Author of 'Notes on the Revolution' and agrarian economist in whose apartment the Bolshevik CC voted for armed uprising
"Sukhanov is one of the best representatives of the petty bourgeoisie" — Lenin, Sept 1, 1917
Born Nikolai Gimmer. A founding member of the Petrograd Soviet Executive Committee after the February Revolution, he belonged to the Menshevik-Internationalists, opposing the war and the Provisional Government while arguing for a united socialist coalition. His seven-volume memoir 'Notes on the Revolution' remains one of the most vivid primary sources on 1917. On October 10, 1917, the Bolshevik CC met in his Petrograd apartment and resolved on armed uprising. Sentenced to 10 years at the 1931 Menshevik Trial and shot on false charges in 1940; posthumously rehabilitated.
Career Timeline
- 1903–1905Joined SR Party; arrested 1904 in Taganka Prison; freed Oct 1905, took part in Moscow December armed uprising
- 1911–1913Exiled 3 years to Arkhangelsk; compiled agricultural census data
- 1914–1917Editor of 'Sovremennik' and 'Letopis'; anti-war internationalist; Feb 1917 founding member of Petrograd Soviet Executive Committee, launched first 'Izvestiya'
- 1917–1918Menshevik-Internationalist; editor of 'Novaya Zhizn'; VTsIK member 2nd–4th convocations; expelled June 1918
- 1919–1923Wrote and published 7-volume memoir 'Notes on the Revolution' (Записки о революции)
- 1920–1929Left Menshevik Party; worked in trade agencies & Agrarian Institute; Communist Academy member; 1928 speech opposing forced collectivization
- 1931Sentenced to 10 years at Menshevik Trial; imprisoned in Verkhneuralsk political isolator
- 1940Sentenced to death June 29; shot same day in Omsk prison
Related historical events
- 1905–1907The Revolution of 1905participated in Moscow armed uprising
- 1917.02–07The February RevolutionPetrograd Soviet Executive Committee member, Izvestiya founderElected to the Soviet Executive Committee on 27 February as the representative of the 'socialist literary group,' he organised the first issue of Izvestiya and took part in negotiations with the Duma Committee. He supported the Soviet majority's positions on the formation of the Provisional Government and the war.
- 1937–1938The Great Purgearrested and executed in 1937
Notes on the Revolution
Sukhanov's seven-volume memoir 'Notes on the Revolution' (Записки о революции, 1919–1923) stands as the only full-length eyewitness account of the 1917 Russian Revolution. As a Menshevik-Internationalist and Petrograd Soviet Executive Committee member operating at the revolution's center, Sukhanov moved almost daily between the Tauride Palace and the Smolny Institute, observing the unfolding revolution and recording it in vivid detail. The work conveys the political atmosphere of revolutionary Petrograd and the internal dynamics of the revolutionary leadership, and has been recognized across the political spectrum as an indispensable primary source.
The memoir's fate in the Soviet Union was troubled. First published in Berlin in 1922, it was suppressed under Stalin. Only in 1955 did an abridged English edition ('The Russian Revolution 1917: A Personal Record,' edited by Joel Carmichael) introduce Sukhanov to Western readers. Princeton University Press published a fuller edition in 1984, and in Russia the work was not reprinted until 1991. In 1992, a special rehabilitation committee formally declared all charges against Sukhanov baseless.
The memoir is significant not only as a historical record but also as the direct occasion for one of Lenin's last major writings, 'On Our Revolution' (О нашей революции, January 1923). Already in failing health, Lenin leafed through Sukhanov's work and took direct aim at the 'orthodox Marxist' proposition that Russia's productive forces had not reached the level required for socialism. According to Lenin, Sukhanov and the heroes of the Second International had failed to grasp revolutionary dialectics and could not see that, in the exceptional circumstances of the imperialist world war, Russia had seized the opportunity to realize the very combination of 'peasant war with the working-class movement' that Marx himself had envisioned for Prussia in 1856. Thus Sukhanov's 'Notes on the Revolution' entered history also as the text that provoked a decisive formulation of Leninist revolutionary theory.