A people's tragedy

fn11 F. I. Dan and E. I. Martynov had also broken with this old Menshevik view (which went back to the 1880s). Their theory of the ‘unbroken revolution’, which they advanced in the newspaper Nachalo during the autumn of 1905, differed little from that of the ‘permanent revolution’.

Chapter 6

fn1 Lvov was taken ill on the way to Vyborg and had to return to St Petersburg. So he never signed the Manifesto, although he clearly sympathized with it.

fn2 Like all Great-Russian nationalists, Stolypin counted the Ukrainians and Belorussians as bearers of the Russian national idea.

fn3 This last cultural aspect was a crucial one — and itself a sign of the mountain to be climbed — for the introduction of a constitutional order in a country such as Russia which then (as today) had no real traditions of constitutionalism. Whereas in Western countries the constitution merely had to guarantee the rights of a pre-existing civil society and culture, in Russia it also had to create these. It had to educate society — and the state itself — into the values and ideas of liberal constitutionalism.

fn4 The parties of the Right (the Nationalists and the Rightists) had 154 deputies in the Fourth Duma, those of the Centre (Octobrists and Centre Group) 126, and those of the Left (Kadets, Progressists and Socialists) 152.

fn5 Tsushima was the site of Russia’s biggest defeat in the war against Japan.

Chapter 7

fn1 The largest department store in Moscow.

fn2 Zinovy Peshkov (1884–1966) was the brother of Yakov Sverdlov, the Bolshevik leader and first Soviet President. After recovering from his wound, he enlisted in the French military intelligence. He supported Kornilov’s movement against the Provisional Government. In 1918 he joined Semenov’s antiBolshevik army in the Far East and then Kolchak’s White government in Omsk. In 1920 he was sent to the Crimea as a French military agent in Wrangel’s government and left Russia with Wrangel’s army. He later became a close associate of Charles de Gaulle and a prominent French politician. What is strange is that until 1933 Peshkov maintained good relations with Gorky in Russia, and that Gorky knew about his intelligence activities. See Delmas, ‘Légionnaire et diplomate’.

fn3 The big metal factories of Petrograd, to cite the most extreme example, enjoyed a five-fold increase in profits during the war.

Chapter 8

fn1 It was rumoured that Protopopov had promised each policeman 500 roubles for every wound he received from the crowd.

fn2 People said the same thing in 1989 after the East German authorities had shot at the demonstrators in Leipzig. Crowds are afraid of the threat of bloodshed but emboldened after it occurs.

fn3 The Inter-District group, or Mezhraionka, was a leftwing faction of the Social Democrats in Petrograd. It favoured the reunification of the Menshevik and Bolshevik wings of the party. Trotsky and Lunacharsky belonged to it until the summer of 1917, when they joined the Bolsheviks.

fn4 Lvov, Kerensky, Nekrasov, Tereshchenko, Konovalov and Guchkov.

fn5 Several US eagles were also taken down mistakenly.

fn6 According to an opinion poll in 1995, only 7 per cent of the Russian people favoured the return of the monarchy.

Chapter 9

fn1 For the Social Democrats, steeped in Marx’s writings of 1848–52, Bonapartism meant Napoleon III rather than Napoleon I.

fn2 Not surprisingly, many of the squires had left their fields unsown.

fn3 The nationalist leadership was also largely derived from these groups. In the Ukraine, for example, the main leaders of the nationalist movement were Vinnichenko (the son of a peasant), Hrushevsky (the son of a minor official), Doroshenko (the son of a military vet), Konovalov and Naumenko (both the sons of teachers), Sadovsky, Efremov, Mikhnovsky, Chekhovsky and Boldochan (all the sons of priests).

fn4 According to General Polovtsov, some of the soldiers thought the International was some sort of deity.

fn5 Valentinov, who knew Lenin well in Switzerland, wrote: ‘He would never have gone on to the streets to fight on the barricades, or stand in the line of fire. Not he, but other, humbler people were to do that … Lenin ran headlong even from émigré meetings which seemed likely to end in a scuffle. His rule was to “get away while the going was good” — to use his own words — meaning from any threat of danger. During his stay in Petersburg in 1905–6 he so exaggerated the danger to himself and went to such extremes in his anxiety for self-preservation that one was bound to ask whether he was not simply a man without personal courage.’

fn6 Many of the workers who came to greet Lenin may have turned up on the expectation of free beer. Welcoming receptions for returning party leaders had become a regular feature of life in the capital since the revolution, and for many of the workers they had become a pretext for a street party. This was particularly relevant in the case of Lenin’s return from exile, since it coincided with the Easter holiday.