†Lenin, PSS, XI, 222. Both Wolfe (Three, 291–94) and Schapiro (Communist Party, 77–78) believe this statement to be an aberration on Lenin’s part, because he subsequently said on many occasions that Russia could not bypass the “capitalist” and “democratic” phase. But as his behavior in 1917 would reveal, he only paid lip service to the idea of a “democratic” revolution: his true strategy called for an immediate transition from “bourgeois” democracy to the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
*Proletarii, August 21, 1906, No. 1, in A. I. Spiridovich, Istoriia Bol’shevizma v Rossii (Paris, 1922), 138. The Okhrana, whose agents kept it well informed on Bolshevik affairs, reported shortly before the February Revolution that Lenin was not opposed to terror but thought that the SRs attached too much importance to it: Report dated December 24, 1916/January 6, 1917, Hoover Institution, Okhrana Archives, Index No. XVIIa-XVIId, Folder 5, No. R. As we shall note, his organization supplied the SRs with explosives for their terrorist operations.
*These facts did not escape Stalin. Referring to the Fifth Congress, which he had attended, he wrote: “Statistics showed that the majority of the Menshevik faction consists of Jews.… On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of the Bolshevik faction consists of Russians.… In this connection, one of the Bolsheviks observed in jest (it seems it was Comrade Aleksinskii) that the Mensheviks are a Jewish faction, the Bolsheviks a genuine Russian faction, hence it would not be a bad idea for us Bolsheviks to organize a pogrom in the party”: I. V. Stalin, Sochineniia, II (Moscow, 1946) 50–51.
*Krasin’s employment by this German electronics firm may not have been fortuitous. According to the head of Russian counterintelligence in 1917, Siemens had used its agencies for purposes of espionage, which led to the shutting down of its office in southern Russia: B. Nikitin, Rokovye gody (Paris, 1937), 118.
*The importance of such subsidies was stressed by Lenin in a letter of December 1904 to a potential donor: “Our undertaking is faced with bankruptcy if we do not hold out with the help of extraordinary resources for at least half a year. And in order to hold out without cutting back, we need a minimum of two thousand rubles a month”: Lenin, PSS, XLVI, 433.
*Padenie, V, 69, and I, 315. He abolished police cells in the armed forces and in secondary schools, on the grounds that it was improper for men in uniform and students to inform on each other. S. P. Beletskii, the director of the Police Department and Malinovskii’s immediate supervisor, believed that these measures disorganized the work of political counterintelligence: Ibid., V, 70–71, 75. Beletskii was shot in September 1918 by the Cheka in the first wave of the Red Terror.
*The possibility has been raised that Dzhunkovskii fired Malinovskii because he was alarmed by the effect his inflammatory Duma speeches were having on workers at a time when Russia was in the grip of a new wave of industrial strikes: Ralph Carter Elwood, Roman Malinovsky (Newtonville, Mass., 1977), 41–43.
†Lenin, PSS, XXV, 394. In 1915, Malinovskii volunteered for the Russian armies in France. Wounded and captured by the Germans, he conducted pro-German propaganda among Russian prisoners of war. During this time, he maintained a regular correspondence with Lenin: Padenie, VII, 374; Elwood, Malinovsky, 59; Grigorii Aronson, Rossiia nakanune Revoliutsii (New York, 1962), 53–54.
*Vestnik Vremennogo Pravitel’stva, No. 81/127 (June 16, 1917), 3. Lenin’s testimony on Malinovskii is published neither in the multivolume edition of the commission’s records (Padenie) nor in his Collected Works.
†Tatiana Aleksinskii recalls that when questions were raised about the possible presence on the Central Committee of a police informer, Zinoviev quoted from Gogol’s Inspector Generaclass="underline" “A good household makes use even of garbage.” La Grande Revue, XXVII, No. 9 (September 1923), 459.
‡The likelihood that Lenin was aware of Malinovskii’s police connections is accepted, in addition to Burtsev, by Stefan Possony (Lenin: The Compulsive Revolutionary, Chicago, 1964, 142–43). Malinovskii’s biographer rejects this hypothesis on the grounds that the Bolsheviks learned far less from Malinovskii about the police than the police learned about the Bolsheviks (Elwood, Malinovsky, 65–66). But he ignores Lenin’s own argument as well as Spiridovich’s statement about the use of double agents, cited above.
*Lenin, PSS, XXVI, 6. Lenin’s puzzling emphasis on Russia’s “oppression” of the Ukraine must be explained at least in part by his financial arrangements with the Austrian Government. He did not demand that the Ukrainians also be liberated from Austrian rule.
† An accusation to this effect is made by General Spiridovich, the usually well-informed official of the gendarmerie. He claims, without furnishing proof, that in June and July 1914 Lenin traveled twice to Berlin to work out with the Germans a plan of seditious activity in the rear of the Russian armies, for which he was to be paid 70 million marks: Spiridovich, Istoriia Bol’shevizma, 263–65.
*He felt vindicated by the events. In 1918, referring to the 1917 Revolution, he wrote that “Prussian guns played a larger role in it than Bolshevik leaflets. In particular, I believe that the Russian émigrés would still be wandering in emigration and stewing in their own juice if German regiments had not reached the Vistula”: Izvne (Stockholm), No. 1 (January 22, 1918), 2.
*On him, see Michael Futrell in St. Antony’s Papers, No. 12, Soviet Affairs, No. 3 (London, 1962), 23–52. The author had a unique opportunity to interview this Estonian but, unfortunately, chose to accept his testimony rather uncritically.
†Futrell in Soviet Affairs, 47, states that this was his only encounter with the Bolshevik leader, but this seems most unlikely.
‡It is reproduced in a cable from the German Minister in Berne, Count Romberg, to Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg in Berlin, dated September 30, 1915: Werner Hahlweg, Lenins Rückkehr nach Russland, 1917 (Leiden, 1957), 40–43 (English translation in Zeman, Germany, 6–7).
*Hans Steinwachs of the Political Section, German General Staff, to Minister Diego von Bergen of the Foreign Office, in Zeman, Germany, 17. The language of this document indicates that Kesküla misinformed Futrell when he intimated that he had obtained such reports by infiltrating Lenin’s organization in Sweden: Futrell in Soviet Affairs, 24.
*Lenin, Sochineniia, XIX, 437. “And objectively who profits by the slogan of peace?” Lenin wrote at this time. “Certainly not the revolutionary proletariat. Not the idea of using the war to speed up the collapse of capitalism.” Citing these words, Adam Ulam comments: “He overlooked the fact that the lives of millions of human beings also could have ‘profited’ by the ‘slogan of peace’ ”: The Bolsheviks (New York, 1965), 306.