Lenin and the Agent Provocateur Malinovsky

Abstract

*This article is a chapter in a forthcoming book, a triple biography of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, entitled Three Who Made a Revolution, scheduled for publication by Dial Press in I946. [Ed.j The life and deeds of Roman Malinovsky and the political line pursued by the Tsarist Police Department in the Social Democratic Party is reconstructed here from the police archives and from the testimony before the Extraordinary Commission of the Provisional government in I9I7. All the testimony before the main Investigating Commission was subsequently published by the Soviet government in a seven-volume work called The Fall of the Tsarist Regime (Padenie Tsarskogo Rezhima, po materialam Cherezvychainoi Komisii Vremennogo Pravitelstva . . . Gos. Izdat. Leningrad, 1924-27). The testimony of Ulyanov (Lenin) and Rodomyslsky (Zinoviev) before the sub-commission were not so published, but I have been able to reconstruct the text sufficiently from contemporary accounts in the daily press: Pravda (Bolshevik), Rabochaya Gazeta (Menshevik), Den (Liberal), and Vestnik Vremennogo Pravitelstva (official News Bulletin of the Provisional government). Fortunately, this last contains a fair amount of direct quotation in its issue of June I6, I917, the accuracy of which is confirmed by the accounts in the other dailies, including Pravda. Other sources for the following account are the writings of Burtsev, personal reminiscences of men who knew Malinovsky, and documents summarized from memory by Boris Nicolaevsky, who was director of the Historical Archives of the Russian Revolution in Moscow during the years I919-2I. Except where otherwise noted, the source is always the seven-volume publication by the Soviet government of the Testimony before the Extraordinary Commission of the Provisional government. 1The Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, to which Lenin, Martov, Dan, Plekhanov and others mentioned in this article, belonged, was formed in 1898. At its Second Congress, held in I903, it split into two factions, Bolsheviks (Majority) and Mensheviks (Minority), which continued to regard themselves as members of a single party. During the revolutionary upsurge of I905, pressure from the rank and file forced them to reunite into a single organization, which, at the Stockholm Congress of 1906 and the London Congress of 1907, elected a united Central Committee