The RSDLP and Joseph Fels: A Study in Intercultural Contact

Abstract

THAT travel throughout foreign countries and acquaintance with different peoples foster mutual respect, toleranice, and good will by a deepening understanding of human affairs is a commonplace of the liberal tradition. Yet in view of the increasing number of initernational and intercultural encounters in recent times one begins to wonder if this optimistic assumption might not need modification. Inideedi it may even be urged that the details and consequences of such contacts are given far too little attention in the study of modern history despite their obviLously profound significance for the course of human affairs. One remarkable case study, illustrative of some of the extraordinarily complicated situations which may arise from an encounter between different cultures and nationialities, was the Fifth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor party (RSDLP) which met in London in May, 1907. This occasion brought some three hundred Russian revolutionaries to the epicenter of the western, capitalist world for a three-week stay, among them many of the future masters of the Soviet Union, including Lenin, T'rotsky, and Stalin. And they brought wvith them from home an uncertain atmosphere of waning revolution and reviving despotism. For repercussions of Russia's recent disastrous war with Japan and the ensuing internal upheaval were still being, widely felt, while ominious shadows of the future stretched across the sensitive negotiations already underway toward an Anglo-Russian entente. This congrress turned out to be the last such formal gathering of Russia's Marxist revolutionaries before 1917 and markled the peak effort attained by the united party before the Russian Revolution, with not just one major deleo-ation but five being-, present. These were Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Polish Social Deemocrats, Lettis'h Social Democrats, and the Jewish Bund. However, the record of this congress embodies not only the facts of its physical presence in the British capital but a strange note of dissonance in addition, a monetary