Sotsialisticheski Viestnik [Socialist Messenger] has ceased publication after forty-two years of existence, It was founded in Berlin in 1921 by the left Menshevik Julius Martov, who had just left the Soviet Union. After Martov died in 1923, the left Bundist (Jewish Social Democrat) R. Abramovitch became editor, He con+ ' tinued to put out the publication in Berlin until Hitler came to power in 1935, It was then transferred to New York,
. The founders of the magazine, especially Martov himself, displayed an ambivalent attitude toward the October Revolution, They were not against the transfer of power to the Soviets, but were very much opposed to what they considered to be "one party rule" by the Bolsheviks. They favored a "Soviet government composed of representatives from all working class parties,” including Kerensky!s "trudoviks,"
They overlooked the fact that at the very moment they were seeking an “ideal solution," Kerensky, together with not a few right-wing Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, was conspiring in a counterrevolutionary move against Petrograd. Had the Cossack echelons under Kerensky and General Krasnov succeeded in taking. Petrograd, the revolutionary capital, Lenin and Trotsky would no doubt have suffered the same fate as Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in January 1919 in Berlin when > another right-wing group of Social Democrats succeeded in suppressing a workers! uprising with the help of counterrevolutionary officers...
The tragedy of Martov, a man who had collaborated closely with Lenin during the Iskra period (1900-02) and for whom both Lenin and _ .Trotsky had deep respect, was that he wavered constantly between theoretical acceptance of the idea of the conquest of power by the | proletariat and disinclination to take the practical steps necessary to bring about this conquest in an atmosphere of harsh class struggle that spilled into open civil war,
This wavering continued throughout the civil-war period, Martov, for example, shifted at one point from hostility to the Soviet power to critical support of Lenin's government against the counterrevolution headed by Admiral Kolchak,
The Bolsheviks, characteristically, far from promulgating the oneparty idea, alternatively closed down or permitted publication of the Menshevik press in Moscow and Petrograd, depending on whether it opposed or supported (be it with many harsh criticisms ) the Soviet power,
It was only in the desperate year of 1920 that the decision was made to definitively outlaw the Menshevik press. At the same time, Lenin saw to it that Martov, who was already a sick man, was granted a passport so that he could Léave the country.
During the NEP, when the Soviet government relaxed regulations for the peasants, Sotsialsticheski Viestnik took a rather favorable attitude towards official Soviet economic policy. - During the 1924~27 period
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particularly, it supported the Bukharin-Stalin course against the criticism of Trotsky and the Left Opposition which he led. The magazine was sharply critical of the intensified industrialization after 1927 and especially Stalin's forced. collectivization of agriculture,
During the tragic period when Stalints man Yezhov headed the secret political police and conducted the mass slaughter of the old Bolsheviks, the Menshevik paper made important revelations about the crimes and their | background, The most sensational document the editors published was the | "Letter of an Old Bolshevik," A few years ago, Abramovitch revealed that .the anonymous author of this indiotment of Stalin was Bukharin.
The magazine's collapse is due not so much to lack of means as to lack of contributors, Those who remain are in their eighties, They. plan to publish an occasional issue when sufficient material is on
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