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Reviews of Books
competing organs within the Commissariat of Education itself, responsible for propaganda and scholarship.
The opening of party archives made this particular
study possible. David-Fox has engaged their contents
well, in part because of the knowledge and the perspective gained from his thorough examination of
periodicals from the 1920s and of secondary literature
in French, German, Russian, and English. I am especially impressed by his use of the heavily tendentious
but often valuable historical literature published in the
Soviet Union prior to perestroika.
In sum, this "is a fine work, coherently presented and
argued and supported by an impressive array of original and secondary sources. It contributes substantially
to a more sophisticated understanding of the 1920s
and the Stalinist period that followed.
LARRY E. HOLMES
University of South Alabama
ANDRE LIEBICH. From the Other Shore: Russian Social
Democracy after 1921. (Harvard Historical Studies,
number 125.) Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press. 1997. Pp. xi, 476. $48.00.
Among Russian historians, the Mensheviks have long
played exile losers to the Bolshevik winners, whose
Soviet Union has only recently collapsed in ruin. Rival
Mensheviks and Bolsheviks demonized each other in
print for so many years that historians, too, have
emphasized Bolshevik-Menshevik differences more
than similarities. This definitive monograph on the
Mensheviks from 1903 until the 1980s shows in great
detail how the Mensheviks, in their origins, were
"barely distinguishable from their counterparts [the
Bolsheviks] who went on to undertake the Soviet
experiment" (p. 330).
Most Mensheviks were assimilated Russian Jewish
intellectuals. Andre Liebich argues that the famous
1903 Bolshevik-Menshevik split in the Russian Social
Democratic Workers' Party (RSDWP) over the party
platform revealed minimal dissent between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks on most issues, a common socialist
and Marxist outlook on the world, mutual personal
and political ties (and marriages) between Bolsheviks
and Mensheviks, and continuing pressure to unite the
party. Many Mensheviks were former Bolsheviks, and
many Bolsheviks were former Mensheviks. But World
War I further divided them over issues such as whether
socialists should defend the Russian proletariat and
war effort or support international socialist action
against the war. In 1917, the Mensheviks were a very
strong, worker-based political party in Russia. Only
after October did they suffer a sharp decline in party
membership and influence as the Bolsheviks came to
power and the Socialist Revolutionaries drew broad
popular support from the peasantry.
The Mensheviks were literally an extended family.
Iu. O. Martov's sister Lidia (Tsederbaum) married
Fedor Dan. Martov's sister-in-law K. I. Zakharova was
a left Menshevik. Simon Volin was David Dallin's
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
brother. Dallin married Boris Nicolaevsky's secretary.
In 1917, Martov, the Dans, Paul Axelrod, and Nicolaevsky all lived in the same St. Petersburg apartment.
In 1940, the Dans, the Bienstocks, the Aronsons,
Aaron Iugov and Lazar Pistrak all lived at 352 West
110th Street in New York City.
The Mensheviks after 1917 condemned the Bolshevik Revolution but agreed on little else. Like the
Bolsheviks, they had their party line-the "Martov
line" that the Bolsheviks should not be overthrown by
force-but argued continually over the future of the
Soviet Union and their appropriate role as democratic
socialists. The RSDWP continued its marginal existence inside the Soviet Union into the 1930s. In exile in
Berlin, Paris, and then New York, the Mensheviks
produced a torrent of commentary on the Soviet
Union in the pages of their journal Sotsialisticheskii
vestnik (Socialist Messenger), which criticized the
"Thermidor" and "Bonapartism" of V. I. Lenin's New
Economic Policy and the subsequent brutal dictatorship of Joseph Stalin. The Mensheviks helped invent
kremlinology and sovietology in the West while redefining themselves as international socialists through
the Labor and Socialist International and the Independent Socialist Party of Germany.
The Soviet trial of fourteen Menshevik defendants
on wrecking charges in 1931 and the deprivation of
Soviet citizenship for all Mensheviks one year later
made them permanent exiles. Only their Marxist determinism and their dream of "freedom through socialism" gave the Mensheviks hope amid the tribulations of exile. But by 1940, the RSDWP had disbanded.
The Menshevik Foreign Delegation followed suit in
1951, although individual Mensheviks still found an
anti-Soviet voice in America through the New Leader
and the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The FBI, with
great inaccuracy and ineptitude, investigated the Mensheviks as suspected Soviet agents.
Why did Western and Soviet historians in the 1970s
and 1980s believe that the Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin,
rather than Mensheviks like Martov or Dan, epitomized a missed socialist alternative to Bolshevism?
Historians have dismissed the Menshevik exiles as too
conscience-stricken, too anti-Bolshevik, and too committed to their democratic socialist ideals. Liebich has
combed archives in Amsterdam, New York, Moscow,
Palo Alto, and Washington to show us in sympathetic
detail how the politically adept Menshevik family in
exile retained an ambivalent relationship with its Bolshevik brothers and sisters inside Russia, voicing criticism but always maintaining hope that freedom
through socialism was not an impossible dream. Both
Bolsheviks and Mensheviks naturally emphasized their
differences after 1903. But this important book on the
Mensheviks inside and outside Russia demonstrates
their common socialist language and perspective as
well as their factional disputes. It compels us to take
more seriously history's losers and exiles, as well as the
winners, whose vast Soviet empire in this case has now
collapsed. This book should be useful to all Russian
OCTOBER 1998
1287
Middle East
and modern European historians and political scientists.
ROBERT C. WILLIAMS
Davidson College
MIDDLE EAST
Eunuchs and Sacred Boundaries in
Islamic Society. New York: Oxford University Press.
1995. Pp. xii, 162. $42.00.
SHAUN MARMON.
Despite its enigmatic title, this concise and well written
book is primarily a study of the society of eunuchs
entrusted in the later Middle Ages with supervision of
the second most sacred site in the Islamic world, the
mosque and tomb complex of the Prophet Muhammad
in Medina. Setting aside for a moment the problematic
first chapter, the book's central three chapters trace
the emergence and significance of the eunuch society
in Medina from its obscure origins (possibly in the late
twelfth century) to a position of considerable prominence and power in the Mamluk period (A.D. 12501517). It is in these middle three chapters that Shaun
Marmon's book makes its most important and compelling contributions. She affords us the first full description of the functioning of the eunuch society of Medina
in the late medieval period. Moreover, she illustrates
the manner in which the Mamluk regime in Egypt
solidified its authority over the second holiest site in
Islam through patronage of the eunuch society after
the fall of Abbasid Baghdad to the Mongols in 1258.
The religious leadership of Medina was still predominancy Shiite, and the society of eunuchs, through both
its conscious mirroring of Mamluk imperial ceremony
and its exclusive manipulation of the tremendous
charismatic power of the Prophet's tomb, served as an
effective and inexpensive instrument in the gradual
extension of Mamluk and Sunni authority over the city:
authority that simultaneously reflected a considerable
measure of legitimacy on the Mamluk sultans themselves. Most importantly, Marmon provides a richly
textured account of the ways in which the eunuchs
functioned as ideal mediators between the sacred
charisma (baraka) associated with the Prophet's physical remains and generations of pilgrims to his tomb. A
concluding chapter reviews primarily nineteenth and
early twentieth-century European descriptions of this
society of eunuchs.
In the first chapter Marmon examines eunuchs as
agents mediating three distinct sets of boundaries, not
in Medina but in the Mamluk imperial capital of Cairo.
Working first from a fourteenth-century poetic account of the ideal home, which devotes an entire
chapter to the eunuchs of the vestibule, Marmon
highlights the fact that the eunuchs are placed not in
the interior of the home, specifically in the women's
quarters, but in the vestibule, a transitional space
between the bustling public world and the intricately
mediated inner space of the home (p. 4). Turning from
poetry to surviving waqf endowment deeds, Marmon
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
examines descriptions of the dihliz (vestibule) and
finds in its frequently twisted corridors and subsequent
"transitional zones" a highly symbolic architectural
manipulation of space that physically reinforces etiquette to remind visitors that their "presence in the
household is by permission" (p. 7).
Marmon is remarkably gifted at coaxing subtle
meaning from the source material, but in some instances, such as in this analysis of the significance of
the vestibule, one wonders if she is not too quick to
assign deep symbolic meaning where more prosaic
explanations are likely. Her creative interpretation of
the underlying significance of Mamluk domestic architecture clearly supports the particular image of eunuchs Marmon is crafting. A more mundane reason for
the sometimes elaborate asymmetry of Cairene vestibules fits the physical evidence better, however. Late
medieval Cairo was among the world's most densely
populated urban centers. Mamluk builders routinely
faced the challenge of erecting massive stone structures on dwindling and increasingly irregular urban
plots. The creative ways in which these master craftsmen conformed to pre-existing street patterns and
physical stock are still visible.
Marmon next turns from the role of eunuchs as
navigators of transitional space in the domestic architecture of wealthy Cairene homes to their comparable
position in the "home" of Mamluk military and imperial power, the Cairo Citadel. Here one senior eunuch
official supervised the apartments of the sultan's vast
household, while another oversaw the sultan's personal mamluks (slave soldiers), his "military family"
(p. 11). Eunuchs thus exercised a measure of control
over direct access to the Mamluk sultan himself.
In her third illustration of the mediatory role of
eunuchs in Mamluk Cairo, Marmon examines royal
tomb complexes in which sultans made arrangements
for eunuch services to guard their own early remains in
perpetuity. The proliferation of such eunuch services
in the imperial mausolea of Cairo in the late thirteenth
and early fourteenth centuries is closely related, Marmon argues, to the dramatic expansion of Mamluk
patronage of the eunuch society at the Prophet's tomb
in Medina. This connection was posited long ago by
the great Mamluk historian David Ayalon ("The Eunuchs in the Mamliik Sultanate," Studies in Memory of
Gaston Wiet [1977]), but Marmon must be credited
with definitively establishing this link. A minor correction is necessary here, however, when the author
identifies ziyardt as "places of visitation" (p. 14). This
word is a verbal noun indicating not the place but the
act itself of visiting tombs.
The difficulty with this otherwise informative initial
chapter is that in each of these three examples the
author sees eunuchs as critical guardians of "sacred
space," a term she inexplicably never defines. In place
of a rigorous definition she offers only an insufficient
lexical explanation that the Arabic words for the
private interior space of a home thurim), the honor
due a sultan (lJ,urma), and a religious sanctuary
OCTOBER
1998