Reference Library
Luxemburg, Social Reform or Revolution
Korean translation of the preface, both parts and the author’s notes. The German MIA text follows the second edition of 1908, reproduced from the 1982 collected works; it is not an unmodified 1899 first-edition text.
Read the full text → Party & government documentsThe Financial Manifesto of the St Petersburg Soviet (1905)
Issued on 2 (15) December 1905 by the St Petersburg Soviet of Workers' Deputies together with the Peasant Union, the RSDLP, the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Polish Socialist Party. It declares the government bankrupt, calls on the people to refuse taxes and withdraw their deposits in gold, and announces that a free people will not honour debts the autocracy contracted without its consent. The government suppressed the newspapers that printed it and arrested the Soviet the next day; in 1918 it read as a prelude to the repudiation of tsarist debts.
Read the full text → Party & government documentsProgramme of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party (1906)
Full Korean translation, from the Russian, of the programme adopted by the first congress of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party in January 1906: its view of one working class from industrial workers to the labouring peasantry, its demands for a democratic republic and self-determination, the socialisation of land, and its warning against "state socialism".
Read the full text → Party & government documentsSecond International, Stuttgart Congress Resolution on Militarism and International Conflicts (1907)
Korean translation of the full anti-militarist resolution of the International Socialist Congress at Stuttgart, August 1907, translated from the German text in the congress proceedings, including the closing paragraph on using a war crisis to hasten the removal of capitalist class rule.
Read the full text → Writings & speechesRosa Luxemburg, The National Question and Autonomy
A Korean translation of the first five essays in Rosa Luxemburg's 1908–1909 series on the national question. It criticizes the self-determination clause in the RSDLP programme and examines the nation-state and the proletariat, federalism and centralization, and the history and conditions of local autonomy. It translates all five essays included in Horace B. Davis's 1976 English collection; the sixth essay, omitted from that collection, is not included. This is an indirect translation through Davis's English version of the Polish original.
Read the full text → Party & government documentsManifesto of the Extraordinary International Socialist Congress at Basel (1912)
Korean translation of the full Basel Manifesto of November 1912, translated from the German text in the congress proceedings. It restated the Stuttgart and Copenhagen principles, assigned tasks to each socialist party during the Balkan War and warned governments of the consequences of a world war.
Read the full text → Writings & speechesStalin, Marxism and the National Question
A complete Korean translation of the essay Stalin wrote in Vienna in early 1913. It defines the nation by four common features (language, territory, economic life, psychological make-up), criticizes Austro-Marxist cultural-national autonomy and its Bundist and Caucasian followers, and advances self-determination, regional autonomy, minority equality and a single internationalist workers' organization. Translated from the Russian original, with the forty editorial notes of the Moscow English edition.
Read the full text → Writings & speechesLenin, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination
A complete Korean translation of Lenin's 1914 defence of the right of nations to self-determination. Answering Rosa Luxemburg's critique of clause 9 of the programme, it defines self-determination as the right to secede and form an independent national state, examining Norway's secession, the London Congress resolution of 1896, Marx on Ireland and the programme debate of 1903, against the national-liberalism of the Cadets and the Liquidators. Translated from the Russian original with the fifteen original footnotes.
Read the full text → Writings & speechesLiebknecht, Protest Against the War Credits (1914)
Korean translation of the full statement of reasons Karl Liebknecht handed to the Reichstag president after casting the only vote against the war credits on 2 December 1914, translated from the German text of the illegal leaflet after the president refused to enter it in the record.
Read the full text → Writings & speechesLenin, The April Theses
A complete translation of the ten theses Lenin read the day after returning from exile in April 1917 and published in Pravda three days later: no support whatever for the Provisional Government; passage from the first stage of the revolution, which gave power to the bourgeoisie, to the second, which must place it in the hands of the proletariat and poorest peasants; a republic of Soviets rather than a parliamentary republic, with the police, standing army and bureaucracy abolished; confiscation of landed estates and nationalisation of the land; the merger of all banks into one national bank; not the 'introduction' of socialism but soviet control of production and distribution; a change of the party's name to Communist and a new International. Lenin's reply to Plekhanov and other opponents follows the theses.
Read the full text → Constitutions, laws & ordersProvisional Government decree restoring the death penalty at the front and creating military-revolutionary courts (1917)
Having abolished the death penalty in March, the Provisional Government restored it at the front on 12 (25) July 1917, days after the July Days and the collapse of the Galician offensive, and created military-revolutionary courts of three officers and three soldiers in every division to try treason, desertion and mutiny summarily, with sentences final on pronouncement and executed without delay. Translated from item 2 of journal No. 129 with the fifteen rules on the courts.
Read the full text → Constitutions, laws & ordersThe First Decrees of the October Revolution
Five acts from the regime's first two months: the eight-hour day enacted by telegraph, the workers' control statute that abolished commercial secrecy, the Sovnarkom protocol that created the Cheka, and the marriage and divorce decrees that moved the family from church to state.
Read the full text → Writings & speechesLuxemburg, The Russian Revolution
Korean translation of the four sections and marginal notes of Luxemburg’s unfinished 1918 manuscript, first published posthumously in 1922, from the German collected-works transcription.
Read the full text → Party & government documentsThree Documents of the Constituent Assembly Crisis
Lenin's Theses on the Constituent Assembly, the Declaration of the Rights of the Working and Exploited People as adopted by the Third Congress of Soviets, and the dissolution decree: one month in which the claim of class organs over national ones passed from theory to programme to accomplished fact.
Read the full text → Constitutions, laws & ordersDecree on the Emergency Powers of the People's Commissar for Food
The decree of 13 May 1918 that established the food dictatorship: compulsory declaration of grain surpluses, the enemy-of-the-people clause with informer rewards, and the Food Commissar's nine emergency powers including the use of armed force.
Read the full text → Constitutions, laws & ordersThe 1918 Constitution of the RSFSR
Complete Korean translation of the Constitution of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic adopted by the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets on July 10, 1918. Opening with the Declaration of Rights of the Working and Exploited People, its six parts and 90 articles set out the construction of Soviet power around the All-Russian Congress of Soviets, the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars, an electoral system weighted toward the working class with the disenfranchisement of exploiters, budgetary law, and the state emblem and flag. Translated from the Russian text as adopted.
Read the full text → Party & government documentsThe Twenty-one Conditions of Admission to the Comintern
A complete Korean translation of the twenty-one conditions of admission set by the Second Congress of the Communist International in 1920. They require party control of the press, the removal of reformists and centrists, an illegal apparatus alongside the legal one, agitation in the army and countryside, a break with one's own imperialism in the colonies, subordination of parliamentary fractions, democratic centralism, and a change of name to Communist Party, with expulsion for members who reject them in principle. The splits they forced in the socialist parties drew the line between the Second and Third Internationals.
Read the full text → Treaties & agreementsTwo Documents of the Formation of the USSR: the RSFSR–Ukrainian union treaty (1920) and Lenin's 'On Autonomisation' (1922)
The union treaty of December 1920 in which Russia and Ukraine recognised each other as independent states while merging seven commissariats, and Lenin's dictation of December 1922, in the week the USSR was founded, calling Stalin's 'autonomisation' plan 'administrative intoxication' and proposing a union limited to defence and foreign affairs. Two documents of the debate over how the federation was to be designed.
Read the full text → Party & government documentsKronstadt 1921 Documents: the sailors' resolution, the government statement, the Congress resolution, the rehabilitation decree (1921–1994)
The sailors' resolution of 1 March 1921 that became the rising's programme; the Council of Labour and Defence statement of 2 March that declared it a White Guard plot and outlawed Kozlovsky; the Tenth Congress resolution 'On Party Unity' that banned factions in Kronstadt's name; and Russian presidential decree No. 65 of 1994 that rehabilitated the participants by revoking the statement's first clause. The rising, two responses, and the epilogue, in order.
Read the full text → Treaties & agreementsThe Peace of Riga: the treaty between Russia and Ukraine and Poland (1921)
The twenty-six-article treaty that ended the Polish–Soviet war of 1919–1920, with the additional protocol to Article II fixing the frontier in detail. It settled the border (Western Belarus and Western Ukraine to Poland), non-interference, the option of nationality, minority rights, the waiver of reparations against 30 million gold roubles, the return of cultural property and archives, and of railway rolling stock. The frontier held until September 1939; Articles V, VII and XI remained matters of dispute for twenty years.
Read the full text → Writings & speechesLenin, The Tax in Kind
The full Korean translation of the pamphlet Lenin wrote in April 1921 to explain the turn to the New Economic Policy. It divides the Russian economy into five forms, from patriarchal peasant farming to socialism, and argues that where small commodity production predominates state capitalism must be measured against the small-proprietor element rather than against socialism, and is a step forward by that measure.
Read the full text → Constitutions, laws & ordersThe Church Valuables Decree and Lenin's Shuya Letter
The public decree of 23 February 1922 ordering the confiscation of church valuables for famine relief, and the top-secret letter Lenin circulated to the Politburo after the bloodshed at Shuya: the public face of the operation and its inside, first published only in 1990.
Read the full text → Writings & speechesThe Declaration of the 46
Complete Korean translation of the statement submitted in secret to the Politburo of the RCP(b) Central Committee by forty-six party officials on 15 October 1923. It diagnoses the economic and financial crisis produced by unplanned leadership, argues that the regime of "factional dictatorship" formed after the Tenth Congress has split the party into a secretarial hierarchy and a laity, and demands a conference including comrades who differ with the majority. The reservations added by twelve signatories are translated with it.
Read the full text → Constitutions, laws & ordersThe 1924 Constitution of the USSR
A complete Korean translation of the first Soviet constitution, adopted by the Second Congress of Soviets of the USSR on 31 January 1924. It binds the December 1922 Declaration and Treaty on the formation of the USSR into one basic law, defining in eleven chapters and seventy-two articles the powers of the Congress of Soviets, the two chambers of the Central Executive Committee (Soviet of the Union and Soviet of Nationalities), the Council of People's Commissars and the all-union commissariats, the Supreme Court and the OGPU. The reservation of republican sovereignty and the right of free secession are written down here for the first time. Translated from the Russian text as adopted.
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