UI Press | Eduard M. Dune. Translated and Edited by Diane P. Koenker and S. A. Smith

Notes of a Red Guard

This compelling never-before-published account takes the reader into Red Guard and Red Army units, Moscow factories, workers' homes, and to the unfamiliar world of feudal Dagestan. Worker-revolutionary Eduard Dune was seventeen when the Russian revolution began. He joined the Bolshevik party and fought with the Moscow Red Guard during the October revolution. Notes of a Red Guard is his candid account of what happened through 1921. This uncensored account offers a rare glimpse of revolutionary Russia from the perspective of an educated, skilled worker who became a rank-and-file participant.

"In measured and still haunting tones, Dune captures the idealism, the sense of moral fervor, and the actual political attractions of the Bolshevik movement for young male workers in 1917. . . . Dune's moving memoir is no simple apology for the Bolsheviks, however. He emphasizes the creeping authoritarianism, the terror, the sense of a revolution that had lost its moral bearings during the first years of soviet power."--Daniel T. Orlovsky, author of The Limits of Reform

"This highly readable translation offers numerous insights, the most important of which concern the beliefs and outlooks he reflects as a young man swept up into the revolutionary events of the time."--Donald J. Raleigh, author of Revolution on the Volga: 1917 in Saratov

Diane P. Koenker, a professor of history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is the author of Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution. S. A. Smith, a professor at Essex University , England, is the author of Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917-1918.

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