Pavel Aksel’rod (1850-1928) was one of the founders of Russian Marxism, and the most important ideologue of Menshevism from 1903 until the 1920s. Although he has not received the same attention from historians as Lenin, Trotsky, Plekhanov, or even Martov, he was the subject of one full-length study published in 1972 – Abraham Ascher’s Pavel Axelrod and the Development of Menshevism. Ascher’s account was a model political biography, but was weighted heavily toward the pre-Revolutionary period. Al’bert Nenarokov’s short book, which concentrates on Aksel’rod’s ideas and activities after he left Russia for the last time in August 1917, now provides a useful complement to Ascher’s classic monograph.
Nenarokov has been researching and writing on the history of the revolution for at least three decades and, following the collapse of the USSR, has been working on the history of Menshevism. This book is very much the fruit of his research in Western libraries and archives. It draws very heavily on Aksel’rod’s papers at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, and on the papers of the Menshevik archivist Boris Nikolaevsky at the Hoover Institution. The text contains extensive quotations from Aksel’rod’s letters and articles from the 1920s. By making this material more widely available, Nenarokov has made a valuable contribution to the historiography of Menshevism. Letters from Aksel’rod to the right-wing Menshevik A. N. Potresov in the 1920s, in which he sets out his criticisms of the official line, are reproduced verbatim in an appendix, as are Aksel’rod’s comments on Potresov’s critique of official Menshevism. Nenarokov’s book has no index, but it does contain helpful short biographical notes on the persons mentioned within it.
Menshevik material up to 1920 or so is easy enough to find in Russian archives, but the records of the organization in exile, from 1920 to the 1960s, have remained in the West. As Nenarokov’s book shows, the West is not an incongruous location for those records. From its inception in the 1880s, Russian Marxism was part of the Westernizing trend in Russian social thought. It represented the far left of the Russian Westernizers, those who believed that capitalism and Western patterns of development were inevitable for Russia, and needed to be met with a powerful Western-style labor and socialist movement. Perhaps more than anyone else, Aksel’rod embodied this idea. He spent most of his adult life as a political exile, mainly in Switzerland. He imbibed the values and traditions of Western, especially German, social democracy, and was concerned above all to apply what he had learned to the Russian situation.
Unusually, however, Aksel’rod had not come from the educated, cosmopolitan intelligentsia. He was born into a desperately poor, uneducated, and devout Jewish family, and managed to acquire a Russian education, up to university level, through a combination of sheer luck and hard work. His relentless pursuit of broader horizons, which in his early youth led him to reject the mental straightjacket of Orthodox Judaism, later led him to reject the backwardness of Russian society. As Nenarokov aptly puts it, Aksel’rod progressed from being “a ‘Europeanizer’ of Jewish society to a ‘Europeanizer’ of the Russian workers’ movement” (p. 29).
From the 1880s until 1903, Aksel’rod, with Plekhanov and a few others, propagated a Marxist view of Russia’s development from their Swiss exile, without much of an audience, and even less of a party, inside Russia. From 1903, when Russian social-democratic groups met in Brussels and London for their second congress and immediately split into two factions, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, Aksel’rod became one of Menshevism’s leading theoreticians. As it turned out, this was not fortuitous. Bolshevism under Lenin gradually, almost imperceptibly, evolved from a Westernizing trend into a peculiarly Russian form of Marxism, incorporating elements as diverse as the insurrectionism of Bakunin and Nechaev, and the militaristic authoritarianism of Arakcheev. Menshevism remained much truer to its Westernizing origins, insisting that Russia first needed a “bourgeois-democratic” revolution against Tsarism, followed by a period of capitalist development, before any kind of socialism became possible. However, it was not until after 1917 that the full significance of the divergent evolution of Bolshevism and Menshevism became apparent.
Although he had been a revolutionary from around 1870, Aksel’rod did not get to play a large practical role in Russia’s revolution. His wife’s terminal illness meant that he missed the events of 1905. In the spring of 1917 he returned to Russia from Switzerland in a sealed train, but in August that year his party sent him to Stockholm to help prepare for an international socialist peace congress. He was never to return to Russia. This was his “last emigration” – the subject matter and title of Nenarokov’s book.
Once Bolshevik repression against the Mensheviks had begun in earnest after mid-1918, Aksel’rod was joined in emigration by an increasing number of his colleagues. By 1922 the entire effective leadership of the party, along with some activists who had refused to abandon their activities, had been expelled from Soviet Russia. Quoting extensively from Aksel’rod’s correspondence and other papers, Nenarokov discusses the debates and feuds among the Menshevik йmigrйs as they tried to make sense of the Bolshevik regime and the failure of the Russian revolution to follow the path they had mapped for it. In these debates Aksel’rod was fighting on several fronts at once, while managing to retain the respect and affection of all sides.
From the end of 1917, the official Menshevik line had been that of the “left”, represented by Martov and Dan, which sought to operate as a legal opposition in Soviet Russia, and regarded the Bolshevik regime as a lesser evil than its likely replacements. Aksel’rod could not accept that line. For him, the regime was one of “Arakcheevist serfdom”, against which a struggle was needed “for the sake of the vital interests not only of the Russian people, but also of international socialism and the international proletariat, possibly even of world civilization itself” (p. 88). The international aspect of the struggle was of particular concern to Aksel’rod, in that many parties in the Labour and Socialist International were inclined to sympathize with Soviet Russia. He was very anxious to ensure that the Western socialist movement did not form too rosy a picture of Bolshevik rule, and was exasperated by the Austrian socialist leader Otto Bauer’s attempt to understand Bolshevism in terms of Russian backwardness. Aksel’rod hoped that Western socialists could play an important part in the downfall of the Soviet regime, and believed, furthermore, that their contribution was vital if the regime were not to be replaced by a counterrevolutionary dictatorship.
On this question he was critical of those on the right of the Menshevik party like Potresov, who believed that almost any regime would be better than the Bolsheviks. Aksel’rod was concerned that Russian social-democracy should not act as “a bridge for anti-socialist and anti-proletarian forces”. At the same time, however, Aksel’rod considered the right-wing dictatorships that existed in Europe in the mid-1920s to be less damaging than the Soviet regime. Dictatorships such as that of Horthy in Hungary, he reasoned, kept the economic structure and relations in their countries intact, and this would make it much easier for those societies to recover after the fall of the dictatorship.
Nenarokov quotes the right-wing Menshevik S. O. Portugeys on the occasion of Aksel’rod’s 75th birthday in 1925: “There is nobody else in Russian social democracy whose name and moral-political make-up allow him to exercise such an imperative influence on the party as a whole, on all its squabbling, embittered brothers...” (p. 79). Indeed, following his death in 1928, Menshevism continued to disintegrate. Its organization within Russia was reduced to nothing, many exiles drifted away from politics, the differences between its left and right grew larger, and the remaining Mensheviks were driven out of Berlin in 1933, and Paris in 1940, ending their days in the USA.
It may be asked – does any of this matter? After all, Aksel’rod’s final emigration was the swan song of a doomed political current that was never able to revive after its debacle of 1917. The answer should be a qualified “yes”. Westernizing left ideas enjoyed an unexpected and striking renaissance in the USSR during the six-year rule of Mikhail Gorbachev, and although once again they were defeated, it would be premature to write them off altogether.