The Trotsky Papers I-II [antikvár]

PREFACE In 1936 the International Institute of Social History acquired from Leon Trotsky a collection of over 800 documents covering the period 1917-1922. The collection was called by Trotsky the Lenin-Trotsky correspondence, the bulk of it in fact falling under this heading, though it had added to it a fair number of communications to and from other persons. The collection consisted not of the originals but of typewritten copies together with photocopies of 58^ of the original documents, almost all of them in Lenin's handwriting. In 1940 Trotsky's archives were acquired by the Harvard College Library. These included second typescript copies of the documents earlier acquired by the Institute. A microfilm of these was kindly made available to the Institute and they proved to be identical with those already in the Institute's possession, of which they were !evidently carbon copies. The only exceptions to this were docuraerLt -no:/! and part of document no. 152, which have been incorporated into-this volume with the consent of Harvard University, whose" assisfahce is hereby gratefully acknowledged. The Institute considered the documents important enough to be worthy of publication. For practical reasons it was decided to divide them into two volumes. The present, first volume comprises documents 1-435 covering the period 1917-1919, i.e. roughly half of the total number of documents. A second volume will contain the documents for 1920-1922. One reason for this division is that in 1919 the most important part of the Civil War came to a close. After this date new problems cropped up and the subject material of the documents changes accordingly. The fact that neither Harvard's nor the Institute's collection consist of the originals of the documents raises two closely related questions 1 Viz. of documents nos. 108, 184, 187, 188, 189, 191, 192, 193, 194, 196, 197, 203, 208, 217, 226, 228, 234, 253, 258, 259, 260, 261, 264, 268, 277, 283, 284, 292, 293, 294, 295, 304, 305, 307, 308, 310, 311, 312, 313, 314, 316, 321, 330, 334, 336, 344, 356, 365, 369, 377, 386, 387, 388, 393, 394, 417, 418, 419. No. 307 has been written by Skljanskij and only signed by Lenin.