LADIS K. D. KRISTOF

B. I. Nicolaevsky: The Formative Years

The lives of some people are marked by turning points—sudden emotional or intellectual experiences which generate the driving impetus for the next stretch of life until some new idea or event redirects the heart and mind. On the other hand, there are people whose lives seem to be guided by a constant, an a priori commitment to, or at least a strong inclination for, a certain path, practical and moral. Nicolaevsky undoubtedly belonged to the second category. His life, although turbulent, filled with diverse activities and marked by periodic migrations which took him further and further from his homeland, was nevertheless a logical unfolding of certain tendencies which crystallized while he was still in his teens. It was then and there, in the beloved country between the Volga and the Urals—in Belebei, Ufa, and Samara—that his lifelong political and scholarly inclinations took root.

FAMILY BACKGROUND

Boris Ivanovich Nicolaevsky¹ was born on October 8/20, 1887, in the foothills of the Urals, in the little town of Belebei in Ufa guberniia. Although the town is located in what is now the Autonomous Bashkir Republic, about two thirds of the population of Belebei were Russians with the balance composed mostly of Tatars, some Chuvash (descendants of the ancient Bulgars), and a few Jews. Boris Ivanovich remembered a common town joke that the population numbered 3,333 of which 3,000 were Russians, 300 Tatars, 30 Chuvash, and 3 Jews. He remembered also that as a group the Russians were the best off, with the Tatars closely following. The Chuvash, on the other hand, were very much at the bottom of the ladder, socially, economically, and culturally. The better lands had been taken from the native Chuvash and Bashkir population by the Russian colonists who moved in steadily throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Both in town and in the surrounding countryside some well known noble families had settled. S. T. Aksakov’s autobiographical sketch, Detskie gody Bagrova vnuka, immortalized in Russian literature places located only a few miles from Belebei.

Boris Ivanovich’s father, Ivan Mikhailovich Nicolaevsky, born about 1860 in Orel guberniia, was a priest who had followed, albeit reluctantly, a long family tradition when choosing his vocation. Seven of his direct ancestors were priests, as were his two brothers. His mother, Evdokiia Pavlovna Krasnoborov, from the city of Orel, was the daughter of a merchant of peasant origin. It was apparently through her that some non-Slav, Mongol blood was inherited. Settled in Belebei in the mid-1880s, the Nicolaevskys had seven children, five boys and two girls, of whom Boris was the second oldest. In time five of the children became involved in the revolutionary movement with Boris being the first to join and politically the most active.² The atmosphere at home was nonpolitical but enlightened (within the limits of the milieu of a small, literally backwoods provincial town of nineteenth century Russia) and forward looking in social and educational matters. Even in questions of faith the father seems to have been unusually liberal in his thinking. He strongly emphasized education, and specifically secular education, and had a definite preference for his children not to follow religious careers. In a sense, the outlook which prevailed in the Nicolaevsky home reflected the progressive spirit of the era of the Great Reforms except that, given the humble origins of the family—socially only one step, and on the mother’s side only one generation, removed from the peasantry—it was populist rather than liberal, and more Russian than Western. There was nothing contrived, self-conscious, or even conscious about the Nicolaevskys’ relation to the peasant masses. They did not need to “go to the people”; they were close to the people.

Of course, the parish priest of Belebei, even if only the junior one, with but a small church located in the cemetery, was both culturally and economically a cut or more above the average dweller of the town, not to speak of the peasants in the countryside. The additional income from teaching religion in the local school, a sizeable plot of land, an orchard, a fairly large two-story home (part of which was rented out), a few horses, servants—all of these provided a relatively secure if not comfortable existence. Nevertheless, Boris Ivanovich always recalled that he imbibed in the home atmosphere a compassion for the downtrodden, a certain sense of elementary social justice. The lowly were seen for what they primarily were—people suffering from poverty and, more often than not, from the consequences of some kind of injustice or arbitrariness. Not even the generally despised ethnic minorities, like the Chuvash, were mocked or treated with contempt in the Nicolaevsky home, though a true understanding of the causes of their plight may have been lacking.³ One of Boris Ivanovich’s earliest recollections was the hunger of 1891-92 when peasants were streaming into town to beg for food and he would run into the kitchen for bread whenever one of them knocked at the porch.

Another source of intellectual influence in those early years was the reading material available at home. Among the periodical press there was Svet, a conservative newspaper, very patriotic, even imperialistic and, above all, virulently anti-English in sentiment. There was also Niva, a generalinterest, illustrated weekly oriented towards the provincial intelligentsia, and Russkaia mysl’, a serious “thick” (tolstyi) journal with a semi-populist orientation. Years later Boris Ivanovich sometimes wondered why his father chose to read a right-wing, monarchist paper. But in those days it may not have been so incongruous as it may seem now to subscribe to Svet and Russkaia mysl’ at the same time. Dostoevsky for one combined views quite close to those expounded on the pages of these two periodicals: a narodniktype concern for the suffering and downtrodden on the one hand and a Pan-Slavist, Anglophobe and imperialistic patriotism on the other.

Whatever the elder Nicolaevsky’s reasons for subscribing to Svet, the discussion of its contents in the family circle awakened in Boris Ivanovich an interest in foreign policy. Grand strategy on the Asian continent and Russia’s role in it, the geopolitics of Central Asia and of the Indo-Russian and Sino-Russian border lands, the problem of Afghanistan and of the straits—all these questions were first brought to his attention by Svet and remained an on-and-off preoccupation throughout his life. The study of geopolitics, for instance, became something of a hobby to him. He became well versed in the geopolitical ideas of Karl Haushofer and closely followed their impact within the Soviet Union. In 1942 and 1943 he published a series of articles in Novyi zhurnal on Soviet foreign policy elucidated from a geopolitical perspective and with special reference to Asia. In 1949 he returned to this theme in an article in the Far Eastern Quarterly in which he analyzed Soviet foreign policy towards Japan and the Pan-Asiatic movement.

In this early adolescent period, however, the natural sciences and not politics or history were his primary interests. Flammarion’s Pictorial Astronomy particularly impressed him. While later it was historical documents and manuscripts which became his treasures, in those years he collected minerals, insects, and plants; but the streak of scholarly investigator and collector was unmistakably manifesting itself.

SAMARA AND UFA: FROM REBELLIOUS MOOD
TO REVOLUTIONARY COMMITMENT

In 1898 Boris Ivanovich was sent to high school (gymnasium) in Samara (now Kuibyshev) where he was to spend the next five years. For four of these he lived in a dormitory; the last year, because his family’s material situation had grown more and more precarious, he stayed at the home of his closest school friend, Levka.⁴ His father died in 1899 and soon afterward his family moved to Ufa. Thus ended the Belebei era. Though Boris Ivanovich was to return there only once, emotionally he remained forever attached to it.

Physically, what made the greatest and most indelible impression on Boris Ivanovich in Samara was the Volga. If there was anything he liked in the dreary students’ pansion (dormitory), with its stifling atmosphere and meager meals—reduced virtually to starvation level by dishonest supervisors— it was the panorama of the great river which extended in front of it. “I would just open a window, or the door, and there she was right before me, the real Volga,” he reminisced.

Intellectually, Samara awakened in him a mood of rebelliousness. In the immediate sense it was a rebellion against the school and the spirit which pervaded it; against outdated curricula and old-fashioned pedagogical methods; against incompetent and often morally corrupt educators, ready to crawl before any official who might influence the course of their careers. With some rare exceptions, Boris Ivanovich was simply unable to feel any respect for his Samara teachers.

It was different in Ufa where the gymnasium was on a much higher level. In the few months he studied there he did develop a genuine esteem for some of his teachers, both as pedagogues and as human beings. But by that time he had already crossed the Rubicon between the mere rebelliousness of a frustrated schoolboy and the conscious commitment of a social revolutionary, and the sequence of events that followed—illegal activity, arrest, and the volchii bilet (exclusion from all schools in Imperial Russia)—was a foregone conclusion.

In general, the defiant spirit of the youth of Samara was stimulated by stories circulating in the town about Gorkii, who in the eyes of the establishment was a buntar’ (rebel) in every way-by birth, by deed, and by appearance. Considered something of a local-boy-made-good (or bad, depending on the viewpoint), Gorkii had grown up on the Volga and had lived in Samara just a few years earlier (1895-96). Under the pseudonym Iegudiil Khlamida he had written reviews of the regional press and satirical essays on the local scene for the Samarskii vestnik which became, in 1896, the first Marxist newspaper in Russia. His long hair and the long caneintended as a weapon in rougher neighborhoods—with which he strolled through the streets had become a fashion which every schoolboy wanted to imitate. Boris Ivanovich, too, wore long hair until ordered by the school authorities to cut it, which he did. “I would not have become another Khlamida anyway,” he consoled himself.

During the first three Samara years the buntarstvo (rebelliousness) of Boris Ivanovich remained understandably quite boyish in character and was at most potentially political. His two main interests, the natural sciences and poetry, earned him the nicknames of astronomer and scholar. His great passion was geology, which he had developed a taste for earlier, in Belebei. Given the proximity of the Urals with their numerous mines, which were just then being expanded and modernized, it was a natural interest. What was characteristic of Boris Ivanovich was that he went about it so seriously in a systematic, scholarly way. He was not satisfied to read about minerals in the library but went to the local museum for further study and finally attracted the attention of a young professor, Preobrazhenskii, later to become an Academician, who was heading a geological expedition in the environs of Samara. The expedition had a laboratory at its disposal and Preobrazhenskii opened it to Boris Ivanovich for various experiments.

His interest in poetry was directed above all to Nekrasov, the poet of the Volga and of the bunty (rebellions) along it. Boris Ivanovich made a concerted effort to collect poems permeated by the populist spirit and had various friends, including some at the girls’ gymnasium attended by his older sister, copy this type of poetry from library books for him. Many of these poems he knew by heart and could recite with feeling more than sixty years later. These literary interests led, in 1902, to the formation of an informal reading circle composed of some eight boys of more or less similar background—sons of merchants, declassé nobility, functionaries, and other raznochintsy⁵—sharing a certain mood of restlessness. They gathered in the apartment of his friend Levka and read Pisarev, Dobroliubov, Pomialovskii, Gorkii, Nekrasov, Pushkin, and others. Specifically under the prodding of Boris Ivanovich they also studied K. A. Timiriazev’s Life of Plants and made some scientific experiments. On his own, and as a result of his frequent visits to the museum, Boris Ivanovich began in this period to be interested in history, and when their group decided, early in 1903, to publish a little journal, Podsnezhnik, he startled everybody by contributing to the first issue a study “On the History of the [Ancient] Bulgars.”⁶ His friends laughed at so much learnedness for they were satisfied with the authorship of lighter essays and poetry.

At this point, Boris Ivanovich and his group of friends were not yet acquainted with the revolutionary movement. Although the Decembrists did attract their attention, they had only the vaguest notions about the more recent “to the people” and People’s Will movements and were not even aware of the contemporary polemics between the populists and the Marxists. Boris Ivanovich distinctly remembered that he read Chernyshevskii’s Chto delat’ only much later.⁷

Nevertheless, bits and pieces of revolutionary propaganda began to drift into his hands quite early. In 1900, he had the great excitement of seeing, and actually laying hands on, a clandestine leaflet, a mimeographed sheet of paper which he and a friend found in some bushes along the street. The leaflet was antireligious in character and ridiculed the custom of kissing icons—“kissing the behind of a saint” as it was described. It had been written in connection with the arrival in Samara of an allegedly miraculous icon which was ceremonially kissed by all the school children and teachers of the town.⁸

The chances of a Samara school boy coming into direct contact with an active revolutionary were quite slim, at least until the influx of exiled students in the wake of the major disturbances which took place at several universities in the course of 1901.⁹ There was in the town a small contingent of old-time exiles, activists from the heyday of populism, surrounded by an aura of fame; but they had to be very circumspect in their contacts. Boris Ivanovich made his first acquaintance among these old timers quite accidentally (in December, 1902), at a public commemoration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Nekrasov’s death. There he met Vasilii P. Artsybushev, an old revolutionary of the 1870s who had spent many years in Siberian exile and in time become a convert to Marxism. It was from him that Boris Ivanovich received his first piece of illegal Marxist literature—Plekhanov’s pamphlet on Nekrasov.¹⁰

Boris Ivanovich was to recall, however, that the “revolutionary instinct” was awakened in him not by some underground political tract, but by an ably written piece of critical reporting published in 1901 in Permskii krai, a small provincial paper shut down by the censor later that same year.¹¹ He did not know at the time who had written that fateful article and it was not until four decades later, in New York, that he was to meet its author, a fellow Menshevik, la. M. Lupolov.¹²

The pace of Boris Ivanovich’s conversion to the revolutionary movement quickened considerably in the course of 1903. For one thing, it was a year in which the ferment within Russian society began to manifest itself more frequently and more violently. The explosion that was to erupt in 1905 was already stirring close beneath the surface, even in the provinces. Samara experienced a bakers’ strike; the lack of bread for several days had a serious impact. In Zlatoust, near Ufa, there was a major strike resulting in a number of fatalities and with a number of workers subsequently condemned to death. The governor of Ufa was assassinated. At the same time, news from other parts of Russia, for instance about the Kishinev pogrom, added to the tensions on the local scene.

Another factor was that Boris Ivanovich now began systematically to familiarize himself with the ideological and historical foundations of the revolutionary movement. Instinctively, drawing on the atmosphere within which he lived, he considered himself a Social Democrat by the end of 1902;¹³ yet his acquaintance with Marxism was still limited to what little he could derive from Gorkii’s articles in Zhizn It was only in the spring of 1903, in a circle organized by a Social Democrat, Pavel V. Bekenskii, that he first heard a more or less coherent exposition of Marx’s teachings.

Meanwhile, the authorities throughout Russia were deciding on measures to check the spread of subversive ideas. The director of the Samara gymnasium thought that an appropriate step in that direction would be to get rid of the young Nicolaevsky and some of his closest friends, and this he did. Thus, in June, 1903, Boris Ivanovich moved to Ufa to join his family. Two of his younger brothers were attending the local gymnasium where he was accepted. But he arrived from Samara armed with a secret address (iavka) of Sergei F. Gordenin, a member of the local Social Democratic group,¹⁴ and immediately plunged into studies and activities more serious and more political in character than those in Samara. He gained access to a good private library, that of “Nadezhda” Kozlov, a Socialist Revolutionary and veteran revolutionary of the 1870s, where he read extensively in the literature of the populist and the People’s Will movements. He also gained access to various Marxist brochures and to the legal Marxist journals Novoe slovo and Nachalo. Thus his instinctive revolutionary ardor began, for the first time, to acquire some theoretical grounding.

At the gymnasium he directed his energies toward the organization of a circle with a definitely revolutionary-political profile. The success of his efforts can be judged from the fact that in the 1905-1906 period virtually all the members of this circle then present in the town joined the “fighting (boevaia) organization” of the Ufa Social Democrats.¹⁵ In the fall of 1903, however, the members of the circle were still relatively peaceful, quietly reading and spreading revolutionary propaganda and organizing for the future. Not all of them professed to be Social Democrats. Some leaned towards the Socialist Revolutionaries; others were still uncommitted. Their reading list included such items as Lavrov’s Historical Letters and current issues of Iskra. Their organizing efforts were directed towards the creation of a Society of Students for all Ufa. Boris Ivanovich insisted also on the need to publish a journal. The first issue of the mimeographed Rassvet, of which he was editor and to which he contributed a long essay on Novikov as the precursor of the Decembrists, came out in the second half of January, 1904. Simultaneously, the circle issued a proclamation authored by Boris Ivanovich in which the publication of the journal as well as the formation of a Center for the Society of Students were announced. A young Socialist Revolutionary, an ex-student at Moscow University, Mikhail Kozlov, was caught carrying a copy of this proclamation, and his indiscretion led to the arrest of Boris Ivanovich on January 24/February 6, 1904.¹⁶

REVOLUTIONARY ACTIVIST

With this first arrest, at the age of sixteen, Boris Ivanovich’s formal education came to an end, and he entered the adult world. From this point on his days were to be wholly devoted to the making and the study of Russia’s socio-political history. This was particularly true of the years up to the February, 1917 Revolution during which his career literally oscillated between periods of frantic revolutionary activity at large and quiet reading in jail cells. The latter periods, which he called his university years, totaled thirty-one months (in eight “installments”). There were also four terms of exile, three in the Russian Arctic and one in Northern Siberia, which added up to seven years. While in exile he divided his time between political and scholarly activities.

The five-and-one-half months in the Ufa jail were especially conducive to study because he was kept throughout in isolation. For the first few days he had access to a window through which he observed with admiration how Zlatoust workers, the strikers from the previous year, organized a demonstration in the prison courtyard while being taken in groups to the court house. Later, except for a few furtive direct contacts, and some communication by knocking on the walls, he was entirely cut off from his fellow prisoners. Nevertheless, he remained in high spirits, for he had been psychologically ready to accept the inevitable fate of every revolutionary. He had also been coached on how to behave in case of arrest and had refused to testify. In fact, he was unnecessarily cocky at the hearing and paid dearly for it by being deprived of the privilege of receiving packages, tantamount to being cut off from any outside reading material. Only two months later, after he threatened a hunger strike, was this privilege restored to him.

At first, then, Boris Ivanovich’s readings were limited to what was available in the prison library, and he ploughed through the Bible from cover to cover, something he had never before attempted. After the ban on outside packages was lifted, his sister Alexandra began to supply him with literature, both Marxist and populist, particularly the latter because her sympathies and connections were with the Socialist Revolutionaries. It was then that he systematically read the six volumes of the writings of Pisarev, whose primitive rationalism and utilitarianism greatly appealed to him. He also read all of Dobroliubov, various populist writers like Koronin, Lipkin, F. M. Reshetnikov, G. I. Uspenskii, and Zlatovratskii, and back issues of the Marxist and populist journals Novyi mir, Nachalo, Novoe slovo, and Russkoe bogatstvo-of the latter, complete sets for several years. Among the works by Marxist authors which he read were P. B. Struve’s Critical Observations on the Question of the Economic Development of Russia, and Kautsky’s The Agrarian Question. He also read Plekhanov but clearly remembered being put off by the polemical tone of his writings. On the other hand, he recalled that he was very favorably impressed by some articles of V. M. Chernov published in Russkoe bogatstvo and Zhizn’ on the question of the capitalist and agrarian type of evolution and in defense of the labor theory of value. ¹⁷

This reading reinforced Boris Ivanovich’s inclinations towards Social Democracy. Thus when he was freed in mid-July, 1904, in the care of his mother—a trial was still pending—and was approached by a representative of the Socialist Revolutionaries urging him to join their group, his answer was that he was already definitely committed. Formally he did not join the Social Democrats until a few months later, after moving to Samara. He remained in Ufa until late September, 1904, spending his time making contacts with various adult groups of revolutionaries. Among his new acquaintances was A. F. Ogorelov, a young but already prominent party member, with whom he was to be bound by a lasting bond of friendship.¹⁸ The decision to become a journalist prompted his move to Samara. Ufa was a much smaller center and had no newspaper while Samara had two.

In Samara, at the age of seventeen, a new chapter began in Boris Ivanovich’s life. He was now entirely on his own, embarking on a career of professional journalist and professional revolutionary—more the latter than the former—and at the same time embracing a highly bohemian style of life, at least for a time. When he arrived in town he at once settled down to live in a miniature “commune” of six youths more or less his own age. There were then in Samara quite a few such “communes” of intelligentsia, or rather semi-intelligentsia, usually unemployed and mostly composed of students expelled from local schools. Many of these youths were of peasant, worker, or small-town origin who had attended either the technical or the agricultural schools situated on the outskirts of the town. Frustrated yet cheerful and carefree; iconoclastic, roughish, sometimes lawless, yet essentially idealistic; dead serious in their half-serious undertakings, these were natural rebels who needed only some leadership and discipline to become dedicated professional revolutionaries, fearless members of fighting squads if need be.

Penniless, constantly hungry, their own earnings sporadic to say the least, they depended for survival on Boris Ivanovich’s meager honoraria as a budding reporter. Even then it sometimes took considerable feats of imagination to find ways of filling their empty stomachs. Once, Boris Ivanovich recalled, one of the lads had “a brilliant idea.” From their window overlooking the yard of the neighboring house they could “fish” for chickens. This they did, and successfully too. Then the reporter sat down and wrote an item for the paper about chicken stealing having taken place at such-and-such an address; he then pocketed what was due for the story. Soon after it was printed the neighbor came running. He was a friend of theirs, and had no suspicions, but he wanted to tell them how “incredibly clever” that newspaper was. He, the owner of the chickens, had not even noticed that any were missing, and here it was already reported in the paper. Amazing!

This tough and unorthodox school of life produced some of the keenest activists of the 1905 upheaval. One member of Boris Ivanovich’s “commune,” Razumnik Nikolaevich Dmitriev, was to become a leading figure of the revolution in Samara. A native of Syzran’, son of a former railwayman, he had for a time attended the Technical School of Samara.

At the time his sympathies were with the Bolsheviks, although later he was to die in a Soviet prison. His specialty in 1905 was making contacts with the peasants coming to market. He authored and produced leaflets addressed to the peasantry and soon began to tour the villages himself. By late summer, 1905, a formal Social Democratic Village Organization was already functioning, and when a joint Bolshevik-Menshevik conference on rural problems was held in September, he attended it as the delegate of Samara.¹⁹

Boris Ivanovich himself also played a leading role in Samara during the 1905 Revolution. When he arrived in October, 1904, he took a job as a reporter for the Samarskii kur’er, a newly-established paper, whose editor, N. N. Skrydlov, was leaning towards the Socialist Revolutionaries.²⁰ His first article to appear in print concerned the public library in Ufa and its reading room. Then, in November, wishing to switch to historical themes, he wrote a long article, well researched and based on original material, about the writer N. V. Shelgunov, whose eightieth anniversary was then being celebrated. The quickening pace of events, however, and the atmosphere they generated, inexorably deflected his writings and his attention from historical themes and towards contemporary, political issues.

In October he formally became a member of one of the two cells of the Samara Social Democratic organization. Like practically all future Mensheviks who joined the party in this period, he sided at first with the Bolsheviks. In fact, he did not remember ever having met any Menshevik until the middle of 1905. His initial preference for Bolshevism, shared by virtually all his comrades, was not, however, due to a firm espousal of the programmatic and ideological bent of Leninism as opposed to that of Menshevism. There was in general little knowledge of the causes that had brought about the break within the party and even less understanding of the underlying differences in outlook. The issue was seen as simply that of a minority refusing to subordinate itself to the majority. The Mensheviks were universally blamed for the split and were consequently out of favor, for there was an overwhelming desire for unity, not merely among the Social Democrats but also across party lines, among all the revolutionaries, among all the enemies of autocracy. An upshot of this urge for unity was that the sentiments of the party rank-and-file ran counter not only to Menshevism but also to Lenin’s directives, even if the latter were still not generally known. While declaring themselves for the Bolsheviks, the great majority of Social Democrats insisted on a conciliatory attitude towards the Mensheviks, precisely what Lenin did not want.²¹

The most important party member then in Samara, I. F. Dubrovinskii (known under the pseudonyms of Leo and Innokentii), a Bolshevik, a professional revolutionary, and a member of the Central Committee, was also a “conciliator” (primirenets), unwilling to follow Lenin’s tough policies towards the Mensheviks. When Boris Ivanovich arrived in Samara with the underground address (iavka) of the Eastern Bureau of the Central Committee, Dubrovinskii was just planning to launch a paper. This was contrary to the directives of Lenin who did not favor locally initiated party organs which he well knew would be virtually impossible to control effectively and which would thus inevitably disseminate various heretical ideas. Nevertheless, Boris Ivanovich was recruited for the task of gathering documentation for a review of the domestic scene. The whole plan fell through only when Dubrovinskii, together with eight other members of the Central Committee, was arrested in Moscow on February 9/22, 1905, in the apartment of the writer Leonid Andreev. Boris Ivanovich considered that it was this arrest which, by wiping out almost the entire membership of the Central Committee active within Russia, and with it its “conciliatory” faction, finally permitted Lenin to push through his plans for the Third Party Congress from which he excluded the Mensheviks.²² If Lenin did not at this time achieve his aim of a final, irremediable split within the party, it was because the Third Congress coincided with the outbreak of the 1905 Revolution which brought to the fore an irresistible pressure to conciliate and forget factional quarrels. By September, 1905, reconciliation of the two factions was a fact of daily revolutionary practice everywhere in Russia and the emigre leaders and theoreticians, including Lenin, had to accept it. Only after the revolution was crushed was Lenin able to resume his plans, and not until the Prague Conference of 1912 did he succeed in bringing about the final split within the party, the aim of the Third Congress seven years earlier.

However, Boris Ivanovich was not ready to put all the blame for the Bolshevik-Menshevik split on Lenin alone. He considered that there was a time in 1904 when, after losing Plekhanov and Iskra, and under growing pressure from his “conciliatory” Central Committee, Lenin probably had doubts about the wisdom of his intransigent policy vis-à-vis the Mensheviks and would have been amenable to some kind of reconciliation. But at this point the Menshevik leaders in exile made the mistake of “bending the twig too far” (peregnuli palku) and continued to breathe righteous indignation and attack Lenin without seriously exploring every possible avenue for bridging the gap. Thus, Boris Ivanovich believed that “a chance at reuniting the party was lost”; by the same token the chance of going into, and coming out of, the 1905 revolution as a better defined social force, more appealing to broad strata of the society, and ultimately stronger both numerically and politically, was lessened. Reconciliation would have facilitated the open, mass movement approach in politics favored by the Mensheviks as opposed to the conspiratorial and undemocratic approach favored by Lenin. Of course, at some point Lenin might have split the party anyway, but his strategies and policies would have had to be different, too, had the Social Democratic movement meanwhile grown broader and more mature.

The Samara Social Democratic Committee embraced the conciliatory attitude.²³ There was also considerable cooperation and interpenetration across party lines. For instance, in November, 1904, while in jail for a week after participating in a street demonstration,²⁴ Boris Ivanovich struck up a friendship with Petr Voevodin.²⁵ They roomed together after coming out of prison and jointly engaged in various revolutionary activities. Yet Voevodin was at that time still hesitating between the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Social Democrats, though he was leaning towards the latter. Since there were many others in the same position there even existed a Union of Socialist Revolutionaries which embraced both populists and Marxists, and to which Voevodin had belonged shortly before. Another friend of Boris Ivanovich, Professor Preobrazhenskii, the geologist who had befriended him a few years earlier, became active in the Union of Liberation; but he also had connections in Menshevik circles and copies of Iskra were sent to his address. He then passed them on to Boris Ivanovich. A close collatorator of Preobrazhenskii, V. M. Pototskii, a chemist in the laboratory in which Boris Ivanovich had been permitted to experiment while still in high school, was a member of Samara’s Social Democratic Committee. Each knew of the other’s activities but that did not matter. The immediate common goal—the overthrow of the autocracy—which bound them was much more important than what divided them; the ultimate goal and the ideological justification of their actions.

While still in high school, Boris Ivanovich and his friends were well aware of the distinction between the minimum and the maximum program of the socialists. The former was directed against direct oppression and aimed at political freedom—democratic self-government, civil rights, and what is broadly known as negative freedoms, the freedoms from-while the latter was directed against all forms of indirect oppression and exploitation and aimed at social justice: the freedom to live in a just society. Both the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Social Democrats were at the time aiming only at the minimum program. The former, Boris Ivanovich felt, justified their position by subjective factors, the latter by reference to objective conditions of life, and this was one of the major reasons why Social Democracy held greater appeal for him. The fact that the liberals did not look beyond a political revolution (i.e., the minimum program of the revolutionaries), and were in fact opposed to a social revolution, exposed them to criticism on the part of the socialists. Psychologically the socialists also felt a need to put a distance between themselves and the liberals, to emphasize that the latter belonged to the privileged—the “ins,” the social establishment—while they, the socialists, were the underprivileged outsiders.²⁶ This was the main thrust of their argument at public meetings. At a big public banquet organized by the liberals in Samara early in January, 1905, Boris Ivanovich recalled that Petr Voevodin spoke in this vein about “we the workers,” and “I who have just come out of jail,” and “you who are only talking while we are preparing ourselves in all seriousness,” etc.

Nevertheless, what was decisive was the general mood within the country. Boris Ivanovich emphasized that even prior to 1905, when he was still in the gymnasium and engaging with his friends in illegal political activities, he was never really afraid that some classmate might give him away. Though some of his colleagues, sons of noblemen, were obviously not sympathetic with his political views, he did not remember a single case of deliberate denunciation. In 1905, in Samara, there were moments when one could, according to Boris Ivanovich, almost speak of something akin to a “popular front.” It so happened that only a minority of the top town officials were hard core reactionaries. The chief of police was not interested in arresting every revolutionary in sight. His main concern was to keep things as quiet and nonviolent as possible. A Colonel von Galin, second in command of the local military garrison and who, as Boris Ivanovich was to find out only in 1917 when the police archives were opened, had as a youth been a member of a Social Democratic circle in the 1880s, openly collaborated with the revolutionaries in order to frustrate the plans of the reactionaries. This was in the early fall of 1905 when the counterrevolutionary Black Hundreds hit upon the idea of stirring up the rabble (Lumpenproletariat) and with their help organizing a pogrom against the Jews and intelligentsia whom they identified as the chief villains.²⁷ The revolutionaries, of whatever shade, were determined to prevent this and Boris Ivanovich and his young friends were charged with the organization of a self-defense corps. Local business leaders, most anxious to avoid a situation in which an irresponsible and leaderless mob would rampage through the streets destroying life and property, encouraged them and helped to mediate an agreement between them on the one hand and the police and the military on the other. The self-defense corps, of which Boris Ivanovich was the unofficial chief, took it upon itself to supervise the streets and keep order, and the police and army agreed to stay in the background. If any trouble developed an emissary of the self-defense corps would come to them with a password and ask for help.²⁸

This did not mean, however, that the revolutionaries in general, or the Social Democrats in particular, were in any way more restrained in Samara than elsewhere. Boris Ivanovich emphasized that of all the political parties active in 1905 on the Samara scene the Social Democrats were the most successful in expanding the circle of their supporters. This was particularly true among the younger generation. The Social Democrats, who in this period developed a special pride in the party (Boris Ivanovich called it “party patriotism”) vigorously vied with the Socialist Revolutionaries and Anarchists for the allegiance of the underprivileged and of the youth, regardless of social origin. In all the schools the Social Democrats had the strongest organization except for the Theological Seminary where the Socialist Revolutionaries prevailed. Least successful among the students were the liberals. There were also at this time no tensions between the intelligentsia and the workers. These developed only later, with the crushing of the revolution and the disillusionment that followed, and it was only then, beginning in 1907, that the Social Democrats lost quite a few followers to the Socialist Revolutionaries and Anarchists.

A special Social Democratic Committee, of which Boris Ivanovich was a member, was formed in the spring of 1905 for the organization of the strike movement which was fairly successful given the limited number of industrial plants—mostly flour mills—in Samara. The newspapers were also shut down for a time. The main task of the Committee members was to give expression to and formulate into concrete demands the amorphous grievances of the workers. Boris Ivanovich recalled that workers were seeking them out asking to put down on paper specifics with which they could confront the employers. Some of the demands were economic, some were of a more general, political character. There was great confusion as to what could or should be demanded and from whom. At the peak of the revolutionary tide everybody thought he should demand something. Boris Ivanovich recalled getting word from a rather exclusive girls’ school that the students needed advice because they, too, wanted to present some demands. He went but it was only after long deliberations that the girls could think of any grievance. Suddenly one remembered that their old Russian stoves always smoked because the dampers were defective. They wanted also, however, to demand something more general, for everybody—something political. So it was agreed and set down on paper: new dampers for the stoves and a Constituent Assembly.

Boris Ivanovich admitted that not all that he and his fellow Social Democrats were doing at the time was very serious or significant. But it reflected their mood, aspirations, and hopes, and what was significant was that so large a segment of the population looked towards them as the leading element or at least sympathized with them. In fact, except for the narrow, ultraconservative circles, everybody was ready to help in one way or another. Boris Ivanovich recalled that at one point he was asked to find a good hiding place for the archives of the Eastern Bureau of the Central Committee of the party, and after thinking it over, went to a friend of his sister who was the granddaughter of the chief archpriest of the local Orthodox cathedral. He was introduced to the archpriest and found a sympathetic ear. Soon the party archives were safely stored in the attic of the archpriest’s house.

The sympathetic public response to the revolutionaries was also helpful in making employers conciliatory. The workers did in the course of 1905 win many significant concessions, of which the right to collective bargaining was perhaps the most important. The organization of trade unions became the task on which the Social Democrats concentrated after the October 17, 1905, Manifesto granted the freedoms of speech, press, and assembly. Boris Ivanovich organized unions of typographers, of clerks, and of “ordinary employees,” the latter term being interpreted broadly enough to include a local of prostitutes.

His organizational activities however were not to last very long, for the tide began to turn against the revolution. A new governor and a new military commander were appointed in Samara and they reneged on the informal arrangements made or at least tolerated by their predecessors. In December a house where Boris Ivanovich and other revolutionaries were meeting was surrounded by troops. It was quickly decided that the most valuable revolutionary activists should go into hiding and he was among those who escaped through a back door.

From this point on the emphasis was on propaganda among the soldiers and subversion of the army. While in 1905 the instrument for bringing the government to its knees was the general strike—essentially an economic, indirect weapon—now it was a question of disarming the government, robbing it of its coercive arm, rendering it literally powerless. Boris Ivanovich had for some time looked with envy at the military organization of the Socialist Revolutionaries. This was one area where they were much stronger than the Social Democrats. Now he set out to correct this deficiency and concentrated on the establishment of a Social Democratic military revolutionary organization. Boris Ivanovich and his several collaborators were making good progress when in May, 1906, he was arrested while carrying leaflets which they had prepared for distribution among soldiers. He was tried five months later and would have received two years in a fortress had it not been for the fact that he was still under twenty-one. Still, he did not leave the Samara jail until July, 1907. He spent his time reading and his greatest regret was that he missed the period of the first two Dumas.

When he walked out of the Samara jail Boris Ivanovich was more than ever determined to devote himself in all earnestness to party work. He went to Omsk and there did some propaganda work among the soldiers but without much success. After less than two months he decided to move on because Omsk was too dead and too provincial for him and the revolutionary movement there was on the downgrade. He took the train and, stopping from time to time, began to move towards St. Petersburg, which he had never seen before. He arrived in the capital late in August, 1907, during the period of elections to the Third Duma. The Bolsheviks were in control of the St. Petersburg Social Democratic organization and what struck him immediately was that nowhere before had he seen the lines between the two factions so sharply drawn. He sided with the Mensheviks. Once he even participated in a kind of verbal duel with Lenin when at a meeting he argued for the Menshevik point of view while Lenin spoke for that of the Bolsheviks. “My speech was rather poor,” Boris Ivanovich conceded but he was not given a chance of bettering the score for he was arrested very soon afterwards at a meeting of a council of the unemployed in which he participated in his capacity of party secretary of the local borough. After four months in jail he was exiled for two years in the White Sea region.

FROM BOLSHEVISM TO MENSHEVISM

The transition from Bolshevism to Menshevism was a slow, gradual process. It was for Boris Ivanovich as much, perhaps even more, a question of becoming acquainted with the issues, of grasping the deeper meaning of the differences in outlook, as of changing his own views. He had sided originally with the Bolsheviks because he favored strong party discipline and, above all, unity within the party. He had regarded the Mensheviks as “splitters,” an undisciplined minority defying the majority. In the course of 1905 there were in Samara no real tactical differences between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. The former were somewhat harsher in their attacks on the liberals, denouncing them as traitors, while the latter criticized the liberals mainly with the idea, and hope, of pushing them further to the left. The issues most frequently discussed between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were those of the Party Statute—who should be considered a party member. On this Boris Ivanovich tended at the time to side with the Bolsheviks, not because he opposed a large, mass party—he definitely favored it—but because, reacting to the split which he blamed on wayward behavior, he was for tight discipline and because he favored activism. He and his friends were determined to be full-time revolutionaries, and, in his youthful enthusiasm, he wanted every Social Democrat to come as close as possible to this ideal. In this he reflected the prevailing mood of 1905 which was that of impatient activism; direct revolutionary activity, not reflection and long range tactics and policies, was what seemed to be paying off in 1905, at least until the fall.²⁹

To orthodoxy in ideology, on the other hand, he and his group of young friends, as well as the overwhelming majority of the Social Democrats active within Russia, attached only secondary importance. Briefly, the emphasis was not on ideological unity but on unity in action: unity of the forces struggling with the common enemy and complete, if possible, full-time, devotion to the pursuit of the immediate goal, the minimum program of overthrowing the tsarist regime. Boris Ivanovich recalled how unpopular any independent initiative on the part of either the Bolsheviks or the Mensheviks was among his friends. Factional publications—newspapers, manifestos, leaflets, etc.—were frowned upon. Ideological disagreements among Social Democrats were readily admitted and taken in stride, considered tolerable; not so organizational separatism or going one’s own path, however revolutionary. If the mood of the Samara Social Democrats was representative of the Social Democratic organizations within Russia, which it probably was, Lenin’s Third Party Congress was a tactical mistake. While previously the onus for splitting the party had been laid at the door of the “insubordinate minority,” the Mensheviks, now it was Lenin who, with his attempt at creating an entirely separate party organization, was earning the odious name of “splitter.” The Samara Social Democratic Committee had no Mensheviks within its ranks;³⁰ yet it did harbor two factions: the regular Bolsheviks (better called simply “majority Social Democrats”) who were “conciliatory” (primirentsy) and opposed the Third Party Congress, and the factional Bolsheviks, that is, the Leninists who favored the Third Party Congress. The latter were in the minority.

The margin of tolerance of ideological (and, to some extent, programmatic) diversity was wide enough among many Social Democrats to make them wish the Socialist Revolutionaries, too, would simply join, thus consummating the much sought revolutionary unity. Boris Ivanovich was well aware that this was not quite possible even though he considered that the outlook of a Socialist Revolutionary leader like V. M. Chernov was in fact a mixture of populism and Marxism. He was also, as were his friends, in favor of vigorous competition with the Socialist Revolutionaries for the allegiance of the peasantry. Like every good Marxist, he considered that his party had the best, the most rational and scientific understanding of sociohistorical developments, and consequently he wanted to unite under its banner all the revolutionary forces, the great masses of both town and country. But he could never bring himself to condemn and denounce the Socialist Revolutionaries wholesale and with vituperation as was often done by his comrades. More, he readily admitted that he saw nothing essentially wrong in a situation in which one revolutionary party, the Social Democrats, emphasized the proletariat while another, the Socialist Revolutionaries, put more emphasis on the peasantry.

Underlying this reasoning was Boris Ivanovich’s conviction that given the fact that the Social Democrats had both in theory and in fact concentrated on the proletariat—on the task of revolutionizing the worker and championing his interests—it was natural, and to some extent even desirable, at least temporarily, to have another party which was, so to speak, redressing the balance by concentrating its attention primarily on the peasantry.

The peasant issue, it must be said, was a sore point in Boris Ivanovich’s relation to Menshevism, and to Marxism in general. It was a point on which he felt strongly and was never quite in harmony with the great majority of his party colleagues. Through the years he openly reproached the Mensheviks for consistently displaying a certain aversion towards the peasants which often bordered on outright “peasantophobia.” This was, he said, “the tragedy of Menshevism,” both morally and politically.

Boris Ivanovich’s position towards the Bolsheviks as well as within Menshevism was repeatedly and decisively influenced by the peasant issue. In 1919, after a journey to Siberia convinced him of the plight of the peasants under the Kolchak regime, he veered sharply to the left. In a public speech which Lenin was to quote,³¹ he described at length the sufferings of the peasants in Siberia and called for a united revolutionary front with the Bolsheviks against Kolchak. Eleven years later, in Berlin, reports of the terror and famine accompanying the forcible collectivization of the peasantry again stirred him to take a political position after nearly a decade devoted almost exclusively to strictly scholarly, non-partisan work in the course of which he had collaborated closely with the Marx-Engels Institute of Moscow. His political conscience—his old “revolutionary instinct” as he called it—was aroused and he turned to political writings and began to attack the Soviet regime, all the more so because F. I. Dan was then promoting a Menshevik policy which he considered a de facto acquiescence to the Bolshevik collectivization program. In his last political speech, given in New York in January, 1964, two years before his death, Boris Ivanovich once more blamed the Mensheviks’ woes principally on their persistent anti-peasant attitude.

It should be mentioned here that there was another issue on which Boris Ivanovich was not quite in harmony with his fellow Mensheviks. This was the question of national minorities for which the Mensheviks, the majority of whom were themselves members of some national minority, showed very little understanding. They were impatient Marxists, rigidly orthodox internationalists when faced with the demands of the various minorities. In contrast to Lenin, they did not understand the enormous historical and emotional force represented by nationalism. They believed, like Marx and Engels when writing the Communist Manifesto, that nationalism was waning on the socio-historical scene. Hence they were not willing to make any serious concessions to it and (although making an exception for Poland) took the desirability, and political expediency, of maintaining the unity of the multinational Russian Empire so much for granted that their pronouncements sounded dangerously similar to those of the right wing Russian nationalists who insisted on the “one and indivisible” (edinaia i nedelimaia) Russia.

Boris Ivanovich, while emotionally and ideologically favoring the maintenance of Russian unity under some form or other, however loose, showed a deep understanding for the historical roots and actual and potential strength of the national movements. In emigration, he alone among all the Mensheviks maintained some contacts with nationalist, independence-seeking groups (for instance, the Ukrainians) and was willing to participate in their public meetings to debate the issue of Russia and its national minorities.

It was in fact part of his general political strategy, which in contrast to many of his fellow Social Democrats he did not abandon after 1905, always to seek an understanding and to cooperate with various groups—to aim at a united front of the broad masses regardless of certain ideological disagreements. Characteristic in this respect was his effort in 1947, “to unite all the forces of the Russian democratic, socialist and non-socialist, emigration (both old and new).” This initiative resulted in the formation of a League for Struggle for the People’s Freedom (Liga Borby za Narodnuiu Svobodu, also known as Liga Svobodnoi Rossii) which was headed, among others, by V. M. Chernov, formerly Chairman of the All-Russian Constituent Assembly, and A. F. Kerenskii, formerly prime minister of the All-Russian Provisional Government. ³²

From his very earliest days as a Social Democrat, Boris Ivanovich believed that the emphasis of the revolutionary movement had to be on mobilizing the broadest masses; that only a genuine mass movement could give it the strength it needed. The professional revolutionary was not a substitute for but a means of generating the mass movement. The tactic had to be twopronged. On the one hand, the revolutionary movement had to be broadened through coalitions into a united front of all the democratic forces opposed to the tsarist regime and, on the other hand, the mass base of Social Democracy had to be broadened. This was, of course, not an original idea. Lenin subscribed to it to a considerable extent. The question was, however, how consistent one was in pursuing it. Ideological purity and strict centralization of leadership had in Lenin’s eyes higher priority. Boris Ivanovich, on the other hand, opposed sectarianism, factionalism, and elitism as well as “partisan actions,” etc., precisely because he considered them to be incompatible with grassroots work among the masses, with the so-called “organic work” in the broadest sense.³³

Boris Ivanovich was a great admirer of German Social Democracy. He had begun to study it in 1904, in the Ufa jail. He was awed by its organization, press, systematic activity and, above all, its steady growth in numbers, influence, and power. The party had done its spadework conscientiously, rationally, and it seemed ready to reap the harvest. Here, he thought, was a real mass movement advancing irresistibly, forcing the old order to retreat. It was Marx’s prediction coming true, the logic of history unfolding. However, in the heat of the 1905 Revolution and the continued struggle in 1906 the German model was somewhat forgotten, Boris Ivanovich admitted that he had been quite hotheaded in those days. Reflection came with defeat and the new study period in the Samara jail. It was then that he made the decision to devote himself to systematic, long range, “organic” party work; it was this decision which led him to the Mensheviks on his release. The same decision took him on a path which signified the final break with Bolshevism. What really tipped the scales was that the Bolsheviks turned to “partisan actions.” “That was the end,” Boris Ivanovich recalled. He had always been against terror not because he opposed it on moral grounds but because he considered it futile, if not directly counterproductive. He admired the heroism of the revolutionaries of the People’s Will days but not their wisdom. Still, those were different times and one could understand them. But to turn to terrorism at a time when a mass revolutionary movement was already a reality, when a revolution had just shown the power of the organized masses to shake and weaken, though not yet overthrow, the autocratic regime, was tantamount to an immense step backward. It was, in Boris Ivanovich’s opinion, turning to meaningless exploits instead of concentrating where potentially the real power lay; it was fighting the organized state machinery with isolated pistol shots instead of mobilizing the weight of millions against it. More, it meant missing the opportunity of rationally and systematically preparing the masses as well as the party for the Revolution and for the day after the Revolution. ³⁴

MEETING STALIN

From late 1908 until February, 1910, Boris Ivanovich was in exile in northern European Russia, in the White Sea area. He lodged with peasant families and paid his way from the thirteen-and-a-half ruble monthly allocation which the government paid every exile and which was quite adequate for maintenance. Rustic life, even in the far north, with its harsh climate and isolation from populated centers, never bothered Boris Ivanovich. On the contrary, he retained very pleasant memories from this as well as later Siberian exiles. He loved nature, liked and felt at ease with the peasants, and appreciated the freedom and free time to roam and do what he liked. He studied the peasants and their culture and beliefs and explored the area and its economic potential. With the authorities’ approval, Boris Ivanovich and several other exiles journeyed to the very edge of Arctic Siberia, and explored with his friends the Vorkuta coal fields which were to be opened for exploitation only later, when the Soviets established infamous concentration camps there.

When his term of exile ended in February, 1910, Boris Ivanovich received a passport to Ufa. He was now of military age and, reluctantly, presented himself to the draft board for a physical examination. Seeing a tall, healthy young man, the board at first wanted to send him to the Imperial Guard. Luckily, a secretary who knew about his unreliable political background spotted him at the last minute. After a whispered conference and “a good examination,” the doctor heard some “heart noises” which were deemed serious enough to grant an exemption from military service. However, other troubles were soon awaiting Boris Ivanovich. In Ufa, in the summer of 1910 he was jailed for two months for associating with revolutionaries. Released, he went to Samara to work for the local paper but was again arrested and sent back to the now familiar tundra region, this time for a three year term. He spent the winter of 1910-11 on the shores of the White Sea, where he studied local history and authored a series of articles on the development of Russian schooners. A shipbuilders’ society became interested in these writings and they were collected in a separate volume, his first book.

Still, no matter how much he enjoyed roaming the Northern expanses and studying local history, he could not forget the broader problems—the ills of Russia and the duty he felt to do something about them. In the spring of 1911 he fled, smuggling himself on board a small steamer dressed as a local fisherman. He landed at Arkhangelsk, took a train to the Ukraine and thence to Baku where he knew police control was weak.

From August, 1911, to June, 1912, Boris Ivanovich stayed in Baku, working as a journalist, and was not bothered by the police. One evening shortly after his arrival, a Bolshevik, Avel’ Enukidze, took him to a little Georgian winery. Just off a main street, in a half basement, it was a hangout of the Georgian Social Democrats, many of them veterans of the uprising in Guriia now living under false identities. Boris Ivanovich remembered that first evening as a memorable event—his introduction to the Georgians to whom he was thereafter bound by lasting sympathy and close ties.³⁵

During the evening Enukidze warned him that “we Georgians are very different from you Russians,” for a friend a Georgian will “give his last shirt,” but with an enemy he is tough; he may kill him. Then Enukidze asked: “Do you know our Peter the Caucasian—Tiflisian (i.e. Stalin)?” Boris Ivanovich answered that he had only heard about him. “If you don’t know him you’d better learn about him and remember,” said Enukidze, and he went on to characterize Stalin as one who had a long memory—”very vengeful, doesn’t forget anything, so be careful.”

In fact Enukidze’s main purpose was to test Boris Ivanovich’s reactions to see whether he should be let into the local party organization. Despite the fact that, in response to close questioning, Boris Ivanovich identified himself as a Menshevik, the memorable evening in the winery ended on a friendly note and he was welcomed to work with the Baku Social Democrats.

He soon became a member of the local Social Democratic Committee and found himself struggling with the Bolsheviks who controlled the organization. In the fall of 1911 when many party members, mostly Bolsheviks, were arrested, Boris Ivanovich rose to a leading position³⁶ and as a result was to meet Stalin.

The occasion was a party investigation of a Bolshevik, a member of the old Baku group, who had escaped arrest and attended a regional Social Democratic conference in Baku on the basis of a document to which a two-year-old party seal had been affixed. That seal, a round one, had been discarded when the police gained knowledge of it; since then the party was using a new seal of a different shape. When, in April, 1912, Stalin arrived in Baku as a representative of the Bolshevik Central Committee (newly elected at the recent Prague Conference), Boris Ivanovich was empowered to talk to him about the matter.

The encounter took place at the home of the Bolshevik Sosnovskii, who later became a prominent journalist. When Boris Ivanovich arrived Stalin was already there, sitting in a dark corner, his face hidden. He began by talking about the Prague Conference and the Bolshevik organization and plans. Boris Ivanovich pressed for a clarification of the circumstances under which an old seal, already known to the police, was used and made it clear that he suspected infiltration by police agents. Stalin could not give any explanation, claiming that he did not know because he had been away in exile and would first have to investigate. Thus a second meeting was arranged at which Stalin gave an involved story about two unions of oil workers, one of which had issued the seal. Boris Ivanovich was not satisfied and asked for further clarification, and Stalin again said that he would investigate but refused to meet for a third time.

The paths of Boris Ivanovich and Stalin were to cross directly only once more, this time in jail. It was about three months after their last meeting. Boris Ivanovich had been arrested on May 28, when his false identity was discovered (he had been living under the name of Golosov), and he was being transported back to his place of exile in the White Sea region.³⁷ Meanwhile Stalin, who had gone to St. Petersburg to work on Pravda, had also been arrested and was on his way to exile in Narym in Siberia. They met in the transit jail of Vologda and had a friendly chat. Stalin even asked Boris Ivanovich to give him his kettle (chainik) as he had none and was scheduled to be shipped out the same day, without companions, while Boris Ivanovich was in a party, several of whom had kettles. Boris Ivanovich gave him his kettle—”a good, blue enamel kettle,” he remembered—and that was the last time they ever talked. ³⁸

Indirectly, however, the paths of Boris Ivanovich and Stalin crossed in more significant ways than their three face-to-face meetings would suggest. The shadow of Stalin’s operations profoundly affected Boris Ivanovich’s nine month Baku period, and ultimately his whole attitude toward Bolshevism and later toward the Soviet Union in general. His attitude towards Bolshevism, it should be emphasized, was not something which crystallized overnight, or even within the few months of 1906-1907 when he made the switch to Menshevism. On the contrary, it was the product of a slow process marked by many ambiguities and for a long time devoid of exclusive, clear-cut loyalties. After all, this was the era following the Stockholm Unity Congress when the overwhelming majority of Social Democrats believed that the two factions represented merely nuances which could and should be able to cooperate within one party organization. Only slowly, first among the emigres and the politiki (party politicians), did a more aggressive stance, stressing the irreconciliability of the factions, gain in strength. Among the praktiki (practical party workers), and in Russia generally, the idea of an actual split within the party organization was resisted much longer, even by centers otherwise dominated by Lenin’s ideas. Baku was somewhat of an exception in that the local party organization had already split in February, 1908 (undoubtedly a reflection of Stalin’s influence); but as Boris Ivanovich’s experience proved, even in Baku there were many Bolsheviks quite ready to welcome a confessed Menshevik into their organization.

When he came to Baku Boris Ivanovich was an outspoken primirenets (conciliator),³⁹ who had no compunction about working with Bolsheviks, even within their organization, or about cultivating old or striking up new friendships with individual Bolsheviks. On his arrival he had expressed readiness to work within the framework of the local Bolshevik controlled organization and said that he neither had, nor intended to seek, an introduction to the parallel Plekhanovite-Menshevik organization.⁴⁰ Of course, Boris Ivanovich felt at ease primarily with those Bolsheviks who, like Enukidze, were primirentsy, and like himself sought to minimize the conflict between the two Social Democratic factions, while he found it more difficult (but not impossible) to collaborate with irreconcilable Leninists some of whom (for instance Stepan Shaumian) nevertheless commanded his respect.

It was in the course of rebuilding, and then leading, the Baku Social Democratic Committee following the mass Bolshevik arrests of September, 1911, that Boris Ivanovich encountered for the first time a brand of Bolshevism with which he could not cooperate on either political or moral grounds. Bolshevism in Baku was a product, on the one hand, of the mores of the local milieu which generated mafia type ties and interrelationships and, on the other, of the mode of operation of Stalin, who was himself the product of a similar milieu. According to Boris Ivanovich, it was in 1905-1906 that Stalin had created for himself a personal power base in Baku. At that time a Tatar millionaire named Tagiev, owner of the newspaper Kaspii and head of a Muslim sect, tightly controlled the whole Baku Tatar population. Conforming to the local custom, he had a squad of body guards called kochi, who also served as an enforcement arm. During the 1905 Revolution Stalin was able to infiltrate, win over, and organize Tagiev’s kochi and thereafter used them as his own body guards and executive arm. In 1906-1907 some suburbs and areas of Baku became dangerous territory for the Mensheviks because of frequent roughing ups by these minions of Stalin. ⁴¹

Politically, Stalin’s success in organizing Tagiev’s kochi was of considerable significance for it was apparently the first time that the Social Democratic movement had penetrated and created a base in the Muslim population of Transcaucasia. The reputation which Stalin acquired among the Bolsheviks as an expert in dealing with minority nationalities may well have originated with this success. It also gave the Bolsheviks an incontestable advantage over the Mensheviks whose base remained very narrow in places like Baku. Characteristically, when Boris Ivanovich began his drive to re-establish a Baku Social Democratic Committee after the September, 1911, arrests, his core of organizational strength was a union of mechanical workers and a much smaller union of draftsmen, both of which were composed of skilled, ethnically Russian workers. Bolshevik, and in particular Stalin’s personal strength, on the other hand, rested with a union of oil workers, the great majority of whom were unskilled Tatar laborers. Seregin, the secretary and seal holder of this union for over a decade, a follower of Stalin and his trusted man, was discovered in 1917 to have been a police agent all along. Boris Ivanovich was convinced that Seregin informed the police selectively, denouncing some revolutionaries while protecting Stalin’s followers.

Stalin’s mode of operation in Baku left an unfavorable impression on Boris Ivanovich. Later, while in exile in Siberia, he was to hear unconfirmed rumors further questioning the reliability of Stalin himself. Then, in 1918, Martov openly charged that Stalin had at one point been expelled from the party for organizing so-called “partisan actions” which had been expressly forbidden by the Central Committee. Stalin countered with a suit for defamation and Boris Ivanovich was sent to the Caucasus to bring back documents concerning the episode.⁴² Still, it wasn’t until Stalin emerged as undisputed ruler of the Soviet Union and Stalinism showed its true face as a political doctrine that Boris Ivanovich took a militant anti-Stalinist stance and began to write prolifically on the evils of Stalinism. In 1933 Boris Ivanovich published in Sotsialisticheskii vestnik a series of “Letters from Moscow”⁴³ about the G.P.U., Stalin, and the men around him. These “Letters,” based mainly on information supplied by the writer Isaac Babel⁴⁴ but supplemented from other Bolshevik sources, are to this day a valuable source for any student of Stalin and his era. In 1937 Boris Ivanovich published the now famous “Letter of an Old Bolshevik,” an analysis of Stalinism based on a conversation with Bukharin who visited Boris Ivanovich and F. I. Dan, while on an official trip to Paris. Still later came a series of articles in Novyi zhurnal analyzing the evolution of Stalin’s foreign policy in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Finally, in 1947, Boris Ivanovich co-authored (with a fellow Menshevik, D. Dallin) a book on forced labor in the Soviet Union. This work caused an international stir and was the object of a blistering attack by Andrei Vyshinskii, the Soviet representative at the United Nations.

From the 1940s on, various people turned to Boris Ivanovich for confirmation of their suspicions that Stalin was at one time a police agent, but he consistently refused to admit this even though his own investigations had at times strongly tempted him to accept some variant of these suspicions as truth. All that Boris Ivanovich was willing to say was that he considered Stalin so devoid of any moral scruples as to be certainly capable of stooping to collaboration with the police. The degree to which he considered Stalin a virtual embodiment of evil and a menace to the whole world can be seen from a letter he wrote in August, 1948, to a boyhood friend in which he said that Stalin was “worse than Hitler” and consequently another war, “more terrible than the last one,” was inevitable.

What undoubtedly restrained Boris Ivanovich from ever mentioning in public or in print any suspicions concerning Stalin’s past was the tradition strongly rooted in him that the basest of all crimes a revolutionary could commit was collaboration with the police. Hence to accuse a revolutionary of such a crime was so damning that it was permissible only when incontrovertible proof was at hand; Boris Ivanovich always emphasized that in the case of Stalin such proof was not available.

CROSSING PATHS WITH LENIN

Boris Ivanovich met Lenin only twice. Their second meeting was the episode described above, during the electoral campaign in the fall of 1907 when Boris Ivanovich attempted rather unsuccessfully to compete with Lenin from the speakers’ tribune. The first encounter also took place in St. Petersburg, somewhat earlier that same fall.⁴⁵ At the urging of I. N. Konovalov, Boris Ivanovich published in the Bolshevik Vpered an account of his talks with soldiers returning from the Far East and Lenin, having read the article, expressed through Konovalov a desire to meet its author.

The meeting took place at the University of St. Petersburg and Lenin asked many questions about the mood of the soldiers and requested Boris Ivanovich to write more on this subject for Vpered. Boris Ivanovich considered this suggestion quite characteristic of the conciliatory atmosphere within the party during this period, for he made it clear during the conversation that he was a Menshevik and the secretary of a Menshevik district (raion). Otherwise Lenin’s personality made no particular impression on him, and he later wondered why others reminisced again and again about Lenin’s striking, especially penetrating eyes, while he had noticed nothing extraordinary.

A frontal clash between Lenin and Boris Ivanovich occurred in October, 1913. Boris Ivanovich had been released from his exile in the Arkhangelsk region in June, 1913, and had settled, after a visit to Ufa, in St. Petersburg where he worked as assistant to M. I. Skobelev, a Menshevik deputy and secretary of the Social Democratic fraction in the Fourth Duma, and as secretary of the Menshevik paper Luch. As a collaborator and old friend of Skobelev, he was closely involved in the work of all Menshevik deputies and wrote speeches or reports on meetings with constituents for some of them. ⁴⁶

The dispute opened when Boris Ivanovich published an article in Luch protesting an attack by Lenin on N. S. Chkheidze’s loyalty to the party. Lenin came lashing back with a redoubled attack on Chkheidze aimed at undermining the latter’s prestige and authority among Social Democratic deputies in order to facilitate his plan of splitting the Bolsheviks from the Mensheviks within the Duma fraction. Boris Ivanovich wanted to answer Lenin again but F. I. Dan, unwilling to start a great debate with the Bolsheviks for the sake of a Chkheidze whom he did not consider a real party man, firmly opposed the move.

The polemic around Chkheidze left a bitter taste in Boris Ivanovich’s mouth for it showed Lenin’s ruthless readiness to attack party members and question their loyalties and political integrity if that suited his partisan politics. The episode occurred after Boris Ivanovich’s experiences with Stalin and Seregin and on top of mounting suspicions of the police connections of Malinovskii⁴⁷ and other Bolsheviks in St. Petersburg. Finally there was the question of censorship which the Mensheviks felt was hitting their paper harder than the Bolshevik Pravda. A highly provocative article, virtually a call for an armed uprising, passed the censorship in Pravda while Luch was confiscated for far milder statements.⁴⁸ Possibly, even probably, the Bolsheviks were simply bribing the censor. The business manager of Luch, Liubov N. Radchenko, did not have the money and furthermore, as Boris Ivanovich put it, she had never been capable of taking or giving a bribe. Profoundly alien to the Mensheviks was the shadowy world in which one had to wheel and deal with corrupt government officials, not to speak of Okhrana agents, and in which money obtained abroad or at home from undisclosed sources—perhaps by extortion, marriage of convenience, or “expropriation” with murder—was used to further the revolutionary cause. The fact was that the Mensheviks neither knew nor wanted to learn how to operate in such a world. There was, however, a growing feeling among them, shared at the time by Boris Ivanovich, that in one way or another the Okhrana was favoring the Bolsheviks.⁴⁹

It should be stressed, however, that Boris Ivanovich by no means equated Lenin with Stalin. Of course, he disagreed with Lenin politically, condemned his tactics, and disliked many of the people with whom he allied himself. In 1917 he advocated a hard line against Lenin and even had a sharp disagreement with Martov on this issue.⁵⁰ However, Lenin possessed qualities which Boris Ivanovich appreciated and admired and which he would have liked to see in Menshevik leaders. One such quality was total devotion to the cause of revolution. It should be remembered that from his late teens until the age of thirty Boris Ivanovich was a full time professional revolutionary, and though he was not as demanding or inflexible as Lenin in requiring every party member to live only for the revolution, it pained him to see how in the post-1905 era the ranks of the professional revolutionaries began to thin rapidly, especially among the Mensheviks. Everyone was preoccupied with his own affairs he recalled; revolutionaries were talking about such things as planning marriage and a family, about getting out of the revolutionary movement—temporarily, they claimed—in order to finish school and find a job. Even among the more educated and intelligent workers, precisely those who were most needed in the movement, there was a tendency to desert the ranks of the proletariat, to take up teaching or some other white-collar job in order to achieve a more promising personal career and life. The intellectuals within the party, too, often turned to more lucrative types of writing and other intellectual pursuits not directly related to the revolutionary movement.⁵¹

Boris Ivanovich also admired Lenin as a good khoziain or party manager. With the exception of V. N. Krokhmal, Boris Ivanovich felt that among the Mensheviks there was no good Iskra type of organizer. The Mensheviks were more in the tradition of Rabochee delo, that is, they knew how to start a movement but not how to weld together the kind of organization that gave the party strength in underground conditions. Boris Ivanovich often wistfully reminisced about how skillfully Lenin generated loyalties by showing, in little things, that he cared for and remembered the services of party activists. For instance, Krupskaia would write a letter to an exile to which Lenin would add a short note, thus forging a lasting bond between the exile and the party leader who remembered him. Nobody ever received such notes from Martov or Dan. ⁵²

Finally, Boris Ivanovich contrasted Lenin’s skill and perseverance in wooing the masses with the Mensheviks’ poor record on this score. Talented and sophisticated as the Menshevik writers were, they often failed in the narrower publicistic sense because of a tendency to broaden and generalize issues when a narrower and more specific focus would have been more easily understood by the masses.

The Mensheviks were no better at oral propaganda, at least not in 1917. Boris Ivanovich cited the example of Tsereteli who soon after the February Revolution commanded enormous prestige among the masses, but did not succeed in putting it to use or maintaining it, to a large extent because during the long and decisive spring and summer months he went no more than two or three times into the workers’ neighborhoods to explain his policies and seek support for them. The same was true of other Menshevik leaders, but, as Boris Ivanovich explained, it was not simply because of lack of time or, as in the case of Tsereteli, ill health. The underlying reason was that the masses were beginning to move spontaneously in a direction which the Mensheviks considered catastrophic. To flatter them demagogically in order to win their support and thus gain power, but then to turn against them, was unthinkable to the Mensheviks. To oppose the masses (openly and frontally), and thus perhaps keep company with all kinds of non-socialists or even antisocialists, was, however, an equally unpalatable alternative. So the field for propagandizing the masses was left, by default, largely to the Bolsheviks.

THE REVOLUTION AND NICOLAEVSKY’S
EXPULSION FROM RUSSIA

When war came in 1914 Boris Ivanovich was promptly arrested and exiled to Siberia to a distant village on the Angara. He settled fairly comfortably in a peasant’s house with one room serving as a bedroom and another as a study. He was soon able to supplement his government allowance by writing historical articles on the basis of materials he had gathered during his previous exile in Arkhangelsk guberniia which had been lying around unused while he was actively engaged in revolutionary activities. Subscriptions to all the important legal party periodicals and newspapers, ample correspondence, and occasional trips for talks with other exiles were enough to keep him abreast of political developments, so that when he emerged a free man on the first news of the overthrow of the tsarist government he was well versed in the political trends of the day and counted himself among the so-called Irkutsk Zimmerwaldists led by Tsereteli and Dan.

Boris Ivanovich believed that his group’s position was based on a genuine Marxist analysis of the concrete historical situation and the choice of the lesser evil. Thus while Martov’s Internationalists considered all the western powers equally imperialistic, the Irkutsk Zimmerwaldists saw France and England as essentially democratic countries, even though deviating from democratic positions in many respects, and Germany as an essentially imperialistic power. Accordingly, the group dispatched a telegram to Martov (Boris Ivanovich was one of its signers) urging him not to travel to Russia from Switzerland by way of Germany, which greatly irritated Martov.

Boris Ivanovich settled in Petrograd in an apartment with Dan and his wife Lidia Osipovna (Martov’s sister), and Martov himself. Thus he had the opportunity of hearing the top Menshevik leaders discuss the issues of the day and of participating in these discussions himself. His main job was serving as a member of Rabochaia gazeta’s editorial board. Politically he wished to see the Mensheviks act much more energetically. He wanted a strong and well advertised move for peace—not a separate peace but a general settlement-and was dismayed to see that when Tsereteli finally did make the unspectacular move of sending Aksel’rod abroad on a peace mission it hardly received any notice in the papers. On the question of government, he favored full participation by the Mensheviks.

Of course, Boris Ivanovich was in many ways as disoriented and at a loss about what to do throughout 1917 as most people both within and outside of the Menshevik ranks. However, he did recall with some bitterness his disappointment at the lack of leadership, the mood of drift and disorganization, which characterized the Menshevik party during those days. “Martov had no line” he was to repeat. When it came to criticizing his opponents, or giving a sophisticated analysis of their behavior, Martov excelled; but when pressed for an alternative, a clear and precise statement of what should be done, he faltered. “Martov was not a man for big decisions,” especially under pressure, Boris Ivanovich emphasized. The tragedy of Menshevism in 1917, Boris Ivanovich believed, lay in its refusal to take power because of the fear that it might be necessary to use that power against the workers. Since the proletariat was wrong—it was heading down the road towards pugachevshchina-the Mensheviks could not ally with it, but neither could they desert it.

Boris Ivanovich’s last great hope was the Constituent Assembly. He believed it to be vested with such prestige and self-evident authority that the masses would naturally rally to it and the Bolsheviks would not dare touch it. This hope faded quickly but by that time Boris Ivanovich had already become less involved in politics. During the August Party Congress, he became so disgusted with the inability of his fellow Mensheviks to set forth a clear new policy and put some energy behind it that he turned his primary attention to organizing archives;⁵³ this led to a collaboration with Riazanov which was to last almost fourteen years. During the next two years Boris Ivanovich traveled widely through Russia—twice to the Caucasus and once as far as Vladivostok—gathering archives for the Academy and performing also various missions for the party.

On February 21, 1921, he was arrested by the Cheka. His political and scholarly career on Russian soil came to an end when after a difficult year in jail marked by a hunger strike, he was expelled from Russia early in 1922. Ten years later he was deprived by decree of his Soviet citizenship. Still, until 1931 he continued to work and write from Berlin for the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. With Riazanov’s arrest this last official tie with the Soviet Union was broken.

However, all Boris Ivanovich’s activities as well as his writings during his thirty-five years in emigration—in Germany, France, and the United States— cannot be understood unless we remember that he never became a former Menshevik—never simply an immigrant, never even an American citizen— but always remained a political emigre conscious of the responsibility he bore towards his native country. ⁵⁴

The Austrian Marxist Friedrich Adler believed that “everybody has an a priori of his political consciousness” and that it is essential to realize “which convictions are so deeply rooted in us that they are no longer subject to discussion.”

These deepest convictions can be strengthened by experience and scientific understanding, but they spring from a pre-scientific understanding. They are, in the words of the psychologist Jung, a religious experience-religion being here understood in its broadest sense of faith in contrast to scientific understanding. . . . In my life, socialism was such a religious experience long before I came to know and understand its scientific doctrine. ⁵⁵

Speaking of his early home influence Boris Ivanovich emphasized that it consisted of a certain elemental humanitarianism—a sympathy for the broad masses (narodoliubie) and a love of freedom (svobodoliubie). Whether innate or imbued at home prior to the awakening of the real capacity to understand and judge, these two sentiments, narodoliubie and svobodoliubie, were undoubtedly the a priori of Boris Ivanovich’s political consciousness. If he later turned to Marxism it was because he found in it a rational explanation, an intellectual foundation for what he instinctively already knew—for what he believed in before he knew. And when he switched from Bolshevism to Menshevism it was not so much because he discovered new truths as because he found himself in conflict with the original, a priori truths. Menshevism, too, was not to him a house of truths. If the house did not fit his truths he unceremoniously shaped and reshaped it until it did.

In emotional moments, Boris Ivanovich could sometimes so startle his friends with a gesture that they would wonder whether what they thought was really he was not merely a shell under which some original, pre-political self, going back to the Belebei days, still persisted. Indeed, perhaps all political life and theory was to him merely an outward scaffolding, a crutch practical or intellectual, beyond and above which loomed the essence, his pre-political commitment to the elemental humanitarianism of narodoliubie and svobodoliubie.