Mensheviks Wage the Cold War

Abstract

The tattered remnants of the exiled Menshevik party organization arrived in New York in 1940 from their previous French refuge. They brought with them their twenty-year-old journal, Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, their internal quarrels and many dashed hopes.1 Readily dismissed by US authorities as 'long forgotten in Russia and with no real roots in American society', they were not prepared to abandon their long struggle against bolshevism, although they were to wage it on different foundations.2 As one Menshevik put it, in spite of the fact that the social democratic party networks which had served the exiled Mensheviks so well during the interwar period in Western Europe were unavailable, 'our chances in contemporary America have risen considerably'.3 Astonishingly, this optimistic assessment was borne out. To be sure, the last Menshevik party institution, the Foreign Delegation of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, soon disintegrated over the issue of the post-second world war Soviet emigration. However, several prominent individual Mensheviks notably, Raphael Abramovitch (1880-1963), David Dallin (1889-1962) and Boris Nicolaevsky (1887-1966) succeeded in carving out a strategic niche in American discourse on the Soviet Union. Their outlooks and their