The Vesyegonsk chronicler of Soviet power whose book Lenin called 'remarkable'
Lenin wrote in Pravda (1919) that Todorsky's account of local Soviet work contained 'fine and absolutely true words' that should be 'carved in stone and displayed in every Economic Council and factory.'
A Soviet military educator whose chronicle of local Soviet construction, A Year — with Rifle and Plough (1918), earned Lenin's high praise. Headed the Zhukovsky Air Force Academy; arrested in the Great Terror and imprisoned 15 years, he was rehabilitated in 1955 and wrote a biography of Marshal Tukhachevsky.
Career Timeline
- 1914–17Imperial Army officer, WWI, rose to captain, six combat decorations
- 1918Editor of Vesyegonsk uyezd newspaper & party agitprop head; published A Year — with Rifle and Plough
- 1919–21Red Army division commander; led suppression of Dagestan uprising
- 1923–24Commander, Fergana Region forces, Turkestan Front; anti-Basmachi operations
- 1927–33Commander, 5th Rifle Corps; training visit to Reichswehr
- 1933–36Chief & commissar, Zhukovsky Air Force Academy; Komkor (1935)
- 1936–38Head, Higher Military Educational Institutions Administration
- 1955–65Rehabilitated, promoted lieutenant-general, retired; wrote memoirs & Tukhachevsky biography
Related historical events
A Year — with Rifle and Plough and Lenin's Acclaim
Written in 1918 by the 24-year-old Todorsky — a former Imperial officer turned party member — A Year — with Rifle and Plough is an unassuming chronicle of the first year of Soviet power in remote Vesyegonsk uyezd, Tver province. As editor of the local newspaper and head of party agitation, Todorsky recorded the concrete, ground-level work of distributing land, procuring grain, and organizing soviets.
Lenin encountered the book and in his 1919 pamphlet A Great Beginning called it a "remarkable book" that should be "published in as many copies as possible" so that "all party and Soviet workers" could draw from it "the most serious lessons on the most important questions of socialist construction." What seized Lenin's attention was Todorsky's account of how Vesyegonsk Bolsheviks pragmatically dealt with bourgeois specialists: paying them high salaries to work for Soviet power rather than against it. Todorsky wrote: "To coax the intelligentsia and make them devote their skills to socialist construction — that was our task." Lenin cited this as a model for the entire country, holding it up as the "art of governing" specialists from hostile classes.
The book went through multiple editions; the 1927 edition included not only Lenin's preface but also a poem by Demyan Bedny and commentary by Sosnovsky. A modest account by an obscure provincial party worker, elevated by the revolution's leader into a textbook of socialist construction, the book's fate symbolically captures the propaganda weight that 'voices from below' carried in early Soviet culture.