[4] In these early activist years, Bokii was already to show impressive talent in cryptography, a skill which will go on to be evident and ongoing in his later Soviet career.

[7] Early in 1917, Bokii was arrested and sentenced to exile in Yakutsk, but before he was transported, the Tsar Nicholas II was overthrown by the February Revolution, and he was released and resumed his leading role on the Petrograd City Committee,[5] of which he served as Secretary from April 1917 to March 1918.

[4] Bokii was recognized as a supporter of the "Left Communists" headed by Nikolai Bukharin who sought to fight a revolutionary war against German invaders rather than signing a separate peace in the period immediately after the Bolshevik uprising.

[4] Ultimately, the German offensive was halted when Lenin and the party Central Committee won the day by signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the government of Imperial Germany on March 3, 1918.

[4] He remained in this position until the end of August 1918, at which time he was briefly made the head of that same organization following the assassination of his chief, Moisei Uritsky.

[12] On September 10, 1918 Bokii responded by forwarding to the Consul the text of a message he had sent to district soviets ordering the release of all citizens of nations under German protection against whom no specific evidence supporting charges of speculation or counterrevolutionary activity could be mustered.

[12] Bokii's moderation with respect to the use of terror brought him into conflict with Zinoviev, who in mid-September 1918 was advancing the idea of distributing arms to the Petrograd workers and allowing them to administer mob justice against their perceived class enemies as they saw fit.

[13] Stasova seems to have felt that her ally Bokii was in physical danger if he remained in Petrograd without protection and she appealed to Yakov Sverdlov for his transfer to Moscow, outside of Zinoviev's fief.

[14] Other sources indicate that Bokii remained as the head of the Petrograd secret police until November 1918, at which time he was made a member of the collegium of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) of Soviet Russia.

[4] Bokii has been said to have been "one of the most active creators of the Gulag system"[16] and labelled by another historian as "the OGPU boss in charge of concentration camps" in the early 1920s.

[17] Such claims may tend to hyperbole, however, as he figures in the account of Alexander Solzhenitsyn only as the head of the Moscow troika rather than as architect or chief of the camp system itself.

[4] Inspired by Theosophical lore and several visiting Mongol lamas, Bokii along with his writer friend Alexander Barchenko, embarked on a quest for Shambhala, in an attempt to merge Kalachakra-tantra and ideas of Communism in the 1920s.

[19] Bokii's fellow bureaucratic NKVD foes had conjured up fictions of his being as a sort of Dracula-like human blood drinker.