The date on this book's spine is the least reliable thing about it. Progress Publishers issued Yakov Sverdlov in English in 1981, in Liv Tudge's translation, and a reader could be forgiven for taking it as an artefact of the late Brezhnev years. It is nothing of the kind. Its author, Klavdiya Timofeevna Sverdlova, died in 1960 — the book says so itself, in an editorial footnote on its first page of text — and the same footnote records that "Andrei Sverdlov, their son, recorded her memoirs and supervised their publication during her lifetime." So the memoir was composed and first published before 1960, which is to say in the 1950s, by a woman then in her seventies recalling a husband who had been dead for forty years.
The editorial apparatus is younger than the text it annotates. One footnote carries the Party's name-changes down to 1952; another gives Kerensky's dates as 1881–1970; a family footnote records deaths in 1964 and 1966. So the notes were revised at some point after 1970 and the English translation made for 1981. (Readers working from the electronic text should note that the two apparent "1981" citations in it are file-stamps left by the digitisers, not references in the book.) What we have, then, is a 1950s Russian memoir, lightly re-annotated in the 1970s, sold in the 1980s to English-language readers who were given no indication of any of this.
That gap of a quarter-century is not a bibliographical curiosity. A widow's memoir written under Stalin, or in the first uncertain years after him, is a different object from one written after the Twentieth Congress had done its work — and this book, revealingly, is neither one thing nor the other. It has been de-Stalinised on the surface and left Stalinist underneath, and watching how that was done is the most instructive thing a modern reader can take from it.
Yakov Mikhailovich 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 held 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, before the Testament, before the Left Opposition, before collectivisation, before the Trials. He took no side in any quarrel that later became fatal to take a side in.
This is why he is in print at all. Of the men who ran the Bolshevik Party in 1917, almost every one was later shot, exiled, murdered abroad or erased. Sverdlov's early death made him the rarest thing in the Soviet pantheon: a first-rank October leader who could be praised at full length without any need to explain what became of him. A whole city carried his name — the book's first sentence introduces Ekaterinburg as "the town in the Ural Mountains that is now Sverdlovsk" — and a Party university, and a square in the middle of Moscow. He was safe. The uncomfortable corollary is that the safety was the qualification, and a book built on a safe subject will be shaped by what the subject was safe from.
The judgement of Sverdlov's stature, incidentally, is not a Soviet monopoly. Trotsky, who worked alongside him daily through 1917 and 1918 and had every political reason by then to be ungenerous, was not. In "On the Suppressed Testament of Lenin" (1932), under a section heading he gave as "Sverdlov and Stalin as Types of Organizers", he wrote: "Up to the spring of 1919 the chief organizer of the party had been Sverdlov. He did not have the name of General Secretary, a name which was then not yet invented, but he was that in reality." Of the source of his authority Trotsky said simply: "The basis of this authority of Sverdlov was loyalty." In his memorial essay of March 1925 he recorded the working method that made the man indispensable — "'Talk it over with Sverdlov,' Lenin would advise in many cases whenever someone turned to him with a particular problem" — and the standing joke that when Lenin telephoned to propose an emergency measure, the answer was usually "Already." The American Trotskyist John G. Wright put the point at its sharpest in Fourth International in March 1949: "If one could speak of a 'third' in the Russian Revolution itself, in addition to Lenin and Trotsky, it was Sverdlov, and could not possibly be Stalin."
Sverdlova's estimate of her husband and Trotsky's are, on this narrow point, the same. Where they part is on everything the estimate was later used for.
The tell-tale of this book is not the presence of Stalin but the manner of it. He is named nine times in fifty-six thousand words, always flatly, never with an epithet. In the Narym chapter: "At about that time Stalin arrived in Narym and they met for the first time. It was a short-lived acquaintance, however, as Stalin escaped at the end of the month." In the Arctic Circle, at the settlement of Kureika, there are "several police guards and two exiles—Sverdlov and Stalin", and then not another word — no conversation, no shared work, nothing. Anyone who has read the surrounding literature knows that the two men shared quarters at Kureika and could not stand one another; the memoir simply declines the subject. This is the residue of an editing operation. The adjectives of the cult have been scraped off; the sentences beneath them have been left in place.
And the sentences beneath them still carry the old architecture. The clearest case is the account of 16 October 1917, where the book states that "a Military-Revolutionary Centre, comprising Sverdlov, Stalin, Bubnov, Uritsky and Dzerzhinsky, was elected to lead the rising, and head the Military-Revolutionary Committee."
That claim is the single most durable falsification in the Soviet history of October, and it had been publicly demolished half a century before this English edition appeared. In his "Letter to the Bureau of Party History", written in 1927 and printed in English in The Stalin School of Falsification (1937), Trotsky set out the case: Stalin, "with the help of the Yaroslavskys, is trying to construct a new history of the organization of the October insurrection, basing himself on the fact that the party created a 'practical center for the organizational leadership of the insurrection,' of which, if you please, Trotsky was not a member. Neither was Lenin a member of that committee. That fact alone demonstrates that the committee had only a subordinate organizational significance. It played no independent role whatever. The legend about this committee has been created today for the simple reason that Stalin was a member of it." And then the detail that settles it: the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, which the "centre" is said to have headed, already had a chairman — Trotsky. "Superfluous, it would seem, for Trotsky to be introduced a second time into the staff of an organization of which he was already chairman! How hard it is, after all, to correct history after the event!"
The five-man body was real; it was minuted; it was a sub-committee of no independent life whatever, and it never met as such. Sverdlov's presence on it is a fact. What is fabricated is the phrase "to lead the rising" — the promotion of a drafting convenience into the general staff of the revolution. The purpose of the fabrication was never Sverdlov; it was to put Stalin at the centre of a picture from which Trotsky could then be cropped. Trotsky described the resulting canvases with some relish in 1938: "Sverdlov, Djerjinsky, Uritsky and Bubnov are represented in oils or in tempera, seated or standing around Stalin and following his words with rapt attention."
By 1981 that painting had been taken down in the USSR. The sentence it was painted from was still in print, in London and Moscow bookshops, over a dead woman's name.
The same layer shows in the treatment of everyone else. Trotsky appears nine times and never as a colleague — as a fence-sitter in 1910 ("Meanwhile Trotsky and his followers were sitting on the fence, recommending conciliation with the liquidationists— simply playing into their hands"), as a disease in 1913 (Sverdlov instructs the Turukhansk exiles on "the cancerous influence of liquidationism and Trotskyism"), and as an obstruction over Brest-Litovsk. Zinoviev is named exactly once, in a list: "alarmists, deserters and disorganisers arose within our own ranks— Kamenev, Zinoviev, Rykov, Nogin and Milyutin, to name a few". Bukharin appears only as a Left Communist wrecking the peace. These men were Sverdlov's daily working colleagues for eighteen months; he chaired the body several of them sat on; his Secretariat assigned them their work. A memoir that cannot say so is not remembering, it is reciting.
To be fair to the author, the Brest-Litovsk chapters are not simply invented. Trotsky did advance the "no peace, no war" formula; Bukharin's Left Communists did resist Lenin's line to the point of crisis; the Central Committee did divide bitterly, and Lenin's ultimatum quoted here — "These terms must be signed. If you don't sign them, you will sign the Soviet power's death warrant within three weeks" — is a real ultimatum from a real fight. What the book withholds is that this was a dispute among revolutionaries about how to save a revolution, conducted in public, settled by vote, and followed by everyone concerned going back to work together. Rendered here as the manoeuvres of the unstable and the confused, it becomes the first chapter of a story whose last chapter is a firing squad — and that last chapter, in a book compiled in the 1950s, everyone concerned knew perfectly well.
Now the silence. In July 1918 the Romanov family was shot in the cellar of the Ipatiev house in Ekaterinburg — the town that would be renamed after Sverdlov — on the night of 16–17 July. The killing was carried out by the Ural Regional Soviet. On 18 July the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee met, took note of the execution and endorsed it, and Sverdlov reported it to the Council of People's Commissars. He chaired that Presidium. Whether Moscow ordered the shooting in advance or ratified a decision taken locally under military pressure is genuinely contested among historians and turns on documents that have been read in more than one way; what is not contested is that the body Sverdlov chaired approved it and that Sverdlov announced it.
This book, which is about Sverdlov, which opens in Ekaterinburg, and which follows him week by week through the summer of 1918, does not mention it. Not to justify it, not to defend it, not to attribute it elsewhere. The words "Romanov" and "Ipatiev" do not occur. Nicholas II is named once, in a footnote, to date Stolypin's premiership.
The elision is precise enough to be visible. The narrative gives the Fifth Congress of Soviets in detail, day by day, through the Left SR rising of 6 July and the arrests of 8 July; it records that "On 10 July the Congress ratified the Constitution of the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic"; it then notes that "Lenin, Sverdlov, Lunacharsky, Petrovsky, Krylenko and other CC members and commissars gave reports about the Congress to mass meetings on 12 July, which was a Friday." From there it turns aside into a charming digression about which Friday evenings the leadership spent speaking in factories, and when it resumes a dated narrative it is mid-September. The single most consequential act of Sverdlov's chairmanship falls into that gap, and the gap is where the prose becomes anecdotal.
Something similar, though less absolute, happens with the Red Terror. The book gives a full and rather moving account of 30 August 1918 — Uritsky's assassination in Petrograd that morning, Sverdlov's refusal to cancel the evening meetings ("were we going to hide, let that bourgeois filth frighten us?"), the telephone call to his wife in the country, the sleepless Kremlin the next morning. It records that he went to the Cheka offices "to see Kaplan, the would-be assassin", and assigned two men to begin questioning her. And it reproduces, in full and without comment, the appeal he issued that night over his own signature as Chairman of the All-Russia Central Executive Committee: the working class "will respond with merciless mass terror against all enemies of the revolution."
That sentence is the opening of the Red Terror, and the book prints it as a rallying cry. It does not print what followed — the decree of 5 September, the hostage-taking, the executions by category. The reader is shown the words and denied their consequences, which is a more sophisticated evasion than simple omission and, in its way, a more revealing one: the terror was not something the memoir was ashamed of, merely something it saw no reason to count.
None of this is Klavdiya Sverdlova's failure of nerve, or not only that. It is worth remembering who assembled this book. The footnote quoted at the outset says her son Andrei recorded the memoirs and supervised their publication. Andrei Sverdlov spent his career in the Soviet state security organs, and the memoir literature of the Terror — Anna Larina, Bukharin's widow, among others — records him as an interrogator of the families of the arrested. He is also the infant his mother carried into Tomsk prison in 1911 to be shown to his father, in one of the most affecting scenes in these pages. The book was shaped, in other words, by a man with a professional stake in what the 1950s were permitted to remember. Sverdlova's voice is audible throughout; it is not the only hand on the page.
Set all of that aside — and it can be set aside, because it is concentrated in the last two chapters — and what remains is a good book, and in places an unusually good one.
The first five chapters cover 1905 to 1917: the Urals underground, the Ekaterinburg and Perm committees, five and a half years of prison, six years of Siberian exile, an escape by boat down the Ob. Sverdlova was not a spectator to any of it. She was a member of the Ekaterinburg RSDLP committee, arrested in the spring of 1905 over an underground press, and her account of meeting "Comrade Andrei" — dodging through courtyards to shake a tail, walking arm in arm with a comrade to look like a courting couple — is first-hand social history of a kind that is scarce in English at any price. She followed him into exile, bore children there, and brought them into his cell.
Above all she kept his letters, and quotes them at length. From Maksimkin Yar, the settlement above Narym where he was the only exile, in October 1913: "Imagine a narrow room, three paces across and seven long, like a prison cell. One little window on one side, two on the other. A plank bed on the wall nearest the street, like a prison bunk, a trunk, a little table..." On the food: "It's like this—for four days we have been living on tea and boiled potatoes with beer." On what he did with his days: coaching his landlady to qualify as a teacher, running a fish trap, staging Chekhov's The Bear with villagers who had never seen a theatre, doctoring the settlement out of medical supplies sent for his own use — "I have doctored almost everyone here, or done them some other favour... and take nothing for it, which still bewilders them all." There is a small masterpiece of a scene in which the two guards raid the room, seize a sheaf of "mysterious signs and diagrams" as proof of sedition, and are told by their superior that the most terrible of the confiscated documents is a Pythagorean triangle.
And there is the exhaustion under it. "I did not sleep and felt very bad towards evening... Oh, it's all so dreadful! And I have no one here—even if I were to go under completely nobody would know for months..." What follows is the best thing in the book: the Bolshevik exiles across four settlements agree that this is a matter of life and death, and simply besiege the district police officer, week after week, each spending his single permitted audience on the same request — bring back Sverdlov. It worked. That is what the underground actually was, and no official history conveys it.
Sverdlova's own summary of the cost is unimprovable: "In 1917 he was 32, and had spent almost 12 years of his life in detention: five and a half years in prison and six in exile in the most remote and wretched corners of Siberia. He was arrested 14 times. Those are the statistics of his life."
The account of the Left SR rising of 6 July 1918 is also worth having, whatever one makes of its politics. The detail of how the Bolsheviks secured the Bolshoi Theatre — Left SR guards accepted but each shadowed by two or three Latvian riflemen, all doors locked but the orchestra-pit exit, credentials checked at the door by the CEC secretary — is circumstantial in a way that reads like testimony rather than construction. So does the chapter on Sverdlov's last weeks in Kharkov, arguing exhausted Ukrainian factions back into one party. The book then declines even to narrate his death: "He was never to leave Moscow again..." and the section ends. For that scene one has to go to Trotsky's 1925 essay, where Lenin telephones and says, in "that special muted voice which meant great strain": "He is gone."
Treat this as two books bound together. The first, running to the end of the Turukhansk chapter, is a participant's memoir of the Russian underground by a woman who lived it, and it is valuable precisely in proportion to how little it argues. The second, covering 1917 to 1919, is a 1950s official narrative wearing a widow's voice, and every load-bearing claim in it should be checked against something else.
The something else is not hard to find and was mostly written by people who knew the man. Trotsky's memorial essay of 13 March 1925, translated in Fourth International in November 1946, is the fullest portrait of Sverdlov as organiser that exists outside Soviet publishing. The section "Sverdlov and His Role" in Lenin Before October (1924) describes his method of chairing. "Sverdlov and Stalin as Types of Organizers", in "On the Suppressed Testament of Lenin" (1932), is the direct comparison, and contains Lenin's warning, when Stalin was proposed for the post Sverdlov had held in fact if not in name, that "this cook will prepare only peppery dishes". For the Military-Revolutionary Centre, go to chapter four of The Stalin School of Falsification. Two things this series' readers should know it cannot supply from its own shelves: Trotsky's account of learning about the Romanovs' fate is in his Diary in Exile, which is not among the local texts consulted for this introduction, and no contemporaneous Left Opposition analysis of the September 1918 terror decree turned up in them either. Those gaps are stated here rather than papered over.
Sverdlova wrote about a young man she loved who worked himself to death at thirty-three, and about a life the two of them spent mostly apart, in cells and taiga settlements, waiting for post that came twice a year. There is no reason to doubt that she meant every word about him. The tragedy of the book is not that she lied; it is that by the time she was allowed to remember him in print, the terms on which he could be remembered had been set by people who had killed nearly everyone else in the story — and one of them was sitting at her elbow, taking down what she said.