The October coup is imperfectly reflected in the heavily doctored minutes of the Central Committee: Protokoly Tsentral’nogo Komiteta RSDRP (b): avgust 1917-fevral’ 1918 [Protocols of the Central Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks): August 1917-February 1918] (Moscow, 1958). Of the histories, outstanding are S. P. Melgunov’s, Kak bol’sheviki zakhvatili vlasf [How the Bolsheviks Seized Power] (Paris, 1953) (an English condensation: The Bolshevik Seizure of Power, Santa Barbara, Calif., 1972) and Robert V. Daniels’s Red October (New York, 1967; London, 1968).
For the Communist dictatorship, an indispensable source is the decrees (not entirely complete) published as Dekrety sovetskoi vlasti (Moscow, 1957), of which at the time of writing 13 volumes have appeared. Leonard Schapiro’s The Origin of the Communist Autocracy, 2nd ed. (London and Cambridge, Mass., 1977), traces the rise of the one-party dictatorship into the early 1920s. There is a reasonably good Communist account of the same process, seen from a very different perspective, by M. P. Iroshnikov, Sozdanie sovetskogo tsentral’nogogosudarstvennogo apparata [The Creation of the Soviet Central State Apparatus], 2nd ed. (Leningrad, 1967). Trotsky’s Stalinskaia shkola fal’sifikatsii [The Stalin School of Falsification] (Berlin, 1932) has important documentation not available elsewhere.
On the Constituent Assembly, there are the memoirs of its Secretary, M. V. Vishniak, Vserossiiskoe Uchreditel’noe Sobrante [The All-Russian Constituent Assembly] (Paris, 1932), and an identically titled monograph by the Soviet historian O. N. Znamenskii, published in Leningrad in 1976.
The story of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty by J. Wheeler-Bennett, Brest-Litovsk: The Forgotten Peace (London-New York, 1956), although first published over half a century ago, has still not been superseded. There are important documents on German-Soviet relations in Vol. I of Sovetsko-Germanskie Otnosheniia [Soviet-German Relations] (Moscow, 1968). The tangled story of German-Russian relations in 1918 is told authoritatively by Winfried Baumgart in Deutsche Ostpolitik 1918 [Germany’s Ostpolitik in 1918] (Vienna-Munich, 1966).
The Czech uprising is recounted by M. Klante, Von der Wolga zum Amur [From the Volga to the Amur] (Berlin-Königsberg, 1931).
There are no satisfactory treatments of either the Left SR uprising or Savinkov’s rising in Iaroslavl.
In many ways the best book on War Communism is by a participant, L. N. Kritsman, Geroicheskii period Velikoi Russkoi Revoliutsii [The Heroic Period of the Great Russian Revolution] (Moscow-Leningrad, 1926). Much data can be found in S. Malle, The Economic Organization of War Communism, 1918–1921 (Cambridge, 1985). Communist treatment of labor is the subject of M. Dewar’s Labour Policy in the USSR, 1917–1928 (New York, 1979). Simon Liberman’s Building Lenin’s Russia (Chicago, 1945), illuminates the human side of Soviet economic experimentation.
No comprehensive study has been written on the peasantry in the first years of Communist rule. Among the most informative are D. Atkinson’s The End of the Russian Land Commune, 1905–1930 (Stanford, Calif., 1983) and V. V. Kabanov’s KrestHanskoe khoziaistvo v usloviiakh “Voennogo Kommunizma” [The Peasant Economy under Conditions of “War Communism”] (Moscow, 1988). Mikhail Frenkin’s Tragediia kresVianskikh vosstanii v Rossii, 1918–1921 gg. [The Tragedy of Peasant Uprisings in Russia, 1918–1921] (Jerusalem, 1988) describes peasant resistance to Communist agrarian policies.
On the Imperial family in 1917–18 there is S. P. Melgunov’s Sud’ba Imperatora Nikolaia II posle otrecheniia [The Fate of Emperor Nicholas II after Abdication] (Paris, 1951). N. A. Sokolov’s Ubiistvo tsarskoi sem’i [The Murder of the Imperial Family] (Paris, 1925) summarizes the findings of the investigatory commission which the author chaired (in French: Enquête Judiciaire sur l’Assassinat de la Famille Impériale Russe, Paris, 1924). The fate of the other Romanovs in Soviet hands is the subject of Serge Smirnoffs Autour de l’Assassinat des Grands-Ducs [About the Assassination of the Grand Dukes] (Paris, 1928).
The most important work on the Red Terror in all its dimensions is G. Leggett’s The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police (Oxford, 1986). On early Soviet concentration camps, there is James Bunyan’s The Origin of Forced Labor in the Soviet State, 1917–1921 (Baltimore, Md., 1967).
TEXTUAL ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published materiaclass="underline"
Gerald Duckworth & Company Ltd. : Excerpt from Letters of Tsarita to the Tsar 1914–1916 edited by Sir Bernard Pares, Duckworth & Co., 1923. Reprinted by permission of Gerald Duckworth & Company Ltd.
Europe Printing Establishment and Mouton de Gruyter: Translation by Richard Pipes of excerpts from Kantorovich in Byloe, No. 22 (1923); Maliantovich in Byloe, No. 12 (1918); Gorovich in ARR, VI (1922); and NChS, No. 9 (1925). Reprinted by permission of Europe Printing Establishment and Mouton de Gruyter, a division of Walter de Gruyter & Co.
Karin Kramer Verlag: Translation by Richard Pipes of excerpts from Gewalt und Terror in der Revolution by Isaak Steinberg (1974). Reprinted by permission of Karin Kramer Verlag, Berlin.
Peters Fraser & Dunlop Group Ltd. : Excerpt from The Kornilov Affair: Kerensky and the Break-up of the Russian Army by George Katkov, Longman Group Ltd., London. Copyright © 1980 by George Katkov. Reprinted by permission of the Peters Fraser & Dunlop Group Ltd.
Royal Institute of International Affairs: Excerpt from Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, Vol. I, 1917–1924, selected and edited by Jane Degras. Published by Oxford University Press for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, London, 1951. Reprinted by permission.
Times Newspapers Limited: “Ex-Tsar Shot: Official Approval of Crime” from The Times, July 22, 1918. Copyright by Times Newspapers Limited. Reprinted by permission.
The University of Chicago Press: Excerpt from Building Lenin’s Russia by Simon Liberman. Copyright 1945 by the University of Chicago. Reprinted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
Excerpt from The Catastrophe: Kerensky’s Own Story of the Russian Revolution by Alexander F. Kerensky, 1927, published by Penguin USA for D. Appleton and Company.
Excerpt from The Murder of the Romanovs by Captain Paul Bulygin, 1935, published by Random Century Group, London, for Hutchinson & Co. Ltd.
About the Author