Marxists in a Declining Empire

Abstract

Histories of the “Russian” Revolution have often either largely ignored developments in the periphery of the empire altogether or appended them to the main narrative as interesting case studies of secondary importance. The major all-Russia parties (the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party [RSDRP], the factions of the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, the Constitutional Democrats, etc.) have been comprehensively studied in the literature, and the relations among them have been exhaustively analyzed. However, the smaller parties of the nonRussian national minorities, their relationships with one another and with the major all-Russia parties have received considerably less attention. Before the collapse of the USSR in 1991, in Soviet historiography the revolution in the non-Russian periphery was presented almost exclusively as the story of how the local Bolsheviks won power. In this narrative, the Bolsheviks’ rivals, whether all-Russia or regional/national parties, were generally depicted as amorphously “petty-bourgeois” or “counterrevolutionary,” and the details of their ideas were almost never explored. In English-language works of that time, only the revolutionary process in Ukraine could have been said to have a “historiography,” produced mainly by diaspora scholars.1 Since 1991, the newly independent former union republics have had