Yakov Sverdlov

A widow's memoir of one of the few Bolshevik leaders the Soviet state could commemorate without difficulty.

Yakov Sverdlov was Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee - the Soviet republic's head of state - and simultaneously the Bolshevik Party's chief organiser, the man who carried the whereabouts, capacities and reliability of the entire cadre in his head. He died in March 1919, aged thirty-three, of an illness contracted on a speaking tour. He therefore died before the trade-union debate, before the ban on factions, before Lenin's illness and the Testament, before the Left Opposition, collectivisation and the Trials, and took no side in any quarrel that later became fatal to take a side in. Of the men who ran the party in 1917, almost every other was later shot or exiled.

Klavdiya Sverdlova knew him from the underground years, and the memoir's value is in that first-hand material: the exile in Siberia, the prison correspondence, the organisational work, and the texture of a revolutionary marriage conducted largely by letter and across distances.

A note on dating, because the spine is the least reliable thing about it. Sverdlova died in 1960 and the book records that their son took down her memoirs and supervised publication in her lifetime, so the text was written in the 1950s. Its footnotes were revised after 1970, and the English translation made for 1981. What a reader holds is a 1950s memoir, lightly re-annotated two decades later.

Translated by Liv Tudge.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.