Volume 27, Number 6 · April 17, 1980
Communist Myths
By Leonard Schapiro
The October Revolution
by Roy A. Medvedev, translated by George Saunders
Columbia University Press, 240 pp., $14.95
On Stalin and Stalinism
by Roy A. Medvedev, translated by Ellen de Kadt
Oxford University Press, 205 pp., $13.95
On Soviet Dissent
by Roy Medvedev, by Piero Ostellino, translated by William A. Packer
Columbia University Press, 147 pp., $10.95
Trotsky, Fate of a Revolutionary
by Robert Wistrich
Rowman & Littlefield, 235 pp., $17.50
Leon Trotsky: A Biography
by Ronald Segal
Pantheon, 446 pp., $15.00
Trotsky: A Study in the Dynamic of His Thought
by Ernest Mandel
Schocken, 156 pp., $6.75 (paper)
'The most popular mass insurrection in history' was Trotsky's description, in his History of the Russian Revolution, of the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks on November 7, 1917. More accurately, one should date this event from the night of November 6 to 7, when the Bolshevik Red Guards, supported by the few troops who did not remain neutral, seized all the vital points in Petrograd. But no one knew better than Trotsky the importance of myth. It was owing to his insistence that the seizure of power was made to coincide, more or less, with the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets which met on November 7—and hence 'Soviet' power, and eventually 'Soviet' Union. Lenin was interested in one thing—power—and had he had his own way this would have been secured some days earlier, and dressed up in the necessary rhetoric later.
Review, 3443 words
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