Top Highlights

• The Soviet State has not established in any instance electiveness and recall of public officials.
• One outstanding study of socialist opposition to Bolshevik rule finds that workers’ demands in 1918-19 centered not only on matters like food distribution and working hours, but also on demands for “free elections to the Soviets, release of all political prisoners, and freedom of political activity for the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries”
• Koenker and Rosenberg concluded that rather than the leadership of the Vanguard Party, it was, in fact, factory-centred strike activism within the context of social and economic breakdown that led workers to assume a temporary “revolutionary” perspective. With the exception of a hardcore of party members, most Russian workers gave their support to ...
• The Emancipation of Labour group was the seed of the Bolshevik Party, but it was itself the inheritor of a unique Russian revolutionary tradition. Given the nature of Russian society, this had of necessity been a tradition of revolution from above, and one could argue that the Bolshevik Party did not, ultimately, depart from this.
• Since then, all attempts at radical reform, let alone revolution, had been instigated from the top, from the modernising programme of Peter the Great to the liberal aristocratic “Decembrists” of 1812. Only the unruly mass rebellions of Stenka Razin in 1671-72 and Yemelyan Pugachev in 1773-74 had deviated from that pattern, being movements of discon...