Modern History and Revolution

RUSSIA AND EAST EUROPE

Leon Trotsky, 1905  [1909]
      Still one of the best histories of the 1905 Russian revolution, in which Trotsky (during his more radical pre-Bolshevik period) played an important role.

Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution  [1933]
      A monumental account of the 1917 revolution from the Bolshevik standpoint.
      Here and elsewhere Trotsky made some pertinent critiques of Stalinism, but he was himself too implicated in the Bolshevik roots of Stalinism for those critiques to amount to a credible analysis.

Maurice Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers Control: 1917-1921  [1970]
      Excellent chronological documentation of the Bolsheviks’ brutal authoritarian practices under Lenin and Trotsky, well before Stalin had taken power. It is also included in the recent collection of Brinton’s works entitled For Workers’ Power.
      For a more personal account of the same period, see Emma Goldman’s My Disillusionment in Russia.

Voline, The Unknown Revolution  [1947]
      An anarchist history of the Russian revolution, focusing on the 1917 popular movement that took place without Bolshevik leadership and on the subsequent radical struggles that the Bolsheviks repressed: the Makhnovist peasant movement in the Ukraine and the revolt of the Kronstadt sailors.
      On the latter struggles, see also Peter Arshinov’s History of the Makhnovist Movement, Ida Mett’s The Kronstadt Commune, Paul Avrich’s Kronstadt, 1921, and Israel Getzler’s Kronstadt 1917-1921: The Fate of a Soviet Democracy.

Ante Ciliga, The Russian Enigma  [1938]
      A powerful autobiographical account of the Bolshevik regime’s devolution into Stalinism. Ciliga saw it all happen from the inside, first as a Yugoslavian representative of the Comintern, then as a Left Oppositionist, then in a Siberian prison camp. He and Victor Serge were among the few who managed to get out just before the Moscow Trials eliminated virtually all of the old-guard revolutionaries.

Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary  [1941]
      Another excellent account of the same period. Serge was a French anarchist who rallied to the Bolsheviks during the revolution, then joined the Left Opposition and was interned in one of Stalin’s prison camps.
      He also wrote several novels drawing on his experiences, including one about the Moscow Trials (The Case of Comrade Tulayev) that compares favorably with Koestler’s more well known Darkness at Noon.
      [Rexroth article on Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary]

Boris Souvarine, Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism  [1939]
      Yet another revolutionary author who experienced the development of Stalinism as it happened.
      Several other interesting writings by Souvarine are available only in French.

* * *

Andy Anderson, Hungary ’56  [1964]
      Excellent brief account of the Hungarian councilist revolution.

Jacek Kuron and Karol Modzelewski, Open Letter to Members of the Polish Communist Party  [1964]
      This document, for which the two young authors were imprisoned, was one of the most advanced theoretical critiques of Stalinism from within.
      There have been several English-language editions under different titles: An Open Letter to the Party; A Revolutionary Socialist Manifesto; Revolutionary Marxist Students in Poland Speak Out; and Solidarnosc, the Missing Link.

Ivan Sviták, The Czechoslovak Experiment: 1968-1969  [1971]
      Interesting collection of documents and analyses of the “Prague Spring” by a dissident Marxist (who incidentally was one of the Situationists’ earliest East European contacts).
      [Situationist article on Czechoslovakia 1968]

I.C.O., Poland: 1970-71  [1975]
      Account of the insurrectionary strike of December 1970-January 1971.

Poland 1981-1982
      There have been numerous books on the Polish “Solidarity” movement. The following are among those worth reading: Oliver MacDonald (ed.), The Polish August: Documents from the Beginnings of the Polish Workers’ Rebellion, Stan Persky’s At the Lenin Shipyard: Poland and the Rise of the Solidarity Trade Union, Neal Ascherson’s The Polish August: The Self-Limiting Revolution, Henri Simon’s Poland 1980-82: Class Struggle and the Crisis of Capital, and Jean-François Martos’s La contre-révolution polonaise. The latter work, available only in French, documents the complicity of Walesa and other Solidarity bureaucrats in the defeat of the movement.

Slavenka Drakulic, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed  [1993]
      A more personal perspective on life in Stalinist East Europe by a Yugoslavian woman.

 
Section from Gateway to the Vast Realms: Recommended Readings from Literature to Revolution, by Ken Knabb (2004).

No copyright.

[Next Section]

[Previous Section]

[Table of Contents]

HOME   INDEX   SEARCH

Bureau of Public Secrets, PO Box 1044, Berkeley CA 94701, USA
  www.bopsecrets.org   knabb@bopsecrets.org