TSERETELI - A DEMOCRAT IN THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

Transcription

1 TSERETELI - A DEMOCRAT IN THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

2 STUDIES IN SOCIAL HISTORY issued by the INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL HISTORY AMSTERDAM I. W. H. RooBoL. Tsereteli - A Democrat in the Russian Revolution. A Political Biography.

3 1. Tsereteli in 1917

4 TSERETELI-A DEMOCRAT IN THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION A POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY by W.H.ROOBOL translated from the Dutch by PHILIP HYAMS and LYNNE RICHARDS MARTIN US NI]HOFF / THE HAGUE /1976

5 The editing of this volume has been made possible by the financial support of the Netherlands Organization for the Advancement of Pure Research (Z.W.O.). I976 by Martinus Nijhoff. The Hague. Netherlands Softcover reprint a/the hardcover 1st Edition 1976 AU rights reserved. including the right to translate or to reproduce this book or parts thereof in any form ISBN-13: e-isbn-13: DOl: /

6 CONTENTS List of Illustrations Preface VII IX I. A GEORGIAN MENSHEVIK r II. A MENSHEVIK IN THE DUMA 32 III. A SIBERIAN ZIMMERW ALDIST 66 IV. A DEMOCRAT IN THE REVOLUTION I. A Revolutionary Defensist Leader of the Soviet Minister Tsereteli The last Compromise Swan Song 173 8r V. A GEORGIAN INTERNATIONALIST r83 I. A Separatist in spite of Himself A Georgian Diplomat Towards Isolation 2II VI. CONCLUSION 252 Bibliography 258 Index 27r

7 ILLUSTRATIONS Tsereteli in October This picture was taken during his stay in Georgia in October 1917 (pp ). I. Tsereteli in cover frontispiece 2. Irakli Tsereteli with his sister Eliko and his brother Levan in Georgia in facing page 4 3. Tsereteli in the Metekhi prison in Tiflis in 1904 (p. 30) The,Lions' room' in the,remand Prison' in St. Petersburg 68 where Tsereteli was incarcerated after his arrest in June The letter is written on the reverse of the drawing. (For a translation see p. 63.) 5. Tsereteli as Minister of Posts and Telegraphs. From a picture 132 postcard. 6. Tsereteli and Chkheidze as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. 196 From a full page caricature in the Georgian newspaper RespubUka, 21 March 1918.

8 PREFACE About Tsereteli relatively little has been written in historical literature. A study of his political career fits well into the current, gradually widening interest in the men who were the losers in the Russian revolution. A biography of Tsereteli is certainly not out of place alongside S. H. Baron's biography of Plekhanov, I. Getzler's work on Martov and the biography of Aksel'rod by A. Ascher. While Plekhanov, Martov and Aksel'rod laid down the theoretical principles of Menshevism, Tsereteli was certainly their superior in the field of practical politics. The quantity and quality of the available source material is unequally divided over the different periods of Tsereteli's life. There is very little more about his youth than the brief notes which he himself made much later in his life, and the recollections which Boris Nikolaevskii and Tsereteli's sister Eliko noted down from things he said. There is quite a lot of material about the student movement in Moscow between I900 and I902, in which he took an active part, so that it is possible to get a good general picture. Since the students often acted anonymously, however, it is not easy to determine Tsereteli's role. The period of the Second Duma is also well documented, but here one comes up against the problem that the majority of the sources are more or less official records. The actions of the Social Democratic fraction, of which Tsereteli was chairman, can be reconstructed with reasonable accuracy, but little is known about the relationships within the fraction. There is also very little documentary evidence about Tsereteli's long period of imprisonment and his exile in Siberia. When one looks at the events of I9I7, the year of the revolution, however, the reverse is true, and the historian runs the risk of wallowing helplessly in a morass of documents, memoirs and secondary literature. Nevertheless this material too is relatively one-sided and far from

9 x PREFACE adequately researched. Quite a lot has been published about what took place in the top political echelons, but the question of the extent to which this political leadership was divorced from what was happening among the people, for instance, can only be answered in the most general terms. Tsereteli's own memoirs are an extremely important source about the history of the revolution but, however objectively they may have been written, they give no decisive answer to the question of how far his policy was based on a preconceived opinion and how far on his judgment, right or otherwise, of what moved the masses of workers, soldiers and peasants. We have little documentary evidence about Tsereteli's activities in Georgia but there are in contrast many letters dating from the period after 1919, when he was living abroad, which give an insight into his personality and his political behavior. These letters are an important source, not only for Tsereteli's biography but also for the history of the International. Tsereteli's personality does not lend itself very easily to the writing of a full-scale biography. He was naturally uncommunicative and reserved and seldom, if ever, wrote even to his best friends about personal matters. He himself was well aware of this and referred to it mockingly as his 'maladie epistolaire'. He was moreover a typical example of homo politicus, in two meanings of the term. On the one hand he threw himself so wholeheartedly into realizing his political ideals that his personal life and his political life were practically indentical, and on the other he had little inclination for social and economic questions. The framework of the book has meant that it ends at the point, at the beginning of the nineteen thirties, when Tsereteli became completely isolated politically and his political career was to all intents and purposes over. He did not die until The way in which the book is divided up is closely connected to the above-mentioned factors. The chapters are chosen in accordance with the periods in which Tsereteli was politically active, which are, at the same time, the best documented. At first sight this gives a rather unbalanced impression: the length of the chapters varies considerably and they cover very unequal periods of Tsereteli's political activities. The third chapter, for example, taking in ten years of his life, is less than xx pages long, while the fourth chapter, covering a period of only six months, has more than xxx pages. The advantage of this system is that I have not had to force the available material into the straitjacket of an artificial chronology.

10 PREFACE XI A biographical study, by its very nature, does not lend itself to a central problem. It is therefore more of a narrative than an argument. There are nevertheless a number of themes which I have concentrated on particularly. I have tried to analyze and describe Tsereteli's political ideas, the significance of these ideas for the situation in which he found himself, the consequences this hadfor his political behavior, and the extent of his influence. Finally, where it seemed useful for the sake of clarity, I have compared his political behavior with that of other politicians of the time. I hope in this way to have built up a picture of one of the few important democratic politicians to have emerged in the history of Russia. In this study I have kept to the Julian calendar until the moment - ISth April/Ist May I9IS - when the Gregorian calendar was introduced in Georgia. Thereafter I have followed the Gregorian calendar. Transliteration is based on the Library of Congress System, but diacritical marks are omitted. Where names and terms have acquired common usage, for example Dostoevsky, Gorky, Kerensky and Trotsky, this usage is retained. This study and the translation were made possible by the financial support of the Netherlands organization for the advancement of pure research (Z.W.O.) and the University of Amsterdam. The East-Europe Institute, the International Institute of Social History at Amsterdam and the Hoover Institution, Stanford, were a constant source of help. I should like to express my gratitude to Professors J. W. Bezemer and M. C. Brands of the University of Amsterdam and to Professor Rex A. Wade of the University of Hawaii for their encouragement and invaluable advice. I am also most grateful to Mrs Anna Bourguina, Mrs Rusudan Nikoladze and Dr Boris Sapir, all of whom knew Tsereteli well and were prepared to tell me a great deal about his life. Finally I am indebted to Philip Hyams and Lynne Richards for all their work on the translation of this study, and last but not least, to Mr Charles B. Timmer of the International Institute of Social History, who saw the book through the press.