* Vtoroi S’ezd RSDSRP: Protokoly (Moscow, 1959), 181–82. Trotsky in 1903 said something similar: “All democratic principles must be subordinated exclusively to the interests of the party.” (M. Vishniak, Bolshevism and Democracy, New York, 1914, 67.)
*O. N. Znamenskii, Vserossiiskoe Uchreditel’noe Sobranie (Leningrad, 1976), 338. Much of the Left SR support came from Petrograd workers and radicalized sailors in the Baltic and Black Sea navies.
*E. Ignatov, in PR, No. 5/76 (1928), 37. The author claims that these worker signatures were forged but furnishes no proof.
*Kerensky was, in fact, in Petrograd at this time, but there is no evidence that he tried to organize anti-Bolshevik forces.
*NZh, No. 6/220 (January 9/22, 1918), 1. Afraid of a backlash, the Bolsheviks ordered an inquiry into the shooting. It revealed that troops from the Lithuanian Regiment had fired on the demonstrators in the belief that in so doing they were defending the Assembly from “saboteurs” (NZh, No. 15/229, February 3, 1918, 11). The Commission of Inquiry discontinued its work at the end of January without issuing a report.
†Znamenskii, Uchreditel’noe Sobranie, 339. The exact number of the deputies present is not known: it could have been as low as 410: Ibid.
*Zhelezniakov was a leader of the anarchists who had occupied Peter Durnovo’s villa the previous year and whose arrest caused the Kronshtadt sailors in June 1917 to revolt: Revoliutsiia, III, 108.
*I. S. Malchevskii, ed., Vserossiiskoe Uchreditel’noe Sobranie (Moscow-Leningrad, 1930), no. Zhelezniakov was killed the following year, fighting in the Red Army.
*In May 1918, Vladimir Purishkevich, one of the most reactionary pre-revolutionary politicians, published an open letter in which he said that after having spent half a year in Soviet prison he remained a monarchist and would offer no apologies for the Soviet Government which was transforming Russia into a German colony. However, he went on, “Soviet authority is firm authority—alas, not from that direction which I would prefer to have firm authority in Russia, whose pitiful and cowardly intelligentsia is one of the main culprits of our humiliation and of the inability of Russian society to produce a healthy, firm authority of governmental scope’: letter dated May 1, 1918, in VO, No. 36 (May 3, 1918), 4.
*This attitude was pointed out by Martov in the spring of 1918 when Stalin accused him of slander and brought suit before a Revolutionary Tribunal. Noting that these tribunals had been set up to try exclusively “crimes against the people,” Martov asked: “Can an insult to Stalin be considered a crime against the people?” And he answered: “Only if one considers Stalin to be the people”: “Narod eto ia,” Vperëd, April 1/14, 1918, 1.
*The idea of a Workers’ Congress had been first advanced by Akselrod in 1906, at which time it was rejected by both Mensheviks and Bolsheviks: Leonard Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (London, 1963), 75–76.
*In fairness it must be noted that a small group of old Mensheviks, among whom were the founders of Russian Social-Democracy—Plekhanov, Akselrod, Potresov, and Vera Zasulich—thought differently. Thus, Akselrod wrote in August 1918 that the Bolshevik regime had degenerated into a “gruesome” counterrevolution. Even so, he and his old Genevan comrades also opposed active resistance to Lenin, on the grounds that it would assist reactionary elements to return to power. A. Ascher, Pavel Axelrod and the Development of Menshevism (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), 344–46. On Plekhanov’s attitude: Samuel H. Baron, Plekhanov (Stanford, Calif., 1963), 352–61. Potresov criticized his Menshevik colleagues then and later (V plenu u illiuzii, Paris, 1927), but he, too, would not participate in active opposition.
*NZh, No. 115/330 (June 16, 1918), 3. According to NV, No. 96/120 (June 19, 1918), 3, the Bolshevik faction of the CEC refused to eject the Mensheviks and SRs from the soviets but consented to their expulsion from the CEC.
*V. Stroev in NZh, No. 119/334 (June 21, 1918), 1. According to one newspaper (Novyi luch, cited in NZh, No. 121/336, June 23, 1918, 1–2), of the 130 delegates initially “elected” to the Petrograd Soviet, 77 were handpicked by the Bolshevik Party: 26 from Red Army units, 8 from supply detachments, and 43 from among Bolshevik functionaries.
†NZh, No. 127/342 (July 2, 1918), 1. Somewhat different figures are given in Lenin, Sochineniia, XXIII, 547, where the total number of deputies is placed at 582, of whom 405 were Bolsheviks, 75 Left SRs, 59 Mensheviks and SRs, and 43 partyless.
13
Brest-Litovsk
