Abstract
Before coming to the crisis in Soviet-German relations provoked by the murder of Count Mirbach and the Left SR revolt, let us take a look at a characteristic Soviet document of this period, namely, a broadsheet in English, ‘signed’ by Lenin and Chicherin and entitled Why Have You Come to Murmansk?1 It is not dated, but from internal evidence would appear to have been produced in July.2 The broadsheet begins:
Comrade! Why have you come to Murmansk? You have been told in England that the demand for men on the Western Front is greater than ever. You know that in England men of 45 and over are being called to the colours because of the urgent need of men in France. Yet you are brought here, right in the Arctic Sea, a thousand miles from the battlefront.
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Notes and References
V. I. Mashezerskii, Pobeda velikogo oktyabrya i obrazovanie sovetskoy avtonomii Karelii (1978), p. 54.
A. Paquet, Im kommunistischen Russland (1919), p. 28.
Arthur Ransome, Autobiography (1976), pp. 244–5.
A. F. Ilyin-Zhenevskii, The Bolsheviks in Power: Reminiscences of the Year 1918 (English translation, 1984) p. 114. Some historians doubt the veracity of the official Soviet story about the murder of Mirbach, and consider that, if the Bolsheviks did not directly inspire the murder, they at least deliberately allowed it to take place, in order to have an excuse to crush the Left SRs, who were dangerous opponents of Bolshevik policy towards the peasants. For a recent summary of the evidence, see Yu. G. Fel’shtinskii, Bolsheviki i levye eseri okt. 1917-iyul 1918 (1985). Fel’shtinskii thinks (p. 263) that Lenin understood, no worse than Steinberg’, that in July 1918 Germany was no longer in a position to attack Soviet Russia.
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© 1987 Brian Pearce
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Pearce, B. (1987). The Mirbach Crisis. In: How Haig Saved Lenin. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18843-7_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18843-7_8
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