Douglas Boyd - Red October: The Revolution That Changed the World

RED OCTOBER

First published in 2017

The History Press

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This ebook edition first published in 2017

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Douglas Boyd, 2017

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1. All translations by the author, unless otherwise attributed.

2. With the exception of the last Tsar, referred to throughout by the English form of his name as Nicholas to distinguish him from all other Russians called Nikolai, Russian first names are in their transliterated form of e.g. Yevgeni A. Tchaikovsky, with the middle initial standing for the patronymic.

3. Until February 1918 Russia used the Julian calendar, which by then was thirteen days behind the modern or Gregorian calendar introduced under Pope Gregory in 1582 and subsequently used elsewhere in Christian countries. This is why the October Revolution took place in November 1917. Dates here are according to the modern calendar, except where noted otherwise.

4. Russian being gender-sensitive, the wife of Mr Ranevsky is Mrs or Madame Ranevskaya, etc.

Karl Marxs Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei was published in German in 1867 and subsequently translated into a number of other languages. Its English title was The Manifesto of the Communist Party. In the original, it beganEin Gespenst geht um in Europa a spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of the communism. It continued with the assertion that all the governments in Europe were afraid of a virtually non-existent political party, ending with the exhortation, Proletarier aller Lnder, vereinigt Euch! which is commonly rendered in English as, Workers of the World, Unite! The manifesto did not include the formula Jeder nach seinen Fhigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedrfnissen From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Outside of a few religious communities this utopian formula has never been known to work for very long. Marx quoted it in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme, but it had previously been used by French socialist Louis Blanc in 1839, whose version of communist philosophy was named Blanquism. In less succinct form, it can be traced back as early as 1755 to express the ideal of communism, not its practice.

The year 1848, in which Marx began to write the Manifesto, was the Year of Revolution throughout Europe. It began in Sicily in January, followed by France in February and spread to more than fifty other countries in Europe and elsewhere. There were many factors in this coincidence, which included the dissatisfaction of the rapidly growing working class employed in the vast factories of the time and badly paid, fed and housed in slums of towns whose expansion was too rapid for a proper infrastructure of paved streets and sanitation. Their anger was often harnessed and given direction by middle-class educated leaders like Marx, himself raised in a prosperous German-Jewish family, and his collaborator Friedrich Engels, who came from a rich German Protestant background. Engels had contributed to the drafting of the manifesto, but was not credited as co-author or contributor on publication.

The March revolution of 1848 in the thirty-nine states of the German Confederation it was not a united country until 1871 was followed by an uprising in Denmark and Schleswig-Holstein at the end of the month. Further north in Sweden, the riots collectively called