Dan, who outlived Lenin by nearly a quarter of a century and who knew him well, spent a good part of his life as the political and ideological leader of Menshevism, together with Martov, who died in 1923. Repeatedly arrested and exiled by the tsarist regime, he exerted great energy to preserve the democratic ideals of the RSDLP. His star reached its zenith in June 1917 when he co-chaired the Executive Committee of the All-Russian Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies (Ispolkom) with N.S. Chkheidze, was chief editor of Izvestiya, and with I.G. Tsereteli and A.R. Gots was one of the spokesmen of the democratic wing of Russian social democracy. Symbolically, it was Dan who opened the Second Congress of Soviets on 25 October (7 November) 1917, and when the Bolsheviks and Left Socialist Revolutionaries voted approval of the seizure of power that had just taken place, Dan protested by leaving the Congress together with the other Mensheviks.
For the next three years, the Menshevik leadership represented the democratic opposition, within the legal means permitted. Lenin, meanwhile, missed no opportunity to launch insulting attacks on his former comrades. Nevertheless, until 1920 the Mensheviks led a more or less legal existence, even if the term ‘Social Democrat’ became a dirty word. Then the Politburo launched open persecution, beginning with ‘semi-harsh’ measures. On 22 June 1922 it was decided that the political activity of ‘these accomplices of the bourgeoisie’ must be ‘curtailed’, and that this should be achieved for the time being by exile: ‘All People’s Commissars should be informed that Mensheviks, at present employed in commissariats and capable of playing any political role, should not be kept in Moscow, but dispersed in the provinces, in each case after enquiries have been made at the Cheka and Orgburo.’69 At the same time, Mensheviks were being arrested throughout the country. Protests and appeals for release were sent to Lenin and the Politburo. On 14 October 1922, for instance, the Politburo unanimously voted against an appeal for the release of a group of Mensheviks.70 The arrests continued.
Lenin was especially interested in Martov’s activities. In July 1919, in an article entitled ‘Everyone into the Struggle with [White General] Denikin!’, he wrote: ‘Martov and Co. think themselves “above” both warring sides [in the civil war], think themselves able to create a “third side”. This desire, even if sincere, is still an illusion of the petty bourgeois democrat who even now, seventy years after 1848, hasn’t learnt the alphabet, namely, that in a capitalist milieu there can only be the dictatorship of the bourgeosie, for the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot coexist with any third option. It seems Martov and Co. will die with this illusion.’71 When Martov and Dan were elected with other Mensheviks to the Moscow City Soviet in 1918, Lenin wrote on Kamenev’s report: ‘I think you should “tire them out” with practical tasks: Dan for sanitary work, Martov can look after canteens.’72 When, in the same year, Martov submitted the manuscript of his memoirs for publication through Gorky – there was still some latitude in such matters – Lenin had it censored.73 Martov was under constant threat of arrest, but Lenin, perhaps because of their earlier friendship, held back. At the first sign that Martov wanted to go abroad, however, permission was granted, thus releasing Lenin from the dilemma, and enabling him to say ‘We willingly let Martov go.’74
There had never been close relations between Dan and Lenin, and Dan was arrested in February 1921, and held in the Petropavlovsk Fortress in Petrograd (as St Petersburg had been called since 1914) for nearly a year. He was no stranger there, having ‘sat’ (i.e. been imprisoned) in 1896 before being exiled under the tsar. He was now accused of instigating the anti-Bolshevik uprising of soldiers and sailors on the fortress island of Kronstadt in the Baltic, once the spearhead of Bolshevik support, and faced possible execution. Instead he was sentenced to internal exile, in the words of the special Politburo resolution, ‘to some distant non-proletarian district where he can work in his speciality’.75 Dan began a hunger strike, demanding the right to go abroad, and since the inflexibility of the Stalin era had yet to come, the request was granted.
Any real or imagined threat which arose in those years was invariably attributed to some ‘counter-revolutionary activity of the Mensheviks’, thus ensuring harsher treatment for them as a whole. On 28 November 1921, for instance, Trotsky reported to the Politburo that he had information about a counter-revolutionary coup being prepared in Moscow and Petrograd. It was headed by Mensheviks, SRs and ‘surviving bourgeoisie’. Trotsky was immediately appointed ‘Chairman of the Moscow Defence Committee’, and it was decided that ‘Mensheviks should not be released, and the Central Committee should be told to intensify arrests of Mensheviks and SRs’.76 Whenever the Politburo returned to the subject of the Mensheviks its position hardened. On 2 February 1922 Stalin reported on imprisoned Mensheviks, as a result of which the Politburo issued a special order to the GPU, the successor to the Cheka, ‘to transfer to special places of imprisonment the most active and important of the leaders of anti-Soviet parties. Mensheviks, SRs and Anarchists at present held by the Cheka should continue to be kept in imprisonment.’77
The Mensheviks tried appealing to Social Democrats in the West. The Cheka intercepted one such letter to the International Berne Conference and reported it to Lenin. He read it, and underlined the words: ‘the prisons are overflowing, the workers are shooting each other, many of our Social Democrat comrades have been shot’.78 The Mensheviks’ Central Bureau also wrote to Lenin, asking for the ‘honest legalization’ of their party, but Lenin’s only response was to consign their appeal ‘to the archives’.79 All that was left for the Mensheviks was to try, even from afar, to save something of the values of the revolution of February 1917 through their journal Sotsialisticheskii vestnik (Socialist Messenger), published first in Berlin, then in Paris and, when the war came, in New York, where it closed in 1965, as there were no more old Mensheviks left to run it.
The Bolsheviks meanwhile tightened the screws. It was not only the Menshevik leaders who were being imprisoned and exiled; rank and file members of the Party, most of them of the intelligentsia, were suffering various punishments and persecution. The radical wing of the revolution was finishing off the democratic wing. Not that the Mensheviks were blameless. They had not done well in the election to the Constituent Assembly, they had failed to rally significant numbers of liberal forces, and they had failed to get across the ideas they had advocated for decades. Theirs was a sad fate. With the help of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, Russian Social Democracy died both inside and outside the country quietly and unnoticed. Some of the Social Democrats, it is true, changed direction under the impact of international events. For instance, in 1936, in Paris, Dan recognized the Soviet Union as the main bulwark against fascism. He published Novyi mir (New World), and then after escaping in March 1940 to New York, aged seventy, he retired as chairman of the Foreign Delegation and as editor of Sotsialisticheskii vestnik and launched Novyi put’ (New Way). His break with Menshevism was complete by 1943. In Novyi put’ he as it were rehabilitated Stalin. In his last book, The Origins of Bolshevism, published in 1946, the old adversary of totalitarianism suddenly saw something positive in the forced collectivization of agriculture, and found himself unable fully to condemn the show trials of the 1930s, or the Hitler – Stalin Pact of 1939. He even stated that ‘the internal organic democratization of the Soviet system was not