Representations of the
Russian Revolution

Revolutionary silhouettes

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The present book is made up of a series of articles written on various occasions about some of our comrades in the RCP.

I should begin with a warning that these are not biographies, not testimonials, not portraits, but merely profiles: it is their virtue and at the same time their limitation that they are entirely based on personal recollections.

In 1919 the publisher Grzhebin, whom I already knew and who had been recommended to me by Maxim Gorky, asked me to start writing my memoirs of the great revolution. I was soon able to deliver him the first — or more precisely the preliminary — volume, in which I attempted to acquaint the readers both with myself, as a point of reference in judging the rather more subjective aspects of my ‘chronicle’, and with the main dramatis personae of the revolution in so far as I knew them and in so far as a knowledge of their characters and the events of their pre-revolutionary lives seemed to me to merit further exposition.

That book, however, was overtaken by a strange fate. At a moment when circumstances precluded me from working on it and when I had become convinced that to write memoirs at a time when not a single event of the revolution had cooled down — we were still living in its very crucible — was simply impossible (Sukhanov’s multi-volume work on the revolution, among others, had already convinced me of this); at a time, as it seemed to me, when any premature description of those events without an adequate study of the documents would be too subjective and little more than essay-writing — it was then that Grzhebin, unknown to me, published the first volume of my proposed memoirs. He is apparently continuing to publish them abroad, entirely without my permission.

I think it essential to state these facts here, in order to avoid any misunderstanding about the nature of that book. Continue reading →