Marxists in a Declining Empire

Abstract

Marxists in a Declining Empire Francis King Eric Blanc, Revolutionary Social Democracy: Working-Class Politics across the Russian Empire (1882–1917). 470 pp. Brill: Leiden, 2021. ISBN-13 978-9004449923. €190.00 (cloth). Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022. ISBN-13 978-1642597646. $36.00 (paper). Histories of the "Russian" Revolution have often either largely ignored developments in the periphery of the empire altogether or appended them to the main narrative as interesting case studies of secondary importance. The major all-Russia parties (the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party [RSDRP], the factions of the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, the Constitutional Democrats, etc.) have been comprehensively studied in the literature, and the relations among them have been exhaustively analyzed. However, the smaller parties of the non-Russian national minorities, their relationships with one another and with the major all-Russia parties have received considerably less attention. Before the collapse of the USSR in 1991, in Soviet historiography the revolution in the non-Russian periphery was presented almost exclusively as the story of how the local Bolsheviks won power. In this narrative, the Bolsheviks' rivals, whether all-Russia or regional/national parties, were generally depicted as amorphously "petty-bourgeois" or "counterrevolutionary," and the details of their ideas were almost never explored. In English-language works of that time, only the revolutionary process in Ukraine could have been said to have a "historiography," produced mainly by diaspora scholars.1 Since 1991, the newly independent former union republics have had [End Page 437] to develop their own national historical narratives, and some of those with a distinctive revolutionary history, such as Georgia, have seen significant interest both at home and abroad in recovering that history. Ukraine, however has remained the most thoroughly studied area on the ex-Soviet periphery and the nation that has done the most to develop its own narrative of 1917 and after. In 2017, the Ukrainian state provided schools with lesson plans and materials to provide a national interpretation of the events of 1917.2 To emphasize the distinctiveness of their national experience, some Ukrainian and diaspora scholars have also been using decolonizing and postcolonial concepts in their presentations of this history of the revolution in Ukraine.3 The problem with these national(ist) historiographies has been their authors' need to separate these stories out from the all-Russia narrative—which, while understandable, downplays the interconnectedness of the revolutionary process across the Russian Empire. Eric Blanc's book, by eschewing both exclusively Russocentric and narrowly nationalist approaches, is therefore a welcome contribution to the historiography of the revolution. His focus is on the various social democratic (that is, avowedly Marxist) parties that operated in the periphery of the Russian Empire, and he seeks to integrate their histories into the wider history of the revolution. Few historians could undertake this sort of study, as it requires facility in several of the languages of the Russian Empire. The bibliography suggests that he has used an impressive range of primary and secondary sources. As one might expect from a book in the Historical Materialism series of monographs, it is not merely a work of historiography but also of politically engaged scholarship. Throughout the work, Blanc seeks to draw political lessons for today from the material he is presenting and to criticize or refute certain (mis)conceptions commonly found both in the scholarly community and among radical socialist activists, past and present. His researches have led him away from "traditional Leninist interpretations of revolutionary Russia" (17) and toward "retrieving the lost tradition of revolutionary social democracy" (407), which he associates particularly with the pre–World War I writings of Karl Kautsky. Blanc's ideological engagement [End Page 438] is both a strength of the work—it lends the book a vitality and intellectual coherence sometimes lacking in purely academic monographs—and, as will be discussed below, a source of some of its limitations. Besides an introduction and an epilogue, the book contains ten thematic chapters, mostly concerned with particular aspects of socialist politics, subdivided into sections dealing more with specific case studies. In his introduction, Blanc sets out his stall. His first key argument is that "the Russian revolution was far...