Russian Social Democracy The Menshevik Movement [antikvár]

PREFACE This bibliography, prepared by Anna M. Bourguina in collaboration with the late B. I. Nicolaevsky, provides an extensive and almost exhaustive record of the publications in the Russian language—issued through legal and underground channels, in print and in mimeographed form—of individual figures, groups, and official agencies of the Menshevik movement. The bibliography is devoted chiefly to publications that appeared from the inception of the movement to the out- break of the Second World War (when Menshevism ceased to function, even in the emigration, as an organized political entity), but it also lists some later historical works. In Miss Bourguina's introduction, the reader will find a de- tailed explanation of the rules she followed in the preparation of this biblio- graphy, and of their rationale. I will largely confine my remarks, therefore, to a few observations about the difficulties that attended her work, and to the signi- ficance that should be assigned to it. The difficulties have stemmed mainly from the fact that, except during the "days of freedom" of the Revolution of 1905 and the brief interlude between February and October 1917, the Mensheviks had to articulate their views under precarious conditions of underground and émigré life, or under the shadowy rules—wavering between recognition and wholesale suppression—officially ap- plied to the Menshevik movement between the Stolypin coup d'état of June 1907 and the outbreak of the Revolution of 1917, and again from the Bolshevik seizure of power until 1921. Given these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that collections of Menshevik publications have remained to this day scattered and incomplete, and that many of the writings by individual figures (often un- signed or published under changing pseudonyms), have proved so difficult to identify. The difficulties have remained largely unchallenged during the half century since the October Revolution. With the exception of the admirable bibliography on the Revolution of 1905 and its aftermath, published in 1930 by the Com- munist Academy,* these years have not seen the appearance of any major biblio- graphical work on the Menshevik movement, either in the Soviet Union or abroad. Thus, Miss Bourguina's bibliography may be regarded as a pioneering study, which partly fills a gap that has stood in the way not only of scholarly work on the Menshevik Party but indeed of studies of all the opposition groups and parties which, along with the Bolsheviks, were active on the Russian political and social scene from the beginning of the twentieth century to 1917.