211. Trotskii, Kak vooruzhalas’ revoliutsiia, I: 105.
212. Sidorov, Revoliutsionnoe dvizheniie; Krastin’š, Istoriia Latyshskikh strelko; Germanis, Oberst Vacietis; “Iz vospominanii glavkoma I. I. Vatsetis.”
213. Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks in Power, 201 (citing TsA VMF, f. r-342, op. 1, d. 116, l. 34–56ob.).
214. Mal’kov, Zapiski komendanta [1967], 133–5.
215. Izvestiia, March 17, 1918: 2. The Soviet had post facto approved the capital’s “temporary” relocation. Zinoviev had opposed the move to Moscow; he favored Nizhny Novgorod, precisely because the latter would be temporary.
216. The “Muscovite tsardom” would not be formally dissolved until June 9, 1918, for the sake of “economizing.” Lenin, Leninskie dekrety o Moskve, 62–3; Ignat’ev, Moskva, 85–7. Lenin managed to abolish the province (oblast) council in August 1918, and placed Kamenev in charge of Moscow as chairman of the Moscow soviet.
217. Istoriia Moskvy, II: 127.
218. The Metropole Hotel became House of Soviets No. 2; the Theological Seminary, on Moscow’s innermost ring, House of Soviets No. 3, a residence with offices. The building housing the party’s Central Committee apparatus on Vozdvizhenka was designated House of Soviets No. 4. House of Soviets No. 5 was a residential complex on Sheremetev Street (renamed Granovskaya Street). The Central Committee apparatus had also gotten part of Moscow’s Hotel Dresden.
219. Krasnaia Moskva, 347; Izvestiia, January 25, 1921: 4; Narodnoe khoziaistvo, 1918, no. 11: 11–14 (V. Obolensky-Osinsky).
220. In December 1920, the Cheka moved its headquarters to the Russia Insurance Co. building on the Lyubyanka Square, 2. Leggett, The Cheka, 217–20 (Spravochnik uchrezdeniia RSFSR, January 22, 1920, 215–28). Within weeks of the March 1918 move to Moscow, the Cheka launched massive raids on more than two dozen “anarchist” compounds, including at the famous Ryabushinsky mansion designed by the architect Fyodor Shekhtel in art moderne, where the police made no attempt to dispel the large crowd of onlookers—let the masses see the Cheka! MChK, 20; Klement’ev, V Bol’shevistkoi Moskve, 139.
221. Solomon [Isetskii], Sredi krasnykh vozhdei, I: 192–4. Georgy Isetskii (1868–1934), aka Solomon, from a noble family, was close to Lenin. Isetskii claims he started living at the colossal structure of his commissariat (Narkomvneshtorg) on Miliutin Lane.
222. Germany’s postwar government, known as the Weimar Republic (where it was founded), had left the 1,200-room Hohenzollern Palace in Berlin empty, seeking to avoid association with the monarchy and militarist old regime. Hitler and the Nazi regime would also steer clear of the Hohenzollern Palace and its connotations of Prussian monarchy.
223. One person who attended Council of People’s Commissars meetings in 1918 found the first two floors below Lenin’s wing in the enormous structure lifeless. Bortnevskii and Varustina, “A. A. Borman,” I: 115–49 (at 129).
224. Mal’kov, Zapiski [1967], 116–20; Malkov, Reminiscences, 123–4. In Petrograd, officials of the new regime had commandeered tram cars. Mal’kov, Zapiski [1967], 43.
225. Mal’kov, Zapiski [1967], 133–5.
226. Trotsky, My Life, 351–2; Trotskii, Portrety revoliutsionerov, 54–5.
227. Stanisław Pestkovskii, “Vospominaniia o rabote v narkomnaste (1917–1919 gg.),” Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, 1930, no. 6: 124–31 (at 130).
228. Golikov, Vladimir Il’ich Lenin, V: 307–8. Official sources do not record the precise date of Stalin’s marriage, and it was left out of his chronology for 1918: Sochineniia, IV: 445–56. Stalin would return to Petrograd on only three more occasions for the rest of his life: 1919, when the city fell under threat from anti-Bolshevik forces; 1926, to mark the destruction of the Zinoviev machine; and 1934 when Kirov was murdered. McNeal, Stalin, 342, n1.
229. Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 104 (to Alisa Radchenko).
230. Alliluev, Khronika odnoi sem’i, 27.
231. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d, 668, l. 18 (F. S. Alliluev, “V Moskve [Vstrecha s t. Stalinym],” undated typescript); Alliluyeva, Vospominaniia, 187.
232. Moskovskii Kreml’—tsitadel’ Rossii (Moscow, 2008), 185.
233. Trotskii, Portrety revoliutsionerov, 54–5.
234. Astrov, Illustrated History, II: 509.
235. V. I. Lenin, “Doklad o ratifikatsii mirnogo dogovora 14 marta.” Pravda, March 16/17, 1918, in PSS, XXXVI: 92–111.
236. The congress also formally approved, belatedly, the relocation of the capital to Moscow on March 16, 1918. Delegate numbers conflict: Izvestiia, March 17, 1918: 2.
237. Chetvertyi Vserossiikii s”ezd sovetov rabochikh, 30–3; Bunyan and Fisher, Bolshevik Revolution, 532.
238. Warth, The Allies, 199–205, 235–41.
239. George, War Memoirs, II: 1542–3, 1550–1, 1891–2, 1901; Kettle, Allies and the Russian Collapse, 172–3. British intervention in Russia recalled the ill-fated Dardanelles campaign of the Great War, an attempt to reap large gains at seemingly low cost.
240. Not coincidentally, many of the British intelligence agents on the ground in Russia had previous India experience. Occleshaw, Dances in Deep Shadows.
241. GARF, f. r-130, op. 2, d. 1 (Sovnarkom meeting, April 2, 1918).
242. Protokoly zasedanii Vserossiiskogo, 263–70 (Lenin speech of May 14, 1918).
243. Pravda, March 26, March 27, 1918.
244. Pravda, April 3, April 4, 1918.
245. A. Goldenweiser, “Iz Kievskikh vospominanii (1917–1921 gg.),” in Gessen, Arkhiv russkoi revoliutsii, VI: 209–16; N. Mogilianskii, “Tragediia Ukrainy,” in Gessen, Arkhiv russkoi revoliutsii, IX: 84–90; Bunyan, Intervention, 6–17.
246. Bunyan, Intervention, 4; Collin Ross, “Doklad . . . o polozhenii del na ukraine,” in Gessen, Arkhiv russkoi revoliutsii, I: 288–92; Fedyshyn, Germanys’ Drive to the East, 133–83.
247. Martov, “Artilleriskaia podgotovka,” Vpered!, March 18, 1918.
248. Pravda, April 1, 1918; Zaria Rossii, April 17, 1918.
249. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 2, d. 3, l. 1–63; op. 2, d. 42. Stalin’s chief defender at the trial, Sosnovky, editor of Pravda, would be murdered in the purges.
250. Hoover Institution Archives, Nicolaevsky Collection, no. 6, box 2, folder 27; Grigorii Aronson, “Stalinskii protsess protiv Martova,” Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, 19/7–8 (April 28, 1930): 84-9; Vpered!, April 14 and April 26, 1918; Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution, 470–1 (citing oral interviews with Nicolaevsky, Rafael Abramowich, and Samuel Levitas); Chavichvili, Revolutionnaires russes à Geneve, 74–91; Trotsky, Stalin, 101–10; “Delo Iu. Martova v revoliutsionnyi tribunale,” Obozrenie, 1985, no. 15: 45–6, no. 16: 43–6; Kun, Unknown Portrait, 81–4. Later, the Menshevik Nicolaevsky, overreacting to Menshevik memoirs, wrongly argued that “the role played by Stalin in the activities of the Kamo group was subsequently exaggerated.” Nikolaevskii, Tainye stranitsy istorii, 88. The fate of the affidavits Nicolaevsky gathered from the Georgians remains mysterious.
251. Okorokov, Oktiabr’ i krakh russkoi burzuazhnoi pressy, 275–7.
252. This episode has often been garbled: Antonov-Ovseenko, The Time of Stalin, 3–7.
253. N. Rutych (ed.), “Dnevniki, zapisi, pis’ma generala Alekseeva i vospominaniia ob otse V. M. Alekseevoi-Borel,” in Grani, no. 125, 1982: 175–85.
254. Lincoln, Red Victory, 48 (citing K. N. Nikolaev, “Moi zhiznennyi put’,” 150–1, in Bakhmeteff Archive, Columbia University, K. N. Nikoaev Collection).
255. S. M. Paul, “S Kornilovym,” in Beloe delo, 7 vols. (Berlin: Miednyi vsadnik, 1926–1933), III: 67, 69.
256. Lincoln, Red Victory, 88 (citing A. Bogaevskii, “Pervyi kubanskii pokhhod [Ledianoi pokhod],” 82, in Bakhmeteff Archive, Columbia University); Khadziev, Velikii boiar, 369, 396.
257. Denikin, Ocherki russkoi smuti, I
I: 301.
258. “Rech’ v Moskokskom sovete . . . 23 aprelia 1918 g.,” Pravda, April 24, 1919; Izvestiia, April 24, 1919, in PSS, XXXVI: 232–7.
259. Jászi, Dissolution.
260. Rossiia v mirovoi voine 1914–1918, 41,
261. Klante, Von der Wolga zum Amur, 318; Bradley, Allied Intervention, 65–105.
262. Fić, The Bolsheviks and the Czechoslovak Legion, 206, 242, 262, 307–8, 313. The Legionnaires were mostly stationed in Ukraine, and in February 1918, when the German and Austrian army entered Ukraine in force, the Czechoslovak Legion had retreated into Soviet Russia.
263. In March 1918, the Omsk Soviet indicated it did not want to receive the Czechoslovak Legion, deeming it a counterrevolutionary force: Stalin telegrammed on March 26, 1918, to inform them it was by decision of the Council of People’s Commissars. Bunyan, Intervention, 81–2.
264. Maksakov and Turunov, Khronika grazhdanskoi voiny, 168. Trotsky had received a Cheka telegram (May 20–21, 1918) concerning a Serbian officer, Georgy Vukmanović, among the Czechoslovak Legion: “I am convinced that the organization of these troops has a counterrevolutionary character, they are being specially formed for dispatch to France but at the same time . . . they intend to concentrate their troops along the rail stations of Siberia and in the event of a Japanese attack they will take all rail lines into their hands.” It was countersigned by Dzierzynski, with a handwritten note, indicating he was skeptical about the Serb [“aforist”] and his alleged Bolshevism but not entirely dismissive. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 13, l. 1.
265. Bunyan, Intervention, 86–92.
266. Bullock, Russian Civil War, 46.
267. Bunyan, Intervention, 277, n1.
268. Pestkovskii, “Vospominaniia o rabote v narkomnaste,” 130.
269. Stalin, “O iuge Rossii,” Pravda, October 30, 1918. “Of all the difficulties which confront us,” Trotsky remarked in a speech on June 9, “the most pressing . . . is that of food,” citing countless telegrams of hunger and typhus. Bunyan, Intervention, 468; Trotskii, Kak vooruzhalas’ revoliutsiia, I: 74–86 (at 74).
270. Israelin, “Neopravdavshiisia prognoz graf Mirbakha.”
271. Pravda, April 27, 1918. Radek wrote of “the hate with which every working man in Moscow today greets the representative of German capital.” Izvestiia, April 28, 1918.
272. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 4, l. 10.
273. Izvestiia TsK KPSS,1989, no. 4: 143–4.
274. Nashe slovo, May 15, 1918: 2.
275. Drabkina, “Dokumenty germanskogo polsa v Moskve Mirbakha,” 124; Pipes, Russian Revolution, 617 (citing Winfried Baumgart, Vierteljahreshefte fur Zietgeschichte, 16/1 [1968]: 80).
276. Sverdlov followed up with additional circulars that month to all party organizations to reinforce the point. Pravda, May 19, May 22, and May 29, 1918; Perepiska sekretariata TsK RKP (b), III: 64, 72–4, 81–3; Sakwa, “The Commune State in Moscow,” 443–7; and Hegelsen, “The Origins of the Party-State Monolith.”
277. PSS, L: 88.
278. Nicoalevskii, Tainy stanitsy istorii, 384–6 (the words of Kurt Riezler).
279. Ludendorff, My War Memories, II: 658; Bunyan, Intervention, 177–9; Denikin, Ocherki russkoi smuty, III: 82–3. Ludendorff forwarded a long memorandum to the imperial chancellor on June 9, 1918.
280. In less than six months, it would be Wilhelm II who was kaput. Zeman, Germany and the Revolution in Russia, 126–7, 137–9. “Please use larger sums,” wrote Germany’s state secretary to the German minister (ambassador) Count Mirbach in Moscow on May 18, 1918, “as it is generally in our interests that the Bolsheviks should survive.” He added: “If further money required, please telegraph how much. It is very difficult to say from here which trend to support if Bolsheviks fall.” Zeman, Germany and the Revolution in Russia, 128–9.
281. Wheeler-Bennet, Forgotten Peace, 348–55.
282. Baumgart, Deutsche Ostpolitik 1918, 84.
283. Even as Germany, despite having signed the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, continued to seize former tsarist territory (Ukraine), Lenin turned to the Reichswehr to intercede against uncontrollable Red units (!). I. I. Vatsetis, Pamiat’, 1979, no. 2: 44.
284. N. Rozhkov, “Iskliuchenie oppozitsii iz TsIK,” Novaia zhizn’, June 18, 1918; Drabkina, “Moskva 1918.”
285. Hafner, Die Partei der linken Sozialrevolutionare; Leont’ev, Partiia levykh sotsialistov-revoliutsionerov. The Left SRs existed as a standalone party only since November 1917.
286. Makintsian, Krasnaia kniga VChK, II: 129–30; Gusev, Krakh partii levykh eserov, 193–4. The Cheka volume was soon withdrawn from circulation; during perestroika, it was reissued (Moscow: Politizdat, 1989).
287. Litvin, Levye esery i VChK, 69–73 (TsA FSB, d. N-2, t. 2, l. 10). This collection of documents amplifies Makintsian, Krasnaia kniga VChK.
288. V Vserossiiskii s”ezd sovietov, 5–37; Rabinowitch, “Maria Spiridonova’s ‘Last Testament,’” 426; Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks in Power, 288 (citing TsA SPb, f. 143, op. 1, d. 224, l. 75).
289. Bunyan, Intervention, 198, n57.
290. V vserossiiskii s”ezd sovetov, 22–3; Bunyan, Intervention, 200.
291. V. vserossiiskii s”ezd sovetov, 50–61; Izvestiia, July 5, 1918: 5; Bunyan, Intervention, 207–9. The reintroduction of the death penalty also angered the Left SRs, especially in an instance involving apparent heroism. The Baltic Fleet, still intact, was stationed at its main base Helsingfors (Helsinki), but the landing of German troops on the southwest of Finland in March 1918 jeopardized the fleet as well as Petrograd. The British, wary of German seizure of the Baltic Fleet, were conspiring with Trotsky to scuttle the ships. In March–April 1918, Alexei Schastny, the commander, worked a miracle to bring the fleet to safety at Kronstadt, his path cleared by icebreakers. But Trotsky wrongly suspected Schastny of hesitating to implement his orders to prepare the fleet for destruction. Schastny resigned in May. Unsatisfied, Trotsky himself organized a trial and had him executed on the fabricated charge of attempting to overthrow the Petrograd government. Trotsky was the sole witness allowed to testify. Rabinowitch, “Dos’e Shchastnogo.”
292. V vserossiiskii s”ezd sovetov, 73; Bunyan, Intervention, 210.
293. V vserossiiskii s”ezd sovetov, 63, 69; Gogolevskii, Dekrety Sovetskoi vlasti o Petrograde, 171.
294. Makintsian, Krasnaia kniga VChK, I: 185.
295. Makintsian, Krasnaia kniga VChK, I; 201–6 (Blyumin), II: 224–33. See also Neizvestnaia Rossiia: XX vek (Moscow, 1992), II: 55.
296. Latsis, Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, 1926, no. 9: 90.
297. Sadoul, Notes sur la revolution bolchevique, 305; Lockhart, British Agent, 295. Both Sadoul and Lockhart were eyewitnesses.
298. RGASPI, f. 4, op. 2, d. 527, l. 13 (recollections of Danishevsky).
299. Strauss, “Kurt Riezler, 1882–1955”; Thompson, Eye of the Storm.
300. Erdmann, Kurt Riezler, 713–4 (a deposition given in 1952); von Bothmer, Mit Graf Mirbach in Moskau, 72, 78; Makintsian, Krasnaia kniga VChK, I: 196–7; Hilger and Meyer, Incompatible Allies, 5–6, 8–9; Jarausch, “Cooperation or Intervention?” Andreyev would die of typhus in 1919. Their credentials also carried the signature of Ksenofontov, the Cheka secretary.
301. The German military attache, Bothmer, had raced to the Metropole Hotel to the commissariat of foreign affairs, whence Lev Karakhan, deputy commissar, phoned Lenin. Golikov, Vladimir Il’ich Lenin, V: 606.
302. Erdmann, Kurt Riezler, 715; Baumgart, Deutsche Ostpolitik 1918, 228, n71; Chicherin, Two Years of Soviet Foreign Policy; Sadoul, Notes sur la revolution bolchevique, 405. Some testimony indicates Lenin signed the condolence book.
303. Pravda, July 8, 1918, reprinted in Dzierz˙ynski, Izbrannye proizvedeniia, 111–6 (at 114). The quotation was retained in subsequent editions
: (Moscow, 1967), I: 265; (Moscow, 1977), I: 176–9.
304. “He considers that Lenin is doing secretly what Kamenev and Zinoviev did in October,” a Bolshevik party meeting recorded Dzierzynski as having said. “We are a party of the proletariat and we should see clearly that if we sign this peace the proletariat will not follow us.” VII ekstrennyi s”ezd RKP (b): mart 1918 goda, 245.
305. Bonch-Bruevich, Ubiistvo germanskogo posla Mirbakha i vosstanie levykh eserov, 27. See also Spirin, Krakh odnoi aventiury, 38. Abram Belenky was also taken hostage with Dzierzynski.
306. Makintsian, Krasnaia kniga VChK, II: 194.
307. Litvin, Levye esery i VChK, 97 (Lacis: TsA FSB, d. N-8, t. 9, l. 8); Vladimirova, “Levye esery,” 121.
308. Steinberg, “The Events of July 1918,” 122.
309. Paustovskii, Povest’ o zhizni, I: 422–24; Lockhart, British Agent, 294–300.
310. Litvin, Levye esery i VChK, 211–33 (Shliapnikov: Za zemliu i voliu, July 16–19, 1918).
311. Steinberg, “The Events of July 1918,” 20.
312. PSS, L: 114.
313. “Pis’mo V. I. Leninu,” Sochineniia, IV: 118–9; Pravda, December 21, 1929; Voroshilov, Lenin, Stalin, i krasnaia armiia, 43; Bolshevik, 1936, no. 2: 74.
314. Vatsetis, “Grazhdanskaia voina: 1918 god,” 26–7.
315. Muravyov had begun his career as the head of security in Petrograd in 1917. He went on to crush the Rada in Ukraine in February 1918, then was sent to Bessarabia. In April, Dzierzynski had Muravyov arrested for looting, summary executions, discrediting Soviet power, and plotting with anarchists in Moscow. On June 13, 1918, however, the high command had appointed the fearless, no-holes-barred Muravyov as supreme commander of pro-Bolshevik forces on the key Volga front. The German embassy official in Moscow, Kurt Riezler, meanwhile, was funneling bribes to Muravyov to take on the Czechoslovak Legion rebels, a fact that became known to the Cheka. After the Left SR rebellion in Moscow was put down, on July 10, Muravyov declared he was switching sides to make war against Germany, “the vanguard of world imperialism,” and invited his enemies of the days before, the Czechoslovaks, to join. He commanded the largest single intact Red force at the time, and his betrayal threatened to detach from the Bolsheviks the entire strategic Volga valley and its food supply—a potential turning point. A young Lithuanian worker Bolshevik in the town of Simbirsk, Jonava Vareikis, saved the day, luring Muravyov to a trap, where on July 11 he was shot and bayonetted to death. (Vacietis would be sent eastward to sort matters out.) Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks in Power, 25 (citing Izvestiia, November 2, 1917); Savchenko, Avantiuristy grazhdanskoi voiny, 44–64 (at 56); Baumgart, Deutsche Ostpolitik 1918, 227; Erdmann, Kurt Riezler, 474, 711; Alfons Paquet, in Baumgart, Von Brest-Litovsk, 76; Pipes, Russian Revolution, 631; Dekrety sovetskoi vlasti, III: 9–10; Vladimirova, “Levye esery,” 120, 131; Lappo, Iosif Vareikis, 13–4; Spirin, Klassy i partii, 193–194; Mawdsley, Russian Civil War, 56–7.
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