Canadian Slavonic Papers

Pis'ma (1899-1946) by Fedor Il'ich Dan; Boris SapirReview by: R. C. ElwoodCanadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes, Vol. 29, No. 2/3 (June-September1987), pp. 303-304Published by: Canadian Association of SlavistsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40868764 .

Accessed: 16/06/2014 07:41

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Canadian Association of Slavists and Canadian Slavonic Papers are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.49 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 07:41:14 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Vol. xxix, Nos. 2&3 Book Reviews | 303

empire, "distinctive parochial revolutions" sealed the utter repudiation of the old regime and contributed mightily to the failure of its temporary successor.

What do we learn about the revolution in general from the particular case of Saratov? Certainly by now we can accept with no difficulty that provincial Russia was more than "a torpid partner to developments in the capital cities.' Saratov's experience confirms and deepens this lesson. We also see in the city on the Volga the fatal weaknesses of Russian liberalism and moderate socialism. "We don't want to listen to any orators" expressed a common sentiment which deprived liberals and centrists of their only weapon. It is also interesting to read Raleigh's description of the region's Bolsheviks in revolution, away from the immediate supervision of party chiefs in Petrograd. Radicalized soldiers and land-hungry peasants forced the pace here as elsewhere in Russia. Saratov's experience, thor- oughly analyzed in this book, contains no great surprises. Raleigh's study greatly expands our knowledge of events in provincial Russia in revolution, when it briefly seemed that the ordinary masses had at long last won control over their lives and country.

R. H. Johnston, McMaster University

Fedor IFich Dan. Pis ma (1899-1946). Selected, annotated and with an outline of Dan's political biography by Boris Sapir. Amsterdam: Inter- nationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis, 1985. lviii, 678 pp. $98.00.

Scholars of the Russian revolutionary movement owe a great debt to the Inter- national Institute for Social History in Amsterdam and to the long-time curator of its Russian collections, Boris Sapir. The Institute's archives are rich in un- published documents and hard-to-obtain newspapers relating to pre-revolutionary Russian anarchism, populism, and Social Democracy. Its bright and friendly reading room has served as a pleasant work place for several generations of researchers from abroad. And, until his retirement in 1982, Boris Sapir provided the type of friendly guidance and informed advice rarely found in the larger, more impersonal libraries of Europe and North America. Since 1970 Dr. Sapir has also been active in publishing valuable collections of documents largely drawn from the Institute's own archives: first, two volumes on the populist newspaper Vperëd!' then two more on P. L. Lavrov's years in emigration; and now a collection of Lydia Dan's essays and letters and a volume of fascinating letters written by her husband, Fedor Ifích Dan.

The volume under review contains 345 letters. The vast majority were written to four persons: Dan's Menshevik associate P. B. Aksefrod, the leading German socialists Karl and Luise Kautsky, and the Austrian socialist Friedrich Adler. There also are 26 letters written to A. N. Potresov before the split in Social Demo- cratic ranks in 1903 and 20 to B. B. Mering near the end of Dan's life in 1947. There

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.49 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 07:41:14 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

304 I Canadian Slavonic Papers June-September 1987

are unfortunately only four letters to his close friend and brother-in-law, Iu. O. Martov, and only one to V. I. Lenin. The letters are concentrated in two periods: 1899 to June 1914, when Dan served as the "chief of staff of the Menshevik move- ment, and July 1924 to 1946, when he once again was forced to live in emigration and devoted his time to the Socialist International and the Mensheviks' Sotsialis- ticheskii vestnik. The important years on either side of the 1917 Revolution, when Dan was at the peak of his political career and was the architect of his party's coalition policy in the Petrograd Soviet and the Provisional Government, are represented by only four letters to Aksel'rod.

To most readers, the early letters will seem the more interesting and important. Dan's comments on the pre-revolutionary congresses he attended, on the rivalries and personalities within the movement, and on Social Democracy's changing fortunes within Imperial Russia serve both to complement the letters published in the 1920s between other Menshevik leaders and as an antidote to Lenin's cor- respondence readily available in the fourth and fifth editions of his Sochineniia. The post- 1924 letters may be less significant politically but they reveal more of emigre life when Dan increasingly disagreed with his more pessimistic Menshevik colleagues, including Boris Sapir, about the possibility of moderation within the Soviet state.

Given the fact that author and editor ended up on opposite ends of the Men- shevik political spectrum, this volume is less a labour of love than a reflection of Boris Sapir's desire to preserve the historical record. It is also a testament to his objectivity and his scholarship. The letters, which are published in the language in which they were written (largely Russian and German), are explicated by detailed notes identifying individuals and providing background on party debates. The 63-page index of persons and publications supplies more biographical and biblio- graphical information and ought to be a godsend for researchers seeking to track down seemingly obscure Mensheviks. The volume also includes a useful appendix of sixteen related documents and an interesting "outline of Dan's political bio- graphy." One wishes that the latter might have been longer than 22 pages but it and the letters which follow will surely stimulate greater interest in Dan and perhaps even a long-overdue biography of him. Although this book is almost prohibitive in cost, it will be indispensable reading for any student of Russian Social Democracy.

R. C. El wood, Carle ton University

Mary Gluck. Georg Lukacs and his Generation 1900-1918. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985. ix, 265 pp. n.p.

There has been a remarkable revitalization of generational history in this decade. Since the publication of Carl Schorske's book Fin de Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York, 1980) we have seen the proliferation of interdisciplinary books which take as their point of reference not the study of a single event, or the un-

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.49 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 07:41:14 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions