Dominic Alexander’s series continues looking at the twists and turns of the revolutionary process in the fight for a workers’ revolution, and the fight to prevent a far right coup against it

The new coalition government began with confidence that it could lead Russia in a new direction. Thus the intention to prepare the army for both defensive and offensive action was announced. Propaganda against the Bolsheviks was stepped up accordingly. The first all-Russia Congress of Soviets, with a strong Social Revolutionary and Menshevik majority, held in June, voted to support the government’s offensive plan. Kerensky as the new Minister of War, hoped this would help unite the country behind the Provisional Government, and it certainly, temporarily at least, strengthened the right-leaning socialist parties.

The offensive was launched against Austro-Hungarian and German forces in Galicia, and was at first successful, despite the original plan having been abandoned because too much of the army was judged unready. This, of course, resulted in rapturous acclaim by the war’s supporters. Tsereteli proclaimed that a ‘new page is opening in the history of the great Russian Revolution’, but others were less enthused, with a Petrograd machine-gun regiment on 21 June resolving not to send any forces to the front unless the war had a revolutionary character, and then defied threats of its disbandment. The Vyborg District Soviet also protested against ‘the adventure of the Provisional Government, which is conducting an offensive for the old robber treaties’.^[i] New elections for the Petrograd Soviet produced increasing numbers of Bolshevik members, and the more left tendencies in the Mensheviks and SRs began to block with the Bolsheviks.

After the initial successes of the Russian advance, the German and Austrian troops were able to regroup and counter-attack on 6 July. The Russian forces were unable, or unwilling, to hold their new positions and quickly began to retreat, regardless of the pleas of officers. The defeat of the offensive was a disaster for the government, and it increased support for the Bolsheviks among the soldiers.

While this was happening, the pace of the rural revolution was also increasing. Initially, peasants were promised that land redistribution would be part of the revolutionary agenda, but the land committees set up for the purpose were observably dragging out the process, and peasants began to take matters into their own hands. Organised actions against landlords’ assets began early, but by May into June were turning into wholesale expropriation and redistribution of their lands. The Social Revolutionaries, ostensibly the party of the peasantry, did all they could to restrain this movement, but under the pressure of rural discontent, the party began to split in two, with left SRs supporting the peasant revolution.

From the front to the countryside, as well as in the cities, the forces of revolution were driving a new polarisation between the wish to settle with a bourgeois democratic government, and revolutionary demands which went well beyond those narrow confines. The trend is reflected in the growth of the Bolshevik Party in Petrograd from a mere 2,000 members in February to 16,000 in April, and 32,000 by late June.^[ii]

The generals reacted to the almost total breakdown in discipline in the army during and after the June offensive with demands that the government act to restore officers’ authority. The death penalty at the front, which had been abolished early in March, was to be reinstated as a first step. Not all generals were convinced that this would be effective, however.^[iii] The proposal was met with overwhelming hostility from all parts of the left, with a resolution demanding its withdrawal passing the Soviet with only four votes against. The leaders of the SRs and Mensheviks in the government, such as Tsereteli, found that the delegates of their own parties had voted en masse against their own measure. The generals had also wanted to abolish the soldiers’ committees, but this was deemed too difficult even to try.

As the offensive turned to disaster, matters were polarising on the domestic front. There was not just an explosion in the growth of the Bolshevik Party, but their supporters in Petrograd were increasingly demanding that power be transferred to the soviets, with the Bolshevik Military Organisation (the party structure for soldiers and sailors) being particularly militant and restless. New supporters also tended to be impatient. And yet, however high frustrations went with the Provisional Government, there were still expectations that the SR and Menshevik right in government could achieve something. In one incident, a worker shook his fist at Chernov, the Social Revolutionary minister, and Soviet leader, angrily shouting: ‘Take power, you sonofabitch, when it is given to you.’^[iv] On the other hand, rightist elements around the leaders of the army and the Kadet Party were increasingly desperate to regain control of events.

The July Days

It was the demands of the offensive which precipitated crisis. The First Machine Gun regiment in Petrograd on 21 June was ordered to send two thirds of its personnel to the front, breaking a promise that the Provisional Government had made that no soldiers involved in the February Revolution would be disarmed or moved from the city. The soldiers decided to resist this measure, also suspecting it would lead to the disbandment of the regiment. A mass demonstration was organised, helped by the Bolshevik Military Organisation, for 3 July. Mass meetings had recruited other regiments and factory committees to the action, and on the day about 10,000 armed sailors from Kronstadt and 30,000 workers from the Putilov Works turned out.^[v] In the course of two days of demonstrations, somewhere between 100,000 and half a million were protesting on the streets.

Lenin had been trying to calm the mood of the most militant sections of the party, including the Petrograd Committee, but was unable to restrain them. Food shortages were severe and inflation and profiteering were rampant, so the patience of workers and soldiers was breaking. Lenin, however, had the clearer picture. In parts of Petrograd, the Bolsheviks were indeed very strong, but the majority of workers and soldiers elsewhere were not yet fully convinced of the need to overthrow the government. Also, because the Soviet announced its support for the Provisional Government, the standard Bolshevik slogan, ‘all power to the Soviets’ was disabled.

While it might have been possible to overthrow the Provisional Government at this stage, Lenin and others feared the party would not be able to hold power. However, once the demonstration had begun, the Bolshevik leadership, including Lenin, supported it fully, because to do otherwise would be a betrayal of the revolutionary forces they had nurtured, and indeed anarchists were already denouncing delay and betrayal by the Bolsheviks.^[vi] Instead, the decision was made that Bolsheviks should lead the demonstration in order to keep it channelled within peaceful limits.

Part of the demonstration thronged outside the Tauride Palace where the offices of the Soviet CEC were, demanding that the socialist coalition with the Kadets be broken. Bolshevik speakers tried to calm the crowds, but with little success. Then it became known that the crowd had seized Chernov. Trotsky delivered a passionate speech, which was received sullenly, and only just succeeded in rescuing him.^[vii]

The two-day demonstration was beginning to disperse when troops from the front arrived, and counter-revolutionary gangs appeared on the streets, leading to clashes, and hundreds of deaths. At this point, the newspapers began reporting the collapse of the government’s war offensive, and an anti-Bolshevik reaction began, as some blamed them for the debacle. The reaction was also fuelled by the slanderous, but supposedly documented, accusation that Lenin was a German spy.^[viii]

Then as now, fabricated allegations can have a devastating impact, not so much on convinced supporters of a cause, but on all the waverers and uncommitted people, and gives the opposing side confidence and energy. The Soviet appealed for newspapers to withhold judgement about the accusations against Lenin until they could be investigated, and several, but not all, of the ‘moderate’ socialist papers complied. However, these ‘moderate’ socialist papers all blamed the Bolsheviks for the July Days demonstrations, with only the left-Menshevik Gorky’s paper rejecting this line of attack on the Bolsheviks.^[ix] The exponential growth of the party was abruptly halted by the combination of the reaction against the apparently intended insurrection, and the defamation campaign. Relatively few members actually left the party, and many areas held steady.^[x]

Nonetheless, the situation gave the Provisional Government space to act against the Bolsheviks, and soldiers were sent to the printers of the Bolshevik paper Pravda, where they smashed all the machinery, then attacked the Bolshevik headquarters, but failed to capture Lenin, who with Zinoviev, went into hiding. The leaders of the Mezhrayonka, Trotsky and Lunacharsky, were arrested along with hundreds of Bolsheviks and workers, soldiers and sailors deemed complicit with Bolshevik actions. The party press was entirely suppressed. Trotsky allowed himself to be arrested, hoping to use a trial as a political stage, while Lenin chose to go into hiding, not unreasonably fearing he would be summarily killed.

The backlash

Reactionaries were let off the leash due these events, with gangs of ‘gilded youth’ appearing on the streets, acting as vigilantes, breaking into private dwellings looking for ‘suspects’ to arrest. Workers’ defence units were disarmed, and the attacks went well beyond the Bolsheviks, with trade unionists, Mensheviks and SRs being victimised as well. There was plundering and even some shooting, with Bolsheviks only safe when hidden in working-class areas.^[xi] Employers began trying to supress the factory committees, imposing lockouts, and peasant land committees were also subject to wholesale arrest. Capital punishment was reinstated at the front. The leader of the Black Hundreds reappeared in public, demanding that the soviets be suppressed, while chauvinistic attacks on non-Russian minorities, particularly Jews, were stimulated. The Menshevik and SR leaders were alarmed by all this, but it prompted them to double down on their anti-Bolshevik and pro-government position, under the illusion that this would bring them safety from further persecution.

In the course of July, Left Mensheviks and Left SRs became further estranged from their right-wing leaders. A sign of this came on 23 July when Trotsky and Lunacharsky were finally arrested, even though the government had no real legal grounds to do so. When this was announced to a Menshevik meeting, there was an indignant uproar, and the meeting had to be brought to a halt.^[xii] Rank-and-file Mensheviks had quite different views from their leaders on the CEC.

The Provisional Government had itself been reconstituted, after three Kadet ministers had resigned on 2 July, followed by an SR minister, and then on 7 July, the Prime Minister Prince Lvov, rejecting a socialist plan for reforms. The remaining ministers chose Kerensky as the new first minister.^[xiii] However, there were negotiations to bring the Kadets back into government. Their price was the abandonment of all social reforms, the separation of socialist ministers from the soviets, and the clear subordination of soviets and workers’ committees to government authority. The government remained in limbo, as agreement could not be reached on these matters.

Kerensky threatened to resign, and so the remaining ministers agreed to give him carte blanche. Kerensky severed the connection between ministers and their parties, and from the soviets, and entirely rejected the reform programme of earlier in July. In essence the liberals’ demands had been met, even though the new government had eight ‘socialists’ and only seven liberals.^[xiv] The situation was paradoxical: the moderate socialists now had a majority in the government, yet they were past their peak popularity and could not advance their programme.

However, the wave of reaction soon reached its limits. The Bolshevik Party could not be definitively smashed, partly because the Soviet insisted that only individuals could be charged in relation to the July Days, rather than whole organisations. The moderate leaders correctly feared that if they allowed the Bolshevik Party to be destroyed, they would be next in line.^[xv] The repression stalled also because the government doubted its ability to control protests during a wholesale attack on the left.^[xvi] Then there was also the total failure to bring any of the arrested Bolsheviks to trial. One factor here was that the July Days were mixed up with the accusations of German espionage, for which evidence was thin and which risked opening the government up to ridicule.

By the beginning of August, some Bolsheviks were even being released as their imprisonment was becoming a popular outrage.^[xvii] The reactionary momentum from early July was fading rapidly. The government, in any case, was now barely functioning. There had not even been much success in moving Bolshevik-influenced regiments out of Petrograd, nor in disarming the workers. Generals at the front did not want more unreliable troops, and workers hid their weapons.^[xviii]

Bolshevik recovery

By August, the Bolshevik Party was growing once again, with local Menshevik and SR leaders complaining to their centres of numerous defections from their organisations to the former.^[xix] Bitterness against the Bolsheviks among workers in Petrograd had dissipated within weeks of the July Days, and while anger against them was worse in the army, the Kerensky government’s re-imposition of the death penalty helped to revive soldiers’ sympathy for the party.^[xx] One of the most marked developments was the increasing divergence between the politics of the district soviets and the central soviet bodies, the Petrograd CEC and the All-Russia Congress of Soviets Central Executive Committee (known by its acronym as the Tsay-ee-kah^[xxi]) which had been set up in June.

Increasingly, at a local level, the reactionary wave of July had acted to bring different factions to work together in defence of the revolution. The district soviets were not dominated by middle-class intellectuals as was the Petrograd CEC or the Tsay-ee-kah, and were far more accessible to rank-and-file workers. At the district level, Bolshevik-sponsored resolutions were increasingly being passed by mid-summer. Here also, Left SRs and Left Mensheviks readily co-operated with the Bolsheviks. In Petrograd, an Interdistrict Conference of Soviets had been formed in April, and was revived in mid-July and August, increasingly being used to pressure the CEC over its unpopular support for the government.^[xxii] Factory re-elections to the Petrograd Soviet were also returning increasing numbers of Bolsheviks, which by September finally gave them a majority there, as well as in Moscow and other industrial cities.

This surge in popular revolutionary feeling also helps explain the settlement of a major disagreement within the Bolshevik leadership. Lenin, in hiding, had sent new theses and a resolution urging a major change in tactical orientation. He believed that the soviets had been decisively beaten, and the SR and Menshevik Parties were entirely lost to the revolution, necessitating that the Bolsheviks drop the slogan and policy of ‘all power to the soviets’. There was certainly a residual reluctance on the part of some of the leadership to turn entirely against the moderate parties, as a holdover from the February position. However, there was also an awareness of the change in the mass mood, and the fruitful cooperation with the left factions of the moderate parties, such that Lenin’s view was rejected. For once, with Lenin in isolation from events, the rest of the leadership was probably correct.^[xxiii]

By mid-August, the situation in Russia was spiralling into chaos, with peasant disorders and land seizures increasing, worker militancy rising again as food shortages and inflation worsened, breakdowns in production, and surging independence movements among Finns and Ukrainians. Kerensky could do nothing about the situation, as his cabinet wouldn’t agree to any programme of reforms. Kadets, business and landlords’ organisations all agreed by this point that the government was not viable, and needed to be replaced by an anti-socialist dictatorship which could crush the soviets.^[xxiv]

Into this situation, there came further military disaster when the Germans took Riga in Latvia. This caused considerable panic, as many feared Petrograd would be next, prompting financially able citizens to plan to flee.^[xxv] The right blamed soldiers who would not fight, and workers who refused to work. On the other hand, there were serious suspicions among workers and soldiers that Riga was sacrificed as it was a revolutionary centre, and that Petrograd would be too, so that the Soviet would be wiped out, and a dictatorship established.^[xxvi] A preference for the Germans over the Soviet was openly expressed in middle-class circles.

General Kornilov

Reactionary elements, particularly the Union of Officers of the Army and Navy, had been actively trying to find a figure to organise around who could become the dictator they wanted. By late July, they had landed on the figure of General Kornilov. Kornilov had been appointed commander-in-chief by Kerensky soon after the latter had become prime minister. A thorough-going reactionary, another general described Kornilov as ‘a man with a lion’s heart and the brains of a sheep.’^[xxvii] The other generals, meanwhile, had already lost patience with Kerensky by mid-July, blaming the government for the army’s collapse, and believing that imposing strict discipline, with harsh sanctions, would be enough to restore military capacity.^[xxviii] Kornilov’s clear agreement with this agenda, and reports that he was pressuring Kerensky, made the former appear as a leading symbol of the counterrevolution to the public.^[xxix] Controversies arising from Kornilov’s appointment by Kerensky, and his plans to impose severe discipline also acted to unite moderates and revolutionaries in opposition to both in late July and early August.

Any possibility that Kerensky might replace Kornilov with a less divisive general were pretty much scotched when a group of wealthy industrialists announced their support for Kornilov in very strong terms at a preliminary meeting before the Moscow State Conference, scheduled for 12 August. At this point, Kornilov’s circle was pushing plans for the railways to be put under martial law, and for this to be then extended to coal mines and most factories.^[xxx] The counter-revolution was taking ever firmer shape, but a previous meeting between Kerensky and Kornilov on 10 August had been icy and inconclusive enough to make the latter think a coup against the government itself was necessary.

Already before the Moscow State Conference opened, rumours were swirling that Kornilov was bringing troops into position around the city. The Bolshevik Moscow Regional Bureau decided to organise a protest strike, which was then supported by the trade unions and district soviets, although the Moscow Soviet opposed it. The strike was almost total in the city, down to the staff of the Bolshoi Theatre where the conference was being held. The resurgent strength of Bolshevik influence was not lost on anyone, except perhaps Kornilov. The conference itself was heavily biased towards representatives of the propertied classes and the Bolsheviks pointedly boycotted it.^[xxxi] Even so, it was strongly divided between supporters of Kornilov and his detractors, such that Kerensky was left stranded in the middle. Milyukov wrote that he ‘appeared to want to scare somebody and to create an impression of force and power … In actuality he only engendered pity.’^[xxxii] The conference was a failure in terms of the intention to unite Russia behind Kerensky. As a result, Kerensky moved towards accepting Kornilov’s plan for a military crackdown, but he envisaged himself rather than the general as the future dictator.

Nonetheless, preparations started to move those troops deemed most reliable into positions around Petrograd.^[xxxiii] This was very much with the participation of Kerensky, as General Alekseev explained in a letter to Milyukov in early September.^[xxxiv] There was also a plot to stage a rightist coup in the city at the approach of Kornilov’s troops, possibly including a staged ‘leftist’ rising as an excuse. In this instance, it is not clear how far Kornilov or his immediate circle were aware of the plans, however, it is certain that all kinds of manoeuvres were taking place, involving a host of individual players, while there was little trust between Kerensky and Kornilov themselves.

It was a cackhanded intervention of a liberal Duma member, V. N. Lvov, attempting to act as a mediator between Kornilov and Kerensky between 22 and 26 August, which revealed to the prime minister that the general intended to do away with him entirely.^[xxxv] As Kornilov’s troops were advancing upon Petrograd, Kerensky attempted to have the general removed and replaced, but the substitute general refused this order on the grounds that the operation, approved by Kerensky, could not now be halted. Kerensky made public the attempted coup, but most of the generals then affirmed their allegiance to Kornilov. The Union of Officers declared that the Provisional Government could no longer remain and urged the military to line up with Kornilov.^[xxxvi]

The Kornilov coup

On 27 August, the Tsay-ee-kah met in an emergency session, and decided to support the Provisional Government against Kornilov, although it rejected Kerensky’s plan to create a dictatorial ‘Directory’ government, after the French Revolutionary precedent. The Petrograd Soviet issued orders to impede the movement of counterrevolutionary forces, and not to obey orders coming from the military high command. The Bolsheviks were included in the newly formed Committee for Struggle Against the Counterrevolution; the left-Menshevik Sukhanov noted that with ‘the Bolsheviks, the committee had at its disposal the full power of the organised workers and soldiers’.^[xxxvii]

The situation actually posed some tactical difficulties for the Bolsheviks at this point, as Lenin had been anxious to break the Bolshevik leadership of their wish to work with the moderate socialists, who he was sure, had ‘deserted to the camp of the enemy of the proletariat for good.’^[xxxviii] Any kind of ‘alliance’ with the ‘defencists’ or with Kerensky was out of the question, but the necessity for a mass response to Kornilov was clear to all the Bolshevik tendencies.

Lenin made sure there was a clear line that defence against Kornilov did not mean in any way a lessening of Bolshevik opposition to Kerensky.^[xxxix] For Bolshevik supporters too, the situation was unclear. Trotsky, at this point imprisoned, received a delegation of Kronstadt sailors at his cell. The sailors wanted advice on how to act, whether to defend Kerensky, or oppose both him and Kornilov as equal enemies. Trotsky persuaded them that the reckoning with Kerensky would come soon, but that Kornilov had to be defeated first.^[xl]

Despite fractious debates, however, the Bolsheviks tended to work within the soviets and the revolutionary defence committees which rapidly sprang up. With the government effectively paralysed, and many officials secretly siding with Kornilov, it was the Committee for Struggle which became the national centre for organising against the counterrevolution, finding and distributing arms, protecting food supplies, and issuing information on the latest developments. They dispatched soviet officials to meet and agitate Kornilov’s troops, and worked with trade unions, the railways in particular, to disrupt the advance. Lower-level organisations themselves responded immediately to the emergency: it’s been noted that it ‘would be difficult to find, in recent history, a more powerful, effective display of largely spontaneous and unified mass political action.’^[xli] ‘Spontaneous’ is a misleading word here, though, as the mobilisation was made possible by the high level of organisation and consciousness already existing among workers and soldiers.

It was the initiative of district soviets in the first instance which led to the organisation of armed defence units. The largest union in Russia, the Petrograd Union of Metalworkers, pledged massive financial resources to the Committee for Struggle, as well as its staff. The Left-SR chauffeurs’ union pledged transport and maintenance services, and the Menshevik printers’ union refused to print Kornilov-supporting newspapers. The railway union executive committee, known by its acronym as Vikzhel, ordered ‘suspicious telegrams’ to be delayed, all information about suspect military forces using the rail to be sent along, and all means be used to delay and disrupt the movement of those forces, down to dismantling tracks, and leaving key posts unstaffed.^[xlii]

By August 28-9, factory workers were forming fighting detachments of their own accord, and the term ‘Red Guards’ quickly spread as a description, while arms factories speedily supplied them with weapons. Bolsheviks were the numerically dominant group within these units.^[xliii] Training for new units was frequently accomplished by the Bolshevik Military Organisation, who were then dispatched to dig trenches, tear up rail lines or set up other defences. Soldiers in the Petrograd garrison and naval installations held meetings which denounced the counterrevolution and organised the defence of the city. The Petrograd Cossack units remained neutral, while the officer cadets openly supported Kornilov. However, Finnish organisations also mobilised to defend the revolution, blocking several key Cossack and calvary units from aiding Kornilov. On 29 August, three thousand armed sailors from Kronstadt headed to the capital and were detailed to protect rail stations, the post and telegraph stations, and government buildings.

Plans by rightist forces to spark disorder were stymied by the robust communication lines assembled in the Petrograd region, while rail and telegraph workers prevented rightists from establishing contact with the approaching counterrevolutionary forces. Officers who demonstrated any sign of sympathy for Kornilov were arrested, and some at the Helsingfors naval base who refused to pledge allegiance to democratic organisations were actually killed.

By 28 August, one major division of Kornilov’s forces had reached Vyritsa, 37 miles from Petrograd, but there they had to halt as rail workers had blocked the way with laden railway cars and torn up the tracks for miles ahead. They were also unable to communicate with their generals. Then, agitators sent by the soviets, factories and soldiers’ committees arrived to harangue the rank-and-file soldiers, and even local workers and peasants surrounded the soldiers, angry with them for betraying the revolution. It turned out that the soldiers had been unaware of the nature of their mission, and on 30 August they hoisted a red flag, with ‘Land and Freedom’ emblazoned on it, over their headquarters, formed a revolutionary committee, and arrested their commander.

Other divisions faced very similar obstacles and were similarly won over by agitators. Even in the case of the First Cossack Division, the commander, General Krymov, had to abandon his plan to march his troops the final stretch to Petrograd, when it became clear that the local garrison and soviet in the town in which he was stuck would resist his advance, and that his soldiers would not fight them. He then could do nothing while his troops were drawn into mass meetings. Soon, facing arrest by his own troops, Krymov agreed to go to Petrograd on his own to meet with the government. He later committed suicide, rather than face trial and prison.^[xliv] Elsewhere, General Denikin on the south-western front was arrested by his own troops, and the general of the northern front resigned as the scale of the debacle became clear. Kornilov himself was soon under house arrest.

---

[i] ibid. pp.358-9.

[ii] Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power (London: W. W. Norton 1976), p.xxix.

[iii] Cliff, Power to the Soviets, p.197.

[iv] ibid. p.266.

[v] ibid. pp.259-60.

[vi] Deutscher, Prophet Armed, p.223.

[vii] ibid. p.225.

[viii] ibid. p.226.

[ix] Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks Come to Power, p.19.

[x] Cliff, Power to the Soviets, pp.283-7.

[xi] ibid. p.274

[xii] Deutscher, Prophet Armed, p.230.

[xiii] Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks Come to Power, p.21.

[xiv] ibid. pp.25-6.

[xv] Cliff, Power to the Soviets, p.276.

[xvi] Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks Come to Power, p.53.

[xvii] ibid. p.57.

[xviii] Cliff, Power to the Soviets, p.278.

[xix] Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks Come to Power, p.90.

[xx] ibid. p.75.

[xxi] John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World (London: Penguin 1977), p.26.

[xxii] Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks Come to Power pp.76-7.

[xxiii] Cliff, Power to the Soviets, p.271; Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks Come to Power, pp.59-62.

[xxiv] Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks Come to Power, p.95.

[xxv] ibid. p.94.

[xxvi] Cliff, Power to the Soviets, pp.294-5.

[xxvii] Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks Come to Power, p.97.

[xxviii] ibid. p.101.

[xxix] ibid. p.100.

[xxx] ibid. p.106.

[xxxi] Cliff, Power to the Soviets, p.289.

[xxxii] Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks Come to Power, p.113.

[xxxiii] ibid. p.116.

[xxxiv] Cliff, Power to the Soviets, p.296.

[xxxv] Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks Come to Power, pp.121-4.

[xxxvi] ibid. p.127.

[xxxvii] ibid. p.132.

[xxxviii] ibid. p.132.

[xxxix] Cliff, Power to the Soviets, p.300.

[xl] Deutscher, Prophet Armed, p.232.

[xli] Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks Come to Power, p.139.

[xlii] ibid. p.142.

[xliii] Cliff, Power to the Soviets, p.303.

[xliv] Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks Come to Power, pp.149-50.

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