PHILIP E. MOSELY

Boris Nicolaevsky: The American Years

The year 1940 marked a new turning point in the turbulent life of Boris Nicolaevsky, as it did in the lives of millions of people and entire nations. While other democratic leaders were beginning their first or second exile, many Russian political exiles, among them Boris Ivanovich, sought a new refuge for the third time. As Hitler’s still advancing power overwhelmed the defenses of France and flooded onward to the Pyrenees, it swept along in its undertow the wreckage of many hopes; it also threatened the lives of numerous devoted democrats and socialists from many European countries, including Russia. Through its prompt action, and through its political influence and financial support, the American labor movement literally rescued from annihilation hundreds of political and intellectual exiles and helped many of them find their footing once more, this time in America. An adequate description of this rescue action still awaits the pen of an historian.

The actions of Boris Ivanovich in 1940, like so many before and after, expressed values that lay deep within him. Repeatedly he postponed leaving France while he worked day and night, using his early training in conspiratorial methods and moving from one hide-out to another, both to promote the exodus of other political refugees and to place in safekeeping the tremendous and unique collections that he had accumulated in the previous three decades. Many Russian, German, Czech and Austrian socialists were persuaded by Nicolaevsky to escape from Hitler’s Europe via Marseilles or Lisbon; many others refused to heed his warnings, and among these many perished.

Nicolaevsky’s other aim was to place in secret safekeeping the vast collections he had assembled on the Russian revolutionary movements, the European socialist parties, and the Second and Third Internationals. Major sections of them were concealed in attics, one part even in a chicken coop. Characteristically, Anna Mikhailovna Bourguina, later Mrs. Nicolaevsky, risked her own life by remaining behind in occupied France in order to safeguard the collections. Unfortunately, the major part of Nicolaevsky’s library was discovered by agents of the Alfred Rosenberg Office and transferred to the notorious Institute on Judaism and Bolshevism, at Frankfurt-on-Main. There, in the confusion at the end of the war, this treasure-house was again uncovered, this time by Soviet agents who ranged throughout occupied Germany in search of captured Soviet “booty.” Because most of the materials were in Russian, a major part of the collection was reportedly turned over to Soviet officers by an American lieutenant and removed promptly to the Soviet Union.

Once in New York, Boris Ivanovich again resumed, with his youthful hope and unflagging energy, the task of systematic accumulation of historical materials, and was also able, once the war was over, to retrieve and transfer to New York nearly all the remaining collections he had been forced to leave behind in 1940.

It is impossible to think of Boris Ivanovich, in Berlin, Paris, or New York, except surrounded by his enormous collection of books, journals, newspapers, pamphlets, diaries, letters, handwritten memoirs, and manuscripts. The setting has been described vividly by the late Louis Fischer.

One would sit in his two-room [actually four-room] apartment near Columbia University, the walls covered, floor to ceiling, with tightly packed shelves of ancient and new Soviet publications. The overflow was stacked on chairs and desks or on the floor. Suddenly he would mention an event, hoist his heavy frame and insert an arm behind a row of volumes, rummage for a moment, and bring out, for instance, a pamphlet, yellow with age, published in Russian in Geneva in 1887, the work of Lenin’s executed brother, Alexander, or some equally antiquarian treasure elsewhere unobtainable.¹

One of the strongest memories of many dozens of American and other scholars, who either met or worked with Boris Ivanovich, is his unstinted sharing of his experiences, his deep and intricate knowledge of people and events, and his wide-ranging and unique collections. Out of habit Boris Ivanovich was reserved toward each newcomer, but once he placed his trust in him, he gave generously of his time and knowledge.

The work of collecting never ceased, right to his sudden demise on February 2, 1966. Writing at high speed on his Russian typewriter, Nicolaevsky maintained an extensive correspondence with survivors of the many parties and groups of the Russian revolutionary movement. With the devoted assistance of Anna Mikhailovna, he developed a system of identifying and locating materials that was clear to them, if to no one else. A large and valuable part of the books and pamphlets, comprising between 10,000 and 12,000 titles, was acquired in 1955 by the Indiana University Library. The Indiana Nicolaevsky Collection includes many periodicals published before 1917 by revolutionary groups outside Russia, clandestine revolutionary journals published in Russia, legal but scarce left-wing publications, and a large number of Russian publications of the post-1917 emigration. Individual items of special interest include two supplements to the famous Kolokol of Alexander Herzen, rare issues of Chernyi peredel, and a wealth of materials relating to the pre-1914 International Socialist Congresses and Conferences.²

The remaining and far more extensive Nicolaevsky collection was acquired in 1964 by the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, at Stanford University, which thus further strengthened the position it had achieved in the 1920s as the leading archives of Russian history outside Russia (and, since World War II, as a major library and research and publications center on the history and politics of all nations). At that time Boris Ivanovich, now installed as curator of the Nicolaevsky Collection, established a new home, not far from the Hoover Institution, and, with Anna Mikhailovna’s assistance, continued his work of collecting, systematizing, annotating and, in too small measure, making use of these rich materials for his own research projects. Since his death Anna Mikhailovna has continued the work of indexing and annotating the Nicolaevsky Collection and has also performed a similar service for Nicolaevsky’s personal archives, which include his voluminous correspondence and memoranda.

By instinct a man of action as well as the leading historian of the Russian revolutionary movement, after 1940 Boris Ivanovich continued both interests from his new base in New York. During the war years, when his new host-country, the United States, relied on Soviet military cooperation to defeat Hitler and hoped that the victorious powers could work together to build a peaceful and cooperative postwar order, a guest and a refugee such as Nicolaevsky could only speak in quiet tones to remind people of some of the essential features of Soviet totalitarianism; the depth of his knowledge was impressive even to people who preferred to listen to their own wishful thinking.

With the refounding of the Sotsialisticheskii vestnik (Socialist Courier) in New York (1940), Nicolaevsky and other recently arrived socialist refugees regained and enlarged a small but select audience, and Boris Ivanovich began with increasing frequency to publish his articles and reviews in English translation as well. His first book in English, Aseff; the Spy, Russian Terrorist and Police Stool, published in 1934, had created for him, in advance of his arrival in America, a reputation as an historian of the Russian Revolution, and now his interpretations of Soviet events and prospects also came gradually to be received with great respect.

The year 1947 saw a major contribution by Nicolaevsky to the study of one of the grimmest aspects of Soviet life. The publication of Forced Labor in Soviet Russia, by David J. Dallin and Boris I. Nicolaevsky, as Brooks Atkinson wrote ( New York Times Book Review, Aug. 31, 1947), “. . . reconstructed a somber and ominous portrait of daily life inside a police state.” Careful collecting and checking of Soviet sources, many previously overlooked or ignored by analysts, was supplemented by the first-hand accounts of a growing number of new Soviet non-returners and refugees, many of whom had barely survived their experiences in Soviet prisons and concentration camps. Much of what Dallin and Nicolaevsky brought together in 1947 in systematic analysis was dramatically confirmed in Khrushchev’s secret speech of February, 1956, and since then, in a wide range of Soviet autobiographies and novels.

In the postwar years Nicolaevsky resumed his efforts to define democratic socialism as an alternative to Bolshevism in Russian political life. He remained in active consultation with the principal groups among the much-divided Mensheviks, whose center had been moved to New York in 1940. His active sympathy and intellectual support went to those party leaders who emphasized the democratic goals within democratic socialism, and he had scant patience for those who sought a reconciliation with the Communists, and, in some cases, advocated a return to Russia.

In the late 1940s Nicolaevsky’s political “action” seems to have followed three main channels. One of them was the familiar one of uniting the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries in exile into a single democratic force. True to his village origins, and deeply sympathetic to the long-suffering peasantry, Boris Ivanovich had long regarded the antagonism between Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) and Mensheviks as damaging to both. In exile he worked constantly to heal the partisan wounds of past battles and promoted good personal and intellectual relations among the various groups of exiled revolutionaries in their latter years.

A second line of action arose from the postwar influx of new Soviet refugees into the West, and from Nicolaevsky’s keen interest in and sympathy for them. After the end of World War II, and especially after the Allied military authorities had finally abandoned their policy of promoting and even compelling the return of ex-Soviet “displaced persons” to the Soviet Union, a large number of ex-Soviet citizens sought and found refuge in the West. Nicolaevsky was keenly interested in understanding this new generation of Russians, and especially of younger Russian intellectuals. After all, these were part of “the people” for whose sake several generations of revolutionaries had fought and suffered. But who and what manner of men were these ex-Soviet “sons,” and would they even acknowledge aging exile democrats and socialists as “kin” in any meaningful degree? To Boris Ivanovich, the new arrivals also brought reinforcements—first-hand knowledge of Stalinist Russia, and a deep repugnance for some aspects of Soviet life blended with an unconscious set of assumptions and attitudes deeply ingrained in their lives. Who knew what new talents they might bring to replenish the thinning ranks of Russians in exile? And would they, being from ten to thirty years younger than the post-1917 exiles, take up the political struggle against Stalinism outside Russia?

Many, perhaps most, of the exiled intellectuals of the post-1917 emigration found it difficult to enter into intellectual and human communication with the wave of new arrivals. The new refugees’ experiences in growing up under Soviet rule had made them very different people, often untutored in intellectual matters, often greedy for a material security they had never known, often uncouth in language and manner. Unlike most exiles of his generation, Boris Ivanovich had kept a “feel” for the “new Soviet man,” and he was able, far more than most of his own generation, to understand and help many talented individuals find a new footing in a strange country. If he was disappointed or disillusioned in his hopes for recruiting new political forces in exile, somehow combining the idealism and deep historical memory of the older exiles with the practical energy of the new arrivals, he had too much sense of the varieties of human experience to bemoan this failure.

Finally, as part of the reaction, after 1948, to the mounting alarms of East-West tension, Nicolaevsky threw his energies into the creation of a coalition of Russian political forces in exile, League for the Struggle for the People’s Freedom, which he hoped would form a common front embracing liberals to socialists, in opposition to Soviet totalitarianism. Again, the fissiparous effects of exile politics led to early disillusionment, and Boris Ivanovich again vowed to himself and his friends that he would give up squandering his time on “politics” and would devote his principal efforts to completing several of his projects of historical research.

One of Nicolaevsky’s favorite projects was a documentary and analytical history of the First International. In one of his expansive moods he would draw from the shelf any one of several enormous folders, pointing lovingly to previously unknown and still unpublished letters, diaries, draft memoranda and resolutions, and would explain how this and that of his materials would turn upside down many of the accepted notions of historians. Yet, there were always a few more sources that must be brought to light, perhaps copied from obscure party newspapers or extracted from some family archive, before he could be sure of his ground with respect to this or that detail. It was useless to argue with Boris Ivanovich that, even as they stood, slightly short of perfection, it would be a great service to historians, and a monument to two decades of his labors, to publish this monumental study in its present state.

In 1955 Boris Ivanovich, assisted by Anna Mikhailovna, undertook another of his monumental documentary histories, this time with support from the Research Program on the History of the CPSU. He had earlier undertaken a minute restudy of the evolution of Bolshevism from the revolutionary ebb of 1907-1908 to the second founding, this time definitive, of Lenin’s “party of a new type.” To him, the final schism of Russian Social Democracy, in 1912, was far more significant for the history of Russia and the world than the much-studied split in 1903 between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Building on his own collection of original and largely unpublished sources, and supplementing them with a truly youthful zeal in searching out still other materials and questioning the few survivors in minute detail, Nicolaevsky brought together six manuscript volumes of documents on the development of the Leninist party, 1907-12, and provided them with extensive commentaries. Scholars who have had the privilege of making use of this collection and discussing its findings with Boris Ivanovich have given it the highest praise and urged strongly that it be published, even though its compiler insisted that he needed still more time and more materials before he could let it out of his hands. Hopefully, it will some day see the light of day through the devoted ministrations of Anna Mikhailovna.

A third project to which Nicolaevsky made innumerable and invaluable contributions was the Research Program on the History of Menshevism, under the direction of Professor Leopold Haimson. Through his personal encouragement to present and former Mensheviks to make their political and personal records available and to write their memoirs in detail, and through his thoughtful advice and criticism to the research workers, Boris Ivanovich made a very large investment in the success of the entire project. Anna Bourguina, with assistance from him, prepared an authoritative bibliography of Menshevism, published by the Hoover Institution.³

These are only three examples of the historical enterprises to which Boris Ivanovich devoted many years and much of his intellectual energy. Torn between history and political action; responding with youthful zest and a warm heart to new events, especially if they affected his beloved Russia and its prospects; delighting in long and deeply informative discussions of both historical and current events; responding to new books and constantly writing reviews and articles; answering the queries of scholars, both established and novice, sometimes in greater detail than they could fully assimilate; sustained by a few intimate and lifelong friendships, Boris Ivanovich enjoyed all his manifold activities, even though he was the first to say that he must learn to shun distractions and get on with completing one or several of his documentary histories.

In the end, despairing of badgering Boris Ivanovich to bring his own major studies to completion, a group of friends did persuade him to allow them to select, with his approval, a number of his most important essays. Thus, his Power and the Soviet Elite⁴ saw the light of day in November, 1965, in English, just three months before his unexpected death. Obviously, this final collection of essays need not be described here, in a volume dedicated to the memory of Boris Ivanovich, for Power and the Soviet Elite provides its own recommendation and its own commemoration of the author. It illustrates the importance, in attempting to interpret and even predict the unfolding of Soviet policy and the struggle for power, of turning the spotlight of analysis alternatively to the fundamental factors that shape the political, social and psychological environment and to outwardly minor changes in personnel, assignments and policies, which may indicate whither the all-powerful party elite is turning the massive and cumbersome machine through which it rules.

The gifts Boris Ivanovich left his friends and even to many who did not know him were those of character and integrity, of love of freedom, even more than the studies he completed. Through his active concern for the strength of the democratic tradition in the world and through his generous sharing of his wealth of historic experiences and insights, Boris Ivanovich repaid the country of his final quarter-century many times over for the haven it had provided him in a time of mortal danger to freedom and humane values.