5 Leon Trotsky, The Lessons of October, 1924, Bookmarks (1987), p.40
6 Deutscher, Ibid, p.298
7 V.I. Lenin, The Bolsheviks Must Assume State Power: a Letter to the Central Committee and the Petrograd and Moscow Committees of the RSDLP, Progress Publishers, Collected Works, English Edition, Vol. 26, p.19
8 V.I. Lenin, Advice of an Onlooker, Progress Publishers, Collected Works, English Edition, Vol. 26, pp.179-81 Proletarskaya Revolyutziya No 10, Moscow, 1922, p.462
9 Trotsky, Ibid, pp.44-45
10 Rabinowitch, Ibid, p.3
11 Trotsky, Ibid, p.51
12 P.A. Sorokin, Volya narado No 116, September 1917
13 Howe, Ibid, p.50
14 Sukhanov, Ibid, p.578
15 Deutscher, Ibid, p.310
16 Trotsky, Ibid, p.1074
17 Shub, Ibid, pp.274-75
18 Sukhanov, Ibid, p.628
19 Sukhanov, Ibid, p.630
20 Figes, Ibid, p.493-94
21 P.N. Maliantovich, “In the Winter Palace, October 25-26 1917”, The Past No 12, 1918, p.117-19. Antonov-Ovseenko would later discover just how interesting the social experiment would become. A principled Bolshevik, he was appalled at the rise of the Stalinist machine in the 1920s and was a prominent member of the Trotskyist opposition until Trotsky’s exile in 1929. He was sent to Spain in the 1930s to work for the Comintern but on his return to the Soviet Union in 1938 he was executed in the Great Terror. Thus Stalin murdered the Bolshevik who had led the storming of the Winter Palace.
22 Sukhanov, Ibid, p.635
23 Figes, Ibid, p.494
24 John L.H. Keep, The Russian Revolution: A Study in Mass Mobilization, W.W Norton & Company, 1976, p.255
Chapter Nine: Sovnarcom
1 Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Ibid, p.838
2 Trotsky, Ibid, p.839
3 Sukhanov, Ibid, p.636
4 Boris Nicolaevsky, “Pages from the Past”, Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, No 77-78, 1958, p.150
5 Oleg Budnitskii, Russian Jews Between the Reds and the Whites 1917-1920, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012, p.65
6 T.H. Rigby, Lenin’s Government: Sovnarkom 1917-22, Cambridge University Press, 1979, p.3
7 For the complete translated texts of Sovnarcom’s most important Decrees between October 1917 (November in the subsequently adopted Gregorian calendar) and July 1918 see First Decrees of Soviet Power: Acts of Legislation November 1917-July 1918, compiled with an introduction and explanatory notes by Yuri Akhapkin, Lawrence and Wishart, 1970. Most of the Decrees published in Akhapkin were translated from Decrees of the Soviet Government Volumes I and II, 1957 and 1959, prepared by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Institute of History of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
8 Brinton, Ibid, p.12
9 Diane P. Koenker, “Labour Relations in Socialist Russia: Class Values and Production Values in the Printers Union 1917-1921”, in Making Workers Soviet, Ibid, p.171-72
10 Cited in Carr, Ibid, p.152
11 V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Fifth Edition, Vol. 37, p.245; Lenin, Ibid, Vol. 41, p.383
12 Rabinowitch, Ibid, p.26
13 Broido, Ibid, p.22
14 The full text of the resolution of the Baltic Shipbuilding Works, 2nd November, 1917, is in Steinberg, Ibid, p.274
15 Getzler, Ibid, p.168
16 Rabinowitch, Ibid, p.31
17 Tony Cliff, Revolution Besieged: Lenin 1917-1923, Bookmarks, 1987, p.25
18 The Debate on Soviet Power: Minutes of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets, 2nd Convocation, October 1917-January 1918, Oxford University Press, 1979, translated and edited by John L.H. Keep, contains “a composite text, reconstructed according to published primary sources, of the proceedings of Soviet Russia’s first quasi-legislative assembly” between 27th October, 1917 and 6th January, 1918. It thus records the only period of free and uncensored debate in the CEC after 25th October, 1917, when Sovnarcom had not yet consolidated its power and all strands of socialist opinion could argue about the political and economic make-up of the regime, whether there should be a broad socialist coalition government, how accountable it should be to the CEC, and if the executive and legislative functions should be united or divided. As Keep summarises the matter of the arguments, “very few of these representatives, or the men for whom they spoke, were in favour of unlimited dictatorship by a single revolutionary party, the form which ‘Soviet power’ quickly assumed” (Keep, Preface, p.v). Ibid, pp.50-53
19 Keep, Ibid, p.63
20 Quoted in Shub, Ibid, p.310
21 See Shub, Ibid, pp.311-12 for a breakdown of all socialist newspapers forcibly closed down in late 1917.
22 Keep, Ibid, pp.68-74
23 Keep, Ibid, pp.77-78
24 Quoted in Pipes, Ibid, p.523, drawn from the Minutes of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets, 4th November, 1917
Chapter Ten: No Power to the Soviets
1 The most forensic examination of the Constituent Assembly general election, Oliver H. Radkey’s Russia Goes to the Polls: The Election to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly 1917, first published in 1950, found that although the electoral statistics were in “a deplorable condition” it was still possible, with great care, to reconstruct them and establish reliable results. Radkey’s definitive totals, while clarifying and improving some regional returns, were surprisingly not that far from those published at the time. In all the controversy surrounding the Constituent Assembly elections it is significant that no party, not even the Bolsheviks, seems to have questioned the overall statistical accuracy of the result, and there is no reason to do so now.
2 Sheila Fitzpatrick, Introduction to Radkey, p.2
3 See Radkey’s chart on pp.18-19 of Russia Goes to the Polls (1977 version) for a breakdown of the electoral returns. Chapter 2 considers the returns by regions and provinces, and also other segments of the vote such as soldiers still at the front.
4 Liebman, Ibid, p.233
5 Leninist arguments about a misleading united SR Party list have some validity but miss the main point. Most SR voters, before and after the SR split, did not differentiate between Left SR and Right SRs. The vast bulk of their peasant supporters saw the historic SR programme as a whole, and voted for it. There is no evidence that any of those who voted the main SR slate did so because of a hidden desire for an urban-based dictatorship of the proletariat overseen by another party. Additionally, if a united SR electoral list was misleading it was no more misleading than a united Bolshevik party list. The Bolsheviks, too, had vast and fundamental internal differences, although these had been disguised. And the Bolsheviks, in any guise, had not gone to the electorate offering what became their actual programme for the land. The peasant electorate would never get another chance to pronounce on this programme as there were no further national elections.
6 Radkey, Russia Goes to the Polls: The Election to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly, 1917, Cornell University Press, 1950 (updated edition 1977), p.16