Synopsis

This book presents the life histories, drawn from a series of interviews conducted in the 1960s, of three prominent survivors of the Menshevik party: Lydia Dan, Boris Nicolaevsky, and George Denike. Each of these figures played an important role in the politics of Russia's Social Democracy and eventually in the Menshevik party. The interviews range well beyond politics. They reconstruct, in quasi-anthropological fashion, the childhood and youth of the three figures in the social and culture milieus in which their ideas and attitudes were shaped and in which they played their political roles. Taken together, their recollections form a tableau of a political culture that played a prominent role up to the Revolution, and that was dramatically extinguished in its aftermath.