1999 Reports

Review of André Liebich, From the Other Shore: Russian Social Democracy after 1921

Corney, Frederick

A cottage industry of scholarly publications has up in Trotsky's “dustbin of history.” Indeed, the Mensheviks and Menshevism have acquired a particularly coherent profile in Soviet, post-Soviet and Western historiography. Scholars often pay lip service to the recent genesis of the revolutionary parties and the accompanying weakness of party identities, to the mercurial nature of popular support for these parties, and to the alienating effects of the long periods of exile of most of their leaders. Still, most studies nonetheless treat the immediate pre- and post-revolutionary period in Russia as a battleground of competing and largely coherent political parties.