Likewise I'm sure it's purely co-incidental that throughout the years of Cold War those parts of Orwell's work which can be seen as an literary attack on Eurasia, sorry I mean the U.S.S.R., thrived while his indictment's of British capitalism ('The Road to Wigan Peer'), poverty ('Down and out in Paris and London') and the British Empire ('Burmese Days) were largely forgotten (disappeared down the 'memory hole' perhaps).
Furthermore his inability to find a publisher for 'Animal Farm' when the British Empire was allied with the Kremlin is again just more evidence of the hand of co-incidence.
'Animal Farm' is not just a normal literary work, it cannot be understood as such, it is polemic by fable, and as such it must be judged on the basis of it's political argument. There can be no do doubt about this, Orwell himself said so "Animal Farm was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing , to fuse the political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole."
Every character in the book either represents a historic individual or a social type (or what Orwell imagined to be a social type) and every event is a representation of what Orwell considered to be the key events of the Russian Revolution and the first two decades of the 'Soviet' state's existence.
The relevance of 'Animal Farm' is apparent when you consider that it is the widest read book in the English language on any revolution and as such plays a major role in shaping the popular view of revolution in general.
A brief synopsis of what 'Animal Farm' says about the revolution, would be this:
Firstly the revolution is created by the pigs, i.e. the Bolsheviks, then the original goals of the revolution are perverted by the Bolsheviks/pigs and at all times the other animals submit to the pigs.
The pigs take the initiative always because they are naturally more intelligent than the other animals who cannot get it together to resist the pigs or even comprehend that they need to do so because they are naturally stupid.
Some quotations will illustrate the accuracy of this synopsis:
"Major's speech had given to the more intelligent animals on the farm a completely new outlook on life"
"The work of teaching and organising the others fell naturally upon the pigs, who were generally recognised as being the cleverest of the animals."
"Their most faithful disciples were the two cart-horses Boxer and Clover. These two had great difficulty in thinking anything out for themselves, but having once accepted the pigs as their teachers they absorbed everything that they were told ...."
The central premise of Animal Farm is that the revolution was an external process imposed by the pigs/Bolsheviks and that the "perversion of the original doctrine" (to use Orwell's phrase, actually it is questionable to what extent the original doctrine was perverted) was down to the inability of the working people of the Russian Empire to comprehend the fact that they were being exploited and oppressed by a new set of masters (after all they needed the pigs/Bolsheviks to tell them that was the case under human rule), or articulate any nagging doubts, let alone offer any resistance to the pigs/Bolsheviks. It is difficult to imagine an interpretation of these events which could be more untrue than that.
Throughout Animal Farm Orwell presents the other animals as going along with the Pigs perversion of the original ideals of the revolution out of their natural ignorance and stupidity, at all times the animals, in particular, Boxer, the representative of the urban working class, are deluded by the greater cunning of Squealer, the representative of the propaganda machine. Their fooling made all the easier by their inability to read or remember. Some examples:
"When it was put to them in this light , they had no more to say. The importance of keeping the pigs in good health was all to obvious. So it was agreed without further argument that the milk and the windfall apples (and also the main crop of apples when they ripened) should be reserved for the pigs alone."
The ending of the Sunday meeting, representing the closure of Soviet democracy (which actually happened a lot earlier than is presented in Animal Farm):
"the animals were dismayed by this announcement. Several of them would have protested if they could have found the right arguments. Even Boxer was vaguely troubled. He set his ears back, shock his forelock several times and tried hard to marshal his thoughts; but in the end he could not think of anything to say."
Of course if the Russian people had actually been like this, there would have been no need to repress the democratic aspects of the revolution!
"All that year the animals worked like slaves . But they were happy in their work; they grudged no effort or sacrifice, well aware that everything that they did was for the benefit of themselves and those of their kind who would come after them, and not for a pack of idle, thieving human beings."
"Clover warned him sometimes to be careful not to overstrain himself, but Boxer would never listen to her. His two slogans 'I Will Work Harder' and 'Napoleon is Always Right', seemed to him a sufficient answer to all problems."
"It was about this time that the pigs suddenly moved into the farmhouse and took up residence there. Again the animals seemed to remember that a resolution against this had been passed in the early days, and again Squealer was able to convince them this was not the case."
"Our Leader, Comrade Napoleon,' announced Squealer, speaking very slowly and firmly, 'has stated categorically &endash; categorically comrade &endash; that Snowball was Jones's agent from the very beginning - yes, and from long before the Rebellion was ever thought of'
'Ah, that is different!' said Boxer. 'If Comrade Napoleon says it, it must be right."
"In any case he had no difficulty in proving to the other animals that they were not in reality short of food, whatever the appearances might be."
And so on, again and again, each time there is a departure from the original Seven Commandments the animals can not remember what the original was, and have difficulty reading the mural of the Commandments. In fact they are hardly capable of having any thought independent of the Pigs (who are naturally more intelligent than everyone else).
There is one rebellion in Animal Farm, that of the hens, representing the peasantry, resisting Napoleon's plan to trade eggs with humans. This being a parable for the resistance of the peasantry to the imposition of State control over the land and the removal of the land from the control of those that work it. That is to say, the "de-kulakisation" and "collectivisation" campaigns of the late 1920ies/early 1930ies. Orwell tells us that "For the first time since the expulsion of Jones there was something resembling a rebellion.".
The only other opposition is that of the pigs, essentially a representation of the various internal power struggles within the Party leadership.
However, reality was something different, and once this is appreciated the entire story of the Russian Revolution is seen in a different light and Animal Farm seen as a distortion. For the Russian people of this period were far from being fools deluded by their naturally more intelligent masters.
In fact there was a popular resistance to the Bolshevik counter-revolution , right from the beginning, in the summer of 1918, to culminate in late 1920/early 1921 and after resistance was crushed with massive violence discontent continued. Resistance to a far greater extent than Orwell portrays it in a single scene out of step with the rest of the book.
Also a resistance which began much earlier than 1929.
Once this fact is appreciated we can only reject his account of how the "Communist" Party remained in power.
This can be seen from innumerable sources, from across the political spectrum, from Bolsheviks, to White Russians, to exiled anarchists, to dissident writers, to modern day academics of both East and West.
For starters Lenin: "This petty-bourgeois counter-revolution is undoubtedly more dangerous than Denikin, Yudenich, and Kolchak put together." (1).
Petty-bourgeois being a scientific socialist term for any one opposed to THE PARTY, counter-revolution, in this context meaning such things as wanting free elections to Soviets, or not wanting to have your produce stolen by the government. He is of course referring to people's revolts against the dictatorship.
Again Lenin: "at home we have a growth of banditry and kulak revolts.", "There are no deliveries from Siberia now, because kulak rebels have cut off the railway". (2) 'Kulak' and 'Bandit' being again scientific socialist terms for, perhaps for people who, to quote Trotsky, "have made a fetish of democratic principles", who "have placed the worker's right to elect representatives above the party. As if the party were not entitled to assert it's dictatorship even if that dictatorship clashed with the passing moods of the worker's democracy." (3)
Victor Serge, another Bolshevik, "We knew that in European Russia alone there were at least fifty centres of peasant insurrection." (4) Like Lenin Serge is referring to early 1921.
The official history of the Communist Party from the Stalin era describing the same times as Lenin and Serge: "Kulak revolts, engineered by Whiteguards and Socialist-Revolutionaries, broke out in Siberia, the Ukrainne and the Tambov province (Antonov's rebellion). All kinds of counter-revolutionary elements &endash; Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, Anarchists, Whiteguards, bourgeois nationalists &endash; became active again. The enemy adopted new tactics of struggle against the Soviet power. He began to borrow a Soviet garb, and his slogan was no longer the old bankrupt "Down with the Soviets" but a new slogan: "For the Soviets, but without Communists.". (5)
To briefly translate this from the language of scientific socialism, that is the Russian people rising up against the Party ruling class in favour of free elected Soviets, or local councils, as existed in earlier times, before the Bolsheviks borrowed Soviet garb and removed them from democratic control (Soviets were originally a "spontaneous", i.e. non-party, development during the revolution of 1905 initially opposed by the leftist politicians).
And so to academic historians: "Reports on the increasing frequency of peasant's armed resistance to the collection of the food levy were coming in from all sides: from Vitebsk and Smolensk in the west, Viatka in the northeast, Ryazan and Penza to the east, and Orel, Kursk, Voronezh , and Tula to the south. Peasant war was raging in the Ukraine and Siberia as well." (6)
"The peasants often called their revolts - a 'revolution' and that is just what they aimed to be. As in 1917, much of the rural state infrastructure was swept aside by a huge tidal wave of peasant anger and destruction. This was a savage war of vengeance against the Communist regime.
Thousands of Bolsheviks were brutally murdered. Many were the victims of gruesome (and symbolic) tortures: ears, tongues and eyes were cut out; limbs, heads and genitals were cut off; stomachs were sliced open and stuffed with wheat; crosses were branded on foreheads and torsos; Communists were nailed to trees, burned alive, drowned under ice, buried up to their necks and eaten by dogs or rats; while crowds of peasants watched and shouted.
Party and Soviet offices were ransacked . Police stations and rural courts were burned to the ground. Soviet schools and propaganda centres were vandalised. As for the collective farms, the vast majority of them were destroyed and their tools and livestock redistributed among the local peasants. .. .. This reclamation of the peoples property &endash; in effect a new 'looting of the looters' helped the rebel armies to consolidate the support of the local population." (7)
Not quite sheep bleating "Four Legs Good, Two Legs Bad" is it?.
As in the country side so in the cities, but unfortunately not to the same extent or with the same militancy. Go-Slows, strikes and workplace "theft" were common in the Russian Empire under the dictatorship of that proletarian Lenin. The most significant of these being the general strike in Petrograd in late February 1921.
Sticking with historians: "Worker's disturbances broke out in Petrograd on 24 February, triggering a sailors rebellion in Kronstadt. Petrograd was paralysed by the general strike. The strikers were circulating openly anti-Bolshevik leaflets" (8)
We can turn to an exiled Russian anarchist for the text of one of those leaflets:
"In the first place, the workers and peasants need liberty. They do not want to live according to the regulations of the Bolsheviks; they want to decide their own destinies for themselves. Comrades, maintain revolutionary order! Demand, in an organised and determined way: Liberation of all imprisoned socialists and non-party workers; Abolition of the state of siege, and freedom of speech, press and assembly for all who work; Free re-election of shop [factory] committees and of representatives to the unions and the Soviets." (9)
The strike in Petrograd inspired what has became known as the Kronstadt revolt or rebellion in an island and naval base in the bay to the west of Petrograd. Although the terms "revolt" and "rebellion" are perhaps misguiding for what was the adoption of a resolution by a 15,000 strong general assembly, the election of a Provisional Revolutionary Committee and the preparation of fresh elections to the local Soviet.
This particular outburst of democracy was smothered in blood, mass arrests and mass executions. Orwell was aware of it, there is no doubt of that.
Essentially the Bolsheviks had to fight a civil war on two fronts, the external front against rival governments, and the internal front against their subjects. This internal front was, as we have seen Lenin admitting, a far greater threat to the dictatorship than the Allied intervention and the armies of the White Generals.
Considerable resources were devoted to crushing the peasant revolts which by 1920/1921 had developed into full scale insurrectionary guerrilla armies known as the Greens. All the tools and methods of counter-insurgency warfare were deployed; a little reform coupled with armoured cars, aeroplanes, induced famine, hostage taking, destruction of villages and deportation to far flung provinces of the Empire. The death toll from this Red Terror has been estimated at running into the millions. In other words the Bolshevik dictatorship established itself in the Russian Empire through bayonets.
Even at the time of the Second World War, after 20 years of "Communist" indoctrination, after the annihilation of the resistance, the population of the U.S.S.R. was still hostile to the state. Finnish intelligence officers, determining the attitude of Red Army soldiers captured in the Winter War, found that:
"There is a permanent state of fear of everything Soviet, the peasant hates the Kolhoz (state owned farm) and longs for the restoration of his land.". (10)
(The actual Soviets of the revolution having been done away with, the word became synonomus with tyranny - the "Soviet" state.)
In 1941 a Polish officer, released from the GULAG now that with the German invasion of Russia he was on the same side as the Kremlin, observed "the lower strata of the Russian populationÉwere all impressed by the spirit of revolt, by hatred of the regime and unpopularity of the war, which were everywhere in evidence during those first few months when, as a result of the chaos caused by the German offensive, the iron grip of the N.K.V.D. was relaxed.". (11)
A.Anatoli, author of "Babi Yar" a classic memoir of life and atrocities in German occupied Ukraine, recounts how initially the army of the German state was greeted with relief: "my grandfather hated Soviet rule with all his heart and soul and longed for the arrival of the Germans as liberators, on the assumption that there could be nothing worse in the whole world than the Soviet system." (12)
Somewhat different from Orwell's vision "sometimes they clamoured to be allowed to go out in a body and attack Pinchfield Farm, drive out the humans and set the animals free.". Pinchfield Farm representing Nazi Germany. In fact, despite the Nazi programme of racial extermination of all Slavonic peoples, the "Communist" regime was so hated in had to go to enormous lengths of coercion to maintain discipline and order in it's army, and guerrilla forces emerged opposed to both Moscow and Berlin.
I'm ending my brief survey at the point in history where Animal Farm was written, however since then the world has seen brief flowerings of freedom in Hungary, Poland and East Germany and finally the downfall of the East Bloc in '89 &endash; forever revealing the false nature of Orwell's portrayal.
All of this is inexplicable if seen from the classic mainstream view of the revolution, promoted in both East and West, that of revolution equals Bolshevism and Bolshevism equals revolution. Judging from Animal Farm this is a view point Orwell accepted.
In the first scene of the novel Old Major single handedly invents socialism and inspires the animals to revolt. Old Major provides the ideas behind the revolution. Before I go on to quote from an alternative outlook on this question I would like to point out one thing - where the vast majority of the Russian people lived, and therefore where most of the events of the revolution took place, in the rural villages, there was in 1917 almost no Bolshevik organisation and the other parties of the intelligentsia had minimal influence.
"Centuries of serfdom had bred within the peasant a profound mistrust of all authority outside his village. What he wanted was volia, the ancient peasant concept of freedom and autonomy without restraints from the powers that be.
That peasant dream was kept alive by subversive tales of Stenka Razin and Emelian Pugachev, those peasant revolutionaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, whose mythical images continued as late as the 1900s to be seen by peasants flying as ravens across the Volga announcing the advent of utopia.
And there were equally fabulous tales of a 'Kingdom of Opona', somewhere on the edge of the flat earth, where the peasants lived happily, undisturbed by gentry or state" (13)
"For the vast majority of the Russian people the ending of all social privilege was the basic principle of the revolution. The Russians had a long tradition of social levelling stretching back to the peasant commune. It was expressed in the popular notions of social justice which lay at the heart of the 1917 Revolution.
The common belief of the Russian people that surplus wealth was immoral, that property was theft, and that manual labour was the only real source of value owed much less to the doctrines of Marx than it did to the equalitarian customs of the village commune. " (14)
Rather than being directed from above the revolution was created from below.
In representing the February Revolution Orwell half admits this, but then pulls away from this admission by having the animals cower before the final step of breaking into the farm house, until Napoleon leads the way.
Trotsky himself admitted that the February Revolution was independent of, and opposed as premature by, the political parties: "since the committee (of the Vyborg section of the Bolshevik party) thought the time unripe for militant action --- the party was not strong enough and the workers having too few contacts with the soldiers -- they decided not to call for strikes but prepare for revolutionary action at some indefinite time in the future". (15)
"The leaders were watching the movement from above; they hesitated, they lagged -- in other words they did not lead. They dragged after the movement. The nearer one comes to the factories, the greater the decisiveness." (16)
One American book has the title "Three Who Made A Revolution" referring to Stalin, Lenin and Trotsky, well they must have been truly superhuman because in February Lenin was in Switzerland, Trotsky in Boston and Stalin in Siberia!
As with destruction so with construction and throughout March of 1917, before the "great leader" returned to Russia, factory committees were established in the industries of St Petersburg. These were directly democratic, elected by a general assembly of the workforce, with the delegates on the committees replaceable at any time and therefore answerable to those that elected them.
Initially these enforced reforms such as an eight hour day and an end to piece work, but they had wider goals.
As the committee of the famous Putilov works put it "While the workers of the particular enterprises educate themselves in self-management, they prepare themselves for the moment when private ownership of the factories will be abolished and the means of production transferred into the hands of the working class. This great and important goal for which the workers are striving must be kept steadfastly in mind, even if we are carrying out only small details in the meantime". (17)
This was not a matter of "independent republics", the factory committees federated together, and spread to other urban areas as well as in later times establishing barter relationships with village communes.
The factory committees established militia units - the Red Guards, armed with the estimated 70,000 firearms which went missing from military stores during the February Revolution.
While the central or city level Soviet (a Russian word meaning council) was a bureaucratic cancer growth established by the political parties, a talking shop representing the intelligentsia, the local ones were genuinely creations of the people and under democratic control.
Moving away from the capital to the front we find the Army disintegrating itself not by taking orders but by not taking orders! Soldier's committees were set up, along the lines of the factory committees, the more offensive aspects of the Army hierarchy removed, local truces were made with the German or Austro-Hungarian soldiery along with outright mutiny and mass desertion.
In the rural areas the traditional communes, which held the land in common, and took decisions through assemblies of heads of households, took over the lands of the gentry and were revitalised and made more democratic.
The important thing to realise about all this is that it was a self organised, autonomist, independent mass movement of people taking control of their lives and did not reflect the programme of any political party. It was only in April that the Bolsheviks began to orientate themselves to this movement, after it was well under way.
As has already been mentioned in regard to the peasant movement they couldn't even be accused of having anything to do with it, given as they had no influence whatsoever in the villages.
Likewise the first uprisings in St Petersburg against the Provisional Government created after the February revolution were "spontaneous", i.e. non-party, affairs.
"Great October" on the other hand, the Bolshevik seizure of power, was not an uprising of the people, but the coup d'etat of a secret conspiracy.
A secret conspiracy directed against a ruling state already weakened almost to the point of destruction by the revolutionary movement detailed above. The coup encountered immediate opposition from within the working class, in particular from people working in the railways. Unfortunately an opposition in favour of a broad based coalition government and against one party rule rather than an opposition against government in general.
The relationship between Bolshevism and the revolutionary movement is simply this:
Before October Bolshevism supported anti-authoritarian revolt to gain support and to weaken the existing powers so as the Party could be in a better position to gain power for itself. Thus it sucked into it's influence may genuine revolutionary militants, including many later to revolt against it. But their relationship with Bolshevism was an entirely passive one &endash; policy was determined by the centre, and the extent to which the recruits of 1917 turned against the Party, once it's true face was exposed is shown by the minimal amount of working class members it had in 1921. Thus you cannot equate Bolshevism with the base of the party, as they did not direct it's course, and entered into it's influence under false pretences.
After October with the Bolsheviks in power then Factory Committees, Red Guards, local democratic Soviets, and village communes not to forget simple reforms such as the eight hour day, an end to piece work and an end to the saluting of Army officers, became "petit bourgeois" (the ultimate sin) as they were now an impediment to a government different in one important essential: it was controlled by the Bolshevik party.
Thus they were to be suppressed, by carrot or more frequently stick.
Factory committee became one man management.
Red Guard - a democratic militia, became Red Army controlled by the State. Soviets were soviets without free elections, just instruments of the state.
The village communes, with communal ownership of the land, the place where Bolshevism met the most resistance, became first village dictatorships staffed with urban Party activists and eventually, when that didn't work and after much bloodshed they became State run so-called "collective farms".
While the workplace reforms were replaced with unpaid "voluntary" labour, armed police in factories, the "militarisation of labour" (a return to the practises of serfdom), piece work and eventually slave labour in the GULAG concentration camps.
This process, rather than a slow corruption, as one might imagine from Animal Farm, was in fact initiated right from the beginning of the "worker's state" and most of it's features were fully in action within one year.
The major exception being the suppression of the village commune, but only because of staunch resistance.
Thus the clash between Bolshevism on the one hand and the Revolution on the other, as described in the first part of this essay. Here too is the root of the massive repression under the secret police formed in December 1917. A subject population of docile sheep would hardly need repressing.
If we consider Bolshevism part of the revolutionary movement because of it's pre-power orientation toward that movement we would have to say the same about other political factions with even less credibility. For example, how about the C.I.A. who certainly attempted to promote revolutionary uprisings in Eastern Europe in line with it's own ends (Radio Free Europe, practical support for Solidarity), or National Socialism (the strikes in Berlin in 1932), or the Roman Catholic Church (it's relationship with the worker's movement in Poland in the early 80ies).
Of course during the late Tsarist period the Bolshevik party was an underground, dissident, insurgent organisation but then so were the Kadets, who wanted a Western style capitalism and after 1917 aligned with the White counter-revolution. That was a product of the Tsarist system, just as today while the exiled Cuban opposition includes fighters for freedom it also has ultra rightists. Both want to overthrow a government but only one could ever be part of a revolutionary movement. Dictatorship necessitates extreme methods.
Likewise Bolshevism in power claimed to be "socialist", a state run in the interests of the working people and so on, but then other states claim to be "democratic" and some even claim to be directed by God. So the use of an official ideology in a pale attempt to mask reality is in no way unique to the U.S.S.R. and it's clones. Nor for that matter is the use of subversion as a foreign policy tool, that was used by German Imperialism before then - it's support for the Bolsheviks for instance.
I actually like quite a lot of Orwell's writings, here and there in the Free Earth website you can spot Orwellisms. It's not literary quality which is at question here but politics, after all I like the writings of Tolkien and Lovecraft as well and it's not like they could ever win a Nobel for libertarianism. Read again the quotations from Animal Farm which are at the start of this essay, or better yet hunt out that dusty copy from where ever you left it after finishing school (if that was a long time ago don't worry it's in your local charity shop right next to the rest of the curriculum).
Compare Orwell's creation with the following: "We have said that there could not have been Social-Democratic consciousness among the workers. It would have to be brought to them from without.
The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc.
The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical, and economic theories elaborated by educated representatives of the propertied classes, by intellectuals. By their social status, the founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia.
In the very same way, in Russia, the theoretical doctrine of
Social - Democracy arose altogether independently of the spontaneous
growth of the working-class movement; it arose as a natural and
inevitable outcome of the development of thought among the
revolutionary socialist intelligentsia."
(Lenin, What is to be Done, pages 31/32)
Is the point being made that different from Orwell's? No the same authoritarian elitism to be found in Lenin's polemic is to be found in Orwell's novel.
The difference is that whereas Orwell at least morally recoiled from it, while perhaps unconsciously accepting it as 'natural' (in fact Animal Farm is Social Darwinist), Lenin on the other hand was a man without any of the nicer emotions. Looking at parts of Lenin's tract and parts of Orwell's fairytale is a bit like the end of Animal Farm: "The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."
(2) 'A Deteriorating Situation' February 24 1921, to be found in vol.42 of Collected Works pp. 272-73. (or in the Pathfinder book 'Kronstadt' page 41)
(3) Trotsky, 10th Party Congress, 1921, Quoted in 'Stalin did not fall from the Moon', pdf version, page 3.
(4) Quoted in 'Kronstadt' page 17, the quote is from Serge's 'Memoirs of a Revolutionary'.
(5) 'History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union/Bolsheviks/' 1943 version. Page 250.
(6) 'The Bolsheviks in Russian Society', Edited by Vladimir N. Brovkin, Chapter 8, 'Peasant Rebellions' by Taisia Osipova, page 169.
(7) "A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891 &endash; 1924", Orlando Figes, page 757.
(8) 'The Bolsheviks in Russian Society', Edited by Vladimir N. Brovkin, Chapter 7, 'Worker's Protest Movement Against War Communism' by Sergei Pavliuchenkov, page 150.
(9) Quoted in "The Unknown Revolution", Voline, page 470.
(10) Quoted in "Stalin's Secret War", Nikolai Tolstoy, page 162.
(11) Quoted in "Stalin's Secret War", Nikolai Tolstoy, page 243.
(12) "Babi Yar", A.Anatoli, page 38.
(13) "A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891 &endash; 1924", Orlando Figes, page 101.
(14) "A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891 &endash; 1924", Orlando Figes, page 521.
(15) Quoted in "The Experience of the Factory Committees in the Russian Revolution" (web address below), R.M. Jones, from "History of the Russian Revolution", Trotsky, page 121.
(16) Quoted in "The Experience of the Factory Committees in the Russian Revolution" (web address below), R.M. Jones, from "History of the Russian Revolution", Trotsky, page 131.
(17) Quoted in "The Experience of the Factory Committees in the Russian Revolution", R.M. Jones. http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/8195/FACTRY.HTM