This book grew out of my PhD dissertation, which I submitted at Glasgow University in 1971. I didn’t publish it then, because I began to research other things, some of which were aspects of my work on Pokrovskii. More recently, at Sébastien Budgen’s prompting, I took up the study of Pokrovskii again, this time with the benefit of knowledge gained over the years of research into different aspects of Russian and Soviet history.
For my PhD thesis I was lucky enough to have as my supervisor Dr Rudolf Schlesinger, who was at that time a lecturer in the Institute of Soviet and East European Studies (ISEES), and an editor of the journal Soviet Studies. Rudolf had been a member of the Austrian and German Communist Parties and had lived in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, where he worked at the International Agrarian Institute in Moscow. At the Institute, Rudolf had as his secretary and librarian Stalin’s wife Nadezhda Allilueva and in that way came into contact with her husband. Rudolf had been in Moscow during the purges, and had himself been expelled from the party. After fleeing from the Nazis in 1939, he had sought refuge in Britain, where he found academic employment at Glasgow University. I first met him at ISEES in the early 1960s. Rudolf was a very large man, with spiky grey hair and a booming voice. He spoke English with a strong German accent and German syntax. He had the knack of typing illegibly.
Rudolf was not like a supervisor of today, someone who would hold regular sessions, read draft chapters, and correct typos. It would never have occurred to him to do these things, nor did I expect them of him. We would meet up every now and again and go for lunch at a Chinese restaurant. We would talk in the restaurant, on the way there, and on the way back. Sometimes it was about Pokrovskii, but more often it was about Rudolf’s revolutionary past and the people he had known. I would get him to elaborate on aspects of his book Marx His Time and Ours, which I greatly admired, and he would gladly do so.
What I got from Rudolf was much more valuable than technical supervision. It was contact with a real Central-European Marxist intellectual, and through him, a connection with the Soviet world between the wars that I knew only from books. He would have been a valuable source for me if only I had known better what to ask. I saw less of Rudolf when he retired in 1966, and he never saw my finished dissertation, as he died at his home in Argyll in 1969. I hope he would have approved of it.
What has changed between the dissertation, and the present book? The Soviet Union has collapsed; archives have opened; new research has appeared. It is true that I have more factual information on Pokrovskii now than I had in 1971, but not greatly. In any case the main sources for the subject were, and remain, the published writings of Pokrovskii and other historians.
The main thing that has changed in the intervening period is that I have followed up some of the avenues for research that I discovered while working on my dissertation. The study of Pokrovskii is a gateway to many aspects of the intellectual life of late nineteenth-century Russia and the early Soviet years. The present work provides the opportunity to bring together these offshoot investigations and present Pokrovskii’s life and ideas in a broader context than was possible when the dissertation was written.
Until 1918 Russia used a different calendar from Western Europe. The dates of the Russian (Julian) calendar were twelve days behind the Western (Gregorian) in the nineteenth century, and thirteen days in the twentieth. Rather than give both versions of every date, I have used the Russian calendar in those cases where the events take place in Russia, and the Western calendar where the events take place in Western Europe.
I have used a modified version of the Library of Congress system of transliteration from Russian, exceptions being where there exist generally accepted forms of proper names. I have used these rather than the forms that a strict adherence to the Library of Congress system would have dictated (e.g. Trotsky instead of Trotskii).
My thanks are due to Sébastien Budgen at Brill for his encouragement and advice, and to Danny Hayward and Jamila Squire for their careful copy-editing. This project would not have been possible without the resources of the Soviet Studies section and the Trotsky Collection of Glasgow University Library. I am also grateful to the Inter-Library Loan staff at GUL for their tireless efforts in obtaining for me the more obscure items.
Among the friends and colleagues who gave me help and encouragement in my Pokrovskii project over the years, and to whom I give my sincere thanks are: Alec Nove, Bill Wallace, Ian Thatcher, John Gonzáles, John Lowrie, Jon Smele, John Biggart and Paul Zarembka. Special thanks go to my wife Nijole for her critical reading of the text and the many valuable suggestions she has made. To her I dedicate this book.
JDW
2023