Последняя эмиграция Павла Аксельрода по А. П. Ненароков (review)

620 Рецензии/Reviews society that widened and became politicized in 19th century. Neither was “modern anti-Semitism” (Arendt 1967, 9 passim) synonymous to the hatred or envy of Jews; but rather, and these aspects Gilman overlooks, was motivated by the tensions between the state and different social classes, which invoked anti-Semitism “because the only social group which seemed to represent the state were the Jews” (Arendt 1967, 25). In other words, the objections against the sociopolitical aspects of Gilman’s book here are (i) that his linear and rather one-dimensional view of history is insufficiently located in a particular view of the development of the German state, (ii) does not take into account the complex inter-class relations between Jews and the rest of society, (iii) and actually tells us little about “modern” forms of antiSemitism . Otherwise, of course, Freud, Race, and Gender is an original and highly informative work. I am sure Freud would have read it with interest. Francis KING А. П. Ненароков. Последняя эмиграция Павла Аксельрода. Москва: АИРО-ХХ, 2001. 166 с. ISBN: 5-88735-085-7. Pavel Aksel’rod (1850-1928) was one of the founders of Russian Marxism, and the most important ideologue of Menshevism from 1903 until the 1920s.Although he has not received the same attention from historians as Lenin,Trotsky, Plekhanov, or even Martov, he was the subject of one full-length study published in 1972 – Abraham Ascher’s Pavel Axelrod and the Development of Menshevism. Ascher’s account was a model political biography, but was weighted heavily toward the pre-Revolutionary period. Al’bert Nenarokov’s short book, which concentrates on Aksel’rod’s ideas and activities after he left Russia for the last time in August 1917, now provides a useful complement to Ascher’s classic monograph. Nenarokov has been researching and writing on the history of the revolution for at least three decades and, following the collapse of the USSR, has been working on the history of Menshevism. This book is very much the fruit of his research in Western libraries and archives. It draws very heavily on Aksel’rod’s papers at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, 621 Ab Imperio, 3/2004 and on the papers of the Menshevik archivist Boris Nikolaevsky at the Hoover Institution. The text contains extensive quotations from Aksel’rod’s letters and articles from the 1920s. By making this material more widely available, Nenarokov has made a valuable contribution to the historiography of Menshevism. Letters from Aksel’rod to the rightwing Menshevik A. N. Potresov in the 1920s, in which he sets out his criticisms of the official line, are reproduced verbatim in an appendix , as are Aksel’rod’s comments on Potresov’s critique of official Menshevism. Nenarokov’s book has no index, but it does contain helpful short biographical notes on the persons mentioned within it. Menshevik material up to 1920 or so is easy enough to find in Russian archives, but the records of the organization in exile, from 1920 to the 1960s, have remained in the West. As Nenarokov’s book shows, the West is not an incongruous location for those records. From its inception in the 1880s, Russian Marxism was part of the Westernizing trend in Russian social thought. It represented the far left of the Russian Westernizers, those who believed that capitalism and Western patterns of development were inevitable for Russia, and needed to be met with a powerful Western-style labor and socialist movement. Perhaps more than anyone else, Aksel’rod embodied this idea. He spent most of his adult life as a political exile, mainly in Switzerland. He imbibed the values and traditions of Western, especially German, social democracy , and was concerned above all to apply what he had learned to the Russian situation. Unusually, however, Aksel’rod had not come from the educated, cosmopolitan intelligentsia. He was born into a desperately poor, uneducated , and devout Jewish family, and managed to acquire a Russian education, up to university level, through a combination of sheer luck and hard work. His relentless pursuit of broader horizons, which in his early youth led him to reject the mental straightjacket of Orthodox Judaism, later led him to reject the backwardness of Russian society. As Nenarokov aptly...