Abstract
Alla Yurievna Morozova, an historian in the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, worked at one time as an archivist in the Russian State Archive of Socio and Political History (RGASPI), formerly the Central Party Archive of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. She has drawn upon her knowledge of the collections of RGASPI and of other Russian archives to produce a history of the ideas and political career of Alexander A. Bogdanov, the co-founder, with Lenin, of the Bolshevik fraction of the Russian Social Democratic Party (RSDRP) in 1904, and, in opposition to Lenin, of the Vpered (‘Forward’) group in 1909. The thread that unites the two parts of her book is Bogdanov’s critique of the Marxism of Georgii V. Plekhanov and V. I. Lenin and his rejection of their political response to the failed revolution of 1905. As we know, Bogdanov outlined a path to what he described as ‘Collectivism’ by way of a long-term cultural revolution from below. In 1917 he rejected Lenin’s Soviet revolution, advocated support for the Constituent Assembly, and put forward a programme of gradual reform in industry and agriculture.
In a valuable bibliographical introduction Morozova reviews the development of Bogdanov studies inside and outside Russia since ‘perestroika’, the ending of censorship of party history, and the granting of virtually unrestricted access to Russian archives. Her archival research has left few stones unturned: she has made good use of the collections of RGASPI and of the other main Russian archives, including those of the Department of Police. It is unfortunate, as she herself admits, that she was unable to study the papers of Grigor Aleksinsky (a prominent member of Vpered), in the Bakhmeteff Archive in Columbia University, or the archive of the Basso-Issoco Foundation in Rome where materials relating to Bogdanov’s years in exile are held (an edition of his correspondence with Maxim Gorky has recently been published in Italian by Jutta Scherrer and Daniela Steila). Morozova’s book includes an assortment of photographs of Bogdanov and of his family and closest associates, many of them provided by Bogdanov’s son, the distinguished biologist Alexander Alexandrovich Malinovsky (1909–1996). Hitherto, these photographs had circulated only in poor-quality reproductions.
The history of Vpered reminds us that the RSDRP between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 was a ‘multi-fractional’ party, with the ‘legalist’ group around Alexander Potresov in St. Petersburg, the Lenin group, Vpered, the ‘Conciliator’ Bolsheviks (among whom Aleksei Rykov was prominent), the ‘Golos’ group (Iulii Martov, Fedor Dan and Alexander Martynov) in Paris, the ‘Party Mensheviks’ led by Plekhanov from San Remo, and the Pravda group around Leon Trotsky in Vienna all vying for influence within a party that became increasingly fragmented following its London Congress 1907 and was dealt a death blow by Lenin’s convening of a schismatic conference in Prague in January 1912.
The multi-factional nature of the RSDRP was a major, but not the only, source of its weakness. Bogdanov deplored the reluctance of minority groups to accept the will of the majority, and was of the opinion that the RSDRP was not a ‘party of the European type’. However, the RSDRP, like the agrarian Socialist Revolutionary Party, was also undermined by the virus of police surveillance. The agents of the Russian Department of Police made it their business to exacerbate inter-factional conflict.
Amongst the strengths of RSDRP was its ‘multi-nationalism’. The Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, the Latvian Social Democratic Party, the Jewish Union of Lithuania, Poland and Russia (the ‘Bund’) and the Armenian Social Democrats, all participated in the London Congress of 1907. The first three of these organizations were represented in the five-member Foreign Bureau formed in Paris by the Central Committee in January 1910. Inside Russia, the Social Democrats of Georgia exerted great influence.
The RSDRP was also an international party: its delegates participated actively in the Congresses of the Socialist International in Amsterdam (1904), Stuttgart (1907) and Copenhagen (1910), in international trade union congresses and in the International Congresses of Socialist Women. The contributions of Russian Social-Democrats to such events were far from doctrinaire: during the Stuttgart Congress, both Anatoly Lunacharsky and Vladimir Bazarov enthusiastically supported the quasi-syndicalist ideas of the Belgian theorist, Louis de Brouckere. Lunacharsky expressed his admiration of Daniel de Leon and the Industrial Workers of the World. Alexandra Kollontai, Leonid Krasin and David Ryazanov (an authority on trade unions) were respected figures in international socialist circles. The eclectic composition of Russian Social Democratic delegations to Congresses of the Socialist International would later be ignored by Leninist historiography.
Morozova’s book lends weight to an interpretation that would see the relationship between the RSDRP and the Soviet regime, even between ‘Bolshevism’ and the Soviet regime, more in terms of discontinuity than continuity. Coming as it does shortly after publication of James D. White’s biography of Bogdanov, Red Hamlet (Brill, 2019), it makes a valuable contribution to our knowledge of the Russian revolution.