Year One of the Russian Revolution PDF
Preview Year One of the Russian Revolution
YEAR ONE OF THE RUSSIAN REVOWTION -, KP A rH liCt --..~,,.... :.. . 1.> ~.: \-' bl}iV' rP V1 110 60 e 6.\ ( 't&fi~TO~\AW \(~Arn 0f Mp~ e ~\Le\\ ~ o no " - _ / . ~ ~ G~ A-. \\ ~ u~ \~ '~ l' ~ n ~ t: n 1A f, u ~ ~ ,, 6u > .. \> w ~ i '" '' ~ ~1 '~ ' ~ 't-V - \ ~ ~ Year One of the Russian Revolution Year One of the Russian Revolution Victor Serge TRANSLATED AND EDITED BY PETER SEDGWICK PHOTOGRAPHIC RESEARCH BY CELESTINE OARS HOLT, RINEHART AND WINSTON CHICAGO NEW YOIK SAN FRANCISCO First published as L'An 1 de la revolution russe in 1930 Translation, Editor's Introduction, and Notes copyright (c) 1972 by Peter Sedgwick All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 77-11727 5 First published in the U.S. in 1972 ISBN: 0 7139 0135 7 Printed in the United States of America Contents Editor's Introduction 1 Acknowledgements 16 Foreword 18 1 From Serfdom to Proletarian Revolution 23 2 The Insurrection of 25 October 1917 52 3 The Urban Middle Classes against the Proletariat 82 4 The First Flames of the Civil War: The Constituent Assembly 108 5 Brest-Litovsk 143 6 The Truce and the Great Retrenchment 179 7 The Famine and the Czechoslovak Intervention 211 8 The July-August Crisis 248 9 The Terror and the Will to Victory 280 10 The German Revolution 312 11 War Communism 350 Notes 373 Editorial Postscript: The Allied Part in the Czechoslovak Intervention 415 Notes 423 Index 425 MAPS Western Russia 248 2 Siberia 249 3 Black Sea and Caspian Sea 251 1 dedicate this work to two proletarian revolutionaries: to one now dead, dear Vassili Nikiforovich Chadayev, militant in the Leningrad communist organization, 1917-28, whose principled intelligence, firmness of character and absolute devotion - a unique flame burning within him - never wavered even in the bitterest torment and who perished be.fore he could show the fullness of his powers in the service of the revolution, murdered while accomplishing a mission on 26 August 1928, not far from Armavir (Kuban); and TO A GREAT LIVING REVOLUTIONARY. v.s. Year One of the Russian Revolution Editor's Introduction The present book is one of the first works produced by Victor Serge following the decision he took in 1928, when he was con fined in a Leningrad hos pita) with a near-mortal illness, to turn his literary talents from the fields of immediate agitation and propa ganda (now denied to him as a result of the victory of Stalinism) into more permanent forms of political and artistic testimony. Like the othe.r works produced by Serge for publication abroad during his disgrace as a former Left Oppositionist in the Soviet Union, it was composed according to a peculiar format: 'in de tached fragments which could each be separately completed and sent abroad post-haste and ... could, if absolutely necessary, be published as they were, incomplete'.u In these early years of Stalin's hegemony, the mere act of dispatching a manuscript to a Western publisher was not regarded by Soviet officialdom, as it is today, as in itself tantamount to an act of treason. During the 1920s it had been relatively common for Soviet writers to bring out their work abroad, in order to establish copyright, before it appeared in Russia. This relative freedom was not to last very long: in 1929, for example, Boris Pilnyak was savagely attacked in the Russian press for his publication of the novel Mahogany in Berlin, and was removed from his post in the All-Russian Writers' Union for this supposedly 'anti-Soviet' ac tion. Thus by 1930 when Year One of the Russian Revolution appeared from the presses of a Paris publishing house, Serge must have had grounds for fearing that an historical work which chal lenged, implicitly but still definitely, the Stalinist re-writing of party history might bring unpleasant consequences upon its author. Only a year later, in a novel devoted to the civil war period, he felt it necessary to omit the names of Lenin and Trotsky in a scene which clearly described the two leaders together in close conver sation; 2 and in 1936, when Victor Serge was allowed to leave the Soviet Union after three years of deportation in central Asia, the GPU censorship took care to seize all his manuscripts, including Year Two of the Russian Revolution, the sequel to the present work. This book then, like Victor Serge himself, is a specimen of uncompromising heresy which survived the risks of Stalinist re pression through a combination of skilful timing and historical good luck. In contrast with Serge's other works of political history, Year One of the Russian Revolution contains no autobiographical element: it is in no sense an eye-witness account, since its narra *References are noted at the end of the book, pp. 373 ff.
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