Recent reads: Armed Insurrection by A. Neuberg

This is a great book to download and read if you would like to appear on an FBI watchlist. Earlier this year I was thinking of writing a fictional story about an insurrectionary communist group, and I read this in part as research for it (I swear).

It is in part a textbook and in part a manual, written under directives from the Soviet Union in the 20s, on how to organize workers' insurrections, how to form communist militias, revolutionary military strategy, and some of the theoretical matters surrounding these matters. In part it was written for use in German communist military schools. It was written back at a time when communist parties were still organizing armed revolutionary militias, so today it is mostly only of a historical value, but it is immensely interesting.

To me, the most interesting part of the book is the 4 accounts of actual communist insurrections that had been attempted: one in Tallinn, Estonia (discussed under its historical name Reval), one in Hamburg, Germany, and two in China: Canton and Shanghai. It recounts the way the communist militias were organized, the tactics they used, and perhaps most importantly the mistakes they made. It's rich in facts regarding these events.

All of the people who worked on this book were communist party members with experience in organizing armed insurrection themselves, for example:
The section on Hamburg was written by Hans Kippenberg (here under his pseudonym A. Neuberg) - a German communist who was an organizer and military leader during the Hamburg uprising in 1923 himself.
Thukachevsky, Soviet military general who was known as the "Red Napoleon", wrote some chapters on party military organizing.
And the Vietnamese revolutionary Ho Chi Minh, who I'm sure needs no introduction, wrote a chapter about military organizing among the peasantry.

It's unlikely that the kind of conditions this was written for will return in the future, so the book might not have much practical value, but it can be a real treat for nerds of revolutionary/insurrectionary history.