A Revolution’s Fateful Passages

Steve Downs

Truth Behind Bars
Reflections on the Fate of the Russian Revolution
By Paul Kellogg
AU Press, 2021, 440 pages, $37.99.

“THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION brought tremendous exaltation to vast sections of the Russian people. After eight months of frustrated expectations, there was now a profound sense of relief…. The deepest sensation which October aroused in the people was joy. In city, village, and Army people rejoiced in the fullness of their liberation, in the limitless freedom that now summoned their creative efforts.” (Truth Behind Bars, 7)

So wrote Isaac Steinberg in 1953. Steinberg had been a leader of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries in Russia, and served as People’s Commissar of Justice in early 1918 during the short-lived coalition government between the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs.(1)

It was not just Russian workers and peasants who rejoiced in the limitless vision of freedom opened by the October Revolution. Throughout the world workers, peasants, poor farmers and fighters against national oppression took inspiration from it. And several generations of revolutionaries looked to October, and the Soviet Union, for guidance.

Yet just 20 years after October, during the Great Terror of 1936-1938, almost 700,000 prisoners were executed in the prisons and labor camps that made up “the Gulag.” (TBB, 27) The gulf between October and the Great Terror has confronted supporters of the October Revolution for 90 years.

Many, especially before 1956, simply denied the oppression and lack of democracy that were evident to others. Some made excuses, asserting that “Stalin did what had to be done.” Others highlighted the lack of democracy and spoke of the Revolution’s “degeneration,” while insisting it was still necessary to “defend the gains of the Revolution.” Some took that criticism further and, arguing that a new exploiting class had come to power in the Soviet Union, denied that it was worthy of defense.

Despite the fact that the Soviet Union no longer exists, the revolutions of 1917, the fights of the young Soviet state to survive civil war and foreign intervention and to build an alternative to capitalism still inspire. They not only inspire; they continue to inform current assumptions and debates about revolutionary strategies and struggles, the exercise of working-class power, and the relationship between ends and means.

These current debates make Paul Kellogg’s book all the more valuable. The author is a professor of interdisciplinary studies at Athabasca University in Canada.

The Gulag & the Russian Revolution

A few years after the Great Terror, replying to the allegation that Stalinism was the natural and necessary result of Leninism, Victor Serge, an anarchist supporter of the October revolution, wrote, “The Bolshevik party saw in the perils it confronted the excuse for its Jacobin methods. I think it’s undeniable that its Jacobinism contained in germ Stalinist totalitarianism, but Bolshevism also contained other seeds, other possibilities of evolution.”(2)

Truth Behind Bars: Reflections on the Fate of the Russian Revolution is an effort by Paul Kellogg to account for how the limitless freedom of October transmuted into the Great Terror(3) — and the repression that continued for decades afterward. He examines which of Bolshevism’s seeds took root and flourished.

Kellogg sets the stage for his reflections by discussing the Gulag. He considers its place as site(s) of political repression, and its role in Soviet economic development in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s. He also argues that it was where a new working class was forged in the years after the Civil War.

He then goes on to consider and contrast the politics of “self-emancipation” and “substitutionism.” In the process, he tries to retrieve Julius Martov and the Menshevik-Internationalists (or Left Mensheviks) from the “dustbin of history” to which Trotsky consigned them in October 1917.

Vorkuta: Anvil of the Working Class

The title of the book comes from the name of an oral “newsletter” in the Gulag. In Part 1, Kellogg underlines the roots of the Gulag as the place political prisoners were sent, but he also argues that this sprawling network of prisons and forced labor camps served as a key site of class formation of a post-revolutionary working class.

The working class that existed in the early 20th century had been decimated by the slaughter of the First World War, the violence and destruction of the civil war, famine, and the Soviet government’s suppression of political opponents. While the Gulag played an important part in the last of these, Kellogg argues, it also became the place where a new working class was formed. This was because of, first, the inmates’ role in building the infrastructure of the Soviet economy and, second, the struggles the imprisoned workers waged to improve their conditions.

From the late 1920s to the mid-30s, hundreds of thousands of revolutionaries, many of them anti-Stalin socialists, were sent to the camps. Kellogg’s descriptions of conditions in the camps, and the repression that filled them, are heartbreaking.

The Gulag was not just prisons, but also forced labor camps. The inmates dug coal, felled trees, dug canals, mined for gold, etc. They performed much of the labor needed to build the infrastructure and provide raw materials for the Soviet economy from the 1930s to 1950s. This economic role, the Gulag’s role in “primary accumulation,” in turn drove its need for more inmates/laborers.

The political prisoners of the 1930s were replaced by striking workers; workers accused of sabotage for falling asleep at work; soldiers who had been taken prisoner during the Second World War and returned to the Soviet Union after surviving German prison camps; ethnic minorities who were removed from their lands; peasants who had resisted collectivization, and hundreds of thousands of others deemed “enemies” by the Soviet state.

For Kellogg, the Gulag was not a site of class formation just because lots of people worked there. An additional necessary element was that workers organized and fought to improve their situation through collective action.

First came hunger strikes in the mid-1930s. Kellogg discusses a large strike at the Vorkuta camp in 1936. This strike was for better conditions and also to protest the show trials featuring the former Bolshevik leaders, Kamenev and Zinoviev.

This strike lasted four months and ended only after NKVD (the new name for the secret police) headquarters sent a message stating, “Inform the hunger strikers held in the Vorkuta mines that all their demands will be satisfied.” (TBB, 39)

Kellogg mentions strikes at other camps that also ended in victory for the strikers. However, these victories were pyrrhic — within two years, almost all of the strikers had been executed. Kellogg describes the elimination of political prisoners using the accounts of several former prisoners, as well as independent researchers.

Striking Against the Gulag

In this chapter, Kellogg describes 1) how the Gulag became central to Soviet industrialization and 2) how prisoners built the solidarity and organization necessary to wage a mass strike against the forced labor system.

The remarkable story of how the prisoners organized deserves to be widely known. Kellogg writes about the rebirth of an anti-Stalinist left following the Second World War.

This left was repressed and many of its supporters sent to the camps. There they worked to overcome divisions between “criminals” and “politicals,” and among the different nationalities. They also had to overcome the deep anti-communism of many of the national minorities who had suffered oppression at the hands of the Stalinist state.

In the telling, Kellogg relates several incidents in the late 1940s and early 1950s where prisoners rose up, killed their guards, took their weapons and marched on nearby towns in the hope of sparking a more widespread rebellion. Kellogg compares these rebellions to that of Spartacus and the enslaved in Rome and, like Spartacus and his followers, these were brutally put down.

Then, following the death of Stalin in March, 1953, and inspired by the little they heard about the workers’ uprising in East Germany, imprisoned workers in the camps around Vorkuta began what became a mass strike. On July 21, 1953, “six thousand forced laborers at mine Pits no. 1 and no. 7, where ITL students (left-wing socialists and Leninists —SD) and anarchists were particularly influential on the strike committees, refused to go to work.” (TBB, 68)

The strike spread and, “within ten days, twenty big pits inside the city and its environs were shut down tight.” (69) Strike committees took control of large sections of the camps, ensuring gas did not build up in the shut mines, running bakeries, infirmaries and laundries.

On August 1, 1953 the armed response began. The strike was broken at one small camp, but others held out for weeks or even months, according to Kellogg, with some pits not returning to work until November.

The strikes were not isolated to the Vorkuta area nor did they end in 1953. “New strikes kept breaking out through 1954 and 1955 until finally a general amnesty of political prisoners was granted and the camp system partly dismantled.” (TBB, 73)
Why were the strikes in the early 1950s more effective than those in the 1930s? Kellogg argues:

“By using the strike — the classic tactic of the international workers’ movement — the Vorkuta workers indicated that they were a new force to be reckoned with. In the 1930s, the Vorkuta inmates had only moral power on their side. …By the 1950s, however, the forced labour inmates of Vorkuta had, in addition to moral power, economic power.”

In addition: “By the 1950s, the conditions that made forced labor economically “rational” for the Russian economy were disappearing….Forced labour was less suited to the next stage of industrial development than it had been to the stage of ‘primary accumulation.’” (73)

For Kellogg, “(T)he events of 1953 represented an economic transformation. Most importantly, however, those events represented the transformation of the mass of forced labourers into a collectivity of proletarians.” (74)

Toward Independent Organization

The final strike wave Kellogg draws our attention to was from 1989 to 1991. These were significant not only because of the numbers involved but also because the striking miners, no longer inmates in the Gulag, no longer facing the level of repression of the 1930s and 1950s, sought to build independent workers’ organizations.

The first sets of strikes, involving half a million strikers and centered in the coal mines of Ukraine’s Donbass, broke out in July, 1989. The initial demands were economic. The strikers sought, “more soap, detergent, toothpaste, sausage, shoes and underwear, more sugar, tea, and bread,” according to David Remnick. (TBB, 79)

But something new happened once the strikers won some of their demands and returned to work. “With the end of the strike,” according to historian David Mandel, “the strike committees did not disband but transformed themselves into workers’ committees, whose main task was to monitor the execution of the agreements.”

Kellogg goes on to write, “For the first time in seventy years, organizations based in the working-class, independent of the state and powerful enough to avoid instant repression from the regime, were operating in the Soviet Union. A silence of more than three generations was ending.” (80)

Beginning in October, miners and other workers engaged in a series of strikes that combined economic and explicitly political demands. Reporting on a warning strike that took place on November 1, 1989, Michael Dobbs of the Washington Post writes, “In addition to routine economic demands, the strikers in the Donetsk in the Ukraine, called for abolition of the leading role of the Communist Party and direct election of the Soviet President. Similar political demands have been made by miners in the northern city of Vorkuta.” (Quoted in TBB, 81)

A strike of miners in the Donbass, Vorkuta and Siberia in July 1990, raised the demand, “…for the nationalization of all Communist Party property and the elimination of all party political cells in the government, the army and the KGB.” (82)

Asked in 1989 why the Vorkuta miners were the most militant and politicized, Boris Kagarlitsky, then a young Marxist sociologist (currently imprisoned in Russia for his opposition to Putin’s war in Ukraine), had this to say:

“It’s important to know that these miners are the sons and daughters of Stalin’s victims. No one other than those in the labour camps ever worked in the mines.” Kagarlitsky said today’s miners were aware of the Trotskyists who were forced to work in the Vorkuta labour camps during Stalin’s purges. “They are their sons and daughters. No one ever moves there, so these are the second and third generation.” (88)

The year 1991 proved to be the high point for this wave of increasingly political strikes. Kellogg discusses how decades of authoritarianism, compounded by physical isolation, could not be overcome in just a few years.

The miners (and other workers) were not in a position to put forward their own solutions to the political and economic crisis. Instead, they looked to Russian President Boris Yeltsin and his pro-market reforms as an alternative to Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika. By 1993, economic crisis had become economic catastrophe.

Self-Emancipation versus Substitutionism

In his second section of Truth Behind Bars, Kellogg develops the central political argument of the book: that while drives toward both self-emancipation and substitutionism were present in the Bolshevik Party and the Russian Revolution, substitutionism came to dominate very early in the course of the revolution.

As Kellogg writes in the Preface:

“The concept of self-emancipation has at its core the idea that liberation from oppression can be achieved only by the self-activity of the oppressed, who must become the agents of their own emancipation. By contrast, substitutionism refers to attempts to substitute the actions of others for the agency of the oppressed.” (TBB, xxi)

He further defines substitutionism as, “acting in a ‘revolutionary’ manner even in the absence of any real prospect of mass support and self-emancipation” (94)

To illustrate substitutionism and its effects, Kellogg discusses concrete events from the Russian Revolutions and the early years of the new Soviet state. He discusses the role played by “peasants in uniforms” in the events of October (see accompanying review of World Bolshevism); the Bolsheviks’ analysis of the class structure of the countryside; and, the use of the Red Army to export social revolution. He concludes the section by looking at the efforts of party vanguards to force the pace of revolutions.

A. The Agrarian Question:

In this chapter, Kellogg argues that Lenin’s analysis of the class structure of the Russian countryside was so badly flawed that it led the Bolsheviks and the Soviet government to enact policies — such as forced confiscation of grains and farm animals that resulted in a de facto war on the countryside that divided workers from peasants.

This undermined support among the peasants for the new Soviet government, leading some to support the White (counterrevolutionary) armies. The loss of support in the countryside, combined with the occupation of major agricultural areas, first by the Germans and then the counter revolutionary armies, plus the destruction of transportation infrastructure, added to the disastrous fall in agricultural production that led to mass hunger in the cities in the early years of the revolution.

In brief, Kellogg contends that Lenin was mistaken about there being a significant market-oriented, petit-bourgeois layer in the countryside. (He includes a discussion of the implications of Lenin and the Bolsheviks using “petit-bourgeois” or “petty bourgeois” in their discussions.)

He places his arguments about this supposed rich layer, kulaks, within a discussion of the role of the village commune — the mir — and the development of the reforms fostered by the czar’s minister Stolypin at the end of the 19th century. These reforms, according to Kellogg, had led to a slow growth of a market-oriented layer in the countryside based on an “American-style” sector of family farms, rather than a “Prussian-style” sector of large estates employing landless agricultural workers.

By carrying out the long-sought land reform, the Soviet government at first won broad support among the peasantry. This reform also had the result of strengthening the mir, an institution based upon and maintaining subsistence farming, as opposed to farming to produce a surplus for the market.

But just a few months after the large estates and smaller family farms were broken up and placed under the control of the mir, the first food requisitioning detachments appeared in the villages. Peasants felt betrayed by the government they had supported. The result was several years of conflict between the cities and countryside, taking place within the broader war against the counter-revolutionary armies and the invasions by the armies of several other nations.

The war with the countryside ended only with the defeat of the counter-revolutionary armies and the introduction of the market reforms of the New Economic Policy in 1921. But then, just a few years later, came Stalinist forced collectivization and the “war on the kulaks” — and another period of famine (most brutally in Ukraine where millions died of starvation).

B. Bank Robberies:

Following the defeat of the 1905 revolution, the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Bolsheviks engaged in bank robberies — “expropriations” — to raise funds for their work and in anticipation of an imminent renewal of the revolutionary upsurge. Kellogg writes that this practice was very controversial and was opposed by the majority of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, of which the Bolsheviks were still a faction. He states that at the 1906 Stockholm Congress, the RSDLP voted against armed terrorism, which included “expropriations.” Lenin and the Bolsheviks disregarded this. (TBB, 211)

He argues that the Bolsheviks, especially Lenin, were particularly open to this practice because of the large number of “professional revolutionaries” the faction supported. They needed money to maintain their organizers, as well as to pay for printing and other organizational costs. Other factions that did not rely as much on full-time staff tended to oppose the “expropriations.”

Kellogg gives special attention to a robbery in Tiflis (now Tblisi), Georgia in 1907. A Bolshevik squad attacked a government stagecoach passing through the center of the city. Using bombs and pistols, they successfully made off with the equivalent (in 2015) of $10 million. They also killed approximately 40 bystanders and injured many more.

According to Kellogg, this took place “three weeks after the closing of the Fifth Congress of the RSDLP, held in London, where the delegates had voted unanimously to disband all fighting squads associated with the party.” (212)

Why did a majority of the RSDLP (and, according to Trotsky, “the majority of the Bolshevik faction”) oppose the actions of the fighting squads? (216) Kellogg suggests that the main reason was concern that these actions led to increasing criminality and indiscipline by party members. This in turn would discredit the party in the eyes of the workers they sought to organize and the wider democratic movement.

Differences over whether to engage in “criminal” activities to fund revolutionary organizations certainly didn’t end after the bombs were thrown in Tiflis. We need only look at decisions by armed opposition groups/liberation organizations, from Northern Ireland to Colombia, to involve themselves in drug trafficking to bring the matter closer to home and to weigh the effects of this activity on the revolutionaries themselves.

C. Probing with Bayonets:

In April 1920, the new government of Poland (which had only regained independence in 1918 after over 100 years of partition — occupation — by Russia, Prussia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire) invaded Soviet Ukraine. The Red Army was able to push the Polish troops back. The Russian Communist leadership chose not to stop at the border but to invade Poland and “probe with bayonets” the readiness of Polish workers and peasants for revolution.

The Red Army advanced until it almost reached Warsaw, where this effort to force the pace of revolution from the outside suffered a massive defeat. Lenin supported the push into Poland. In a rare instance of agreement, both the Menshevik Martov and Trotsky opposed it. Lenin and the rest of the Soviet leadership totally misread how an invasion by Russian forces — the historic oppressor of Poland — would stoke nationalist sentiment among Polish workers and peasants (just as Poland’s invasion of Ukraine had stoked nationalist sentiment among Russian workers and peasants.)

The decision to substitute the Red Army for the self-activity of the Polish workers, or as Lenin put it, “to assist the sovietization of Poland,” (143) not only produced a significant military defeat for the Red Army (which lost over 100,000 dead, wounded or interned), but, according to Trotsky, “the development of the Polish revolution received a crushing blow.” (TBB, 151)

The Red Army was more successful in its invasion and occupation of Georgia in 1921. This invasion was not because Georgia posed any military threat to Soviet Russia, as Poland had. It was seen by some in the Russian leadership, though, as a political threat. Georgia was an independent republic where the Mensheviks, not the Bolsheviks, were the dominant party.

Whatever the faults of the Mensheviks as a governing party, the Russians chose to use the Red Army, not organizing among Georgian workers and farmers, to “win” power in Georgia and put an effective end to Georgian independence for decades.

The case of Georgia shows how firmly established substitutionism had become — neither Lenin nor Trotsky supported the invasion of Georgia, but with Trotsky (the Commissar for Military Affairs) away from Moscow, Stalin and others in the leadership ordered troops to move. The government gave its support only after units of the Red Army had already been ordered into Georgia from Armenia, ostensibly in support of a popular uprising.

D. Hungary 1919 and Germany 1921:

In March, 1919, following a period of heightened class struggle in 1918 and 1919, the Communists and Social Democrats in Hungary agreed to proclaim a soviet republic. According to Kellogg, the Social Democrats were willing to make a deal with the Communists out of hope for military aid from revolutionary Russia as the Austro-Hungarian empire broke up.

Kellogg describes a series of measures to impose a social revolution from the top down taken by a government with a very small base in the country. He quotes from a remarkable exchange between two leading members of the Communist International, Karl Radek and Paul Levi.

Radek, a longtime member of socialist groups in Poland and Germany and a member of the Executive Committee of the Comintern, recognizing the weakness of the new government, observed that “the Communists should have maintained the gallows next to government buildings in order, if necessary, to demonstrate to their dear allies the concrete meaning of proletarian dictatorship.” In response, Levi, a German communist from the Luxemburg wing of the German party, wrote:

“To propose the gallows, at the moment of the establishment of soviet-power, as the method of unifying and amalgamating the proletariat; to undertake the organization and consolidation of the proletariat not on the basis of the ‘clear, unambiguous will of the great majority of the proletariat,’ ‘its conscious affirmation of the views, aims, and methods of struggle’ of the Communists (according to Rosa Luxemburg), but on the basis of mutual hangings, all this strikes me — I do not want to use strong words — as a very unfortunate method for the unification of the proletariat.” (TBB, 177-8)

The Soviet government in Hungary was overthrown after 133 days. It was followed by years of right-wing dictatorship.

Two years later, the German Communist Party (KPD — an actual mass party with over 400,000 members, but still a minority within the German working class) called for a mass strike to try to force the issue of power. This became known as the March Action.

In the event, only about 200,000 workers struck. The strike failed and the KPD suffered severe repression and significant loss of membership. While the leadership of the Comintern had supported the March Action, Paul Levi and Clara Zetkin (both Luxemburgists) had been “absolutely clear that the German Left was in no position to challenge state power.” (TBB, 168, 169)

Seeds of the Gulag and Stalinism

Each section of Truth Behind Bars is worth reading in its own right. Following his third section “In the Rear-View Mirror,” Kellogg ties them together in a valuable concluding discussion of “Ends and Means.” Specifically, he argues that the means used to achieve political ends shape the ends that are achieved. This is not a novel opinion but, drawing on the experience of the Russian Revolution, Kellogg argues it forcefully.

He discusses the early decision by Lenin and the new government to reinstitute the death penalty (supported by Lenin, opposed by Martov and Luxemburg and, initially, Trotsky) and to launch political terror against their supposed political enemies. He places the establishment of the Cheka — the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage (the secret police) — in December, 1917, and highlights its role in breaking strikes, many of which had been called to force the Bolsheviks to agree to a multi-party, socialist coalition government. The use of the means of terror and repression to support the end of a workers’ government worked against the achievement of that end. In Kellogg’s telling, there is a clear link between the embrace of “political terror” by the Bolsheviks and the Gulag.

The Constituent Assembly Controversy:

A Constituent Assembly had been seen by a generation of Russian revolutionaries and reformers as a means to the end of building a broad-based democratic political order. Elections to one were finally held in November 1917, just a few weeks after the overthrow of the Provisional Revolutionary Government.

The Bolsheviks received about 24% of the vote (Kellogg argues that, with the support of allies in the Left SRs and other parties, a Bolshevik-led bloc would have had well over 30%.) The Constituent Assembly convened in January, 1918. After just one session, it was dispersed and never met again. Demonstrations in support were suppressed by the government. Workers were killed when Red Guards dispersed the demonstrators with live ammunition.

The Bolsheviks argued that the Assembly did not accurately reflect the support held by the different parties because the candidates were nominated before the Provisional government was overthrown and before the Left SRs formally broke with the right-wing of their party and formed their own party.

This seems a fair point. So why not, as Rosa Luxemburg suggested, hold new elections? (291) What effect did the suppression of this means have on the end of a democratic, working-class led state?(4)

On Ends and Means

For Kellogg, this discussion of ends and means is, ultimately, a discussion of ethics, which he argues “is deeply related to the tension between self-emancipation and substitutionism.” Clearly, Kellogg believes that the means used shape, alter or distort the ends achieved. He goes as far as stating that, “the ends we achieve are completely shaped by the means we employ.” (295)

To make the counter-argument, that the ends do justify the means employed to achieve them, he turns to Trotsky who, in his book, Their Morals and Ours, attempted to do just that.

In brief Trotsky argues that, yes, the ends justify the means; but the ends must also be justified. He writes, “From the Marxist point of view, which expresses the historical interests of the proletariat, the end is justified if it leads to increasing the power of humanity over nature and to the abolition of the power of one person over another.” (TBB, 295)

Kellogg responds that “the historical interests of the proletariat” were “…not served by mass internment in the Gulag. They were not served by the mass depopulation of Leningrad in 1934 and 1935, nor by the Great Terror of 1937 and 1938. The historical interests of the German proletariat were ill-served by the instrument created by the Russian Revolution, the Communist International.”

Arguing that we cannot justify an action in the present by results that will become visible only in the future, he makes what seems to me to be the central point of this discussion of ends and means:

“(W)e do not and cannot know the long-term, or even immediate term, consequences of our actions. The very nature of ethics is to provide guidance as to what actions to take in the present, precisely when we are not aware of how things will work out in the future.” (296)

In Truth Behind Bars, Paul Kellogg has traced the germination of the seed that became dominant back to the earliest days of the revolution. His arguments, and those of Julius Martov, are bound to be controversial among defenders of the Russian Revolution, even those who do so critically.

Nevertheless, his book should be of interest to those defenders. It should also be of interest to those who are working toward future revolutions, as they weigh issues of ends and means as they decide on their strategies and tactics.

Notes

1. Steinberg resigned his position in March, 1918, in protest over the signing of the Brest-Litovsk treaty with Germany. He did not participate in the uprising by some Left SRs against the Bolsheviks later in 1918. Arrested by the Cheka (early Soviet secret police) in early 1919, he was imprisoned for several months. He left the Soviet Union and went into exile in 1923.
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2. Lenin’s Heir (1945), from Carnets (1936-1947), Agone, Marseilles, 2012. https://www.marxists.org/archive/serge/1945/05/lenins-heir.htm
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3. State terror refers to extreme physical coercion of suspected opponents of the state — in this case, the Soviet state. The means of terror included the taking of hostages to ensure good conduct by opponents, as well as the summary execution of hostages, prisoners, strikers and peasants. The “Red Terror” was declared in the fall of 1918, following the assassination of some leading Communists and the attempted assassination of Lenin. While the Red Terror and the Great Terror refer to specific periods of repression, Kellogg argues that the practice of political terror occurred outside of those specific periods. It was preceded by the closing of opposition newspapers and the suppression of opposition parties, and it pre-dated the Red Terror launched in 1918.
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4. In the fall of 1918, the Mensheviks dropped their call for a Constituent Assembly. They explained this by arguing the Constituent Assembly had become “a screen behind which the party that won the elections (was) compromising … with counterrevolutionary forces of capitalism and militarism…” from Martov’s letter of October 16, 1918, quoted in The Mensheviks, edited by Leopold H. Haimson, University of Chicago Press, 1974, 183.
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March-April 2025, ATC 235