Tales of Sub-Lieutenant Ilyin brings to life the Russian Revolution and Civil War through the eyes of someone who was a central participant. Fyodor Raskolnikov, whose real name was Fyodor Ilyin, came from the most ordinary circumstances: the illegitimate son of an Orthodox priest, raised in poverty, who discovered Marx and Engels as a student and participated in the publication of “Pravda” from its very first days in 1912. The seven stories gathered here range from the stormy dissolution of the Constituent Assembly to his capture by British forces and his legendary seizure of the last British garrison on the Caspian Sea.
Raskolnikov’s account of imprisonment in British solitary confinement is an indictment of what the British ruling class was prepared to do strangle the Bolshevik revolution in it’s cradle. What makes the book most extraordinary, however, is the full arc of Raskolnikov’s life. He had been a devoted communist since 1910, an aide of Lenin, a participant in the October Revolution, yet in 1939 he published his famous Open Letter to Stalin, and promptly died from “falling out of a window.” In that letter, he accused Stalin of betraying Lenin’s vision, violating the Soviet constitution, and using terror against the old Bolsheviks and the working class itself. The contrast between the revolutionary energy captured in these stories and the fate of their author at the hands of Stalinism is itself a testament to why the fight of the Fourth International against Stalinism was the struggle to defend everything that the October Revolution had represented.