Table Of ContentTSERETELI - A DEMOCRAT IN
THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
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.
1. Tsereteli in 1917
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
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: 978-94-010-1044-3 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-010-1042-9
DOl: 10 .1 007/978-94-010-1042-9
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations VII
Preface IX
I. A GEORGIAN MENSHEVIK r
II. A MENSHEVIK IN THE DUMA 32
III. A SIBERIAN ZIMMERWA LDIST 66
IV. A DEMOCRAT IN THE REVOLUTION 8r
I. A Revolutionary Defensist 81
2. Leader of the Soviet 101
3. Minister Tsereteli 121
4. The last Compromise 160
5. Swan Song 173
V. A GEORGIAN INTERNATIONALIST r83
I. A Separatist in spite of Himself 183
2. A Georgian Diplomat 198
3. Towards Isolation 2II
VI. CONCLUSION 252
Bibliography 258
Index 27r
ILLUSTRATIONS
Tsereteli in October 1917. cover
This picture was taken during his stay in Georgia in October
1917 (pp. 172-173).
I. Tsereteli in 1917. frontispiece
2. Irakli Tsereteli with his sister Eliko and his brother Levan in
Georgia in 1917. facing page 4
3. Tsereteli in the Metekhi prison in Tiflis in 1904 (p. 30). 36
4. The ,Lions' room' in the ,Remand Prison' in St. Petersburg 68
where Tsereteli was incarcerated after his arrest in June 1907.
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 Res-
pubUka, 21 March 1918.
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 Menshe
vism, Tsereteli was certainly their superior in the field of practical
politics.
The quantity and quality of the available source material is un
equally 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 Niko
laevskii 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 Tsere
teli'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
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 ques
tion 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 ques
tions. The framework of the book has meant that it ends at the point,
at the beginning of the nineteen thirties, when Tsereteli became comple
tely isolated politically and his political career was to all intents and
purposes over. He did not die until 1959.
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 strait
jacket of an artificial chronology.
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 ex
tent 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 intro
duced 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 in
valuable 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.
