André Liebich, From the Other Shore: Russian Social Democracy After 1921. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. 476 pp. $48.00 cloth.

This a history of the ideas of the core leaders in the Menshevik party after its members were dispersed, persecuted, or forced into exile at the end of the Russian civil war. The author has admirably reconstructed and expounded the political opinions shared by the whole of the party in subsequent periods and those raised in mutual contrast by single personalities or groups. The story is largely based on personal memories, correspondence, and archives. In part, the research has been done on an exceptional source for the study of the Bolshevik revolution: the journal Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik, well known to every historian in the Soviet field. It was edited from 1921 to 1963 by the leadership of the party abroad (the optimistically soi-disant “Foreign Delegation”) first in Berlin and then in Paris and New York. Until the mid-1930s, the journal enjoyed the collaboration of a variety of people, straight from inside the Soviet Union: not only the rump of the Menshevik organization, but also, very possibly, influential Bolshevik personnel, such as D. Riazanov, as well.