Menshevik émigré historian and archivist who wrote the 'Letter of an Old Bolshevik'
Born to a priest's family in Belebey, Ufa province, he joined the Social Democratic movement in 1901 and went over to the Mensheviks in 1906. He sat on the All-Russian Central Executive Committee in 1917 and the Menshevik Central Committee from 1920; arrested in 1921, he was expelled abroad in 1922. In Berlin he collected for the Moscow Marx-Engels Institute; in 1932 he lost his Soviet citizenship. After the Nazis took power he moved to Paris and ran the Paris branch of the International Institute of Social History. In February–April 1936 he met Bukharin, sent to Paris to buy the Marx papers, and at the end of that year he anonymously published the 'Letter of an Old Bolshevik' in Sotsialisticheskii vestnik. He moved to the United States in 1940 and later directed the Hoover Institution archive that acquired his collection.
Activities and affiliations
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1920
Scholarship and theory
- Member of the Menshevik Central Committee1920–Political and party leadership
Career Timeline
- 1906Went over to the Mensheviks
- 1917Member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee
- 1920Member of the Menshevik Central Committee
- 1922Expelled abroad; settled in Berlin
- 1932.02Stripped of Soviet citizenship
- 1936.02–04Negotiated the sale of the Marx papers with Bukharin in Paris
- 1936.12.22Published the 'Letter of an Old Bolshevik' anonymously
- 1940Moved to the United States