in June, 1903.

6. Stalin, Sochineniia, 8, pp. 173-75.

7. I. P. Tovstukha, Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin. Kratkaia biografiia (Moscow-Leningrad, 1927), pp. 3-11. This authorized biography also appeared in volume 41 of the Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ Granat.

8. Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography, 2nd ed. (New York, 1966), p. 45. A problem of date also arises with respect to Stalin’s membership in the Tiflis Committee’s successor organization, the Transcaucasian Union Committee, which was formed in March, 1903, while Stalin was in prison. Tovstukha, as noted above, wrote that Stalin, after returning to Tiflis in January, 1904, resumed party work as a member of this Committee. Later Soviet sources stated that he was elected to it in absentia at the time of its original formation. Accepting that version, Deutscher commented that the rarity of such an election in absentia “suggests that at the age of twenty-two he was already some sort of ‘gray eminence’ in the underground of his native province. He was certainly not the undistinguished member of the rank and file, the nonentity, described by Trotsky” (Stalin, p. 50). Curiously, Trotsky also accepted this version of the facts, although without placing the same interpretation on it (Stalin, p. 44). A post-Stalin Soviet history of party organizations in the Transcaucasus has made it clear that the version was false. After listing the names of the nine members elected at the time of the Union Committee’s formation, it mentions nine others, Stalin included, who entered it “at various times”; and says nothing of his having been elected to it in absentia (Ocherki istorii kommunisticheskikh organizatsii zakavkaz’ia, pt. 1, 1883-1921 gg. [Tbilisi, 1967], p. 72).

9. Brdzolis khma, No. 3 (Paris, 1930). Quoted by Bertram D. Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution, p. 420. See also N. Vakar, “Stalin po vospominaniiam N. N. Zhordaniia,” Poslednye novosti (Paris), December 16, 1936, and Grigorii Uratadze, Vospominaniia gruzinskogo sotsial-demokrata (Stanford, 1968), pp. 66-67. Deutscher does not accept this story, but does suggest that Stalin’s move was precipitated by personal and political antagonisms between himself and Djibladze (Stalin, p. 46).

10. This version, which is accepted by Trotsky, has its source in a history of Transcaucasian Social Democracy first published in Geneva in 1910 and republished in Soviet Russia in 1923: S. T. Arkomed, Rabochee dvizhenie i sotsial-demokratiia na kavkaze (s 80-kh godov po 1903 g.), 2nd ed. (Moscow-Leningrad, 1923), pp. 83-84. The second edition was unchanged save for the addition of notes and a preface. Arkomed, himself a Social Democratic participant in events recounted in the book, does not name Stalin directly. He writes that worker participation on the Committee was resisted by one young intellectual whom he describes as motivated by personal caprice and love of power. After being badly defeated in the Committee vote, the young man departed Tiflis for Batum, “whence the Tiflis workers received information concerning his improper behavior, his hostile and disorganizing agitation against the Tiflis organization and its members” (ibid.). Trotsky takes Stalin to have been the young man in question, stating that he was the only member of the Tiflis Committee who moved to Batum in the fall of 1901 (Stalin, p. 30).

11. Filipp Makharadze, Ocherki revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia v Zakavkaz’i (Tiflis, 1927), pp. 83-84. See also the memoirs of Baron (Bibineishvili), Za chetvert’ veka (Revoliutsionnaia bor’ba v Gruzii) (Moscow-Leningrad, 1931), pp. 65-66, where the same events are described without reference to Stalin’s role in them.

12. For direct testimony to this effect, see the memoirs of Joseph Iremaschwili, Stalin und die tragӧdie Georgiens (Berlin, 1932), pp. 21-23, and Uratadze, Vospominaniia, p. 67. Trotsky’s contention that Stalin began his activities as a Menshevik and only aligned himself with the Bolsheviks on the eve of 1905, after much hesitation, is unconvincing. Apart from some debatable psychologizing (Stalin, pp. 50-51), he offers in evidence only a tsarist police report, dated 1911, in which the following appeared: “According to newly obtained agent information, Iosif Djugashvili was known in the organization under the names of ‘Soso’ and ‘Koba,’ worked in the organization from 1902, first as a Menshevik and then as a Bolshevik, as a propagandist and head of District I (Railway District).” This police report was published in the Tiflis party paper Zaria vostoka on December 23, 1925, among reminiscences of Stalin by former comrades on the occasion of his forty-sixth birthday. A copy of the report is contained in the archives of the Imperial Russian Secret Police (Okhrana), the Hoover Institution, Stanford, California. Its authenticity is not in doubt, but its accuracy is. It was an obvious anachronism for the author of the report (chief of the Tiflis province gendarme administration) to ascribe Menshevism to Stalin from 1902. For Menshevism had its inception only in the following year in the aftermath of the Russian Social Democratic Party’s Second Congress. The police officer might have been misled by the fact that most of the Social Democrats with whom Stalin was connected in Tiflis in 1902 subsequently became Mensheviks.

13. Stalin, Sochineniia, 1, pp. 56-61. The Bibineishvili memoir shows that Stalin was taking a Bolshevik position in the developing intra-party conflict when he came to Kutais in the summer of 1904 to head the local Social Democratic Committee (Za chetvert’ veka, pp. 80-81).

14. Trotsky, Stalin, p. 59. The four were Kamenev, Tskhakaia, Djaparidze, and Nevskii. The Third Congress was convened by the Bureau of Committees of the Majority contrary to the desire of the Mensheviks, and it was at this Congress that the Bolshevik section of the party informally organized itself as a separate and independent unit. As regards Stalin, Tovstukha had to confine himself to saying that he “took a most active part in the organizing of the Third Congress of Bolsheviks.”

15. Ibid., p. 115.

16. Uratadze, Vospominaniia, p. 67; and R. Arsenidze, “Iz vospominanii o Staline,” Novy zhurnal, No. 72 (June, 1963), p. 224.

17. Trotsky, Stalin, p. 124.

18. Semeon Vereshchak, “Stalin v tiur’me (vospominaniia politicheskago zakliuchennago),” Dni, January 22, 24, 1928. The cited material appears in the first installment of the article.

19. V. Kaminskii and I. Vereshchagin, compilers, “Detstvo i iunost’ vozhdia. Dokumenty, zapisi, rasskazy,” Molodaia gvardiia, No. 12 (1939), p. 88.

20. Gregory Aronson, “Was Stalin a Tsarist Agent?,” The New Leader, August 20, 1956, p. 24.

21. For the Yeremin document and the case built upon it, see Isaac Don Levine, Stalin’s Great Secret (New York, 1956). In a later communication ( The New Leader, October 1, 1956, p. 28), Mr. Don Levine admitted the possibility that this document might prove of “dubious origin.” For cogent argumentation indicating its fraudulence, see Gregory Aronson, The New Leader, August 20, 1956, and Martin K. Tytell, “Exposing a Documentary Hoax,” paper presented at the New York meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, December 29, 1956.

22. Edward Ellis Smith, The Young Stalin. The Early Years of an Elusive Revolutionary (New York, 1967), pp. 67-68. This is the most voluminous study yet produced on Stalin’s early life, and the major effort made so far to argue the thesis that Stalin became a tsarist police agent. I do not consider the argument successful, for it is based throughout on circumstantial evidence which admits of other possible interpretations. The book contains the fullest bibliography on the young Stalin yet available in English. For an appraisal of the book by George F. Kennan, see The American Historical Review (October, 1968), pp. 230-32.

23. Iremaschwili, Stalin, p. 24. Iremashvili (to use the proper English transliteration) became a Menshevik after leaving the seminary, and emigrated from Russia in the early 1920s. Although the passage here quoted from his memoir does not specifically refer to the period before Stalin obtained part-time employment in the Tiflis observatory but to his post-seminary period generally, it is implausible to suppose that if Stalin’s seminary friends were willing to help him on occasion after he obtained that job, they would not have done so earlier when his need was still greater.

24. Because Stalin entered the Central Committee “through the back door,” Trotsky infers that his candidacy was opposed when put forward at the Prague conference (Stalin, pp. 136-37). Another possibility is that he simply did not receive a sufficient number of affirmative votes. The fact that he originally entered the Central Committee by cooptation was shown in official party documents published in the 1920s, and has been recognized in various Soviet official sources of the post-Stalin period, e.g., Piatyi (Londonskii) s’’ezd RSDRP. Aprel’-mai 1907 goda. Protokoly (Moscow, 1963), p. 888.

25. Stalin, Sochineniia, 1, p. 396. “Colchian” derives from the name “Colchis,” which the ancients used to designate the western part of Georgia. The reported source of the story is the reminiscences of D. Suliashvili, one of the Georgian Bolsheviks then living in Leipzig. According to Suliashvili, the letter of Stalin’s that evoked Lenin’s comment was the one in which he called Lenin a mountain eagle.

26. Ocherki istorii kommunisticheskikh organizatsii zakavkaz’ia, pt. 1, 1883-1921 gg., p. 141.

27. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1958-65), 11, p. 386. For Stalin’s two articles, see his Sochineniia, 1, pp. 89-130, 160-72. Whether Lenin knew at the time that Stalin was author of the two articles is uncertain. The pamphlet appeared in the name of the Union Committee, and the second article (entitled “Reply to ‘Social Democrat’”) originally appeared unsigned. Interestingly, Stalin began it with an unusual assertion of individual authorship: “I must note this: Many consider that the author of Briefly About the Disagreements in the Party was the Union Committee and not an individual. I must declare that the author of this pamphlet is myself. Only the editing of it comes from the Union Committee (Stalin, Sochineniia, 1, p. 160).

28. The position that Stalin supported was presented to the congress by the preceding Bolshevik speaker, S. A. Suvorov.

29. Piatyi (Londonskii) s”ezd RSDRP, pp. 226-32. When Lenin, who presided at the fourteenth session of the congress, called for a vote on the proposal of the credentials commission to admit Ivanovich (Stalin), Barsov (Tskhakaia) and two others with the right of advisory vote, Martov demanded to know “to whom an advisory vote is being given: who are these people, where are they from, etc.?” Lenin called for a vote on Martov’s demand. Martov spoke up from his seat: “I point out that one cannot vote without knowing who is involved.” Lenin then said: “That, in fact is unknown. But the congress can have confidence in the unanimous opinion of the credentials commission.” Martov’s motion was voted down and the credential commission’s proposal was adopted by a majority of votes, with a considerable number of abstentions (Piatyi Londonskii s”ezd RSDRP, p. 241).

30. Stalin, Sochineniia, 13, p. 112. According to the Soviet transcript of the interview, Ludwig coupled the comment here quoted with a query on Stalin’s view of Stepan Razin as an “ideological highwayman.” Stalin took advantage of this opening and confined himself to the historical aspect of the question, denying an analogy between Bolsheviks and such leaders of jacqueries as Razin.

31. This is one of the points on which the non-Soviet biographers of Stalin are generally agreed. See, for example, Trotsky, Stalin, pp. 100-101; Deutscher, Stalin, pp. 87-88; Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution, pp. 390-91. Menshevik sources (e.g., Arsenidze, Novyi Zhurnal, No. 72 [June, 1963], p. 323) have alleged that Stalin was expelled from the party by the Transcaucasian organization for his part in the Tiflis raid of June, 1907. In March, 1918, Martov wrote in his Moscow newspaper that Stalin at one time had been expelled from his party organization for having something to do with expropriations. Stalin thereupon brought charges against Martov before a party tribunal, and denied that he had ever been tried or expelled by his party organization. But he did not deny involvement in expropriations. On this episode see Trotsky, Stalin, pp. 101-102 and Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution, pp. 470-72.

32. L. Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (New York, 1959), p. 101. See also Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution, p. 486: “By 1909 the Party had crumbled away until Krupskaya could write ‘we have no people at all.’ In retrospect, Zinoviev, very close to Lenin then, would say, ‘at this unhappy period the party as a whole ceased to exist’.”

33. Stalin, Sochineniia, 2, p. 147.

34. Ibid., pp. 198-99.

35. Ibid., p. 211.

36. Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin, Kratkaia biografiia, 2nd ed. (Moscow, 1947), p. 50, where Stalin is said to have held the status of agent or upolnomochennyi of the Central Committee from 1910 to 1912. One might question the statement, especially in view of its absence from earlier versions of Stalin’s official biography. It has been confirmed, however, in a footnote to protocols of the Central Committee Bureau’s meeting in March, 1917 (Voprosy istorii KPSS, No. 3 [1962], p. 156).

37. Since the other members of the Russian Bureau (Ordzhonikidze, Spandarian and Goloshchekin) had all three been elected to the new Central Committee by the party conference, it would have been awkward to make Stalin a member of the Bureau without simultaneously coopting him onto the Central Committee itself.

38. These letters do not appear in Stalin’s collected writings. The text of the third, which at the time of dispatch was intercepted by the tsarist police, was disinterred from police files and published among the materials on Stalin in the Tiflis paper Zaria vostoka for December 23, 1925. The full texts of the other two have not, so far as I know, been published. However, excerpts are quoted in I. Dubinskii-Mukhadze, Ordzhonikidze (Moscow, 1963), p. 93, and in V. I. Lenin, Biografiia, 3rd ed. (Moscow, 1963), pp. 179-80.

39. Dubinskii-Mukhadze, Ordzhonikidze, pp. 92-94.

40. ‘“Bol’nye voprosy’ nashei partii: ‘likvidatorskii’ i ‘natsional’nyi’ voprosy,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 22, p. 230.

41. The use in its title of the term “rossiiskaia,” referring to the Russian Empire, rather than “russkaia,” which would have described the party as Russian in nationality, subtly conveyed this distinction. For Lenin’s emphasis upon this transnational meaning of “rossiiskaia,” see his “Tezisy po natsional’nomu voprosu,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 23, p. 320.

42. A brief summary of these views of Lenin’s appears in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 23, p. 59. For an expanded version of them, see ibid., pp. 314-22.

43. Stalin, Sochineniia, 1, p. 42. Entitled “How Does Social Democracy View the National Question?,” this article originally appeared in the Georgian language paper Proletariatis brdzola on September 1, 1904, without signature. Although two other articles precede it in volume one of Stalin’s collected writings, both originally published in the same Georgian paper in late 1901, also without signature, they do not read stylistically like products of Stalin’s pen, whereas the article of 1904 on the national question does.

44. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 48, p. 162.

45. Stalin, Marksizm i natsional’nyi vopros, in Sochineniia, 2, pp. 290-367. When originally published in the party’s theoretical journal Prosveshchenie in the spring of 1913, the work was entitled (like Bauer’s) The National Question and Social Democracy.

46. M. Djilas, Conversations with Stalin (New York, 1962), p. 157. Stalin made the remark in reply to a question from Djilas on the difference in meaning between “people” and “nation.” An ambiguity in the English text at this point makes it unclear whether Stalin was referring to the distinction in question or the whole of Marxism and the National Question when he went on to say: “That was Ilich’s-Lenin’s view” (ibid.). I have been informed by Mr. Djilas that in his view Stalin was referring to the book as a whole.

47. Arguing that Stalin produced nothing of comparably high quality either before or after this work, Trotsky concluded that it “was wholly inspired by Lenin, written under his unremitting supervision and edited by him line by line.” He also suggested that Bukharin and Troianovskii, whom Stalin met in Vienna at the time, selected the most important quotations from the Austrian materials (since Stalin did not know German), and that Bukharin was probably responsible for the logical construction of the work (Trotsky, Stalin, pp. 156-58). Others who have taken Stalin’s work as basically a reflection of Lenin’s thinking include Deutscher (Stalin, p. 117), Souvarine (Stalin, p. 133), and Wolfe (Three Who Made a Revolution, pp. 578-81). The contrary position, which I share, has been argued by Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union (Cambridge, Mass., 1954), pp. 40-41, and by Robert H. McNeal in “Trotsky’s Interpretation of Stalin,” Canadian Slavonic Papers, No. 5 (1961), p. 90, and in his Stalin’s Works: An Annotated Bibliography, pp. 43-44.

48. For example, Otto Bauer’s The National Question and Social Democracy was used by Stalin in a Russian translation by M. Panin. Richard Pipes (Formation of the Soviet Union, p. 41) was the first to call attention to this fact in refutation of Trotsky. Stalin appears to have made at least a desultory effort to study German and knew a few words of it. Significantly, Stalin’s footnote mentioning the Panin translation of Bauer’s book does so by way of correcting a minor mistranslation of the German phrase “nationalen Eigenart.” Stalin evidently wished to convey the impression that he knew German well. See his Sochineniia, 2, p. 321.

49. Letter of February 25, 1913, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 48, p. 169. On March 29, he wrote again to Kamenev: “Koba has managed to write a big (for three issues of Prosveshchenie) article on the national question. Good! We have to fight for the truth against the separatists and opportunists from the Bund and from among the liquidators” (ibid., p. 173). And in an editorial of December, 1913, on the national program of the party, Lenin wrote that Stalin’s article “stands out in first place” in the recent theoretical Marxist literature on the national question (ibid., 24, p. 223).

50. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 48, pp. 101, 161. The first of the two letters appears here for the first time; the second was first published in Leninskii sbornik, 11 (Moscow, 1929). I am indebted to Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov for bringing these letters to my attention.

51. “Protokoly i resoliutsii Biuro TsK RSDRP(b) (Mart 1917 g.),” Voprosy istorii KPSS, No. 3 (1962), p. 143. The protocol on the Bureau’s meeting of March 15 (ibid., p. 149) records that Stalin was on that day elected a member of the Bureau’s presidium. By this time he must have acquired full voting rights.

The Petrograd Garrison and the Bolshevik Seizure of Power

1. The author is grateful to Indiana University Press for permission to use some material previously published in Alexander Rabinowitch, Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising (Bloomington, 1968).

2. The most useful studies of the Petrograd garrison in the revolutionary period are M. I. Akhun and V. A. Petrov, Bol’sheviki i armiia v 1905-1917 gg. (Leningrad, 1929); A. K. Drezen, “Petrogradskii garnizon v iiule i avguste 1917 g.,” Krasnaia letopis’, No. 3 (24) (1927), pp. 191-223; O. N. Chaadaeva, “Soldatskie massy Petrogradskogo garnizona v podgotovke i provedenii Oktiabr’skogo vooruzhennogo vosstaniia,” Istoricheskie zapiski, No. 51 (1955), pp. 3-44; V. M. Kochakov, “Sostav Petrogradskogo garnizona v 1917 g.,” Uchenye zapiski Leningradskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, Vyp. 24, No. 205 (1956), pp. 60-86; V. M. Kochakov, “Bol’shevizatsiia Petrogradskogo garnizona v 1917 godu,” in Akademiia nauk SSSR, Institut istorii, Leningradskoe otdelenie, Oktiabr’skoe vooruzhennoe vosstanie v Petrograde (Moscow-Leningrad, 1957), pp. 142-83. A valuable collection of documents is A. K. Drezen, ed., Bol’shevizatsiia Petrogradskogo garnizona: Sbornik materialov i dokumentov (Leningrad, 1932).

3. V. M. Kochakov’s detailed investigations of the social composition of the garrison in 1917 (Uchenye zapiski LGU, pp. 55-67) indicate that during World War I the number of workers recruited for service in units of the Petrograd garrison tended to increase. In 1917 the percentage of soldiers of working class origin differed significantly from unit to unit; for example, army reserve infantry regiments and particularly engineer units contained relatively greater numbers of workers than did guards infantry or Cossack regiments. However, it is significant that in the minds of Bolshevik leaders who were in close contact with garrison troops, there was no doubt that Petrograd based soldiers were primarily peasants. Bolshevik leaders in the garrison based their agitation on this assumption and, indeed, throughout the summer of 1917 they used it to explain the anarchic character of the troops.

4. Significant in this connection is the fact that the first garrison force to come out against the tsarist government in February, 1917, was the Fourth Company of the Pavlovskii Regiment.

5. For an analysis of the origins and content of Order Number One, see John R. Boyd, “The Origins of Order No. I,” Soviet Studies, January, 1968, pp. 359-72.

6. An interesting view of the significance of the April events in the garrison as seen through the eyes of an official of the Provisional Government, A. I. Koz’min, is contained in V. Maksakov, “Iz zapisnoi knizhki arkhivista,” Krasnyi arkhiv, No. 5 (60) (1933), pp. 149-50.

7. The works of S. E. Rabinovich contain valuable information on the Bolshevik Military Organization in 1917: “Bol’shevistskie voennye organizatsii v 1917 g.,” Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, No. 6-7 (77-78) (1928), pp. 179-98; Bor’ba za armiiu 1917 g. (Leningrad, 1930); and “Vserossiiskaia konferentsiia bol’shevistskikh voennykh organizatsii 1917 g.,” Krasnaia letopis’, No. 5 (38) (1930), pp. 105-32. Especially useful memoir accounts include N. I. Podvoiskii, “Voennaia organizatsiia TsK RSDRP(b) i voenno-revoliutsionnyi komitet 1917 g.,” Krasnaia letopis’, No. 6 (1923), pp. 64-97, and No. 8 (1923), pp. 7-43; V. I. Nevskii, “V oktiabre: Beglye zametki pamiati,” Katorga i ssylka, No. 11-12 (96-97) (1932), pp. 27-45; V. I. Nevskii, “Voennaia organizatsiia i oktiabr’skaia revoliutsiia,” Krasnoarmeets, No. 10-15 (1919), pp. 34-44.

8. See, for example, Nevskii, Krasnoarmeets, No. 10-15 (1919), p. 34.

9. Akhun and Petrov, Bol’sheviki i armiia, p. 224.

10. This is a very rough approximation based on an estimate of Military Organization strength for mid-June in S. E. Rabinovich, Krasnaia letopis’, No. 5 (38) (1930), p. 109.

11. A. Rabinowitch, Prelude to Revolution, and O. N. Znamenskii, Iiul’skii krizis 1917 goda (Moscow-Leningrad, 1964).

12. The protocol of this meeting was published for the first time in Akademiia nauk SSSR, Institut istorii, et al., Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie v Rossii v mae-iiune 1917 g.: Iiun’skaia demonstratsiia, ed. D. A. Chugaev, et al. (Moscow, 1959), pp. 483-85.

13. Vsesoiuznaia Kommunisticheskaia partiia (bol’shevikov), Leningiadskii istpart, Pervyi legal’nyi Peterburgskii komitet bol’shevikov v 1917 g.: Sbornik materialov i protokolov zasedanii Peterburgskogo komiteta RSDRP(b) i ego Ispolnitel’noi komissii za 1917 g., ed. P. F. Kudelli (Moscow-Leningrad, 1927), pp. 153-54.

14. This speech is not in any editions of Lenin’s complete works. The fullest record of it is contained in M. Kedrov, “Vserossiiskaia konferentsiia voennykh organizatsii RSDRP(b),” Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, No. 6 (65) (1927), pp. 216-31.

15. See Pervyi legal’nyi Peterburgskii komitet, pp. 185-205.

16. P. M. Stulov, “Pervyi pulemetnyi polk v iiul’skie dni 1917 g.,” Krasnaia letopis’, No. 3 (36) (1930), pp. 86-94.

17. V. I. Nevskii, “Narodnye massy v oktiabr’skoi revoliutsii,” Rabotnik prosveshcheniia, No. 8 (1922), pp. 20-21.

18. The most thorough study of the organization of the July uprising in the First Machine Gun Regiment is Stulov, Krasnaia letopis’, No. 3 (36) (1930), pp. 64-125. Pertinent documents from the Provisional Government’s official investigation of the July uprising are contained in I. Tobolin, ed., “Iiul skie dni v Petrograde,” Krasnyi arkhiv, No. 4 (23) (1927), pp. 13-26.

19. See, for example, the report of N. I. Podvoiskii at the Sixth Bolshevik Party Congress in Institut marksizma-leninizma pri TsK KPSS, Shestoi s”ezd RSDRP (bol’shevikov) avgust 1917 goda: Protokoly (Moscow, 1958), p. 65.

20. Akademiia nauk SSSR, Institut istorii, et al., Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie v Rossii v iiule 1917 g.: liul’skii krizis, ed. D. A. Chugaev, et al. (Moscow, 1959), pp. 73-74.

21. Tobolin, Krasnyi arkhiv, No. 4 (23) (1927), pp. 6-15.

22. The fullest memoir account of the Military Organization’s activities after the July uprising: N. I. Podvoiskii, “Voennaia organizatsiia TsK RSDRP(b) i voenno-revoliutsionnyi komitet 1917 g.,” Krasnaia letopis’, No. 6 (1923), pp. 64-97, and No. 8 (1923), pp. 7-43.

23. V. S. Voitinskii, “Gody pobed i porazhenii: 1917” (Berlin, 1922-1923), Nicolaevsky Collection, The Hoover Institution, Stanford, California, pp. 295-99.

24. A. L. Khokhriakov, “Iz zhizni Petrogradskogo gamizona,” Krasnaia letopis’, No. 2 (17) (1926), pp. 36-37.

25. It is true that in early August, at the time of the Bolshevik Sixth Party Congress, Lenin abruptly abandoned the slogan, “All Power to the Soviets!” But the change had not been effectively implemented at the time of the Kornilov affair; after Kornilov’s failure Lenin returned to the slogan once again.

26. Pervyi legal’nyi Peterburgskii komitet, p. 313.

27. V. I. Lenin, Sochineniia, 4th ed. (Moscow, 1941-57), 25, pp. 282-87.

28. Lenin, Sochineniia, 26, pp. 1-9.

29. I. V. Stalin, Sochineniia, 4 (Moscow, 1947), pp. 317-18.

30. Bukharin, Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, No. 10 (1922), p. 319.

31. Institut marksizma-leninizma pri TsK KPSS, Protokoly Tsentral’nogo komiteta RSDRP (b): Avgust 1917-fevral’ 1918 (Moscow, 1958), p. 55.

32. Ibid., pp. 85-86.

33. Lenin, Sochineniia, 26, pp. 47-50, 154-61. In this connection see the comments of V. I. Startsev in I. I. Mints, et al., Lenin i Oktiabr’skoe vooruzhennoe vosstanie v Petrograde: Materialy Vsesoiuznoi nauchnoi sessii, sostoiavsheisia 13-16 noiabria 1962 g. v Leningrade (Moscow, 1964), pp. 68-81.

34. Protokoly Tsentral’nogo komiteta, pp. 86-92.

35. Lenin, Sochineniia, 26, pp. 185-88, 192-96.

36. A detailed protocol of the Petersburg Committee meeting of October 15 is contained in V. I. Nevskii, “Istoricheskoe zasedanie Peterburgskogo komiteta RSDRP (bol’shevikov) nakanune Oktiabr’skogo vosstaniia,” Krasnaia letopis’, No. 2-3 (1922), pp. 316-32. (Reprinted in Pervyi legal’nyi Peterburgskii komitet, pp. 307-25.) A summary of the proceedings of the October 16 meeting of the Central Committee is contained in Protokoly Tsentral’nogo komiteta, pp. 93-105.

37. After the revolution Nevskii often acknowledged the impact of the July experience on the thinking of Military Organization leaders in October. See, for example, Nevskii, Katorga i ssylka. No. 11-12 (96-97) (1932), p. 36.

38. According to Trotsky, he and Military Organization leaders in the Soviet recognized the potential importance of troop transfer orders for the seizure of power as soon as they were announced. See Trotsky’s comments in “Vospominaniia ob Oktiabr’skom perevorote,” Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, No. 10 (1922), pp. 52-58.

39. K. Riabinskii, Revoliutsiia 1917 goda: Khronika sobytii, 5 (Moscow-Leningrad, 1926), p. 67.

40. Voitinskii, “Gody pobed i porazhenii: 1917,” pp. 319-22.

41. Chaadaeva, Istoricheskie zapiski, No. 51 (1955), p. 14.

42. Riabinskii, Khronika sobytii, 5, pp. 57-73. In this connection see the resolutions published in Drezen, Bol’shevizatsiia Petrogradskogo garnizona, pp. 297-302.

43. “Kak oboroniat’sia,” Rabochii put’, October 11, 1917, p. 1.

44. On the origins, make-up, and activities of the Military Revolutionary Committee, see S. Piontkovskii, “Voenno-revoliutsionnyi komitet v Oktiabr’skie dni,” Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, No. 10 (69) (1927), pp. 110-37; Iu. S. Tokarev, “K voprosu o sozdanii Petrogradskogo voenno-revoliutsionnogo komiteta,” in Mints, Lenin i Oktiabr’skoe vooruzhennoe vosstanie, pp. 165-81. Pertinent documents are contained in D. A. Chugaev, et al., eds., Petrogradskii voenno-revoliutsionnyi komitet: Dokumenty i materialy (Moscow, 1966), Vol. 1.

45. K. Mekhonoshin, “Boevoi shtab Oktiabr’skoi revoliutsii,” Petrogradskaia pravda, No. 5 (1922), p. 4, and “Vospominaniia ob Oktiabr’skom perevorote,” Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, No. 10 (1922), pp. 72-83, 86-88.

46. Riabinskii, Khronika sobytii, 5, pp. 151-52.

47. In this connection see Dietrich Geyer, “The Bolshevik Insurrection in Petrograd,” in Richard Pipes, ed., Revolutionary Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), p. 178.

48. Robert V. Daniels, Red October (New York, 1967), pp. 217-18.

49. L. D. Trotskii, Sochineniia, 3 (Moscow, 1924), xlix-1.

In Praise of War Communism

1. Ekonomika perekhodnogo perioda. Chast’ I. Obshchaia teoriia transformatsion-nogo protsessa (Moscow, 1920). A German edition appeared two years later. N. Bucharin, Ӧkonomik der Transformationsperiode (Hamburg, 1922); and an English edition only recently (New York, 1971).

2. M. Pokrovskii, “Obshchestvennye nauki v SSSR za 10 let,” Vestnik kommunisticheskoi akademii, Book 26 (1928), pp. 12-14. In Pokrovskii’s opinion, the other two were Lenin’s State and Revolution and L. Kritsman’s The Heroic Period of the Great Russian Revolution, a study of the civil war period. For the influence of The Economics on Soviet thought, see Adam Kaufman, “The Origin of ‘The Political Economy of Socialism’: An Essay on Soviet Economic Thought,” Soviet Studies, No. 3 (1953), pp. 244-45, 248.

3. For the origin and development of war communism, see E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 2 (New York, 1952), pp. 147-268; and Maurice Dobb, Soviet Economic Development Since 1917, rev. ed. (New York, 1966), chap. 5.

4. Azbuka kommunizma: populiarnoe ob”iasnenie programmy rossiiskoi kommunisticheskoi partii bol’shevikov (Moscow, 1919). For its status as a “party canon,” see Bukharin’s remarks in Pravda, January 25, 1923, p. 1.

5. This was already the impression of foreign communists in Russia. See, for example, M. N. Roy, Memoirs (Bombay, 1964), p. 386.

6. Vos’moi s”ezd RKP(b). Mart 1919 goda: protokoly (Moscow, 1959), p. 49.

7. I am aware that this statement is contrary to the commonplace assumption that Bukharin favored extreme economic policies from the outset. Suffice it to say that this mistaken impression apparently is based on his leadership of the dissident Left Communists in early 1918, an advocacy which in fact derived from his opposition to Lenin’s decision to take Russia out of the war by making a separate peace with Germany. On economic matters, Bukharin was considerably less radical, and, in important respects, the policies he urged were distinctly unlike those of war communism. See, for example, his argument in May, 1918 for limiting nationalization to large, easily managed enterprises in his Programma kommunistov (bol’shevikov) (Petrograd, 1918), pp. 25-28.

8. Thus Lenin, to take the best example, despite his fabled pragmatism and subsequent deprecation of the follies of war communism, could say in 1919: “Now the organization of the proletariat’s communist activities, and the entire policy of the Communists, has fully acquired a final, stable form; and I am convinced that we stand on the right road. . . .” V. I. Lenin, Sochineniia, 3rd ed., 24 (Moscow, 1932), p. 536.

9. N. Bukharin, Ataka: sbornik teoreticheskikh statei, 2nd ed. (Moscow, 1924), p. 104.

10. Ekonomika perekhodnogo perioda, pp. 5-6, 123, n.l. Piatakov co-authored chapter 10, one of the most controversial. He apparently agreed with the book’s arguments, and later wrote jointly with Bukharin a defense of it. See “Kavaleriiskii reid i tiazhelaia artilleriia,” Krasnaia nov’, No. 1 (1921), pp. 256-74.

11. Ekonomika perekhodnogo perioda, p. 6.

12. Ibid., chaps. 1-3, 7, 11. Bukharin’s original works on state capitalism, both completed before 1917, were Mirovoe khoziaistvo i imperializm (Petrograd, 1918) and “K teorii imperialisticheskogo gosudarstva,” in Revoliutsiia prava: sbornik pervyi (Moscow, 1925), pp. 5-32. For an examination of these writings, see Stephen F. Cohen, “Bukharin, Lenin and the Theoretical Foundations of Bolshevism,” Soviet Studies, April, 1970, pp. 436-57.

13. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 2, pp. 191-96.

14. See, for example, Lenin’s “The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky,” in Sochineniia, 3rd ed., 23 (Moscow-Leningrad, 1931), pp. 331-412; and Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky (Ann Arbor, 1961).

15. “Diktatura proletariata v Rossii i mirovaia revoliutsiia,” Kommunisticheskii internatsional, No. 4 (1919), pp. 487-88. Also see Ekonomika perekhodnogo perioda, p. 95, n.l.

16. See, for example, Kommunisticheskii internatsional, No. 4 (1919), p. 487; and his Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology (New York, 1925), p. 266.

17. Ekonomika perekhodnogo perioda, chaps. 3, 6, and pp. 63-64.

18. Ibid., pp. 48, 97-98.

19. For Hilferding, see ibid., p. 47; and Vestnik kommunisticheskoi akademii, Book 26 (1928), p. 13. Bukharin described the prevailing social democratic view as follows: “the proletariat . . . removes the commanding ‘heads,’ whom it dismisses more or less gently, and then assumes control of the social apparatus of production, which has been developed to a splendid and uninjured maturity in the bowels of the capitalist Abraham. The proletariat installs its own ‘heads’ and the thing is done.” Historical Materialism, pp. 259-60.

20. See the unnamed person mentioned in Ne-revizionist, “O knige tov. N. Bukharina (otvet tov. M. Ol’minskomu),” Krasnaia nov’, No. 1 (1921), pp. 254-55.

21. Bukharin and Piatakov, ibid., pp. 257, 272.

22. See, for example, Vestnik kommunisticheskoi akademii, Book 26 (1928), pp. 13-14, where Pokrovskii calls it “a turning point” in political economy almost equal to that of State and Revolution “in the area of law.” Also see L. Kritsman, Geroicheskii period velikoi russkoi revoliutsii (opyt analiza t.n. ‘voennogo kommunizma’), 2nd ed. (Moscow-Leningrad, 1926), pp. 19, n.2, 167, n.144; Krasnaia nov’, No. 1 (1921), p. 254; and D. Maretskii, “Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin,” in Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 8 (Moscow, 1926), pp. 280-82.

23. Ekonomika perekhodnogo perioda, pp. 52-56.

24. Ibid., p. 60; also, p. 58.

25. Rudol’f Gilferding, Finansovyi kapital: novieshaia faza v razvitii kapitalizma, 3rd ed. (Petersburg, 1918), chap, xvi (first published in 1910 in German).

26. Ekonomika perekhodnogo perioda, pp. 127-28; also see pp. 129-30, n.l.

27. Ibid., pp. 56, 113; for his discussion of the process of statization and militarization, see especially chaps, vi-viii.

28. Ibid., p. 108. This argument appears repeatedly. See pp. 63-64, 71-72, 83, 84.

29. Ibid., pp. 108-09.

30. Ibid., pp. 84, 138-39.

31. Ibid., pp. 7-8.

32. See Oskar Lange, Political Economy, 1 (New York, 1963), p. 84, n.46; and Kaufman, Soviet Studies, No. 3 (1953), p. 248. For confirmation that it was the majority Bolshevik view, see Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, No. 12 (1929), p. 178. Also see the debate of the question in 1925 in Vestnik kommunisticheskoi akademii, Book 11 (1925), pp. 257-346.

33. Ekonomika perekhodnogo perioda, pp. 124, 125, 134-35.

34. Both charges were levelled by M. S. Ol’minskii in Krasnaia nov’. No. 1 (1921), pp. 247-51; and also in part by Lenin’s sister A. I. Elizarova. See the discussion of an archive copy of her 1921 review, Voprosy istorii, No. 5 (1964), p. 24.

35. See, for example, Ekonomika perekhodnogo perioda, pp. 138-39, and his remark on the role of coercion in creating a communist man, p. 146.

36. Ibid., pp. 62-63, 101-103, 110, 132-33, and chap. viii passim.

37. Ibid., p. 87.

38. Ibid., pp. 132-33. Later, when Bukharin’s thinking had changed, his critics would cite this passage as evidence that he once had understood that equilibrium did not apply to the transition period. See A. Leont’ev, Ekonomicheskaia teoriia pravogo uklona (Moscow-Leningrad, 1929), p. 41.

39. Ekonomika perekhodnogo perioda, p. 82 and chap. v.

40. Ibid., pp. 83-85, 146.

41. Ibid., pp. 85-87.

42. Ibid., p. 151.

43. L. Trotskii, Sochineniia, 12 (Moscow-Leningrad, 1925), p. 413, n. 19. For evidence that parts of the book influenced non-Bolsheviks as well, see A. V. Chayanov, The Theory of Peasant Economy (Homewood, Ill., 1966), pp. xliii-xliv; and Chaianov quoted by Bukharin and Piatkov in Krasnaia nov’, No. 1 (1921), pp. 272-73.

44. Krasnaia nov’, No. 1 (1921), pp. 247-51. Ol’minskii apparently first planned to voice his objections in a letter to the Central Committee, but decided instead on a public review. It was dated April 1921, and written just after the introduction of NEP. He was especially incensed by Bukharin’s statement that “proletarian coercion in all of its forms, beginning with shooting and ending with labor conscription, is . . . a method of creating communist mankind out of the human materials of the capitalist epoch. . . .” And, like other elder Bolsheviks, Ol’minskii was worried about the book’s influence on the young. See Voprosy istorii, No. 5 (1964), p. 23, n. 96, 24.

45. Krasnaia nov’, No. 1 (1921), pp. 256-74. This same issue also contained a pseudonymous defense of Bukharin and The Economics (pp. 252-55).

46. Leninskii sbornik, 11 (Moscow-Leningrad 1929), pp. 347-403. Bukharin does not seem to have been embarrassed by the notes. Two years earlier his disciple-biographer had quoted from them at length. Maretskii, Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 8, pp. 280-82.

47. See Leninskii sbornik, 11, pp. 355, 356, 359, 360, 361, 369, 371, 372, 385, 387, 400-401.

48. Early in his career, Lenin, too, had used “sociological” language. See, for example, his “Chto takoe ‘druz’ia naroda’ i kak oni voiuiut protiv sotsial-demokratov?,” in Sochineniia, 3rd ed., 1 (Moscow-Leningrad, 1926), pp. 55-115. But his bitter philosophical dispute with Bogdanov in 1909 and after seems to have reinforced his natural distrust of Western social thought and particularly any effort to enrich Marxism with it. In this sense, his intellectual orientation was radically unlike Bukharin’s and was to be the source of much friction between the two men. In September, 1920, for example, Bukharin protested a bad-tempered article on Bogdanov by V. Nevskii, which Lenin liked. Bukharin complained that the issue was not whether Bogdanov’s ideas were correct, but rather to understand them, and “this minimum Nevskii does not have.” Leninskii sbornik, 12 (Moscow-Leningrad, 1930), pp. 384-85.

49. Leninskii sbornik, 11, p. 396.

50. Ibid., p. 402.

51. “Professor s pikoi,” Pravda, October 25, 1928, p. 3.

52. Eric Hoffer, The True Believer (New York, 1960), p. 20.

An Abortive Attempt at International Unity
of the Workers’ Movement

1. V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, 4 (Moscow, 1960), p. 354. This same idea had been developed earlier while Lenin was in Siberian exile in 1899. See ibid., p. 211.

2. A. V. Lunacharskii, Vospominaniia o Lenine-O Vladimire Ilyiche. Sbornik statei i vospominanii (Moscow, 1933), pp. 21-22.

3. Milorad M. Drachkovitch, ed., Marxism in the Modern World (Stanford, 1965), p. 49.

4. Lenin, Collected Works, 12 (Moscow, 1962), pp. 425-26; emphasis is Lenin’s.

5. G. Zinoviev, Sochineniia, 15 (Leningrad, 1924), p. 256.

6. Lenin, Sochineniia, 42 (Moscow, 1963), p. 173.

7. Ibid., 43 (Moscow, 1963), pp. 234-35.

8. Ibid., pp. 245, 241-42.

9. Ibid., 44 (Moscow, 1964), pp. 30-31.

10. P. Renaudel, L’Internationale à Berne, Faits et documents (Paris, 1919), particularly pp. 125 ff.

11. Report and debates on the “Twenty-one Conditions” on July 27-30, 1920, in Der zweite Kongress der Komm. Internationale. Protokoll der Verhandlungen (Hamburg, 1921), pp. 240-400.

12. Independent Labour Party [ILP], Report on the 27th Annual Conference, Huddersfield, April, 1919 (London, 1919), p. 112.

13. MacDonald’s article was quoted in full by Lenin in an article “On the Task of the Third International” in The Communist International, No. 4, 1919; see also Lenin, Sochineniia, 39 (Moscow, 1963), pp. 90-93.

14. Lenin, Sochineniia, 39, pp. 94-109; see also Lenin on the I.L.P., Introduction by William Rust (London, 1933).

15. ILP, Report on the 27th Annual Conference, p. 52.

16. Philip Viscount Snowden, An Autobiography (London, 1934), 2, p. 536.

17. ILP, Report on the 28th Annual Conference (held at Glasgow, April, 1920), p. 86.

18. British Labour Delegation to Russia 1920, Report (London, n.d.), p. 5 (cited hereafter as BLD Report 1920).

19. Mrs. Philip Snowden, Through Bolshevik Russia (London, 1920), p. 30; on meeting with Trotsky, pp. 75-77.

20. BLD Report 1920, pp. 149-50, “Part List of Persons Interviewed.”

21. Ibid., pp. 57, 73-79, 83-88.

22. Ibid., p. 64.

23. Ibid., pp. 63-64.

24. Ibid., p. 71.

25. R. Abramovich, unpublished manuscript, “The Mensheviks and the Socialist International,” mimeographed copy at the Hoover Institution, p. 19.

26. German Workmen in Russia, Report of Wilhelm Dittmann (New York: The American-Russian Chamber of Commerce, n.d.), p. 8.

27. Segrew’s telegram was published in Moscow in Pravda, September 12, 1920, and quoted in Lenin, Sochineniia, 3rd ed., 25, pp. 634-35.

28. Lenin, Sochineniia, 5th ed., 41, p. 277; Lenin’s emphasis.

29. K. Radek, Die Masken sind gefallen. Eine Antwort an Crispien, Dittmann und Hilferding (Verlag der Komm. Intern., n.p., 1920), pp. 4, 12-13.

30. Diktatur über das Proletariat oder: Diktatur des Proletariats. Das Ergebnis von Moskau, von Tony Sender (Frankfurt, n.d.), p. 13.

31. USPD, Protokoll über die Verhandlungen des ausserordentlichen Parteitages in Halle. Von 12. bis 17. Oktober, 1920 (Berlin, n.d.), p. 261.

32. ILP, Report of the 29th Annual Conference, Southport, March 27-29, 1921 (London, 1921), p. 124.

33. ILP, Report of the 28th Annual Conference, Glasgow, April, 1920 (London, 1920), p. 67.

34. Protokoll herausgegeben vom Sekretariat der Internationalen Arbeitsgemeinschaft Sozialistisher Parteien- Internationale Sozialistiche Konferenz in Wien vom 22. bis 27. Februar 1921 (Vienna, 1921), pp. 3-4.

35. The text of the Geneva resolution is reported in BLP, Report of the 21st Annual Conference, Brighton, June, 1921 (London, 1921), p. 227.

36. Ibid., pp. 4-8.

37. Ibid., p. 8.

38. Ibid., pp. 147-48.

39. The report on this meeting was published in Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, No. 13 (August 5, 1921), pp. 10-12.

40. For the full text of this letter see ibid., p. 11. Soon afterwards the above mentioned “antagonism” was publicly exposed and discussed. In August, 1921, the Russian Menshevik leader L. Martov published an article on “The Reconstruction of the International” in Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, No. 13, developing the Vienna Union’s point of view. K. Kautsky polemicized with Martov’s argumentation in Der Sozialist, No. 35/36, and Martov replied to Kautsky in the same publication (Nos. 40, 41) with an article, “Zusammenarbeit der Klassen oder Klassenkampf.” See Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, No. 19, pp. 3-6.

41. See Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, No. 20 (November 18, 1921), pp. 11-12 and BLP, Report of the 22nd Conference in Edinburgh, June 27-30, 1922, pp. 14-16, respectively.

42. BLP, Report of the 22nd Conference, p. 16.

43. Deiatelnost’ Ispolnitelnogo Komiteta i Prezidiuma I. K. Kommunisticheskogo Internatsionala ot 13 iiulia 1921 do 1 fevralia 1922 (Petrograd, 1922), pp. 72-73 (cited hereafter as Deiatelnost’ Ispolnitelnogo Komiteta).

44. The following account of this session is based on ibid., pp. 339-55.

45. For the debates on December 18, 1921, see ibid., pp. 366-77; on December 25, see pp. 378-80.

46. Ibid., p. 407.

47. Ibid., pp. 396-97.

48. Ibid., pp. 413-16.

49. For the text of this appeal see Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, No. 2 (24), January 19, 1922, p. 9.

50. BLP, Report of the 22nd Annual Conference, pp. 17-18.

51. Deiatelnost’ Ispolnitelnogo Komiteta, p. 420; there is an obvious printing mistake: February 1, instead of 21.

52. The meetings in Frankfurt are reported in BLP, Report of the 22nd Annual Conference, p. 18.

53. Ibid., pp. 18-19.

54. On January 16, 1922, in a note to the Politbureau members, Lenin mentioned that “perhaps special guarantees against the Fascists (for example an Italian man-of-war with radio facilities put at our disposal? the names of Italian army officers and policemen responsible for security, etc.?) should be requested”; in the same note he suggested that “personal (verbal) negotiations in Berlin and Moscow with the Germans on mutual contact in Genoa should be initiated immediately” (Sochineniia, 5th ed., 54, p. 117; Lenin’s emphasis).

55. Lenin, Sochineniia, 45, pp. 2-3.

56. Ibid., 54, pp. 136-37, 601.

57. Ibid., pp. 130-31.

58. Ibid., p. 134; Lenin’s emphasis.

59. Ibid., pp. 144, 149.

60. See E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923, 3 (London, 1953), p. 370.

61. Lenin, Sochineniia, 54, p. 140.

62. Ibid., pp. 148, 176-77.

63. Ibid., 44, pp. 377-78.

64. Ibid., 54, p. 609, n.260.

65. Ibid., 44, p. 379.

66. See ibid., 54, pp. 149, 608, n.254.

67. Ibid., 44, p. 405.

68. Ibid., 54, pp. 176-77.

69. Ibid., 44, pp. 362-63; 54, pp. 135-36, 139-40; compare Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 3, p. 372, n.2.

70. Lenin, Sochineniia, 44, pp. 374-76, 380, 382-84, 406-408; 54, pp. 133-35.

71. Ibid., 54, pp. 170-71, 614-15, n.385.

72. Not all of the participants had an equal right to vote: Germany, Russia, France, Czechoslovakia, Italy, and the Executives of the two Internationals and of youth and trade unions had been given four decisive votes each. The Ukraine, Poland, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Norway, England, the U.S., Spain, Finland, Holland, Sweden, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Latvia, Rumania, and Japan-two decisive votes each. Delegates from Canada, China, Lithuania, Persia, Estonia, India, South Africa, Iceland, Armenia, Georgia, Denmark, Australia, Java, and Argentina had only a consultative vote. Bibliothèque Communiste, Compte-rendu de la Conférence de l’Éxecutif Élargi de l’Internationale Communiste, Moscou, 21 fevrier-4 mars 1922 (Paris, 1922), pp. 13-14.

73. Ibid., p. 59. On February 25, 1922, Izvestiia gave a more detailed report on Radek’s communication than the official Compte-rendu; it was said in Izvestiia that Radek had had talks with Ledebour and Adler, that, in his opinion, a joint conference of the three Internationals would be a “natural counter-demonstration against a congress of world capitalism in Genoa,” and that a unification of the Third and the Second-and-a-half Internationals alone, without the participation of the Second, would be unacceptable.

74. Despite the fact that since the beginning of February a positive decision on this question had been taken for granted, officially it was presented as a very controversial matter, and on February 21 the editor-in-chief of Izvestiia, Iu. Steklov, published an editorial against any cooperation with the “social-traitors.” The “new tactics” were debated in the course of six meetings, and the report on these debates fills about half of the Compte-rendu of the session, which had 21 points on its agenda. For Zinoviev’s report of February 24, see Compte-rendu, pp. 62-80.

75. For Renault’s speech see Compte-rendu, pp. 81-89; French declaration on p. 119; Treint’s speech p. 140; Italian speeches pp. 90-102.

76. Ibid., pp. 103-33.

77. Ibid., pp. 220-24.

78. Ibid., pp. 224-25.

79. Ibid., pp. 225-27.

80. See Chicherin’s plan in Lenin, Sochineniia, 45, pp. 35-40; for Lenin’s reaction, see ibid., pp. 34-35.

81. Ibid., pp. 69-70.

82. Ibid., p. 41.

83. Ibid., p. 50.

84. On the Committee of Nine, the Comintern was represented by Radek, L. O. Frossard (a Frenchman who broke with the Comintern by the end of 1922), and Clara Zetkin; the Vienna Union by Adler, Bracke, and Crispien; the Second International by MacDonald, Vandervelde, and Wels. Frossard and Vandervelde were later replaced by Heckert (Germany) and Wauters (Belgium), respectively.

85. For proceedings of the conference see Protokoll der internationalen Konferenz der drei internationalen Exekutivkomitees in Berlin vom 2 bis 5. April 1922, Herausgegeben von Neunerkomitee der Konferenz (Vienna, 1922); Edition du Comité des Neuf, Conférence des Trois Internationales, Tenue à Berlin, les 2, 4, et 5 avril 1922 (Compte-rendu sténographique) (Brussels, 1922) cited hereafter as Conférence des trois Internationales; Izdanie Ispolnitelnogo Komiteta Kommunisticheskogo Internatsionala, Mezhdunarodnaia Sotsialisticheskaia Konferentsiia (Ob”edinennoe zasednie Ispolkomov Trekh Internatsionalov), Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow, 1922); The Second and Third Internationals and the Vienna Union, Official Report of the Conference between the Executives held at the Reichstag, Berlin, on the 2nd April, 1922 and following days (London, 1922), cited hereinafter as Official Report. The English version seems to be the least accurate and it should be compared with the other editions; it is quoted when there is no doubt.

86. The following were present: from the Second International, delegates C. Huysmans, E. Vandervelde, Stauning (Denmark); O. Wels (Germany); H. Gosling, R. MacDonald, T. Shaw (Great Britain); Tsereteli (Georgia); W. N. Vliegen (Holland); and G. Moeller (Sweden); guests H. De Man (Belgium); A. Braun, Dr. Lûtkens, V. Schiff (Germany); E. Bevin, M. Cox, W. Gillies (Great Britain); from the Vienna Union, delegates A. Crispien (Germany); R. C. Wallhead (Great Britain); P. Faure, J. Longuet (France); B. Kalniņš (Latvia); F. Adler, O. Bauer (Austria); Iu. Martov (Russia); R. Grimm (Switzerland); K. Cermak (Czechoslovakia); guests W. Dittmann (Germany); A. Bracke, Compère-Morel (France); B. Locker, S. Kaplansky (Poale-Zion); R. Abramovich, A. Schreider (Russia, Menshevik and Left SR, respectively); from the Comintern, delegates C. Zetkin (Germany); L. O. Frossard, A. Rosmer (France); Katayama (Japan); Stoyanovitch (Yugoslavia); A. Warski (Poland); Bukharin, Radek (Russia); B. Smeral (Czechoslovakia); Bordiga (Italy); guests Buyanovitch and Vuyovitch (Yugoslavia); from the Italian Socialist Party, delegate Serrati; guests A. Baratono, D. Fioritto. Among the journalists sponsored by the Second International was the Russian SR leader, Victor Chernov.

For Adler’s speech see Official Report, pp. 7-12.

87. Ibid., pp. 12-18.

88. For Vandervelde’s speech, see ibid., pp. 20-28.

89. E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 3, p. 409.

90. For declaration of the Vienna Union see ibid., pp. 28-30.

91. Conférence des Trois Internationales, p. 46.

92. Official Report, pp. 31-33.

93. Ibid., p. 38.

94. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 3, p. 410.

95. For MacDonald’s speech see Official Report, pp. 39-47.

96. For Serrati’s speech see ibid., pp. 48-56.

97. For O. Bauer’s speech see ibid., pp. 57-65.

98. For Radek’s speech see Official Report, pp. 65-78, with some inaccuracies corrected; Radek’s emphasis.

99. Ibid., pp. 79-80.

100. Ibid., pp. 83-85.

101. Conférence des Trois Internationales, p. 149.

102. Official Report, pp. 88-89.

103. Ibid., p. 94.

104. BLP, Report of the 22nd Annual Conference, p. 21.

105. Official Report, pp. 90-92.

106. Ibid., p. 93.

107. See Pravda, No. 77 (April 5, 1922).

108. See G. W. F. Hallgarten, “General Hans von Seeckt and Russia, 1920-1922,” The Journal of Modern History, 21 (1949), where it is said, among other things, that Chicherin “mentioned the fact that German officers had begun to work in Russia. Fearing some leak, Wirth immediately suggested to Seeckt that this German activity be kept in secret” (p. 32).

109. Lenin, Sochineniia, 45, p. 145.

110. Ibid., pp. 140-44.

111. Ibid., p. 534, n.95.

112. Ibid., pp. 149-51.

113. Pravda, No. 88 (April 22, 1922).

114. Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, No. 9 (31), May 2, 1922, p. 5.

115. Ibid., No. 10 (32), May 18, 1922, p. 13.

116. See ibid., No. 11 (33), June 3, 1922, pp. 3-4.

117. See Martov’s article, “The Bloody Farce,” in ibid., No. 12 (34), June 18, 1922.

118. Report on the meeting of May 23, 1922 see ibid., No. 11 (33), pp. 4-5, and BLP, Report of the 22nd Annual Conference, pp. 23-24.

119. Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, No. 11 (33), p. 6.

The Kaminsky Brigade

1. For other such groups, see Alexander Dallin and Ralph Mavrogordato, “Rodionov: A Case-Study of Wartime Redefection,” American Slavic and East European Review, February, 1960; A. Dallin, “Portrait of a Collaborator: Oktan,” Survey, No. 35 (1961); and A. Dallin, “From the Gallery of Wartime Disaffection: Lukin,” Russian Review, 21, No. 1 (January, 1962).

2. Lokot’ is located in Brasov raion of what was then Orel and is now Briansk oblast’.

3. The biography of Voskoboinikov and the account of Lokot’ under his rule are based on author’s interviews 321 and 359 (Harvard University Refugee Interview Project, series B6); and VAA (i.e., German Foreign Office representative) with AOK 2 Ic/AO (Anton Bossi-Fedrigotti), “Bericht Nr. 5,” April 21, 1942, Himmler File 26 (hereinafter cited as Bossi-Fedrigotti). Glowing accounts eulogizing his performance appear in various Russian emigre publications. See, e.g. M. Bobrov (pseud.), “Strashnoe bezmolvie Rossii,” Vozrozhdenie (Paris), 7 (1949), pp. 130-32, and Vladimir Samarin, “Civilian Life under the German Occupation 1942-1944” (New York: Research Program on the USSR, 1954; Mimeographed Series no. 58) (hereinafter cited as RP-58); also two anonymous accounts, “Obshchestvennyi instinkt i popytka gosudarstvennogo stroitel’stva v usloviiakh nemetskoi okkupatsii,” MS (M-ll), and “Russkie voennye formirovaniia pri nemtsakh,” MS (M-17).

According to one informant, Voskoboinikov had participated in an anti-Bolshevik rising along the Volga in 1921 but had managed to evade apprehension. A Soviet source identifies him as a chaianovets, i.e., a follower of Alexander Chaianov, the “neopopulist” leader implicated in the Prompartiia trial. (N. V. Tropkin, ‘ Kommunisty orlovshchiny v partizanskom dvizhenii (1941-1943 gg.),” in Sovetskie partizany [Moscow, 1961], p. 202 n).

4. The Russian term was Narodnaia Sotsialisticheskaia Partiia Rossii (NSPR). The ambiguity of the term, narodnaia, made it possible for friend and foe alike later to refer to it as National-Socialist. See below, pp. 269 ff.

5. 321; Erkundungstrupp Lt. Glatz, PzAOK 2, Kdr.d.Eis.Pi., “Erkundungsbericht,” January 26, 1942. See also Orlovskaia oblast’ v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny (1941-1945 gg.) (Orel, 1960), p. 150. A later German account erroneously places the size of the “self-defense” force at 500 men (Sven Steenberg [pseud.], Wlassow: Verräter Oder Patriot? [Cologne, 1968], p. 83). See also Zakhar A. Bogatyr’, V tylu vraga (Moscow, 1963), p. 33.

6. Bossi-Fedrigotti, p. 8.

7. 294; 321; 359.

8. Anatolii Shyian, Partizanskyi krai (Kiev, 1946), pp. 43-47. See also Bogatyr’, pp. 43-47.

9. Alexander Saburov, Za linieiu frontu, 1 (L’viv, 1953), pp. 206-25; Za liniei fronta (Petrozavodsk, 1965), pp. 203-53. See also Tropkin, in Sovetskie partizany, p. 202n.

10. Two sources claim that it was common knowledge that Kaminsky had been a Communist Party member. There is nothing to support this assertion. (358; and Anton Dubovskii, “Gody bor’by i porazhenii,” Belaia Rus’ [Munich], 1 [1950].) A far from infallible Soviet source states that Kaminsky had been convicted “in the period of the Shakhty trial.” (Vladimir Lobanok, V boiakh za rodinu [Minsk, 1964], p. 211.)

In addition to sources listed above, this section draws on the following: Friedrich Buchardt, “Die Behandlung des russischen Problems während der Zeit des n.-s. Regimes in Deutschland,” MS; the only published wartime article on Kaminsky, Helmut von Kügelgen, “Der Kӧnig von L.,” Armee-Zeitung, No. 24 (1942), p. 3; “Die Aktion Kaminsky,” MS (hereinafter cited as M-371), a manuscript by a German officer who for some time was close to Kaminsky; author’s interviews with two German officials (G-3 and G-6) and two Russians, one a colonel in the brigade (317) and the other Kaminsky’s representative in Minsk (650); and a detailed report, “Bericht des OKVR von Froreich über eine im Auftrage der Heeresgruppe Mitte/OQu/Abt VIII unternommene Besichtigung des Selbstverwaltungsbezirkes Lokot (25.-30.4.43.),” CDCJ, Paris (hereafter cited as 145a/45). See also Maximilian Preuss, “Kaminsky und seine Brigade,” MS (Institut für Zeitgeschichte, ZS 415).

The earliest secondary account of the brigade was Boris Nicolaevsky, “Porazhencheskoe dvizhenie 1941-1945 godov,” Novyi zhurnal (New York), 18 (1948), pp. 221-23. Other memoirs are largely uncritical eulogies, e.g., the Bobrov and Samarin pieces cited earlier; and A. Kazantsev, “Tret’ia sila,” Posev (Limburg), No. 30 (217) (1950), pp. 13-14.

Various postwar sources erroneously assert that Kaminsky was born in Poznan in 1896, that he had moved to Russia after the First World War, or that he had been a Red Army captain taken prisoner by the Germans around Orel in 1942. See, e.g., [Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, defendant], Vor dem polnischen Staatsanwalt, Jerzy Sawicki, ed. (Berlin, 1962), p. 32; and Jerzy Kirchmayer, Powstanie Warszawskie (Warsaw, 1959), p. 244.

11. M-371, p. 20; 650; 145a/45. A photograph of Kaminsky, taken in 1942, appears in Steenberg, facing p. 160.

12. Quoted in M-17.

13. 294; 359; 371. By 1944 Anna Veniaminovna Voskoboinikova bitterly rued her endorsement of Kaminsky’s appointment.

14. Enclosure with Erkundungstrupp Lt. Glatz, op. cit.

15. Bossi-Fedrigotti, p. 9.

16. Gaupropagandaleiter der AO Felix Schmidt-Decker, “Russischer Selbstverwaltungsbezirk Lokotj,” n.d. [December, 1942],

17. PzAOK 2, “Ermächtigung,” and PzAOK 2, Ic/AO, memorandum, February 23, 1942.

18. (No author) “Bericht über den Bürgermeister von Lokotj Ing. Bronislaw W. Kaminski und die von ihm zur Partisanenbekämpfung geführte Miliz (derzeitiger Stand),” n.d. [July, 1942?] (hereafter cited as “Lokotj-Bericht”). The raiony in question were Navlia, Suzemka, Komarichi, Sevsk, Dmitrovsk, and Dmitriev. The maximum area under Kaminsky’s jurisdiction had had a peacetime population of 1.7 million.

19. OB PzAOK 2 (Schmidt), “An den Bürgermeister von Lokot, Herrn Ing. Kaminski,” July 19, 1942. German opinions of Kaminsky continued to differ sharply. A moderate view was expressed by a special investigator sent to Lokot’ in mid-1942: “. . . Kaminsky is above all a practitioner who understands how to master a situation by cleverly taking advantage of all opportunities. . . . He is aware of his own limitations. . . . It seems doubtful whether Kaminsky, if torn loose from his area and men, would be able to establish a large organization from behind a desk.” (“Lokotj-Bericht,” p. 4.) Hostile comments came from German economic officers and from the staff of German and Hungarian units stationed near Lokot’, who complained that Kaminsky failed to feed them and had adopted agrarian practices contrary to German directives. (E.g., Gebietslandwirt Ssewsk, “Bericht über die Besetzung des Kreises Lokot,” July 9, 1942.) Some fellow Russians evidently denounced him to the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), for reasons unknown. But his German army protectors urged the SD to be circumspect in the matter, as Kaminsky “is rendering the army extraordinarily important services. Anything that he might interpret as suspicions on the part of German agencies must therefore be avoided.” (PzAOK 2, Ic/AO, “An S.D. Kdo. 107B,” September 2, 1942. See also WiStab Ost, Chefgr. La, “Betr. Verwaltungsmassnahmen beim PzAOK 2,” November 5, 1942.) Whereas some German officers thought Kaminsky desirable because he had no political ambitions, he was objectionable to others precisely “because he seeks to promote political programs”; some found him appealing because he favored a Russian variant of Nazism. (See PzAOK 2, Ic/AO, to OKW/WPr/A P6 [Diercksen], September 30, 1942.)

20. OB PzAOK 2 (Schmidt), “Der Heeresgruppe Mitte,” March 11, 1942.

21. Kaminsky to Hitler, n.d. [February, 1942], enclosure to OB PzAOK 2, op. cit.

22. OKH/GenStdH/GenQu/Abt. K-Verw„ “Nr. 11/7040/42 g.,” October 9, 1942. Another document, much later, asserted that the Lokot’ district was established with Hitler’s explicit permission; see below, p. 260.

23. “Lokotj-Bericht,” p. 1; PzAOK 2, Ia/OQu, “Befehl für die Neugliederung des Armeebereiches,” July 11, 1942; Korück 532, la/Qu, “Korück-Befehl für die Neugliederung des Korückgebietes,” August 14, 1942.

24. Korück 532, IIa, “Stabsbefehl Nr. 42,” July 22, 1942. A subsequent order extended Veltheim’s functions to include the coordination of anti-partisan operations outside the district’s territory. (Korück 532, Ia, “Aufgabengebiet des Maj. v. Veltheim,” September 11, 1942.) See also Peter Kleist, Zwischen Hitler und Stalin (Bonn, 1950), p. 200.

25. Korück 532, Qu/Ia, “Herrn Ingenieur Kaminski,” October 11, 1942. An earlier German order instructed administrative personnel not to interfere in local government “directly.” Kaminsky repeatedly complained about the conduct of the Hungarian troops in his area and reportedly threatened to resign unless they were made to respect his authority and the inhabitants’ property. (Korück 532, 1c, “Betr. Ungarische Division,” May 25, 1942; and “Betr. Front Kaminski,” June 12, 1942.)

26. He was much mollified by the award of an honorary dagger by the Hungarian command. In November, 1942, General Bernhard awarded him the special medal for valor for “Easterners,” second class, and an invitation to visit Field Marshal von Kluge. In his negotiations Kaminsky loved to observe all the formalities of his “co-equality” with the Germans. When German soldiers killed a peasant on “his” soil, Kaminsky condemned them to death, arranged for the Germans to send what he called a “diplomatic” mission to sign a “treaty of extradition,” and turned the men over to their officers for summary shooting. (Kazantsev, in Posev, No. 30, p. 14, relates evidently the same episode in more dramatic version.) He enjoyed proving his authority by acts of generosity, such as donating several thousand geese as a present to the German civilian population. On Hitler’s birthday, April 20, 1943, he issued an amnesty for prisoners jailed in his district. (Order No. 118, German trans. in 145a/45, Appendix; Preuss, p. 3.)

27. The RONA should not be confused with the ROA, the German-commanded Russian units nominally under General Vlasov.

28. “Lokotj-Bericht,” p. 1. See also Eugen Hadamowsky and Eberhardt Taubert, “Bericht über die Propaganda-Lage im Osten,” September 17, 1942, p. 16, Doc. Occ E 18-19, YIVO. An eyewitness (Steenberg, p. 84) claims that it had over 20,000 men.

29. See 321; 359; M-17; “Lokotj-Bericht.” The brigade’s symbol was a shield with the letters, RONA, over the black cross of St. George on a white background. With its reorganization and expansion, its men took an oath to Kaminsky, who assumed first the rank of colonel and then of kombrig-the equivalent of brigadier general in the Red Army prior to the reintroduction of generals’ ranks. In the winter of 1942-43 a system of insignia and epaulettes was worked out which amounted to a mixture of Red Army and tsarist ranks and symbols. (M-371; Buchardt; Dubovskii.)

30. Korück 532, Ia, “Freiw. Btl. Lokot,” October 8, 1942. The forces are reported to have included five infantry regiments, one armored brigade, one pioneer battalion, one guard battalion, and one anti-aircraft detachment (Steenberg, p. 84).

31. He did not hesitate to have men shot summarily, for instance, for cowardice. Four of his men were shot, after a partisan attack was repelled in bitter fighting in June, 1942, for retreating in the face of the enemy with their machine-guns at the ready. A hostile German officer reported in October 1942, that most of his troops were forcibly impressed villagers: “Only after the first who tried to run away were apprehended and shot did the rest remain together. . . .” (Korück 532, la, “Freiw. Btl. Lokot,” October 8, 1942; and “Lokot-Bericht,” p. 2.)

32. Stab Major von Veltheim, “Bericht über den Einsatz des Freiw. Btls. Lokot,” September 5, 1942.

33. Korück 532, la, “Reisevermerk Rise 6.10.42,” October 8, 1942; Korück 532 (Bernhard), “An PzAOK 2,” November 14, 1942. See also Partizany brianshchiny; sbornik dokumentov i materialov, 2 (Briansk, 1962), pp. 66-67; and Kurskaia oblast’ v period Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny, 1 (Kursk, 1960), p. 362.

34. Schmidt-Decker, p. 2. Italics in the original.

35. As a brigade member later recalled,

when we would come into a village, we would ask who among the local residents was with the partisans. Then we would take the cow from these people’s folks. We really tried to loot only the houses of partisans and communists. Usually their families would be killed. When the partisans came to the same village after we left, they did the reverse: they would rob the families of policemen and kamintsy [followers of Kaminsky], In a village of 200, there might be forty with Kaminsky and fifty with the partisans. If the partisans raided it by night, the starosta would flee to us; normally he would keep his wife and children in the nearest raion center anyway if the village was on the border of partisan and Kaminsky-controlled territory.

See also Gen. August Winter, chief of staff, PzAOK 2, order, May 11, 1943, IMT, Doc. NOKW-472.

36. Kügelgen; 321; Dubovskii; Bossi-Fedrigotti.

37. A German report specified:

While commander of the Royal Hungarian Division as well as the other German and Hungarian officers in Lokot’ are on foot, it has been noted with displeasure that Kaminsky in the company of a woman (whom German officers are already addressing as “Gnädige Frau”) uses a car to drive the short distance to the theater or movie, and that cars and trucks with huge signs, “In the service of the Wehrmacht,” drive a lot in and out of Lokot’. Frequently the passengers (women) make it unmistakable that the trips are of no official nature, nor in the interest of presecuting the war.

(Korück 532, la, “Reisevermerk 6.10.42,” October 8, 1942, and annexes.)

38. Korück 532 (Bernhard), “An PzAOK 2,” November 14, 1942; 321; 358. For the Germans these “special supplies” represented something of a problem. In November, 1942, Gen. Bernhard requested the army once more to assign a special quota of wine, liquor, and cigarettes to Colonel Rübsam since “collaboration with Engineer Kaminsky imposes certain obligations.” A year later the German liaison officer reminded his superiors that “until now Kaminsky has been receiving from the CG, PzAOK 2, a box of gifts on the average of once a month. This box contained: 100-200 cigars; 200-300 cigarettes; 8-10 bottles of cognac, vodka, or liqueur; 10-15 bottles of wine or champagne. Sometimes smaller consumer goods or items such as eau de cologne were added.” (VSt PzAOK 3 zum SVB Lepel [Kraushaar], letter [to HGeb Mitte, OQu?].)

39. HGr Mitte, OQu/VII (Mil.-Verw.) [Günzel], “Bericht über den Selbstverwaltungsbezirk Lokot,” May 25, 1943. There was also, one suspects, some carry-over from Soviet administration, which tends to provide for more personnel than equivalent Western organizations.

40. 145a/45; “Lokotj-Bericht”; Schmidt-Decker; 321.

41. 321; 358; PzAOK 2, OQu/VII, “Rechtspflege für die Landeseinwohner,” January 1, 1943; “Lokotj-Bericht,” p. 3; 145a/45. The following cases, reported in a random issue of the local newspaper, may give some idea of the nature of the cases and of standards applied. A resident, having insulted another peasant woman, was found guilty “under Art. 27, par. 6, and sentenced to a fine of 500 rubles to be paid to the state [i.e., Kaminsky] and is to be warned that the repetition of such instances would result in criminal charges against her.” Another peasant woman, having stolen articles belonging to a German soldier, was sentenced to three months of forced labor. A local miller received a fine of 1,000 rubles for “beating up Policeman I. M. Senenkov.”

42. G-2. Kügelgen states that in spite of the severe shortage of tractors and horses, actual acreage was reduced by only 8 percent.

43. The situation changed drastically in the first months of 1943. Whereas until then Kaminsky had been able to pay his troops from local receipts (3 to 4 million rubles a month), the Wehrmacht was obliged to assume the costs as of April 1, 1943, largely because most of the district was no longer effectively under Kaminsky’s control.

44. Korück 532, la, “Kaminski Misstände,” October 8, 1942. Ernst von Dohnanyi, “Combating Soviet Guerrillas,” in T. N. Greene, ed., The Guerrilla-And How to Fight Him (New York, 1962), pp. 206-209, gives far too positive an assessment of the Kaminsky forces.

45. For the only time in the record, Hitler referred to Kaminsky at his staff conference of July 26, 1943. As Hitler insists on a complete evacuation of civilians, cattle, and grain from the threatened area, Kluge worries about the difficulties this would cause.

. . . HITLER: What is going to be done with the harvested rye? Is it going to be burned?

KLUGE: Certainly, we’ll have to. Probably we will burn it, but I don’t know whether we’ll have time. We’ll have to destroy it somehow. Especially the valuable cattle we have here. (Over a map of the central front) The famous Kaminsky is here, the one who played a great role that other time.

HITLER: Where is he?

KLUGE: Around here, near Lokot’, in this area. That’s his empire.

(Trans, in Felix Gilbert, ed., Hitler Directs His War [Oxford, 1950], pp. 64-65.) In speaking of “that other time,” Kluge presumably referred to the strong partisan attacks in the Lokot’ area early in 1943. For the original, see [Germany, OKW, FHQ], Hitlers Lagebesprechungen (Stuttgart, 1962), p. 378.

46. Wi In Mitte, Ib, “Aktenvermerk über Besprechung bei 286. Sich. Div. am 3.8.43.” German wartime records and postwar accounts speak of a total of about 30,000. The figures given above are based on German records, such as HGr Mitte, OQu 2/VII, to OKG, GenQu, Abt. E (monthly report for September), October 12, 1943. The protocol of a conference on September 25 reported that 6,000 troops and 23,000 civilians had arrived at their destination, and some 3,800 more civilians were expected. PzAOK 3, OQu, Abt. VII, “Besprechung in Lepel am 24. u. 25. September, 1943” (hereafter cited as “Besprechung”). According to one account the brigade was thrown into frontline action near Dmitrovsk when the Soviet army broke through the German lines in mid-1943; and, to cover the retreat of the remainder, one of its regiments allegedly held the town of Sevsk, where it was cut off and decimated (Steenberg, p. 85).

47. HGr Mitte, la, to OKH/GenStdH/Op.-Abt., August 31, 1943.

48. “Besprechung.”

49. Wi In Mitte, lb, “Aktenvermerk”; “Besprechung.”

50. 321; HGr Mitte, la, to OKH/GenStdH/Op.-Abt.

51. Einsatzgruppe B, to Chef der Bandenkampfverbände (von dem Bach), September 28, 1943; “Besprechung”; Wi In Mitte, lb, “Aktenvermerk.” See also below, pp. 264-65.

52. 321; and Gruppe Rübsam, Ic, “Bericht über die Mitte März aufgedeckte Verschwӧrergruppe in Lokot,” March 24, 1943. See also John A. Armstrong, ed., Soviet Partisans in World War II (Madison, Wis., 1964), p. 237.

53. 321; 358; M-17; M-371; Buchardt; 038; “Besprechung.” For the Soviet version of the Tarasov incident, see Vladimir Lobanok, V boiakh za rodinu (Minsk, 1964), pp. 211-12. See also PzAOK 3, OB, memorandum, April 12, 1944.

54. A few examples will illustrate Protsiuk’s behavior and the terror he aroused.

He was a confidant of Kaminsky [a former RONA man reports]. Like the NKVD, he thrashed anyone he could get his fingers on. He played ball with the Germans and personally killed a number of men.

Protsiuk was both prosecutor and chief judge. He was a sadist. He personally beat women, hit them cruelly, tramped them with his feet [an eyewitness recalls].

Protsiuk [a high-ranking officer testifies] regularly killed captured partisans or sentenced them to five to ten years of “prison.”

55. A former member of the brigade described an operation near Lepel’: “When we entered the village, I declared myself to be a partisan. The starosta could not tell whether I was really with Kaminsky or not. I would ask him to set up some moonshine vodka, which we would take from him. This made him suspicious. ‘ This is funny,’ he said; ‘usually the partisans don’t take any liquor with them.’ The people did not know who was raiding them. If some gang suddenly robbed his house, an old man would not know how to answer questions. There were cases of people . . . guessing wrong every time, so that they would be robbed and beaten in turn by the partisans, Kaminsky’s men, again the partisans, and the German police.”

56. The order stipulated that, with the complete transfer of the brigade, the authority of the German district commissars of Slonim and Nowogródek was to cease. The new “self-governing district,” encompassing a smaller area than in its earlier locations, lay between the west-east railways from Central Poland to Minsk-Smolensk and to Polotsk-Velikie Luki. (Hӧherer SS- u. Polizeiführer Russland-Mitte und Weissruthenien [von Gottberg], “Befehl Nr. 1 zur Umsiedlung der Sturmbrigade RONA,” February 23, 1944.)

57. HGr Mitte, OQu/VII, “Monatsbericht für März 1944,” April 12, 1944; Generalkommissar Minsk (von Gottberg), “Selbstverwaltungsbezirk Kaminski,” March 30, 1944.

58. M-371; M-17; Buchardt; SSFHA, “Generalstabsstellenbesetzung in der Waffen-SS: Stand vom 1.8.44.” The German liaison staff was headed by Obersturmführer Loleit, who had been SS representative with Kaminsky. See also Hans von Krannhals, Der Warschauer Aufstand 1944 (Frankfurt, 1962), p. 316; and George Stein, The Waffen-SS (Ithaca, 1966), pp. 264-65.

59. Reliable evidence is difficult to assemble. Former members of the brigade are reluctant to detail atrocities; few of the Soviet references can be taken as necessarily trustworthy; hostile Belorussian nationalist emigres have provided accounts many of which are evidently based on fact but defy confirmation.

One of the former brigade members admits that “when no supplies were at hand, Kaminsky would send a detachment into the nearest village, firing shots in the air and if necessary firing on the people, to exact from them ‘ contributions,’ confiscating wantonly, sometimes accompanied by murders.” (321) According to another account, his police meted out swift retribution for the slightest complaint. In many villages potatoes were looted for distilling. It was usually at night, after drinking, that Kaminsky’s men got up the nerve to engage in terror raids, which often led the local peasants to flee and hide in the woods. (Dubovskii, 1, pp. 33-34.) According to a Belorussian informant, in Rozhna and Lipsk (near Lepel’), in a raid on a previously partisan-held area, they forced the inhabitants to take refuge in the churches and then burned them to the ground, with the result that after the fire “a few suffocating survivors were seen climbing over rows of corpses to the small windows up high.” (870)

60. M-371; Krannhals, p. 126n.

61. Himmler pointed with pride to Kaminsky’s unit as one of “his” formations which had successfully fought their way out of Soviet traps. (“Reichsführer-SS Himmler auf der Gauleitertagung am 3. August 1944 in Posen,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 1, No. 4 [October, 1953], p. 377.)

62. RMfdbO., Beauftragter beim OK HGr Nordukraine, z.Zt. bei HGr Mitte (O. W. Müller), “Bericht Nr. 2/44,” July 16, 1944, NMT, Doc. NO-1869. As the brigade moved westward into the Bialystok area, which had been annexed de facto to East Prussia (whose Gauleiter, Erich Koch, was ruler of the Ukraine and the leading “Russian-hater”) Koch initially refused to admit Kaminsky and his men; but Alfred Rosenberg, his perennial foe, promptly ordered Koch to let the brigade in and lodged a protest with State Secretary Lammers. In mid-July Kaminsky’s men were allowed to proceed. (Koch to Rosenberg, July 7, 1944; Rosenberg to Koch, July 10, 1944; Rosenberg to Lammers, July 10, 1944; and RMfdbO. [Labs], “Aktennotiz,” July 24, 1944, NMT, Doc. NO-1827.)

63. It was not clear what plans the Germans had for the personnel. Reluctant to admit the unruly “Easterners” into the Reich, the Germans recommended Hungary as an asylum when the retreat across Poland continued. One source states, plausibly enough, that the Germans hoped to use the brigade in anti-partisan warfare. Indeed, a team of German and Kaminsky officers went to Budapest, only to learn that the SS had made the plans on its own and had not bothered to tell its Hungarian allies, who then raised serious objections: they had no use for a “horde of Russian savages.” Kaminsky’s officers demanded that a district near the border of Transcarpathian Munkachevo Province be turned over to them, on the same terms as Lokot’, Lepel’, and Diatlovo had been. This the Magyars flatly-and understandably-refused. Several officials of the Rosenberg ministry (von Mende, Knüpffer) argued, moreover, that the brigade would not perform adequately in anti-partisan warfare except on the Russian front. See also Krannhals, p. 126n.

64. M-17; Bobrov, p. 132; RP-58. Field Marshal Guderian (Erinnerungen eines Soldaten [Heidelberg, 1951], p. 322) and von dem Bach-Zelewski (cited in Krannhals, pp. 251-52) claim that Kaminsky was particularly “anti-Polish.” There is nothing to support this assertion.

65. “Dziennik Iwana Waszenko,” Dzieje najnowsze (Warsaw), 1, No. 2, pp. 324-25.

66. Krannhals, pp. 124, 126.

67. According to rumors, Colonel Belai, Kaminsky’s eventual successor, refused to participate in the Warsaw operation.

68. Krannhals, pp. 131, 135, 139n. Von dem Bach had overall charge of the operation, including Frolov’s regiment. However, operational responsibility lay initially with SS-Gruppenführer Reinefarth, later with Luftwaffe Generalmajor Rohr. See Krannhals, pp. 132, 135, 238, 241, 300; von dem Bach, affidavit, September 10, 1947, NMT, Doc. NO-5479; Heinz Reinefarth, “Kurze Schilderung des Kampfes um Warschau,” NMT, Doc. NOKW-125; also von dem Bach’s extensive account (in Polish), “Relacja von dem Bachu o powstaniu warszawskim,” Dzieje najnowsze, 1, No. 2, pp. 295-323, and (in German) [von dem Bach, defendant], Vor dem polnischen Staatsanwalt, pp. 31-35, 39.

69. M-371; Buchardt.

70. The diary cited above (in note 65) seems to reflect an exceptional attitude-which may indeed account for its publication in the early years of postwar Poland. Its author’s political perspicacity was clearly unusual when he wrote: “What are we fighting for? They tell us, for a new Russia, for a free Russia. This is only Kaminsky’s fantasy, and we are fighting for the benefit of the Germans, who have abused millions of Soviet citizens. . . .” (“Dziennik Iwana Waszenko,” pp. 329-30.)

71. After the war, von dem Bach, testifying against the SS chieftains, asserted that the Kaminsky brigade-“a real robber band”-“had received sanction from Himmler to plunder all of Warsaw.” (NMT, Doc. NO-5479.) Von dem Bach’s testimony is notoriously unreliable, and the question of German orders regarding looting is too complex to be examined here.

Various other eyewitnesses corroborate the general account. “In Warsaw,” a former member of the division sums it up, “the kamintsy were savage and looted indiscriminately. They returned with gold watches, bracelets, even gold teeth.” “They were loaded down with gold seized in Warsaw and drunk all the time,” another soldier recalls; “the Germans and others bought their arms from them in exchange for vodka.” Official German records, including the War Diary of Ninth Army, are full of entries reporting instances of looting, rape, and unprovoked shooting by Frolov’s men, especially on August 7-10. Drunken brawls were endemic, and the fighting quality of the regiment was close to nil. See Krannhals, pp. 127n, 135, 138-39, 238, 246, 251, 317, 362, 368, 371, 381. See also T. Bór-Komarowski, The Secret Army (New York, 1951), pp. 235, 285; and Edward Serwański, ed., Zbrodnia niemiecka w Warszawie, 1944 r.: Documenta Occupationis Teutonicae, 2 (Poznan, 1946), p. 12. A difficulty in the use of memoirs and some secondary studies is the confusion of all Ex-Soviet elements. The population occasionally referred to the Kaminsky forces as “Vlasovites”; likewise, what appear to have been members of the Kaminsky regiment crop up as “Ukrainians”-in this context a generic term for hostile Eastern Slavs.

72. 105; 321; 358; 294; Preuss, p. 6.

73. IMT, Session of June 3, 1946, Trial of the Major War Criminals (Nuremberg, 1947-49), 15, p. 298; Guderian, pp. 322-24; Wilhelm Scheldt, affidavit, November 25, 1945, Doc. 3711-PS, Trial, 32, p. 477. See also Krannhals, pp. 319-20.

74. Buchardt, p. 143; M-371.

75. Ibid.; M-17; Kleist; 321; Krannhals, p. 320.

76. Perhaps unfairly, Guderian attributes this decision to von dem Bach’s desire to rid himself of an inconvenient eyewitness of the Warsaw events (p. 324).

77. Von dem Bach-Zelewski, affidavit, February 21, 1946, Doc. Frank-8, Trial, 40, p. 116. There is no evidence that any other staff members were killed.

78. Buchardt, p. 144; G-3; 105; Krannhals, p. 319.

79. Von dem Bach later alleged, without foundation, that he had been afraid to arrest Kaminsky because of the latter’s bodyguard and that Kaminsky’s men had surrounded von dem Bach’s headquarters, armed with machine guns, when they heard of Kaminsky’s disappearance. He claims to have told them Kaminsky had been called to Cracow and would return the next day. (Krannhals, p. 320; [von dem Bach, defendant], p. 40.)

80. “Lokotj-Bericht,” pp. 3-4.

81. Virtually all the officials of his party turned out to be former members of the Communist Party or the Komsomol.

82. M-371, p. 24.

83. 321; 358; 433; 294; M-17; Golos naroda, 1942, No. 17. In Lokot’ two newspapers were published: Golos naroda for the civilian population, and Boevoi put’ for the brigade. Later on, a large part of the “serious” literature disseminated by Kaminsky was printed in Minsk and Riga. One of the newspapers bore the slogan, “Everything for the people-everything through the people.” The other used a quotation from Hitler: “The commonweal has precedence over the interests of the individual.”

84. 145a/45. See also OKH-GenStdH. GenQu (Qu 4), “Nationalsozialistische Russische Arbeiterpartei,” March 6, 1944.

85. OB HGr Mitte (Kluge), “An den Chef des Gen. Stabes des Heeres,” May 22, 1943, and enclosure, “Plan für die Einsetzung eines National-Komitees im Bereich der Heeresgruppe Mitte,” NMT, Doc. NOKW-3521.

86. OB PzAOK 2, “An den Herrn Oberbefehlshaber der Heeresgruppe Mitte,” June 3, 1943, and enclosure, “Vorschlag für die Errichtung eines russischen Unterkomitees in Orel.”

87. For the protocol of the Hitler conference, see George Fischer, ed., “Besprechung des Führers mit Generalfeldmarschall Keitel und General Zeitzler,” IMT, Doc. 1384-PS, Journal of Modern History, 23 (1951), pp. 63-71.

88. M-27; 294; 433.

89. The foregoing account is based on Dubovskii; 382; 294; 433; M-27; Boris Bashilov, “Istoriia untermensha prevrativshegosia v morloka,” Znamia Rossii (New York), No. 71 (September 30, 1952), and his “Taina smerti Kaminskogo,” ibid., No. 77 (December 28, 1952), No. 78 (January 7, 1953).

90. The documents exist in variant versions. The two here cited appeared in Novyi put’ (Vitebsk), No. 30 (275), April 13, 1944; and Golos naroda (Lokot’), No. 16 (April 5, 1943). See also Bashilov, “Pravda o brigade Kaminskogo,” Nasha strana (Buenos Aires), December 13, 1952; Boris Lewyckyj, “Ukraińcy a likwidacja powstania warszawskiego,” Kultura (Paris), June, 1952, p. 76; and the leaflet, Tsentral’nyi komitet NSTPR, Partizany i partizanki! (April, 1944).

91. Some friction arose between the Central Committee, intent on building up Kaminsky, and some of the more remote sections, which demanded the calling of a Constituent Congress. “When finally the question reached the impasse of either a party congress or its dissolution, the Central Organizing Committee picked . . . Diatlovo as the locale of the conference.” In the atmosphere of Kaminsky’s dictatorship and full control by uniformed and secret police, any conference would have been no more than a demonstration, without any risk of effective criticism or dissent. But the Soviet breakthrough of 1944 forestalled the calling of even this Diatlovo conference. (Dubovskii, II, 9-10, and III, 19-21.)

92. 321; 650; M-17; 294; Dubovskii.

93. Mention should be made of the Kaminsky Brigade’s attitude toward the Jews. On the one hand, his newspaper and printed propaganda systematically pilloried them as one of the major elements responsible for Bolshevism. His manifesto and leaflets repeatedly used them as scapegoats, usually without indicating their future fate and without indulging in Nazi-style fanaticism. On the other hand, people who knew him assert that Kaminsky looked upon Jews much as he did upon other people. If they worked with the partisans or with the hostile peasantry, he would kill them. Yet at least three sources insist that there were Jews even within the brigade.

“There were many Jews hiding with the partisans,” a former Kaminsky colonel recalls. “When we captured them, they were usually treated like everybody else. Later on, in Diatlovo, we captured a group of Jews hiding in the woods and did not turn them over to the Germans. But when we continued our evacuation westward, we released them. Probably the Germans then caught and shot them.” (321)

“No Jews were shot within the Kaminsky movement. When we moved west from the Briansk [Lokot’] area, Kaminsky took along two Jewish musicians and their mother. The mother died in Lepel’ and was buried there in the presence of Kaminsky.” (294)

“There were several Jews in the brigade, who hid the fact, but we knew it anyway. Our driver got drunk one night and told us that he was a Jew. All right, so what? The rich Jews got away, anyway, and the poor ones were killed by the Germans for no reason. There was no special anti-Semitism among the Kaminsky troops. They were not idea- or group-minded. They looted anyone, Jews and Gentiles alike.” (358)

Both the public resort to anti-Semitism and the exceptions in actual practice would tend to reinforce the image of Kaminsky as not primarily “ideological” in motivation.

94. RMfdbO., P3 (von Knüpffer), “Aktenvermerk,” March 8, 1944, with endorsements of other sections.

95. Eugen Hadamowsky and Eberhardt Taubert, “Bericht über die Propaganda-Lage im Osten,” September 17, 1942, Doc. Occ E 18-19, YIVO.

96. 321; M-27.

97. It was characteristic, nonetheless, that the draft roster of guests to be invited to an International Anti-Jewish Congress to be held in Cracow, included among the five former Soviet citizens Kaminsky and the head of his party’s Minsk branch, Soshal’skii. (RMfdbO., “225/44gr.” July 14, 1944, Doc. G-PA-13, YIVO.) The congress never took place.

98. Taubert, final report, December 31, 1944, Doc. G-PA-14, YIVO, p. 33.

99. This section is based on M-17; 650; and D. Stepanov (pseud.), “Istoriia Rossiiskoi Natsional-Sotsialisticheskoi Partii v Minske, fevral’-mai 1944 g.,” MS (Paris, 1951).

100. “Ansichten des Professors D. Soschalski über die deutsche Politik im Zusammenhang mit Russland und der sogenannten russischen Befreiungsbewegung,” Doc. Occ E-6, YIVO. Soshal’skii’s personnel file from the archives of Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg is to be found as Doc. Occ E-41, YIVO.

101. See his speech at the November 18, 1944, celebration of the launching of the so-called KONR (“Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia”), in W. Wladimirow, ed., Dokumente und Materiale des Komitees zur Befreiung der Vӧlker Russlands (Berlin, 1944).

102. See Bobrov’s personnel file, Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, Minsk, “Personalangaben,” Doc. Occ E-41, YIVO; his article, “Strashnoe bezmolvie Rossii”; and his speech at the formation of the Vlasov Committee, in Wladimirow, Dokumente.

103. M-371; Dubovskii, I, 32. The chief of Vlasov’s chancellery and a colonel close to his headquarters state that in 1944 Khomutov and a delegation from Kaminsky came to see Vlasov, who refused to receive them. (321; 188). In 1944 the Polotsk branch of Kaminsky’s party made a modest effort to reconcile the two groups, but in vain. Vlasov’s representative in Riga states that a member of the Polotsk committee, A., came to see him to make contact with Vlasov. “I suggested that Kaminsky could perhaps go to Berlin. Soon A. returned with a new proposal that he [A.] would go to Berlin to negotiate. This time Vlasov replied: Let Kaminsky first publicly announce what he stands for and declare his willingness to recognize the command of the ROA.” (433.) Bashilov (in Znamia Rossii, No. 78, p. 9) claims that in July, 1944 he sought to persuade the same man in Riga that RONA would accept Vlasov’s command.

104. HGr Mitte, OQu/Abt. VII (Mil.-Verw.) [Günzel], “Bericht über den Selbstverwaltungsbezirk Lokot,” May 23, 1943.

105. I. AK, Ic, “Nat.-soz. russ. Arbeiterpartei,” May 7, 1944.

106. HGr Nord, OQu/VII, “Betr.: NSRAP,” May 24, 1944.

107. In addition to the German “envoy” to Slovakia, Ludin, one who objected was Karl Albrecht, formerly a high Soviet official who later worked for the Goebbels Ministry in Berlin. Albrecht inspected the division after Kaminsky’s death and (he later claimed) came away with a devastating impression of degradation and debauchery: they were nothing but a “horde of professional criminals.” Berger, he asserts, thereupon refrained from using the division against the Slovak rebels. (Karl Albrecht, Sie aber werden die Welt zerstӧren [Munich, 1954], pp. 296-301.) Albrecht’s account is rather unreliable. See also Krannhals, p. 319; and Jürgen Thorwald (pseud.), Wen sie verderben wollen (Stuttgart, 1952), p. 440 ff.

108. Buchardt; M-17; 294; 321; 358.

109. 55.

110. 55; 175; Preuss, p. 6.

111. 321;650.

112. 358

The Presidium Meeting of February, 1961

1. Pravda, January 22, 1961; translation in Current Digest of the Soviet Press, 13, No. 8, p. 23 (hereinafter cited as CDSP).

2. Pravda, February 1, 1961; CDSP, 13, No. 5, p. 18.

3. Pravda, February 5, 1961; CDSP, 13, No. 6, p. 20.

4. Pravda, February 12, 1961; CDSP, 13, No. 6, p. 21.

5. Pravda, February 19, 1961; CDSP, 13, No. 7, p. 14.

6. Pravda, February 12, 1961; CDSP, 13, No. 6, p. 21.

7. Pravda, March 1, 1961; CDSP, 13, No. 9, pp. 11-12.

8. Pravda, March 7, 1961; CDSP, 13, No. 10, p. 16.

9. Pravda, March 12, 1961; CDSP, 13, No. 10, p. 21.

10. Pravda, March 26, 1961; CDSP, 13, No. 12, p. 18.

11. Ibid.

12. Harold W. Chase and Allen H. Lehrman, eds., Kennedy and the Press: the News Conferences (New York, 1965), pp. 19-20.

13. On Soviet use of alleged strategic superiority as a foreign policy tool, see Arnold L. Horelick and Myron Rush, Strategic Power and Soviet Foreign Policy (Chicago, 1965).

14. Izvestiia, February 8, 1961; CDSP, 13, No. 6, p. 33. Text in Vneshniaia politika Sovetskogo Soiuza i mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia. Sbornik dokumentov, 1961 god (Moscow, 1962), pp. 33-34.

15. F. J. Krieger, Recent Soviet Advances in Aerospace Technology (Santa Monica, 1962), p. 12.

16. Ibid., p. 15.

17. F. J. Krieger, Soviet Astronautics: 1957-1962 (Santa Monica, 1963), p. 10; no source cited.

18. Pravda, March 4, 1961; CDSP, 13, No. 9, pp. 20-21.

19. Pravda, February 23, 1961; CDSP, 13, No. 8, p. 40.

20. Horelick and Rush, Strategic Power, p. 99, citing Sovetskaia Rossiia and Ekonomicheskaia gazeta.

21. James Reston, New York Times, January 4, 1961, p. 32; Marguerite Higgins, New York Herald Tribune, January 10, 1961, p. 1; Survey of International Affairs, 1961 (London, 1965), p. 212.

22. Documents on Disarmament, 1961 (Washington, D.C., 1962), p. 453.

23. Pravda, August 31, 1961; CDSP, 13, No. 35, pp. 3, 6-8.

24. Hans A. Bethe, “Disarmament and Strategy,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 18, No. 7 (September, 1962), p. 18.

25. Arthur H. Dean, Test Ban and Disarmament: The Path of Negotiation (New York, 1966), p. 90.

26. William E. Griffith, Albania and the Sino-Soviet Rift (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), pp. 69-76.

27. Griffith, Albania, p. 76; Ivo Duchacek, “Czechoslovakia: the Past Reburied,” Problems of Communism, 11, No. 3 (May-June, 1962), p. 24.

28. Griffith, Albania, pp. 74-75.

29. Ibid., p. 76, citing Zëri i Popullit, February 21, 1961.

30. Pravda, October 28, 1961; CDSP, 14, No. 5, p. 20.

The Rehabilitation of M. N. Pokrovskii

1. Voprosy istorii, No. 3 (1965), pp. 211-17.

2. For an appreciation of the state of Soviet historiography in 1961, see Contemporary History in the Soviet Mirror, John Keep and L. Brisby, eds. (London-New York, 1964). A more recent and highly perceptive evaluation is given by H. Rogger in Soviet Studies, 16, No. 3 (January, 1965), pp. 253-75.

3. On Pokrovskii’s attitude during World War I, see O. Gankin and H. H. Fisher, The Bolsheviks and the World War: the Origins of the Third International (Stanford, 1940), pp. 162 ff.; L. D. Trotskii, Permanentnaia revoliutsiia (Berlin, 1930), p. 52.

4. ORF IIAN, f. Pokrovskii, d. 42, cited by E. A. Lutskii, “Razvitie istoricheskoi kontseptsii M. N. Pokrovskogo,” Istoriia i istoriki: istoriografiia istorii SSSR. Sbornik statei (Moscow, 1965), p. 348.

5. Russkaia istoriia v samom szhatom ocherke (Moscow, 1920), p. 143.

6. M. N. Pokrovskii, Istoricheskaia nauka i bor’ba klassov (Moscow, 1933), 1, pp. 152-66.

7. Vsesoiuznaia soveshchanie istorikov o merakh uluchsheniia podgotovki nauchnopedagogicheskikh kadrov po istoricheskim naukam 18-21 dek. 1962 g. (Moscow, 1964), p. 262. D. Dorotich, in his article, “The Disgrace and Rehabilitation of M. N. Pokrovsky” (Canadian Slavonic Papers, 8 [1966], pp. 169-81), which appeared after this essay was submitted for publication, accepts this charge as valid. He does not ask himself whether the ultimate responsibility for this campaign should not rather be ascribed to Stalin.

8. See C. E. Black, ed., Rewriting Russian History: Soviet Interpretations of Russia’s Past (New York, 1956), pp. 12-16; K. F. Shteppa, Russian Historians and the Soviet State (New Brunswick, 1962), pp. 94 ff.; A. G. Mazour, Modern Russian Historiography (Princeton, 1958), pp. 196 ff.; P. N. Miliukov, “Velichie i padenie M. N. Pokrovskogo,” Sovremennye zapiski (Paris), 65 (1937), p. 379, for an interesting contemporary view.

9. K. F. Shteppa, Russian Historians, pp. 67-80.

10. TsPA IML, f. 147, op. 1, d. 42, 1. 35, cited by Lutskii, Istoriia i istoriki, p. 364.

11. P. H. Aron, “Μ. N. Pokrovskii and the Impact of the First Five-Year Plan on Soviet Historiography,” Essays in Russian and Soviet History in Honor of Geroid Tanquary Robinson (Leiden, 1963), p. 301. Aron argues that Pokrovskii was saved by his eminence, but this had not prevented criticism before, and a personal decision by Stalin seems more plausible. For recent evidence on Stalin’s attitude, see Sidorov’s memoir quoted below, n.31.

12. Lutskii, Istoriia i istoriki, p. 337.

13. For a recent and valuable biography of Tarle, see E. Hӧsch, Evgenij Viktorovic Tarle, 1875-1955 und seine Stellung in der sowjetischen Geschichtswissenschaft (Wiesbaden, 1964).

14. Protiv istoricheskikh kontseptsii M. N. Pokrovskogo (Moscow, 1939), p. 9. (The second volume of this work, published in 1940, substituted the word “anti-Marxist” for “historical.”) A. M. Pankratova, for example, alleged that in 1918 Pokrovskii had prepared the ground for treacherous anti-party activities by Bukharin and Trotsky, and hailed “our great security workers” for having “cleaned out this nest of counterrevolutionaries.” The very fact that Pokrovskii had later recanted his errors enhanced his appeal for the unwary, and thus made him more dangerous.

15. Lutskii, Istoriia i istoriki, pp. 337-38.

16. Cited in ibid., p. 338.

17. Voprosy istorii, No. 1 (1956), p. 4.

18. Ibid., No. 10 (1957), p. 171.

19. Cited from the MS. by Lutskii, Istoriia i istoriki, p. 364.

20. V. I. Lenin, Sochineniia, 5th ed., 32, p. 348.

21. V. M. Nechkina, Istoriia SSSR, No. 1 (1960), pp. 83-85; she was supported by G. D. Alexeeva and E. N. Gorodetskii in ibid., pp. 92 ff., and ibid., No. 6 (1960), pp. 85 ff.; cf. also E. A. Lutskii’s article in ibid., No. 2 (1961), pp. 102-115.

22. V. F. Inkin and A. G. Chernykh in ibid., No. 5 (1960), pp. 75-81.

23. Ibid., No. 1 (1961), pp. 81-97.

24. No. 9 (1961), p. 58.

25. XXII s”ezd KPSS: stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow, 1962), 2, p. 185.

26. Voprosy istorii, No. 3 (1962), p. 30 (text of report, pp. 3-31).

27. Ibid., p. 34. It is interesting that A. I. Gukovskii should have come to Pokrovskii’s defense against Mints’s charge that he did not know Lenin’s works: cf. Istoriia SSSR, No. 6 (1965), p. 89.

28. Ibid., p. 40.

29. The proceedings were published under the title given in note 7. It is instructive to compare this record of the lively debates with the dry and abbreviated version initially given in Voprosy istorii, No. 2 (1963), pp. 3-75, which inter alia omitted the exchange discussed below.

30. Vsesoiuznoe soveshchanie istorikov, pp. 368-69.

31. Istoriia SSSR, No. 3 (1964), pp. 118-38.

32. Ibid., p. 136.

33. Ibid., p. 138.

34. Lutskii, Istoriia i istoriki, pp. 334-70; L. V. Danilova, “Stanovlenie marksistskogo napravleniia v sovetskoi istoriografii epokhi feodalizma,” Istoricheskie zapiski, 76 (1965), pp. 62-119.

35. Voprosy istorii, No. 7 (1966), pp. 32-47.

36. Izbrannye proizvedeniia M. N. Pokrovskogo (Moscow, 1965-1967).

37. Ocherki istorii russkoi istoriografii, 4 (Moscow, 1966), p. 198.

38. Dorotich, in the article cited in n. 7, claims (p. 181) that “[Pokrovskii’s] rehabilitation is certainly not forced from above. In the final analysis it is historical truth that is being rehabilitated, together with M. N. Pokrovskii.” This judgment is perhaps a little too sweeping. Certainly a natural professional desire to tell more of the truth, if not all of it, is one of the motives behind the campaign; but Soviet historians are still far from able to present the truth as they see it. “Politics commands,” as it always has done in the USSR.

39. This charge rested formally upon a remark of Pokrovskii’s taken out of context: “History is the most political of all sciences, it is the politics of the past without which it is impossible to understand the politics of the present.” Mazour, Modern Russian Historiography, p. 193, and Aron, Essays, p. 294, erroneously repeat this Stalinist allegation, which has been corrected by the revisionists. See Voprosy istorii. No. 8 (1963), p. 39, and R. Szporluk, “Pokrovsky and Russian History,” Survey, 53 (October, 1964), pp. 107-18.

40. Stalin himself recognized the nature of his creed. He is said to have refused to allow the study of the history of Western philosophy in Soviet universities after World War II on the grounds that “we have to strengthen the faith before we can expose heresies” (snachala nado ukrepit’sia v verouchenii a potom izoblichat’ eresi). M. T. Iovchuk of the Institute of Philosophy in Istoriia i sotsiologiia (Moscow, 1964), p. 203.

41. See, for example, N. E. Zatsenker, “Marks i Engel’s ob istorii,” Voprosy istorii, No. 6 (1964), p. 23.

42. Cf. H. Rogger, “Politics, Ideology and History in the USSR: the Search for Coexistence,” Soviet Studies, 16, No. 3 (January, 1965), 267. When Rogger wrote he had at his disposal only the abbreviated report of the important conference on methodology held in January, 1964, the full proceedings of which have since been published (see note 39).

43. Istoriia i sotsiologiia, p. 83. Gulyga’s views were sharply criticized by B. M. Kedrov, G. E. Glezerman, and other speakers, who accused him of empiricism (ibid., pp. 105, 130). For a favorable comment on Gulyga’s views by a historian, see A. M. Sakharov, Istoriia SSSR, No. 4 (1965), p. 8.

44. Voprosy istorii, No. 8 (1965), p. 21.

45. M. N. Pokrovskii, Leninizm i russkaia istoriia (Moscow, 1930), p. 7.

46. M. N. Pokrovskii, Vneshniaia politika Rossii v XX veke: populiarnyi ocherk (Moscow, 1926).

47. One interesting example is the effort of I. S. Braginskii and others to rehabilitate some leaders of the pre-revolutionary Jadidist movement in Central Asia, which strove for national progress and cultural advance. See Istoriia SSSR, No. 6 (1965), pp. 26-38.

48. Izbrannye proizvedeniia, 1, p. 325.

49. Istoriia i sotsiologiia (Moscow, 1964), pp. 45-46.

50. This episode is fully discussed by V. Varlamov in C. E. Black, ed., Rewriting Russian History, pp. 318 ff. Katorga i ssylka, the organ of the Society of Former Political Prisoners and Exiles, most members of which were non-Bolshevik socialists, was suppressed in 1935.

51. M. N. Pokrovskii, Ocherki russkogo revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia XIX-XX vv. (Moscow, 1924), pp. 63-64.

52. Obshchestvennoe dvizhenie v poreformennoi Rossii: sbornik statei k 80-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia B. P. Koz’mina (Moscow, 1965), pp. 78, 81.

53. Of more than thirty papers read between 1961 and 1965 to the Study Group on Social Movements in Post-Reform Russia, only one, by G. S. Ul’man of L’vov, treated such a theme: Tkachev’s views on state and revolution. It has not been published. Ibid., p. 367.

54. Voprosy istorii KPSS, No. 4 (1963), p. 51n.

55. Istoriia SSSR, No. 3 (1962), pp. 72-78.

56. Pokrovskii, Ocherki russkogo revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia, pp. 150, 229.

57. Ob osobennostiakh imperializma v Rossii (Moscow, 1963), p. 7.

58. E. D. Chermenskii, Istoriia SSSR: period imperializma (90-kh gg. XIX v.-mart 1917 g.): posobie dlia uchitelei i studentov pedvuzov (Moscow, 1965), p. 10.

59. Istoriia SSSR, No. 5 (1964), pp. 74-91; No. 6 (1964), pp. 156-59.

Political Monism and Cultural Duality

1. An earlier version of this paper was presented at a Dartmouth College symposium in October, 1967, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. The paper’s first section, on political monism, draws on work supported generously by the Russian Institute of Columbia University in the late 1960s, including my book, The Soviet System and Modern Society (New York, 1968). The second section of this paper, on cultural dualism, goes back in part to two books on which B. I. Nicolaevsky helped me a great deal: Soviet Opposition to Stalin (Cambridge, Mass., 1952) and Russian Liberalism (Cambridge, Mass., 1958).

2. Historically, as I used it here, “modern” is no more than a shorthand term for later modernization. By contrast, “modernization” stands for the earlier stage of the same ongoing historical process.

At least implicitly, some leading American sociologists treat “modernity” as an end point of man’s evolution. To them, present-day society in its Anglo-American form seems to serve the same role that the Prussian state did for Hegel and the full communist society of the future did for Marx: beyond that point, history no longer involves conflicting social forces as it had in the past. In each case, such a view points to an “end of politics,” which in turn stands close to the “end of ideology” theme shared widely by the same group of American sociologists. In The Soviet System and Modern Society, I try to show how Talcott Parsons reflects this view (including on Russia) in his well-known works.

3. Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston, 1966); Jüergen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Ӧffentlichkeit, 2nd ed. (Neuwied, 1965).

4. On the concept of pluralism, see Helge Pross, “Zum Begriff der pluralistischen Gesellschaft,” in Zeugniss, Theodor W. Adorno zum sechzigsten Geburtstag, edited by Max Horkheimer (Frankfurt, 1963), and Stanislas Ehrlich, “Le Problème du pluralisme,” L’Homme et la société, No. 5 (July-August, 1967). Both of these authors note that it would be wrong to tie the pluralist model of society to the capitalist democracy of the West, as a number of writers now do. As yet no work has dealt at length with another form of this model, a socialist pluralism. This gap can be seen both in the realm of theory and on the empirical plane (we have no relevant study of Scandinavia, Israel, Yugoslavia).

5. Judging by biographic data on top Soviet party executives at the turn of the 1960s (in this author’s The Soviet System and Modern Society), one such mechanism might turn out to be dual leadership skills: those facts point to a trend over the years toward leaders with “dual” skills, economic as well as political.

6. H. Gordon Skilling, “Interest Groups and Communist Politics,” World Politics, 18, No. 3 (April, 1966), 449.

7. After the completion of the present paper, Bertram M. Gross put forth and applied to the United States a new model of totalitarianism: a pluralistic totalitarianism (Social Policy, 1, No. 4 [November-December, 1970]). His model refers to a “friendly” modern autocracy that makes no use of wholesale terror, of an officially enforced creed, or of most other forms of past totalitarian centralization. Similar prognoses on the United States can be found in George Fischer, ed., The Revival of American Socialism (New York, 1971).

In the terms used here, the Gross model spells out the possibility of a negative, anti-democratic convergence between the limited monism of a Soviet type and the limited pluralism of the West. Should such a convergence take place, it would mean the continuing rise of tutelary autonomy in both types of modern society.

8. Robert C. Tucker, “The Image of Dual Russia,” and Henry V. Dicks, “Some Notes on the Russian National Character,” both in The Transformation of Russian Society, edited by Cyril E. Black (Cambridge, Mass., 1960).

9. What marks aspiring “new men . . . of power and influence” in American society, according to E. Digby Baltzell’s study of “the making of a national upper class,” is “more than the ordinary desire to conform to upper class values and rituals” (Philadelphia Gentlemen [New York, 1958], p. 348).

10. In the words of Isaac Deutscher, “even though the peasantry is dwindling, the muzhik tradition still looms very large in Russian life, in custom and manners, in language, literature and the arts. . . . Even in his exit [the muzhik] casts a long melancholy shadow on the new Russia” (The Unfinished Revolution [New York, 1967], p. 53).

11. Murray Yanowitch and Norton Dodge, Comparative Education Review, 12, No. 3 (October, 1968).

12. With the new Soviet semi-affluence, what is apt to weigh the most is not the shift from coercion to the much-discussed material incentives. Still more important is whether these material incentives stress individual goals or collective ties. Thus far, the Soviet shift has stressed individual incentives much more than collective ones (Leo Huberman and Paul M. Sweezy, Monthly Review, 19, No. 6 [November, 1967], 11-17). While in the USSR semi-affluence or state policy seem to cut down collectivism as a norm, much more of it may live on in the “affluent society” of the West than we think. Raymond Williams and Thomas B. Bottomore stress that a good deal of collectivism will be found in the working class. See Williams, Culture and Society (New York, 1966), pp. 326-32, and Bottomore, Classes in Modern Society (New York, 1966), pp. 84-92.