Oct 12, 2022
Faith Hillis, Utopia’s Discontents: Russian Emigres and the Quest for Freedom, 1830s — 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 360 pages, $35
“The future of humanity depended on a Geneva brasserie, or so it seemed.” So Faith Hillis begins her marvelous study Utopia’s Discontents: Russian Emigres and the Quest for Freedom, 1830s—1930s, the first major treatment of the émigré circles that dotted central and western Europe through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Up until now, scholars of Russian revolutionary movements, including fine works on both Russian and Jewish history by Jonathan Frankel, Ezra Mendelssohn, Orlando Figes, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and others, have generally treated the émigré circles as ancillary to Russia. Though recognized as intellectually vibrant, the circles were ultimately considered a stasis chamber of secondary importance to Russia, where the “real work” was being done. This trend directly followed the precedent of primary literature: Raphael Abramovitch’s memoir In Tsvey Revolutsies: Di Geshikhte fun a Dor (In Two Revolutions: The History of a Generation) explicitly treats his time abroad as a fruitful period, but still an unfortunate interlude. But for some decades now, Russian history has learned the value of focusing on the margins: Laura Engelstein’s history of 1917 emphasized Russia’s geographic margins, Jane Burbank drew our focus to include Russia’s vast but oft-forgotten peasantry, and Robert Crews’ work on Islam in Russia shed light on Russia’s second largest religious community. Hillis now pushes that trend further, to the emigre groups in the lands beyond Russia’s frontiers. Created out of necessity as a response to Tsarist repression, Hillis argues that these circles, or “colonies,” represented a crucial space in the development of Russian politics in the decades studied (1).
The denizens of these colonies were disproportionately young, drawn from ethnic minorities (Jews feature prominently), and ripe for political radicalization. It was in these colonies that young Russians, often drawn by the promise of an education or fleeing adverse political conditions, found themselves free from parental or communal supervision. Many lacked financial support and were forced to take low-paying jobs they were unaccustomed to, ranging from tutoring to (in the case of future Menshevik leader Pavel Akselrod) artisanal kefir production, introducing the emigres to new forms of class consciousness. Attracted to the relatively liberal regimes in Switzerland, Austro-Hungary, Germany, France, and Great Britain, these colonies allowed a generation of Russian activists including Alexander Herzen, Alexandra Kollentai, and Iulii Martov to encounter the ideas and traditions sweeping across Europe and bring them back to Russia, a phenomenon Hillis beautifully illuminates.
Yet if past scholarship focuses on these colonies as vectors from which new ideas could enter Russia, Hillis offers a convincing portrait of these colonies functioning as something more, as loci of intense engagement where groups of Russian emigres, including Zionists, anarchists, and socialists of many forms rubbed shoulders, shouted at one another, and exchanged ideas with one another to produce new forms of said politics with drastic importance for world history. In one notable case, Hillis confronts the origins of Iskra (The Spark), the newspaper launched by Lenin and Martov with the purpose of imbuing the Russian Marxist movement with a fierce commitment to party discipline with little room for dissent,which launched both its founders to positions of prominence in the revolutionary movement. Past scholarship has generally placed the origins of the newspaper in Russia, in the country’s tradition of millenarian thought and Orthodox Christianity. But Hillis disagrees, recognizing that the formation of Iskra took place in the colonies at a time of intense internal fracture, framing the Iskra’s founding as a natural response to the fractious politics of the émigré circles. In doing so, Hillis asserts the role this émigré archipelago played in generating the ideas that would transform Russian and world history (155-6).
Though Utopia’s Discontents is not about Jews specifically, Jews were overrepresented among émigrés (e.g., approximately 50% of all Russian emigres in Switzerland in the 1880s were Jewish) and therefore feature prominently in Utopia’s Discontents (3). Indeed, the second chapter is fully devoted to Jews and significant mention of Jewish groups and figures is made throughout the book. For Jews, the experience of emigration proved especially transformative, providing them the first experience free from the webs of antisemitic legislation prevailing in Russia, including residency restrictions, university quotas, and outright bans from certain professions. The colonies also allowed Jews freedom from communal oversight and traditional norms, allowing young Jews the first opportunity to fully engage the broader European world. And Jews were not only participants in the circles, but enablers as well. Forced to the margins of Russian society, Jews had long been present in cross-border smuggling in the Russian Empire and quickly took on key roles such as smuggling activists and forbidden texts across the Russian frontier, forging passports, and other such tasks needed for the colonies to function (42, 93).
image of an interactive map of border crossings and smuggling routes into and out of the Russian empire, from the companion website to Utopia’s Discontents, https://www.utopiasdiscontents.com.
Jews took full advantage of the opportunities the colonies provided. It was in emigration that members of the Jewish Labor Bund first encountered the ideas of Austrian Marxists such as Victor Adler. Seeking to build an international movement in a diverse empire, Austrian Marxists had done much to articulate the concept of national autonomy in cultural affairs within a politically and economically unified workers’ republic. This concept provided the framework for the Bund’s own ideas of national rights (91). Through the Bund, this idea would—with difficulty—be absorbed into the Russian revolutionary movement, eventually laying the foundation for Soviet nationality policy, including the creation of the USSR as a federation of national republics. It is no reach to say that the existence of many post-Soviet states can be traced in part to Jewish émigrés drinking coffee in Viennese cafes. Similarly, Labor Zionist founders Ber Borochov and Nachman Syrkin took advantage of their time in exile to develop their syntheses of Zionism and revolutionary politics, creating yet another thread connecting the émigré archipelago to the present day. For other Jews, the experience of emigration was productive in a rather different way. Zionist thinker Ahad Ha’am found himself dismayed at the stulted life of assimilated Jews in Britain, whose society he decried as “a cemetery with ornamental tombstones,” leading him to redouble his Zionist efforts (76-77).
Yet despite Jewish presence in and contributions to the colonies, Hillis shows that ill will against Jews persisted as well. Jewish activists suffered accusations of clannishness and insularity, a process that in many ways reached its peak at the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) in 1903. Famous for the split of the party into competing Bolshevik and Menshevik factions, the Congress also saw the Jewish Labor Bund—at the time, the largest Jewish socialist organization in Europe and second largest Jewish party (the Russian Zionist Organization was approximately double in size)—expelled from the RSDLP over its insistence on the need for a distinctive Jewish movement.
Flaws in the book are few and inconsequential. Hillis does repeat the claim that the matter leading to the Bund’s expulsion from the RSDLP was its desire for autonomy, a right happily granted to other organizations. This framing represents the Bund as an innocent victim of Lenin’s Machievellian pretensions. The matter, however, was rather more complicated. First, the Bund was demanding federalism, not autonomy–in the latter, party sovereignty rested in the central organization; in the former, with the constituent parties. Every party other than the Bund rejected this in 1903. Moreover, the Bund had attempted to use its status as the largest movement within the RSDLP to unilaterally force the party to accept a federal structure; though its opponents were hardly innocent in their treatment of the Bund, there was more to the toxicity of the conference than antisemitism. 1 1Rezoliutsii V Sezda Bunda, June 1903. GARF f. 102, 0-. 253, d. 207, l. 1-7; V. I. Lenin he National Question in Our Programme,” Iskra no. 34, February 15 1903; V. I. Lenin, Second Congress of the R.S.D.L.P.: July 17 (30)—August 10 (23),” in Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 6, (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), pp. 467-479. Nor was the relationship between the Bund and the Bolsheviks necessarily hostile after 1903, as Hillis states. In fact, the Bund and Bolsheviks were closely aligned from 1905-1910 and it was with the support of the Bolsheviks that the Bund reentered the RSDLP in 1906. 2 2 R. Abramovitch, In Tsvey Revolutsies: Di Geshikhte fun a Dor,vol. 1 (New York: Workmens Circle, 1944), 253, 352.; M. G. Rafes, Dva Goda Revoliutsii na Ukraine (Evoliutsiia I Raskol Bunda), (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatelstvo, 1920), 16; Samuel A. Portnoy, Vladimir Medem: The Life and Soul of a Legendary Jewish Socialist (New York: Ktav Publishing House, inc, 1979), 330; G. Aronson, Revolioutsionnaia Iunnost: Vospominaniia 1903-1917, Project on the History of the Menshevik Movement, Paper no. 6, (New York, 1961), 67-8, 98-99. Yet for reasons not yet evident but likely resulting from both a certain sloppiness in much of the historical record and the Bund’s desire in the post-revolutionary era to portray themselves as the innocent victims of a malevolent Lenin, both errors are so fully enmeshed in the existing historiography—including much of the Bund’s own—that the author can in no way be blamed for repeating them.
With these flaws minor and of no consequence to the main argument—and therefore, overall value—of Utopia’s Discontents, it is easy to sing the book’s praises. The book skillfully and convincingly provides a new understanding of the role of émigré colonies as key loci in the Russian political and intellectual traditions. It is clearly and elegantly written and shows a masterful command of the source material. It shines light on as a creative space capable of generating vast ideas and explores how its Jewish members, the dispersed activists of a dispersed nation, came to generate such vast transformation. Hillis offers a new form of spatial history, a republic of cafes, street corners, bedrooms, and railroad cars where Russia was reimagined and the world transformed. Utopia’s Discontents belongs on every bookshelf, and Hillis deserves every praise for writing it.
