8 April 2004

SOVIET HISTORY - 3

I don't really want to get into this big-time, but a couple of people have reminded me that there is rather a lot of good stuff on the early years of the Russian revolution on the web from libertarian sources, including Emma Goldmann's mid-1920s polemics, My Disillusionment in Russia and My Further Disillusionment in Russia (click here), Alexander Berkman's (much better) The Bolshevik Myth from the same period (click here), Ida Mett’s account of the Kronstadt revolt, first published in France in the late 1940s (click here), Ante Ciliga’s take on the same in a late-1930s polemic against Trotsky (click here) and Maurice Brinton’s (much later) The Bolsheviks and Worker’s Control (click here). But there isn’t a lot from the rest of the democratic left – Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary – in part because many Mensheviks and SRs who could have raised a fuss in the early years of the Bolshevik dictatorship decided not to, in part because what material the reformist democratic socialists did produce has not been republished by enthusiastic anarchists . . .

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