*This device was surprisingly successful with foreigners. In the 1920s Communist Russia was widely perceived by foreign socialists and liberals as a democratic government of a new, “soviet” type. Early visitors’ accounts rarely mentioned the Communist Party and its dominant role, so effectively was it concealed.
†Hitler, who fashioned the Nationalist-Socialist Party closely on the Bolshevik and Fascist models, told Hermann Rauschning that the term “party” was really a misnomer for his organization. He preferred it to be called “an order”: Rauschning, Hitler Speaks (London, 1939), 198, 243.
*B. Eltsin in VS, No. 6/7 (May 1919), 9–10. The author claims that these institutions, created on orders of the Central Committee and the government, initiated the process of the “gathering of the Russian lands,” a term traditionally applied to early modern Moscow.
*These tendencies were exacerbated by the government’s refusal to fund provincial soviets. In February 1918, Petrograd responded to the requests from provincial soviets for money by telling them that they should obtain it by “mercilessly” taxing the propertied classes: PR, No. 3/38 (1925), 161–62. This order led local authorities to levy arbitrary “contributions” on the “bourgeoisie” in their area.
*W. Pietsch, Revolution und Staat (Köln, 1969), 63. The old CEC, disbanded by the Bolsheviks, continued to meet, sometimes in the open, sometimes clandestinely, until the end of December 1917: Revoliutsiia, III, 90–91.
*The Left SRs on this occasion voted against him: Revoliutsiia, VI, 99.
†Dekrety, I, 24–25. Lunacharskii is credited with its authorship by Iurii Larin in NKh, No. 11 (1918), 16–17.
*Dekrety, I, 29–30. The date when the decree was issued cannot be established: it appeared in the Bolshevik press on October 31 and November 1, 1917.
*A. L. Fraiman, Forpost sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii (Leningrad, 1969), 169–70. The Bolsheviks took the precaution of increasing their representation on the CEC with five reliable members (Revoliutsiia, VI, 72).
*In December 1919, the few powers still nominally vested in the CEC were transferred to its chairman, who thereby became “head of state.” CEC meetings, which originally had been intended to be continuous, took place ever less frequently: in 1921, the CEC met only three times. See E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, I (New York, 1951), 220–30.
†“kak pravitel’stvo”: L. Trotskii, O Lenine (Moscow, 1924), 102. The English translator distorted this passage to read that Lenin “acted as a government should”: L. Trotsky, Lenin (New York, 1971), 121.
‡As we shall note below, there were exceptions to this rule.
*According to Professor John Keep, in the first eighteen weeks in power—that is, until early March 1918 when he moved to Moscow—Lenin left Smolnyi only twenty-one times-. Report presented at the Conference on the Russian Revolution, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, January 1988.
*BK, No. 1 (1934), 107. Jay Lovestone, a founder of the American Communist Party, told the author that once, when speaking with Lenin, he used three-by-five cards. Lenin wanted to know their purpose. When Lovestone explained that, to save Lenin’s time, he had written down on them what he intended to say, Lenin said that Communism would come to Russia when she too learned to use three-by-five cards.
†S. Liberman, Building Lenin’s Russia (Chicago, 1945), 13. The minutes of the Sovnarkom, which, next to the protocols of the Bolshevik Central Committee, constitute the most important source on early Bolshevik policies, are preserved at the Central Party Archive (TsPA) of the Marx-Lenin Institute in Moscow, under the shelf mark “Fond 19.” They are made available only to the most trusted Communist historians. Others must rely on secondhand references, such as those contained (in very incomplete form) in the biographical chronicle of Lenin’s life: Institut Marksizma-Leninizma pri TsK KPSS, Vladimir Il’ich Lenin: Biograficheskaia Khronika, 1870–1924, V-XII (Moscow, 1974–82). See further E. B. Genkina, Protokoly Sovnarkoma RSFSR (Moscow, 1982).
*DN, No. 222 (December 2, 1917), 3. The protocols of this congress have not been published: the fullest description of the proceedings, on which the following account is based, appeared in the SR daily, Delo naroda, November 20-December 13, 1917.
†DN, No. 223 (December 3/16, 1917), 3. The Communist chronicle of the Revolution (Revoliutsiia, VI, 258) distorts the sense of this resolution when it claims that the SRs demanded that power be taken away from the soviets and turned over to the Constituent Assembly. The SRs, in fact, wanted the Assembly and the soviets to cooperate.
