Quotes from Robert C. Tucker

The Mensheviks emerged from the Revolution of 1905 as the dominant Social Democratic faction in Georgia.

One factor in their success was the vigor with which they adopted the general Menshevik-favored tactic of participating in the elections for the first Duma. The Bolsheviks, meeting for a conference in the Finnish town of Tammerfors in December 1905, decided (over Lenin's objections) to boycott these elections.

an effort to galvanize the lagging grain procurements campaign, the party leaders fanned out to the main grain-growing regions.

At the end of 1927 and in the early months of 1928 the Soviet regime was confronted with a critical shortage of grain procurements. Among the reasons for peasant withholding of grain from the market was an intensified goods famine brought on in part by fiscal policies espoused earlier under the influence of Bukharinist low-price philosophy.[614] In an effort to galvanize the lagging grain procurements campaign, the party leaders fanned out to the main grain-growing regions.

Stalin chose Siberia as his destination on what must have seemed—as his train pulled out of Moscow on January 15, 1928—a rerun of his grain-expediting mission of a decade ago to Tsaritsyn.

His two brief trips to attend the party congresses in Stockholm and London in 1906 and 1907 were, by the way, his first exposures to foreign life, and it is doubtful that he spent much time outside the meeting-halls. A six-week sojourn in Cracow and Vienna at the beginning of 1913 was his only other known venture abroad before he traveled to Teheran in 1943 to confer with Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt on the war against the Axis.

He spent the next three weeks in the Siberian centers of Novosibirsk, Barnaul, Rubtsovsk, and Omsk conferring with local party and government officials and dictating the line they were to follow. Here at last he found an opportunity to practice the "Leninist hardness" that he had foreseen would be necessary in the revolutionary process of building Soviet socialism.

Implementing the policy of national-territorial autonomy was one of the chief tasks of Narkomnats. To that end the commissariat was structured along national lines. Polish, Byelorussian, Latvian, Jewish, Armenian, and Moslem national commissariats were created within it, and national sections were set up to concern themselves with such smaller national groups on Russian territory as the Estonians, the Germans, the Kirghiz, the Kalmyks, and the mountain tribes of the Caucasus.

What supplanted the notion of progressive autocracy, then, was the idea that a revolutionary seizure of power from below should be followed by the formation of a dictatorship of the revolutionary party, which would use political power for the purpose of carrying through from above a socialist transformation of Russian society.

Russian Jacobinism.

The portion of the "Letter to the Congress" kept secret at the time of writing remained unopened during the first few months after Lenin died. It was probably fortunate for Stalin's emotional equilibrium in those tense months that he continued in ignorance of the fact that Lenin had intended to unseat him from the post of general secretary. The blow was hard enough to sustain when it came.

Stalin's championship of the "Uralo-Siberian method of grain procurement," as he himself later called it, has rightly been described as a great turning-point in Russian history, since "it upset once and for all the delicate psychological balance upon which the relations between party and peasants rested. . . ."[

The prescribed harsh emergency measures, reminiscent of War Communism's forcible grain requisitions, would predictably stimulate greater peasant recalcitrance the next time around, which in turn would stimulate and justify more radical measures culminating in the mass collectivization campaign on which Stalin's sights were set; and so it went in reality in 1928–29.

Under a reorganization carried out in 1920 the national commissariats became regular departments of the central organization, and affiliated sections were created in the executive committees of regional soviets. In that same year a Council of Nationalities was formed as a Narkomnats collegium in which each nationality in the RSFSR had representation.

a Narkomnats collegium in which each nationality in the RSFSR had representation. Under the 1924 Constitution, the Council of Nationalities became the second chamber of the USSR's legislative assembly, and Narkomnats was dissolved on the ground that it had fulfilled its essential mission.

The Tenth Congress was a political setback for Trotsky. He came out a loser in the trade union controversy, and the NEP was implicitly a repudiation of the line that he had publicly been taking in economic policy.

Given all these conditions, it is not surprising that a section of the intelligentsia grew receptive to the ideology of proletarian socialist revolution being propagated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. In a number of European countries there existed by this time Social Democratic parties professing Marxism as their program and acting in the name of the industrial working class as their principal constituency.

In 1883 a populist turned Marxist, Georgi Plekhanov, launched Russian Marxism on its career as an organized movement by forming a group for "The Liberation of Labor" in Geneva, Switzerland, where he resided.

Djugashvili had a way of leaving places under a cloud after some ugly incident, brought on in part by his own tendency to become embroiled with others.

Stalin elaborated the Stalinist version of building socialism into a coherent ideological doctrine.

In these early writings, as it turned out, Plekhanov was laying the theoretical foundations not of the Russian Marxist political movement as a whole but of its Menshevik wing. The opposing, Bolshevik, wing, of which Lenin became leader, showed the influence of some of the very ideas Plekhanov was attacking. But not until much later did all this become clear.

seminary influence was also visible in his dogmatic style of exposition, the way in which he would invoke the classical Marxist texts to establish points of philosophical doctrine. Anarchism or Socialism? was the product of a religiously formed mind that had found in dialectical materialism an irrevocable and enormously satisfying intellectual commitment.

In effect, he amalgamated his earlier Russocentric, great-power gospel of socialism in one country with the programmatic content of high-speed industrialization and collectivization; yet he was flexible on certain points or adopted a moderate tone so as to allay fears concerning the possible implications of this program. A landmark in the arguing of the case was Stalin's principal address during the Central Committee plenum of July 4–12, 1928.

The only acceptable type of autonomy was one exercised through the Soviet organization of a region in which one or more distinct national groups predominated.