Andre Liebich's From the Other Shore: Russian Social Democracy After 1921
Daniels, Robert V.
FROM THE OTHER SHORE: RUSSIAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY AFTER 1921 by Andre Liebich Harvard University Press, 1997 464 pp $48 THERE IS A certain romantic attraction in the history of lost causes. The...
...Dan and a few followers moved further to the left and the dominant right wing became ever more aggressively anti-Soviet...
...Ensconced in Berlin with the benign patronage of the German Social Democrats, they had to flee Hitler twice, first in 1933 when they moved to Paris, and then in 1940 when they took ship to New York with U.S...
...The Mensheviks steadfastly refused to join the anticommunist cause in the Russian Civil War, and the Communists treated the Mensheviks much less harshly than they did other opponents of the new regime...
...The origins of the Mensheviks in the prerevolutionary cleavage among the Russian social democrats, according to Liebich, have been oversimplified by the retrospective contrast of democratic Mensheviks and totalitarian Bolsheviks...
...Other Mensheviks, again outside Liebich's focus, remained in Russia and worked as economic experts...
...More than any other school of thought, the Mensheviks grasped the contradiction between the behavior of the Communist leadership and their Marxist and socialist claims...
...Despite all this, as Liebich learned through the Freedom of Information Act, the Mensheviks were subjected to surveillance by the FBI, which lacked any sophistication about Russian politics and seemed to regard anyone with a socialist label as some kind of Soviet agent...
...They were a close-knit group, despite their personal and ideological bickering, needing each other like the spouses in a bad marriage...
...It avoided the Marxist hang-up over the bourgeois revolution and capitalism as prerequisites for socialism...
...Russian populism, the ideology of the Socialist Revolutionaries, with its stress on the country's predominant peasantry as a natural base for socialism, would have worked much better, both as a guide to action and as a rationale for policy...
...Despite these fateful events, the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks for some time retained a soft spot for each other because of their common doctrinal origins and prerevolutionary associations...
...in the case of the Russian Mensheviks, they were the humanitarian shadow of communist inhumanity...
...who were suppressed and exiled by the victorious communist regime...
...This was the source of the remarkable "Letter of an Old Bolshevik," published by Nicolaevsky in the Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik and translated into English two years later...
...The losers are usually nicer guys...
...What Liebich adds to the tale is the intricate history of the Mensheviks and their thinking in the years of adversity after 1917, as oppositionists during the early years of the Soviet regime, and as critics of the Soviet system from afar throughout the subsequent decades, until they literally died out after midcentury...
...Bukharin's last political act before his arrest and execution was a trip to Paris in 1936, when he unburdened himself to Nicolaevsky about the menace of Stalin...
...I IEBICH CONCLUDES on the pathetic note of Mensheviks wrangling over their 4 own historical record, set against the oblivion the movement has suffered in the world at large, including postcommunist Russia...
...Their material circumstances were penurious at best, while personal and ideological clashes persisted among them in a tiresome tale of sectarian disputation...
...The events of World War II and the incipient cold war exacerbated their old schisms...
...Liebich is at his most fascinating in his vignettes of the individual Menshevik leaders in exile...
...One bright spot in the Mensheviks' glum New York world was the New Leader—"unquestionably the Mensheviks' American 'flagship,' " according to Liebich...
...Realistically speaking, Marxism was an inappropriate theory of socialism for Russia...
...Most of them never adjusted to the culture shock of life in the United States...
...But the Mensheviks' fate was not a tragic one just because they lost...
...Rafael Abramovich, a leader of the Jewish Social Democratic Bund before the revolution, stood close to Martov as a Menshevik-Internationalist until their exile, and in Berlin in 1921 the two co-founded the Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik (Socialist Herald) as the official organ of the "Foreign Delegation" of the Russian Social Democratic Party...
...Nikolai Chkheidze served as chair of the Petrograd Soviet until Trotsky took it over in the fall of 1917, and Irakli Tsereteli was the toughest defender of democracy within the provisional cabinet...
...The Mensheviks ran a distant third, behind the peasant-backed Socialist Revolutionaries and the second-place Bolsheviks, but Lenin made all such democratic distinctions moot when he disbanded the newly elected Constituent Assembly in January 1918...
...That was the point of no return, the beginning of BolshevikCommunist one-party rule, even though other parties were allowed to field candidates in the election of the Constituent Assembly a few weeks later...
...In the event, except for their ill-fated left wing who thought they could cooperate with the Communists, the Socialist Revolutionaries had no more will than the Mensheviks to exploit their brief opportunity for revolutionary leadership in 1917...
...In their final, New York phase, the aging Mensheviks were more isolated than ever...
...Thus, there was indeed some substance to Stalinist charges that the left was a "Menshevik deviation," if we apply Liebich's notion of a continuum to extend from the democratic Mensheviks to the totalitarian Stalinists...
...In fact, as I showed years ago in The Conscience of the Revolution, the opposition factions within the Communist Party leaned repeatedly in the anti-centralist and democratizing direction that had distinguished the Mensheviks all along...
...This was one theoretical root of the ongoing schism between right and left Mensheviks, those who condemned the communist system and those who felt they had to make excuses for it...
...Although Dallin published copiously and Nicolaevsky founded the art of Kremlinology, the Mensheviks and their insights were not exploited by American sovietology as fully as they might have been...
...This trial of the Soviet Mensheviks served as a test run for Stalin's show trials of the later 1930s, with all their fabricated charges and forced confessions...
...There was a bad falling-out in the 1950s between Abramovich and the Columbia University Research Program on the History of the CPSU, leaving the Menshevik leader to publish his own book independently: The Soviet Revolution, 1917-1939 (International Universities Press, 1962), an excellent account of the Communist leaders and their betrayal of genuine socialism...
...That was before Stalin transformed the planning process in 1929 into a regime of military commands and allocations, and put the Menshevik functionaries on trial for "sabotage" in 1931...
...Lidia Dan, Martov's sister, was the peacemaker among the Mensheviks...
...Naturally Trotsky and his sympathizers insisted on their party loyalty and denied Stalin's allegations, but the charge of Menshevism was really to their credit...
...Liebich is inclined to discount parallels between the Mensheviks and the communist opponents of Lenin and Stalin between 1917 and 1929...
...An important corrective, for history's ultimate judgment, has been the Menshevik documentation project at Columbia University directed by Professor Leopold Haimson...
...Because of their common Marxist doctrine, both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks overestimated the Russian working class, in the one instance as a basis for rule, in the other as a basis for opposition...
...Liebich overlooks the influence of the former left Mensheviks, including Trotsky, whose revolutionary zeal in 1917 led them to swallow their previous reservations about Lenin and join the Bolshevik ranks...
...Liebich speaks of a "Menshevik-Bolshevik continuum," along which, before the revolution, it was common for individuals to shift both ways...
...Further, the Mensheviks' efforts to comprehend communism were hamstrung by their own dogmatic Marxism: from the class standpoint, Stalinism had to be either basically bourgeois or basically proletarian...
...All expanded on the theme of Soviet totalitarianism, to the point, according to one critic quoted by Liebich, of becoming "more anti-Communist than socialist...
...Between 1920 and 1923 Lenin allowed the leading Mensheviks to leave the country, in contrast to the more recalcitrant Socialist Revolutionaries, who were hunted down as Civil War enemies and tried as traitors in 1922...
...In its basics the story of the Mensheviks is well known to anyone familiar with the history of socialism: Russian Marxists of the democratic persuasion who, long before the revolution, broke with Lenin and the Bolsheviks over the future winners' authoritarian methods...
...Bazarov and V.G...
...Why, after all, can there not be a socialist path of noncapitalist but democratic development, which is what really would have applied to Russia...
...Abramovich and Nicolaevsky were regular contributors, among a host of other Menshevik bylines, and Dallin served as associate editor under Sol Levitas in the late 1940s and early 1950s...
...THE ENDURING significance of the Mensheviks is their role as critics of the Soviet regime from a Marxist standpoint...
...Groman, in particular, played a key role in the development of Soviet economic planning...
...Nevertheless, the Mensheviks lost their hold on the soviets to the Bolsheviks, who turned to the Second Congress of Soviets to legitimize their seizure of power in the OctoDISSENT / Fall 1998 n 137 BOOKS ber Revolution...
...visas arranged by friends in the labor movement...
...After the fall of Czar Nicholas II in the February Revolution, the Mensheviks took a leading role in the soviets (councils) representing the urban workers and the army, and backed the new provisional government while Lenin and the Bolsheviks were conspiring against it...
...Dominant in the party at this point were the Georgian Mensheviks (largely outside Liebich's account), who had flourished surprisingly in the semiconstitutional politics of 1905-1917, and later ran Georgia as an independent republic from 1918 to 1921, before they were sent into their own exile when the fledgling state was forcibly sovietized...
...After years of research and a series of learned articles on the Mensheviks, he has now produced the definitive work on their postrevolutionary history, with two basic objectives in mind—to overcome history's "deeply ingrained disregard for exile movements," and to comprehend "the fate of Marxism...
...They never established much influence in the debates among American radicals...
...Though constantly harassed, the Mensheviks remained nominally a legal opposition party until 1921...
...Like the Trotskyists, the Mensheviks were late in coming to the realization that Stalinism, as a supraclass dictatorship ruling through the "New Class" bureaucracy, confounded the fundamental class premises of Marxist theory...
...they went on to play a leading role in the Left Opposition from the early 1920s until Stalin suppressed them in 1927...
...But the Mensheviks' insights seem less influential than Liebich suggests: By and large, the outside world could not grasp the distinction between Marxist theory and Soviet practice, and either exculpated Stalinism because it claimed to be socialist, or condemned socialism because it was identified with Stalinism...
...In all, forty individuals appear in Liebich's capsule biographical guide...
...As a principled, if relatively feeble, voice of democratic socialism, the Menshevik philosophy supports the quest for a third way between the ossified bureaucratism of the Soviet system and the free-market quagmire that has succeeded it...
...Andre Liebich is a polyglot scholar of Polish background and Canadian citizenship who teaches at the Institute of International Studies in Geneva...
...Beyond all this, as Liebich stresses, "The Mensheviks' legacy is . . . independent of the course of political development in Russia...
...A successful writer and journalist, Abramovich then emerged as the leader of the Mensheviks' anti-Soviet right wing, in which he was supported by Boris Nicolaevsky, the only non-Jew in the exile leadership, an assiduous archivist and the best scholar of the group...
...In exile the Mensheviks were still buffeted by events...
...140 n DISSENT / Fall 1998...
...David Dallin was the youngest and most independent of the leading Mensheviks, and the most anti-Soviet...
...They refused to recruit new members who had not belonged to the movement before the revolution, and for years they barred their members from writing for nonsocialist publications...
...Dan died isolated in 1946 after completing his magnum opus, The Origins of Bolshevism (English translation, LonDISSENT / Fa/11998 139 BOOKS don, Secker & Warburg, 1964), while Nicolaevsky isolated himself on the right by his vain efforts to organize new Russian emigres despite their antipathy to anything called socialist...
...They were the best prepared and best BOOKS informed of any observers of the evolution of the Soviet system, until the rise of Western Sovietology after World War II...
...hence the key importance of the exiles for Liebich's quest to understand the fate of Marxism...
...Almost all were assimilated Jewish intellectuals, lacking any mundane skills except 138 n DISSENT / Fall 1998 writing, and they imposed on themselves, says Liebich, a new "politics of isolation...
...Their real tragedy in exile was that their unique potential for understanding the evolution of communism was vitiated by their philosophical dogmatism and their petty internal disputes...
...Liebich does point out how the Communist right wing, headed by the ideologist Nikolai Bukharin and by Lenin's successor as prime minister, Alexei Rykov, maintained contact with the Mensheviks throughout the 1920s...
...ROBERT V. DANIELS is professor emeritus of history at the University of Vermont, and author, most recently, of Russia's Transformation: Snapshots of a Crumbling System (Rowman & Littlefield, 1997...
...who tried vainly to sustain the democratic experiment of the provisional government in 1917...
...Abramovich's work contrasted both with the naive ideological interpretation and with the worms-eye sociological studies that dominated much Sovietology at the time and later...
...Yulii Martov, the idealistic adversary of Lenin in 1903, and his brother-in-law Fyodor Dan, chair of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Soviets prior to the Bolshevik takeover, set the "Martov-Dan line": criticize the Communists, but give no aid and comfort to their enemies, who would assuredly be worse...
...His title comes from the famous nineteenthcentury Russian exile Alexander Herzen, and the whole book is in a sense a reflection on Herzen's philosophy of the exile's lonely mission in Russian history...
...As Marxists in a single workeroriented party, the two wings separated much less sharply and abruptly than is usually thought...
...Outraged by the Bolshevik coup and the assault on the Winter Palace, the Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary minority walked out of the congress...
Vol. 45 • September 1998 • No. 4
