Boris Nicolaevsky 1887-1966
SCHWARZ, SOLOMON
Boris Nicolaevsky 1887-1966 Boris Nicolaevsky, the last great name in the Russian Social Democratic movement, is gone. He died suddenly early in the morning of February 22, at his home in...
...He died suddenly early in the morning of February 22, at his home in Menlo Park, California...
...He was the son of an Orthodox priest in a family where for eight generations one spiritual father had followed the other...
...Nicolaevsky's most recent volume, Power and the Soviet Elite, published in September with an introduction by George F. Kennan, was a collection of essays that had appeared previously in the Russianlanguage Socialist Courier, of which he was co-editor, and in The New Leader...
...We have all sat at his feet...
...Although 78, he had in effect begun a new career only two years earlier when he left New York, after more than 20 years as an active participant in its intellectual community, to become curator of the Nicolaevsky Collection at Stanford University's Hoover Library...
...There he started to bring order to his own vast archives on the Russian revolutionary movements, which had been purchased by the Hoover Institution on War Revolution, and Peace, and to work on a book...
...Boris Nicolaevsky was born in 1887 in a small town in the Northern Urals...
...This pattern was repeated many times: In all, he was arrested nine times and exiled four times in Tsarist Russia, managing to flee from Siberia twice...
...Solomon Schwarz...
...Much of this he imparted to those who "sat at his feet," but more is now lost forever...
...In prison and in Siberian exile, where he came to know intimately many who were to lead the USSR, he studied with extraordinary tenacity about revolutionary movements in Russia and abroad, political science, social theories, socialism, and especially Marxism...
...Later he became one of the foremost authorities on everything connected with the life and activities of Marx, and he fought with great energy for the recognition of the humanitarian and democratic essence of Marxism...
...with the fall of France in 1940, he left for the United States...
...But in both cases Nicolaevsky-the old conspirator-was the last of the leading Menshevik's to depart: In Germany, he stayed behind to save and to arrange for the transportation abroad of the great archives of Marx and Engels, then in the possession of the German Social Democrats...
...And even these changes in the Party were of interest for him mainly as a reflection of deep social and spiritual changes in wide strata of the people, changes in the social and cultural face of the country, with which he, in spite of almost a halfcentury exile, felt himself indissolubly connected...
...A huge man physically, he had an even larger memory and brought with him an unrivaled knowledge of not only leading Soviet personalities but the Communist mentality...
...When Hitler came to power in 1933, Nicolaevsky left for France...
...He is our master, the master Kremlinologist...
...in France, to help organize the flight of many European Socialist emigres who were in danger as a result of Hitler's victory...
...His knowledge of personalities and their past, of Marxism and the Marxists' mentality, helps him throw bright light on the endless and endlessly involved turbulence and intrigue at the cold Kremlin summit...
...Nicolaevsky's energies in Russia, before and during the Revolution, were expended on behalf of the Social Democratic (Menshevik) movement...
...He then went to Berlin, where Raphael Abramovitch and L. Martov were publishing the Socialist Courier, to which Nicolaevsky had been smuggling articles under the pseudonym Boris Andreyev...
...Boris broke that tradition...
...This was typical for many revolutionaries of that time...
...In the United States, Nicolaevsky soon won new recognition...
...All that is true...
...What was not typical was Nicolaevsky's persistence in studying...
...George Kennan while writing his Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin, I while writing The Life of Lenin, and innumerable others either literally or figuratively by reading his articles in Russian or in The New Leader in English translation...
...He joined, too, and at the age of 17 he was arrested, expelled from high school, and exiled to the north -from where he soon escaped to return to revolutionary activities...
...The period of his youth was one of turbulence: The revolution was approaching, and the best of the youth were joining the revolutionary movement...
...In 1921 he was arrested once more, this time by the Bolsheviks, and after a year in prison he was expelled from Russia...
...In addition to writing, he established close contact with leading German Social Democrats, and gradually won a popularity in the leading stratum of the Socialist International...
...Yet, while he was best known for his interest in and unique analyses of the struggles at the Kremlin summit, what really interested Nicolaevsky were the ideological and sociological processes developing inside the Communist party which found their expression in conflicts at the top...
...In his review for the New York Times Book Review, Louis Fisher wrote: "Nicolaevsky is without doubt the greatest authority in the Western world on Soviet politics...
Vol. 49 • March 1966 • No. 6
