Memoirs of a Russian Democrat

...He can write of the events of 1917 with an intimacy impossible for one who has not lived through them...

...The English Revolution in the 17th century and the French Revolution in the 18th century were no exception...

...Lenin stressed the principle of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which in practice meant the dictatorship of the Communist party—or, more accurately, of a small Party group (and, in Stalin's time, of a single man...

...The Vikhzhel, or Railway Workers Union, was especially opposed to an exclusively Bolshevik regime...

...for them, talk was a mask behind which the Bolsheviks could consolidate their military gains...

...What was decisive in their view was that in Petrograd they disposed of sufficiently strong police and army units to shoot down demonstrating workers and intellectuals and to dissolve the Constituent Assembly by force...

...The Mensheviks insisted that Socialism and democracy were inseparable...

...No one who has lived in a totalitarian state and is familiar with its internal functioning can believe that this savagery will ever contribute to the cultural development or well-being of mankind...

...Indeed for Lenin, as Abramovitch repeatedly emphasizes, the supreme overriding consideration was always to gain and keep power...

...Abramovitch is eminently qualified to write a history of the Soviet Revolution...

...When totalitarian repression in the Soviet Union made it impossible to carry on an organized struggle there, Abramovitch and some of his comrades established themselves in Germany, where they published a brilliant and informative Russian-language magazine, The Socialist Courier, an important source of reference for Soviet political and economic developments...

...But Lenin and Trotsky never carried on these discussions with any serious intention of having them succeed...

...His creed is summed up eloquently in some of the concluding sentences of his history: "France's great Socialist tribune, Jean Jaurès, author of a Socialist history of the French Revolution, once remarked that all revolutions have been a fairly savage means of achieving a measure of progress...

...But the underlying ideological difference between the two groups was so wide as to be quite irreconcilable...

...For totalitarian rule is not so much anticapitalist as it is anti-human...

...But in Germany he still occupied a point of vantage for observing international Communism, and in his book he notes the curious parallel play of two elements in Soviet policy...

...Reviewed By WILLIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN Raphael Abramovitch is probably the most distinguished of the thinning band of Russia's Democratic Socialists...

...But can it be said that the Russian, or for that matter the Chinese Revolution are steps along the road to progress...

...Early in the present century the Russian Social Democratic party split between a Bolshevik wing, headed by Lenin, and a Menshevik group, in which Julius Martov, Abramovitch and Fyodor Dan were the outstanding figures...

...The myth of an insurgent proletariat, eagerly following the leadership of the Communist party, is exploded in the author's carefully documented narrative: "The 'proletarian revolution' was accomplished while the working masses of the capital stood by passively...

...We do not think so...

...And some of the less extreme Bolsheviks (the Party was then not as tightly disciplined and monolithic as it became later) were quite wilung to discuss the possibility of a coalition government which would have included the more moderate Socialist parties, the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries...

...Abramovitch's direct observation of Soviet developments ceased in 1920, when he was allowed to leave the USSR legally (without the romantic trappings of a personal visit from Lenin mentioned in a recent Moscow dispatch to the New York Times...

...While Communist propaganda was kept alive in Germany, the Soviet government concluded an unholy alliance with extreme German nationalists and future Nazis, helping the Reichswehr to evade the disarmament limitations of the Treaty of Versailles...

...The struggle for the 'world Socialist revolution' was won by war-weary peasant lads in soldiers' or sailors' uniforms...

...To some extent this shortsighted policy created the Frankenstein monster of Hitler's enormous armed force, which fell on the Soviet Union in June 1941...

...Students of the Russian Revolution will be particularly interested in Abramovitch's detailed description of the negotiations seeking the formation of an all-Socialist government, which went on for some time after the November 7 Bolshevik coup d'etat...

...During his long life, and not least in this crowning achievement of his work as a publicist, Abramovitch has been loyal to democratic and humanistic Socialism...

...The original issue in the split was of minor importance...

...Today it is published in New York...

...Commenting on Lenin's sophistries in connection with the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the first and only Russian representative body elected on a basis of universal suffrage and reasonable freedom (there was already some Bolshevik pressure in the larger cities), Abramovitch very justly remarks: "Had Lenin been honest, he would have admitted frankly that he and his party did not care whether the peasants were with them or not...

...His long life has been devoted to the Russian revolutionary movement, first as a participant and then as an opponent and critic of what he regards as the Bolshevik perversion and betrayal of the twin ideals of Socialism and democracy...

...He is able to illustrate his points with references to personal talks with Felix Dzerzhinsky and other Bolshevik leaders...