The Russian Revolution полностью

*Even pre-revolutionary Russian law operated with such subjective concepts as “goodwill” and “conscience.” The statutes that defined the procedures for conciliation courts, for example, instructed judges to mete out sentences “in accord with [their] conscience,” a formula used also in some criminal proceedings. This Slavophile legacy in Imperial statutes had been criticized by one of Russia’s leading legal theorists, Leon Petrazhitskii. See Andrzej Walicki, Legal Philosophies of Russian Liberalism (Oxford, 1987), 233.

*Iz istorii Vserossiiskoi Chrezvychainoi Kommissii, 1917–1921 gg. (Moscow, 1958), 78–79. Under pressure of the Peasants’ Congress, which on November 14 passed a resolution to this effect, the Bolsheviks dissolved the Military-Revolutionary Committee (Revoliutsiia, VI, 144). The Cheka was its successor.

*“The institution was introduced so surreptitiously that historians to this day have not been able to locate the decree authorizing its establishment or even to determine the approximate date when it might have been issued”: Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (London, 1974). 130.

*“Their confusion may have been partly due to the fact, reported on by many contemporaries, that many Cheka employees, including jailers, had served in the same capacities under tsarism.

†PR, No. 9 (1926), 55. Later on, Lenin would charge him and the Georgian Stalin with Russian chauvinism.

*Grigorii Aronson, Na zare krasnogo terrora (Berlin, 1929), 32. G. Leggett, therefore, is not correct when, following Latsis, he says that until July 6, 1918, the Cheka “executed only criminals and spared political adversaries”: The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police (Oxford, 1986), 58.

*The protocols of these interrogations were published in PR, No. 6–7 (1923), 282–85. According to Peters, the principal interrogator, the existing dossier on the case is “very incomplete,” whatever this may mean: Izvestiia, No. 194/1, 931 (August 30, 1923), 1.

†That gun, a Browning, disappeared from the scene of the crime: on September 1, 1918, Izvestiia (No. 188/452, 3) carried a Cheka announcement requesting information on its whereabouts.

*V. Bonch-Bruevich, Tri Pokusheniia na V. I. Lenina (Moscow, 1924), 14. This passage was removed from subsequent editions of Bonch-Bruevich’s memoirs. Klara Zetkin, in 1920, saw in Lenin’s face a resemblance to Grünewald’s Christ: Reminiscences of Lenin (London, 1929), 22.

*P. Malkov, Zapiski komendanta Moskovskogo Kremlia (Moscow, 1959), 159–61. In the second edition, published in 1961, this passage is omitted. Here, Malkov is merely made to say: “We ordered Kaplan to go into the car, which had been previously prepared” (p. 162). A brief announcement of her execution appeared in Izvestiia on September 4 (No. 190/454, 1).

*This was confirmed in April 1922 when physicians removed the bullet from Lenin’s neck and found on it an incision shaped like a cross: P. Posvianskii, ed., Pokushenie na Lenina 30 avgusta 1918 g., 2nd ed. (Moscow, 1925), 64. The poison, however, seems to have lost its effectiveness, since it was not mentioned in the medical bulletins.

*The evolution of the Lenin cult is the subject of Nina Tumarkin’s Lenin Lives! (Cambridge, Mass., 1983).

*For all the attention paid to Lenin by Soviet propaganda after August 30, 1918, apparently not everyone knew who he was. Angelica Balabanoff recalls an incident which occurred in early 1919, when Lenin went to visit Krupskaia in a sanatorium outside Moscow. The car in which he and his sister were riding was stopped by two men. “One pointed a gun and said: ‘Your money or your life!’ Lenin took out his identification card and said: ‘I am Ulianov Lenin.’ The aggressors did not even look at the card and repeated: ‘Your money or your life!’ Lenin had no money. He took off his coat, got out of the car, and without letting go of the bottle of milk for his wife, proceeded on foot.”: Impressions of Lenin (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1964), 65.

*The earliest mention of hostages was in a speech by Trotsky on November 11, 1917, in which he said that military cadets taken prisoner would be held hostage: “if our men fall into the hands of the enemy … for every worker and for every soldier we shall demand five cadets”: Izvestiia, No. 211 (November 12, 1917), 2.