Modern Europe
Whites' defeat in Siberia was far more the result of
their failure as strategists, tacticians, and politicians
than a consequence of great and stunning Red triumphs. In the end, Kolchak proved to be his own worst
enemy. When his government fell in the early days of
1920, there was no one left anywhere in Siberia to
support it.
Critics will no doubt remark that Smele's account
includes few materials drawn from archives within
Russia itself, and they will of course be correct in
noting that these materials have been available for
some time. But it is difficult to imagine that such
sources could change substantially the picture he
presents, for his is the story of White defeat, not Red
victory, and he has mined the many White archives
scattered throughout Europe and the United States
thoroughly and well. Beyond that, he has consulted a
truly formidable array of published materials to produce what seems to this reviewer to be a truly definitive
work. Others may at some point find more to say about
the Civil War in Siberia, but it will be a long time
indeed before Smele's book is superseded.
Given the thoroughness of Smele's account and the
importance of the questions he has addressed, I wish
that his publisher had provided him with better editorial guidance than is evident here. An attentive editor
could have reduced parts of this sprawling text substantially and clarified sentences that are so lengthy
and complex that they sometimes require a second
reading before their meaning becomes entirely clear.
Still, such shortcomings should not detract from the
value of Smele's account nor deter readers from it.
Exhaustive and far-ranging research makes this book
all but certain to become a classic in its field, and all
historians of the Russian Civil War and Siberia must
stand greatly in its author's debt for that reason.
W. BRUCE LINCOLN
Northern Illinois University
MICHAEL DAVID-Fox. Revolution of the Mind: Higher
Learning among the Bolsheviks, 1918-1929. (Studies of
the Harriman Institute.) Ithaca: Cornell University
Press. 1997. Pp. xvii, 298. $45.00.
Historians have interpreted the period of the New
Economic Policy (NEP) in Soviet history from 1921 to
1928 in various ways. Some scholars have presented it
as an era of tolerance on the part of the ruling
Communist Party that made possible peaceful coexistence with non-party institutions and their representatives. Other analysts, however, have found a party
mobilizing for an attack on so-called bourgeois specialists and heretical tendencies within the Marxist
camp. Still others have portrayed the party aggressively seeking a monopoly over most aspects of Soviet
life. The choice of interpretation goes a long way in
determining how historians understand the relationship between Bolshevism before 1928 and Joseph
Stalin's "Great Break" of cultural revolution, forced
collectivization, and state-sponsored industrialization
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1285
that followed. If accommodation characterized the
NEP, then Stalin's policies were indeed a historical
"break"; if an offensive best represented the NEP,
then those policies were part of a continuum. Michael
David-Fox vigorously advocates the latter point of
view.
This book charts the development of educational
institutions founded by the Bolshevik Party primarily
after 1917. Of particular importance are three institutions of higher learning: Sverdlov Communist University, the Institute of Red Professors, and the Communist Academy. But David-Fox is interested in more
than institutional history narrowly defined. He examines how, during the 1920s, these establishments contributed to a redefinition of the party's revolutionary
mission in cultural and intellectual life that reduced
science and scholarship to party service. Thus the
offensive in 1929 against the "bourgeois" Academy of
Sciences and a corresponding politicization (and brutalization) of academic discourse intensified attitudes
and policies already apparent during the NEP years.
And yet, as David-Fox points out, the very success of
the party's assault and a subsequent preservation of
the Academy of Sciences meant a "kind of defeat in
victory" (p. 262) for those Communists who sought the
elimination of bourgeois institutions.
By rejecting any sharp distinction between the 1920s
and the Stalinist period that followed, David-Fox
transcends one of several "hoary dichotomies" (p. xi)
that he finds dominant in standard historiography on
the Soviet Union. He successfully dismisses another
such dichotomy by demonstrating that, before 1917,
almost all Bolsheviks, including followers of both V. I.
Lenin and A. A. Bogdanov, equated revolution with
cultural as well as political transformation. Moreover,
in a truly remarkable section (pp. 101-117), David-Fox
shows that, for Bolsheviks, everyday behavior and
politics merged so that an improperly ascetic life style
became tantamount to political deviance.
David-Fox convincingly demonstrates that not only
those higher up in the party's hierarchy but those at
the lower levels, especially students at the party's
higher educational institutions, applied intense pressure for the politicization of science and scholarship. I
would like, however, to hear more of the personality
and activity of these young militants. It seems to me
that the author avoids further probing their role by
assigning ultimate responsibility for the victory of
political over scholarly criteria to impersonal structures and traditions. Perhaps in an understandable
effort to emphasize the importance of anonymous
forces, David-Fox, along with many others, has tended
to ignore the human element. At any rate, we surely
need to know whether the party's youth believed that
hostile economic, political, and class forces imperiled
the Bolshevik regime and revolution and thus necessitated extreme measures. I am, however, particularly
pleased to find a detailed and consistent concern for
the ideological and jurisdictional disputes that existed
among party and state agencies, including several
OCTOBER
1998
1286
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