Ebook: Dear Comrades: Menshevik Reports on the Bolshevik Revolution and the Civil War

This book presents for the first time in English a collection of previously unpublished Menshevik documents from the Hoover Institution Archives. It draws a dramatic picture of the Russian Civil War and the establishment of the communist dictatorship as witnessed by the Russian Social Democrats, or Mensheviks. When the opposing Bolsheviks consolidated their power to emerge as the ruling party of the 1917 revolution, the Mensheviks' political influence was swept away and most were driven to exile. This collection is a mosaic of small pictures, specific situations, and tragedies that combine to form a large picture of conflict, struggle, and repression. It depicts the everyday reality of the Bolshevik dictatorship and shows the formation of the new mentality of communist rulers and their new relationship with the workers—how unquestioning obedience, military discipline, and intolerance replaced the free-wheeling multiparty competition of 1917.