Notebooks for the Grandchildren. Recollections of a Supporter of the Marxist Opposition to Stalin Who Survived the Stalin Terror

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Published Nov 2024

Mikhail Baitalsky

Editor / Translator: Marilyn Vogt-Downey

These Notebooks are for you who are generations away from the great Russian Revolution of 1917 and seek to understand what went wrong.

Baitalsky describes the process through the eyes of young Ukrainians like him, who came of age fighting for the Revolution but were murdered in the late 1930s as the Revolution “degenerated” under Joseph Stalin. How did Stalin come to power and manage to retain power? What did this “political counterrevolution” look like to this Ukrainian–and Jewish–communist In the 1920s and after?
Arrested three times by the Stalin regime, Baitalsky survived to tell you what happened.

Biographical Note

Marilyn Vogt-Downey translated for the Pathfinder Press Writings of Leon Trotsky series (1970s), Samizdat: Voices of the Soviet Opposition (Pathfinder in 1974), The Bulletin in Defense of Marxism (1990s) and The USSR 1987-1991: Marxists Perspectives (Humanity Books, 1993).

Readership

The audience for this book is anyone of any age who seeks to learn about revolution, how it changes the lives of those who make it and how those who make it can change the course of the revolution.

Table of Contents

Foreword
Acknowledgements
List of Maps and Figures
Glossary
Introductory Comments
Yuula Benivolski
Translator’s Note
A Brief Chronology of the Russian Revolution and its Aftermath
Translator’s Introduction

Notebooks for the Grandchildren

Baitalsky’s Introduction: Preliminary Remarks: The 1920s and the 1970s

NOTEBOOK 1
1 Communist Youth League Christening
2 Our Jacobin Monastery
3 Were We Cultured?
4 Standards of Human Behaviour
5 Primary and Secondary Feelings
6 Husbands and Wives in the Communist Youth League
7 A Few Remarks about the Language of the Times

NOTEBOOK 2
1 How It Was and How It Became
2 The Family of an Odessa Tailor
3 Ideological Commitment and Calvinism
4 I Saw My Homeland
5 Friendship with Grisha
6 Days and Evenings Without Romance
7 Cain, Abel and the ‘Platform of the 83’
8 The View from the Window of Cell No.9

NOTEBOOK 3
1 I Make the Worst Choice
2 My First Arrest
3 A Year of Successes in Astrakhan
4 I Could Have Remained Silent about This Too
5 Features of the New Order
6 More about Boris and the Features of the Time

NOTEBOOK 4
1 Holy and Unholy Work
2 My Second Arrest
3 ‘We Know All about You’
4 Butyrka Humanism
5 Becoming Acquainted with Vorkuta

NOTEBOOK 5
1 At the Brick Factory
2 Tents for the Condemned
3 Borya Elisavetsky
4 Vorkuta, Kotlas, Kirov
5 Russian Patriots

Photographs

NOTEBOOK6
1 They Even Found Me Here
2 My Co-Butyrnik
3 You Don’t Get Something For Nothing
4 A Credo on the Subject of Wages
5 The Scream of a Woman in the Corridor
6 ‘Consider Yourself Lucky!’

NOTEBOOK 7
1 Distinguishing Padding from Content
2 I End Up in the First Circle
3 We Delve into the Psalms of the New David
4 The Cunning Machine of the Special Judicial Sessions
5 Conversations in the Main Alley

NOTEBOOK 8
1 To Vorkuta for the Second Time
2 To Each His Own
3 Even Those Who Were Deported Are Voting
4 Joseph Rakhmetov
5 A Period of Camp Liberalisation
6 A Puddle With a Watchtower on Its Shore

NOTEBOOK 9
1 Meaningless Yackers Fall in Line
2 Vorkuta– My Alma Mater
3 The Poisonous Weapon of Hushing Things Up
4 Love and Hatred
5 On Very Ordinary Honesty
6 I Hope for an Echo

Translator’s Postscript
Appendix 1: Timeline of Baitalsky’s Life
Appendix 2: Baitalsky’s Other Writings
Appendix 3: Baitalsky: Obituaries and Eulogies
Appendix 4: Russian Government Archival Documentation of The Mass Executions February 1937–September 1938
Appendix 5: The Vorkuta Hunger Strike: What Russian Government Archives Have Revealed
Appendix 6: The 1938 Executions of the Left Opposition Supporters at the Brick Factory: The Executioner’s Official Report
Appendix 7: Excerpts from The Official Conviction and Rehabilitation Documents of a Leader of the 1936 Vorkuta Hunger Strike and 13 Co-Defendants
Appendix 8: The Moscow Trials 1936–1938
Bibliography
Index