The Bolsheviks said in explanation that the White Armies attempting to overthrow them would have used Nicholas as a rallying totem for monarchists and conservatives. The hereditary principle meant this applied to his close relatives as well. There was a brutal logic to this, although it fails to explain why they also shot the family doctor, maid and dog.
23 Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, Trotsky: 1879-1921, Oxford University Press, 1954, p.251.
24 Abraham Ascher (Editor), The Mensheviks in the Russian Revolution, Thames and Hudson, 1976, p.91
25 An extremely useful analysis of the Factory Committees arising from the February Revolution is to be found in Chapter 1 of Carmen Sirianni, Workers Control and Socialist Democracy: The Soviet Experience, Verso, 1982; and for a breakdown of their sometimes amorphous procedures see pp.29-32.
26 Maurice Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control 1917-1921: The State and Counter Revolution, Black Rose Books, 1975, introduction, p.i
27 Sirianni, Ibid, p.17
28 Ronald Grigor Suny, “Revising the old story: The 1917 Revolution in light of new sources”, The Workers Revolution in Russia, 1917: The View from Below, edited by Daniel H. Kaiser, Cambridge University Press, 1987, p.7
29 Sirianni, Ibid, p.26
30 Resolution of the workers of the Old Parvianan metal and machine factory, 13th April, 1917, reported in Izvestiia No 41, 15th April, 1917, p.3
Chapter Six: Coalition Governments
1 Paul Mason, Post-Capitalism: A Guide to Our Future, Penguin, 2015, p.58
2 Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-1938, Oxford University Press, 1973, p.25
3 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Harvard University Press, 2001, p.19
4 Hardt and Negri, Ibid, p.xv
5 V.I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Progress Publishers, 1978 (first published 1916), p.83.
6 Karl Kautsky, Bernstein und das sozialdemokratisches Programme, Eine Antkritik, 1899, p.43
7 Massimo Salvadori, Karl Kautsky and Socialist Revolution 1880-1938, NLB, 1979, p.15
8 Thomas Friedman, “Manifesto for a Fast World”, The New York Times, 28/02/99
9 Lenin, Ibid, p.118
10 V.I. Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks, Volume 14 of Fourth Edition of Collected Works, Progress Publishers, p.259-60.
11 Lenin, Ibid, p.109
12 Karl Marx, “Critical Notes on the King of Prussia and Social Reform”, 1844
13 Figes, Ibid, p.358
14 N.N. Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution 1917: A Personal Record, edited, translated and abridged by Joel Carmichael, Princeton University Press, p.280
15 Shub, Ibid, p.216
16 V.I. Lenin, April Theses, Kindle Edition
17 The full text of the proclamation from the Okulovsky Paper Factory, 21st May, 1917, is in Mark Steinberg, Voices of Revolution 1917, Yale University Press, 2001, pp.99-100. A fascinating collection of informal reports, resolutions, complaints, petitions, letters and poems of 1917 translated from the Russian and taken from originals held in the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow, formerly the Central State Archive of the October Revolution. Steinberg’s collection is especially interesting in that it features the seldom-heard voice of semi-literate peasants and workers, some politicised by events, some not, some idealistic, some cynical, but all authentic and direct.
18 SR journal Dela Narodo, No.45, May 1917, quoted in King, Ibid, pp.30-31
19 Vero Broido, Lenin and the Mensheviks: The Persecution of Socialists under Bolshevism, Gower Publishing, 1987, p.15
20 E.H. Carr, Ibid, pp.40-41
21 V.I. Lenin, Vol. 19 of the Fourth Edition of Collected Works, English version, Progress Publishers, 1960-70, p.429
22 V.I. Lenin, Vol. 20, Ibid, p.45
23 Trotsky, Ibid, p.289
24 “A Flame of Gold Ablaze”, Pyotr Oreshin, 14th May, 1917, Delo Naroda No 49, p.2
25 Keep, Ibid, p.388
26 V.I. Lenin, Tasks of the Proletariat in our Revolution, Selected Works, Vol. 6, pp.62 and 85-6
27 Brinton, Ibid, p.5
28 “Argentinean Worker-Taken Factories: Trajectories of Workers’ Control under the Economic Crisis”, Marina Kabat, in Ours to Master and to Own, Haymarket Books, edited by Immanuel Ness and Dario Azzellini, 2011, pp.369-77
29 Gregory Wilpert, Changing Venezuela by Taking Power: The History and Policies of the Chavez Government, Verso, 2007, p.76
30 Brinton, Ibid, p.2
31 Castells, Ibid, p.11
Chapter Seven: All Power to the Soviets
1 Trotsky, Ibid, p.315. Despite his honestly expressed ideological bias Trotsky’s data is usually sound.
2 Deutscher, Ibid, p.266
3 Izvestia number 84, June 1917, quoted in Ascher, Ibid, p.97
4 Liebman, Ibid, p.158
5 Liebman, Ibid, p.148
6 Getzler, Ibid, p.154
7 Getzler, Ibid, p.151
8 Figes, Ibid, p.417
9 Figes, Ibid, pp.420-21
10 Figes, Ibid, p.428
11 Getzler, Ibid, pp.155-56
12 Trotsky, Results and Prospects, 1907, London, 1962, pp.246-7
13 Liebman, Ibid, p.127
14 Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Ibid, p.155
15 Adam Ulam, Lenin and the Bolsheviks, Fontana/ Collins, 1965, p.462
16 Frederich Engels, Anti-Duhring: Herr Eugen Duhring’s Revolution in Science, 1884, Third German Edition, p.303
17 V.I. Lenin, The State and Revolution, 1918, Peking Foreign Language Press, first edition 1976, originally published 1918, p.122
18 Carr, Ibid, p.35
19 Lenin, Ibid, p.123
20 Ramsay MacDonald, Socialism: Critical and Constructive, Cassell and Company Ltd, 1921, p.vi, p.112, p.32. The problem with MacDonald’s socialism was not his general analysis of capitalism–which is surprisingly radical–or faith in a more rational, cooperative alternative, but lack of any realistic plan to get from one to the other. In that respect he and Lenin, alike in no other way, were two sides of the same coin.
21 Wilson & Thompson, Ibid, p.164
22 Derek Wall, Economics After Capitalism: A Guide to the Ruins, Pluto, 2015, p.103
23 Andrew Fisher, The Failed Experiment: And How to Build an Economy that Works, A Radical Read, 2014, p.123
Chapter Eight: October 1917
1 Marc Ferro, The Bolshevik Revolution: A Social History of the Russian Revolution, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976, p.38
2 N. Podvoysky, “The Military Organisation of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party in 1917”, Krasnaya Letopis No 9, Leningrad, 1923, p.34
3 Abraham Ascher, The Russian Revolution, 2014, One World, p.100
4 Steve A. Smith, Petrograd in 1917: The View From Below, in Kaiser, Ibid, p.7