Woytinsky's Final Memoir
DANIELS, ROBERT V.
Woytinsky's Final Memoir STORMY PASSAGE By W. S. Woytinsky Vanguard. 550 pp. $10.00. Reviewed by ROBERT V. DANIELS Associate Professor of History, University of Vermont; author, "The...
...He was arrested, brought to trial, released, and made his way to the new Republic of Georgia, then in the act of becoming independent under Menshevik rule...
...With the fall of Nicholas II in March 1917, Woytinsky, like thousands of other political exiles, hastened to Petrograd and the center of revolutionary politics...
...Woytinsky ends his tale with some notable observations about the country which he had made his final home...
...and the equalitarian sense of opportunity, human dignity and respect for work...
...Rather it was cold, like a steel blade...
...Frustrated by the political impasse in the capital, in the summer of 1917 Woytinsky accepted a post as the Soviets' chief military commissar for the Northern Front...
...In 1920 the Woytinskys were sent on a diplomatic mission, to seek—in vain, as it turned out— Allied recognition for the Georgian Republic...
...Woytinsky established close connections with the German Socialist labor movement, and became its chief economic advisor...
...Here he witnessed the psychological disintegration of the Russian Army— a state of "mass-neurosis" that helped pave the way for the Bolsheviks...
...Even Woytinsky himself was once approached as a candidate for the job...
...Woytinsky refused and did his best to aid Kerensky's vain effort at a countercoup...
...As I finished Stormy Passage I found myself saying, "Here is a man I wish I had been privileged to know...
...author, "The Nature of Communism" Stormy Passage is an extraordinary panorama of recent history seen through the eyes of a man of wide-ranging talent and deep sensibilities who for many years was one of the most distinguished contributors to this magazine...
...On November 7, when the Bolsheviks finally moved to take full power, no one was in a position to undertake serious counter-action...
...The political fluidity of those days is illustrated by the surprising fact that Woytinsky, for all his effort to support the Provisional Government, was the first man to whom Lenin offered the post of Commissar of Military Affairs in the new Bolshevik government...
...A strong and stable government could have been formed after the March revolution only on the basis of cooperation between the revolutionary, democratic forces represented by the Soviet and the progressive elements of the Duma —that is, on the basis of a political coalition of the left...
...Forced to move on once again, the Woytinskys came to America in 1935, and for the next 25 years pursued their work partly with the Government and partly with private foundations...
...It was left to the Bolsheviks to ride the crest of a wave of unallayed popular hatred and desperation and to fill the vacuum of leadership with their one-party dictatorship...
...Fortunately, he recorded the richness of a life lived to the fullest with vigor and conviction...
...Woytinsky was a remarkable man...
...He was an eye-witness to the tragic collapse of the Socialist movement in the face of the depression crisis and the Nazi revolution...
...Shortly before his death in 1960, W. S. Woytinsky completed this vivid autobiography recounting a career which carried him from revolutionary St...
...Four years later he was released as a free deportee...
...Stranded in the West by the Soviet occupation of Georgia in 1921, they settled in Berlin and embarked upon the statistical work that made their professional reputation...
...But it is well to be reminded of the strong points of our society as seen through the eyes of a European humanitarian—not our quasi-official free enterprise ideology, but the essential practicality of American thought...
...Born to a family of the Russian intelligentsia in 1885, Woytinsky was studying economics at the University of St...
...He writes graphically of both the bestialities and the liberal loop-holes in the Tsarist prison system, and the excitement of wilderness life on the Siberian frontier—where, incidentally, he met and married his wife Emma, his lifelong collaborator...
...Petersburg in 1905 through the greatest crises of the 20th century and on to an outstanding record as an economist in the U.S...
...He regarded Alexander Kerensky as an egocentric opportunist who played into the hands of conservatives and counterrevolutionaries...
...To Americans his main points are so obvious that they are too often taken for granted...
...Petersburg when the revolutionary events of 1905 commenced...
...Here he continued his remarkable career as sage advisor to a series of ill-fated democratic regimes...
...Most of the Soviet leaders had no will to power and found it difficult to visualize themselves [as] ministers...
...In 1908, after numerous brief arrests and near-executions, Woytinsky was imprisoned and sent to Siberia...
...He was perhaps the most unemotional man I have ever met in politics...
...The tragedy of 1917, as Woytinsky came to see it, was the failure of the Democratic Socialists (Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries) to accept the responsibilities of leadership by taking vigorous action to deal with the country's desperate problems—including withdrawal from the War with the Central Powers—while there was still time...
...From this vantage point he was able to observe the whole tangled and tragic history of the Provisional Government, and his account of the events of 1917 accordingly constitute a valuable source for every student of the Russian Revolution...
...Month by month, Woytinsky recorded the disintegration of the Provisional Government and the rise of Bolshevik influence...
...He soon broke with the Bolsheviks, because of his stand in favor of national defense, and became a Menshevik member of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets...
...In retrospect," he observes, "the Soviet's leaders . . . chose the wrong road...
...the warmth and informality...
...He knew Lenin well, and writes of him: "He was a fanatic, but there was no fire in his fanaticism...
...Overnight he found himself a leader of the revolutionary labor movement and he was taken into the Bolshevik faction of the Social Democratic party, though he never became a doctrinaire Marxist...
...In the end, Kerensky lost the confidence of the Democratic Socialists and found it impossible to mobilize effective military force against the Bolsheviks, who had meanwhile won control of the key Soviets...
...Moderates and conservatives sank in a quagmire of factionalism and military officers sought a dictator to restore order...
...But the chief culprits, in his estimate, were the Constitutional Democrats, who opposed any drastic reforms and, in the hope of a more conservative climate, blocked the immediate convocation of the Constituent Assembly which might have given Russia a democratic future...
Vol. 45 • April 1962 • No. 7
