Israel Getzler. Nikolai Sukhanov: Chronicler of the Russian Revolution. Oxford: Palgrave, 2002. xix + 226 pp. Appendices, bibliography, notes, index. $69.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-3339-7035-7.
Reviewed by Francis King, School of History, University of East Anglia
Published by (April 2005)
A life between two stools
Almost forty years ago, Israel Getzler's biography of Iu. O. Martov helped rescue a key figure in the Russian revolution from obscurity. Getzler has now performed a similar service for Nikolai Nikolaevich Gimmer, better known as Sukhanov (1882-1940)--a revolutionary socialist, agrarian economist, journalist, and theoretician of a distinctive conception of socialism based on the traditional Russian village commune.
Sukhanov's relative obscurity stems, in part, from a lack of advocates. Martov remained true to his principles and his party to the last, and was duly honored after his death by the Mensheviks in exile and many European socialists. Sukhanov's career was more checkered. He started his political career in the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, which he left around 1907. For the next decade, he advocated a rapprochement between Marxists and Narodniks, which neither side particularly welcomed. In early 1917 he was a nonaligned socialist before joining Martov's Menshevik-Internationalists in the middle of that year. As a Menshevik, Sukhanov followed his own line, deviating from both party and factional policy as he saw fit, until he finally left the Menshevik organization in 1920.
By the mid-1920s he was working in the Soviet economic apparatus and trying, without success, to join the Communist Party. His opposition to the collectivization of agriculture and coercive agrarian policies in general ensured that he fell from favor after 1929, and in 1930 he was arrested. Unlike most of those arrested in preparation for the "Menshevik" show trial of 1931, Sukhanov was persuaded to appear in open court and plead guilty to a series of serious but absurd charges of wrecking and counterrevolutionary activity. For this, he was disowned by the Mensheviks, both abroad and in Stalin's prisons in the USSR. Imprisonment and internal exile followed until he was eventually arrested again in 1937 and shot in 1940.
With nobody to honor his memory either in the USSR or abroad, Sukhanov was largely forgotten in the West until an abridged volume of his memoir of the Russian revolution was published in 1955.[1] Since then, he has been remembered primarily as a chronicler of 1917, all the more since his Zapiski o revoliutsii were republished in Russia in 1991 and 1992. In this new book, Getzler seeks to fill out our picture of Sukhanov by tracing his political and intellectual career from early adulthood up to 1931.
In a brief introduction, Getzler sketches what little is known about Sukhanov's early life. When he was 14, his mother was imprisoned for bigamy, and this obliged him to earn his living as a private tutor in Moscow. After spending some time traveling round Russia and studying in Paris, he returned to Moscow in 1903, where he engaged in Socialist-Revolutionary Party activities. This earned him a spell in Taganka prison, which he used to complete his political education.
As Getzler shows in his first chapter, the distinctive feature of Sukhanov's ideas in this early phase of his political career was his defense of the rights and prerogatives of the traditional peasant commune, the obshchina, as an organ of peasant self-government. He defended it both against the Marxists, who believed it was doomed to disappear with the onward march of economic progress, and against fellow members of the SR party who wished to prescribe the social relations which would exist within the obshchina. At the same time, Sukhanov was acutely aware of the technological backwardness of Russian peasant agriculture, and conceded the Marxists' point that large-scale production, which could take full advantage ofthe latest machines and methods, was more efficient than traditional strip farming. Getzler charts Sukhanov's attempt to bridge the gap between Russian narodnik and Marxist socialism in the years before World War I, which was met with rebuffs from both sides.
Sukhanov's reputation on the Russian left rose during the war, when he was one of the few internationalist socialists who managed to publish critiques of the war legally in Russia. His main vehicle for this was the thick journal Letopis', founded in 1915 by Maksim Gorky. This journal, which Sukhanov edited, brought together a group of talented writers and political activists, many of whom were to play a distinctive role in 1917-1918.
In February 1917 Sukhanov was in the right place-- Petrograd--at the right time. He was closely involved both in the foundation of the Petrograd Soviet and the discussions with the Duma leaders which led to the formation of the Provisional Government and the "dual power" relationship between the two institutions. Relying heavily on Sukhanov's own account, Getzler explains why a radical internationalist like Sukhanov was prepared, even keen, to encourage prowar liberals like Pavel Miliukov to take over the reins of government in March 1917. The vital consideration here was to ensure that privileged Russia did not immediately take fright and rally around tsarism, leading to the defeat of the revolution before it could consolidate itself. However, as Getzler shows, Sukhanov was a major architect of the arrangement whereby only half the power went to the Provisional Government, and he fully expected the share of power held by "the democracy" (the organizations and groups represented in the Soviets) to increase as time went on.
Like many of the early leaders of the Petrograd Soviet, Sukhanov was soon marginalized by the party leaders and others who returned from exile, most notably I. G. Tsereteli. From April 1917 Sukhanov's most important area of activity was on the newspaper Novaia zhizn', again founded by Gorky, a widely read and influential social democratic newspaper with no formal factional alignment. As Getzler shows, one of the most intractable problems for almost all political tendencies in 1917 was the problem of peace. The slogan of "peace without annexations and indemnities," to which Sukhanov and his allies were committed, precluded both continuation of the war as part of an imperialist and annexationist alliance and separate peace with imperialist Germany. In the early summer of 1917 Sukhanov even tried to resolve this conundrum by advocating a separate war, renouncing all alliances. This idea was so absurdly unappealing that he soon dropped it, and, as Getzler observes, from July to October 1917 Sukhanov's main focus shifted from foreign policy to the question of power.
Novaia zhizn' provided a platform for Sukhanov and others to develop their critique of both the Soviet leadership and the Provisional Government. Getzler pays particular attention to Sukhanov's criticisms of Tsereteli and his allies, which constituted a kind of running commentary on the course and development of the revolution. As the summer and autumn of 1917 wore on, and the Bolsheviks became more powerful and assertive, Sukhanov and his colleagues found themselves waging an ideological struggle on a third front, against Lenin's simplistic notion that "Soviet power" would provide the basis for tackling all Russia's problems. It is however, impossible to escape the conclusion that, although Sukhanov and his friends on Novaia zhizn' may have been talented writers and perceptive observers, they were inept politicians. They could neither prevent the Mensheviks from following the policies which led to their ruin nor could they dissuade the Bolsheviks from seizing power in October and ruling alone.
Getzler devotes a whole chapter to Sukhanov's own account of 1917, Zapiski o revoliutsii, from which he quotes liberally. It is not hard to share his enthusiasm for this memoir, with its detailed descriptions of people and events, and its often stenographic records of speeches and resolutions. He stresses how seriously Lenin took Sukhanov's memoir when it appeared. Indeed, the critical remarks he dictated from his sickbed are among Lenin's last writings before he was completely incapacitated.
Although Sukhanov walked out of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets in October 1917 along with Martov and the other Menshevik- Internationalists, by December 1917 he was back in the Soviet Central Executive Committee (CEC). Once again, he was in opposition, but this time, it was to the Bolshevik majority. Getzler records Sukhanov's futile attempt to defend the Constituent Assembly in January 1918 within the CEC, as well as within the pages of Novaia zhizn'. Sukhanov also protested in vain against the Bolsheviks' food policies, which in early 1918 consisted mainly in confiscation of grain stocks. His ability even to protest publicly was eliminated in the summer of 1918, when he was expelled from the CEC and Novaia zhizn' was closed down for good. Like most Mensheviks, during the initial period of Bolshevik rule Sukhanov was convinced that the regime would soon collapse. By 1920, with victory in the civil war in sight, he was obliged to rethink. At the end of that year he broke with the Menshevik party and sought, like many of his former comrades, to work in Soviet institutions while attempting to preserve a degree of intellectual independence.
Sukhanov found work in economic and agrarian institutions, including the Commissariat of Agriculture and the Agrarian Section of the Communist Academy. Getzler recounts Sukhanov's attempts to champion the obshchina, both as a political institution in the villages and as a vehicle for the socialization of agriculture. However, the late NEP period was not a propitious time for such arguments, as state grain procurements were lower than expected and the relative independence of the peasantry was regarded as a major reason for this. Moreover, as the Communist Party leadership prepared to launch into rapid industrialization and a radicalization of economic policy, an increasingly ferocious campaign was waged against the real and imagined opponents of the party line. Getzler provides several examples of the vituperative attacks on Sukhanov at conferences and events as the new line developed. These attacks constituted a kind of prologue to the trial of a fictitious "All-Union Menshevik Bureau" in March 1931, in which Sukhanov was to play a leading part.
Getzler's final chapter deals with this trial and Sukhanov's role within it. Sukhanov was one of the linchpins of the prosecution's case, as he had hosted regular Sunday evening tea parties, attended by many ex-Menshevik and ex-SR colleagues, at which politics were discussed. These innocent social occasions were presented by the prosecution as secret meetings of a vast counterrevolutionary conspiracy. Getzler analyses the published reports of the trial and the preliminary investigations. He tries to work out why Sukhanov consented to slander himself and his own past in open court and suggests that threats to family members may have played an important part.
What emerges very clearly in this chapter is Sukhanov's complete ideological inconsistency at this time. On the one hand, he spoke out courageously at the end of 1928 against a plan to introduce even tighter prepublication censorship of literature. On the other hand, that same year he published a play which gave a thoroughly Bolshevized, historically inaccurate account of 1917, to the extent of slandering his own role and that of his colleagues on Novaia zhizn'. It is interesting to speculate how far Sukhanov's previous concessions to Bolshevism prepared the ground for his performance at the trial. No fewer than 122 people were arrested in connection with the case, but only 14 were deemed suitable to appear in open court.
Sukhanov emerges from this book as a brilliant but in many respects tragic figure. The roots of his tragedy lay largely in his inconsistency. He could not stick to his Menshevik principles like Martov, nor could he abandon them completely like his former comrade A. Ia. Vyshinsky. In prison, after the Menshevik trial, he was boycotted for his treachery by the genuine Menshevik prisoners while receiving no favors from his Bolshevik jailers. But the fact that no political faction wanted to lay claim to Sukhanov should not mean he is forgotten.
Israel Getzler's book is a valuable contribution to keeping his memory alive. It is, overall, a very lucid and readable introduction to the man and his ideas. It deserves to be widely read by students of the Russian revolution and NEP period in the USSR. Alas, the price of the book means that sales are likely to be restricted to the better-funded university libraries.
Note
[1]. See N. N. Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution 1917: A Personal Record, Ed. Joel Carmichael (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
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