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This book presents, for the first time in English, a collection of previously unpublished Menshevik documents from the Hoover Institution Archives.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 in Siberia.

These are not official party statements, but vivid reports, letters, and eyewitness accounts by Mensheviks who came from diverse walks of life and lived in various areas within the Soviet Union. A mosaic of individual portraits, specific situations, and tragedies illustrates the conflict, struggle, and repression during the period of Soviet politics under Lenin.

Vladimir Brovkin has focused this unusual collection not on governments and key rulers, but on the accounts of ordinary citizens testifying to the historic power struggle that raged between the two political parties as they vied for supremacy within post-czarist Russia. Brovkin has skillfully edited the letters, reports, and documents in this book to create a unique documentary history of the Russian Revolution and the ensuing Civil War.