The Workshop Of The Revolution. I. N. Steinberg 1953
1. This date, and all other dates mentioned in this book, are reckoned according to the Julian (or Old Style) calendar, which was still in use in Russia during the years covered by this book. Since 1900, there has been a thirteen days’ difference between the Julian and the Gregorian (or New Style) calendars in the computation of dates: thus, February 27th, 1917 (O.S.) would be March 12, 1917 (N.S.).
2. The name Kadet is formed of the initial Russian letters for “Constitutional Democratic Party.”
3. The particular issue involved the granting of autonomy to the various nationalities in Russia.
4. F. Dan’s account in The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1918. Hoover War Library Publications, No. 5. Stanford University Press, 1934.
5. Quoted by Richard Hare in his Pioneers of Russian Social Thought, published in London in 1951.
6. From Henry Nevinson’s Introduction to Spiridonova: Revolutionary Terrorist by I.N. Steinberg. Metheun, London, 1935.
7. The well-known French playwright, Albert Camus, recently published in Paris a play entitled Les Justes (“The Righteous”), a penetrating drama dedicated to the moral problems of Kalayev and his fellow terrorists. Libraries Gallimard, Paris, 1950.
8. Pravda, August 4, 1918.
9. Weekly Bulletin of the Cheka, No 6.
10. “Open Letter: of Maria Spiridonova to the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party.
11. The quotations which follow are from a series of peasant reports and Government documents from the year 1919.
12..This last letter and the following letters are cited from Maria Spiridonova’s “Open Letter” to the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party.
13. Yurenieff – dogmatic and arrogant – later became an important diplomatic personage-Soviet Ambassador to Japan. His career ended the classic Bolshevik manner: he was proclaimed “traitor” and shot.
14. Platten later settled in the Soviet Union and perished in one of its purges of the 1930s.
15. This is the same Ivan Maisky who later became the well-known Bolshevik diplomat. In 1919, in Siberia, while a Menshevik, he had actively supported the counter-revolutionary government of General Kolchak.
16. Ekaterina Kuskova, in Possledniya Novosty (“Latest News”), July 6, 1935.
17. “Three Attempts on Vladimir I. Lenin” (English translation of title by V. Bontsch-Bruyevitch, Moscow, 1930.
18. This quotation is taken from the essay entitled “How I Became a Socialist,” from Selected Essays on Art and Socialism, Chilton Library, John Lehmann, 1947.
19. All quotations from the newspaper Pravda of the years 1932 and 1937.
20. This quotation is from Mrs. Dzershinsky’s article in Pravda, December 20, 1937. The italics are mine.
21. From Peter’s article on Dzershinksy called “Guardians of October,” printed by the Government Printing House, Moscow, 1926.
22. I feel I must record here an incident which Maxim Gorky related to me in Berlin in the year 1923. At that time he was still indignant against “their,” that is the Bolshevik’s brutality. The story he told concerned a group of Menshevik workers in the city of Tumen who, during the occupation of their town by the forces of General Kolchak, continued to act as the elected members of the City Council. When the city was retaken by the Bolsheviks, these workers were put on trial as “collaborators of Kolchak” and sentenced to death. Their attorneys in Moscow turned for help to the then Attorney General of the Republic, N.V. Krylenko. When it was proved to him that the accused were innocent of the charges, he replied, “We must not only execute the guilty. Execution of the innocent will impress the masses even more.”
Gorky recalled this drama in horror and added. “I had known some of these men personally. They were talented workers, gifted by nature and highly educated.”
23. We continue to call it Cheka, the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, even though its actual name changed several times over the years. At the end of 1921, it was “reorganized” and called the GPU, the State Political Administration; after 1931, it became the NKVD, the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, today it is the MVD, Ministry of Internal Affairs. But in spirit and in method, it has always been the same Cheka.
24. A number of these letters have been included in the chapter “Bolshevik Terror in Action.”
25. Of course, she was caught again by the Government. On October 25, 1920, suffering severely from typhoid, she was arrested in Moscow. She has not succeeded in escaping since, and has not been heard from since 1931.
26. David Mirrany, Marx Against the Peasant, published by the University of North Carolina Press, 1951.
27. “The total extend of the land seized by the communes in 1917-1918 for re-distribution, “ writes David Mirrany in his book Marx Against the Peasant “was put at about 70 million dessyatin (189 million acres) from the peasants and about 42 million dessyatin (114 million acres) from large landowners. More land was taken away and “pooled” from peasant owners than from the large estates. The peasants held firmly to their belief that no rights could be gained by violence. There were no outbursts of violence as in 1905, partly no doubt because the landowners realized that all opposition was useless.
28. This appeared in the August 1923 issue of “Revolutionary Russia” (titled as translated into English), published in Prague.
29. Cited in the extremely interesting book by Madame Ida Mett, La Commune de Kronstadt, published in Paris in 1949.
30. From Znamya Borby, publication of the Left Social-Revolutionaries abroad, in Berlin, This article appeared in the January, 1926 issue.
31. General Kozlovsky had been a Communist Government appointee in Kronstadt who had played no part whatsoever in the revolt.
32. From “The Truth About Kronstadt” (this title as translated into English), published by the Right Socialist-Revolutionaries in Prague in 1921.
33. In Russian sailors’ talk the “ninth wave” during a storm was the most dangerous of all.
34. N. Pukhof, “The Krnostadt Rebellion” (English title), published by the State Publishing House in Moscow in 1931.