Tsereteli — A Democrat in the Russian Revolution: A Political Biography

by W.H. Roobol, P. Hyams (Translation), L. Richards (Translation)

About Tsereteli relatively little has been written in historical literature. A study of his political career fits well into the current, gradually widening interest in the men who were the losers in the Russian revolution. A biography of Tsereteli is certainly not out of place alongside S. H. Baron's biography of Plekhanov, I. Getzler's work on Martov and the biography of Aksel'rod by A. Ascher. While Plekhanov, Martov and Aksel'rod laid down the theoretical principles of Menshe­ vism, Tsereteli was certainly their superior in the field of practical politics. The quantity and quality of the available source material is un­ equally divided over the different periods of Tsereteli's life. There is very little more about his youth than the brief notes which he himself made much later in his life, and the recollections which Boris Niko­ laevskii and Tsereteli's sister Eliko noted down from things he said. There is quite a lot of material about the student movement in Moscow between I900 and I902, in which he took an active part, so that it is possible to get a good general picture. Since the students often acted anonymously, however, it is not easy to determine Tsereteli's role.

Genres: History

284 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1899

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is about Irakli Tsereteli, a Georgian Menshevik and one of the leading figures of the Petrograd Soviet during the Russian Revolution. As the title suggests, its not a real biography but a political one, looking at his career from his early life until he faded out of the public eye in the 1930s. Translated from the original Dutch, it is the only biography of Tsereteli out there, which isn't surprising as he's not exactly well-known these days. However he was a major figure in 1917: a renown public speaker, he was called the "conscience of the revolution" by Lenin. Tsereteli, as Roobol argues, didn't want to acquire power, and was stridently against any conflict that could end the revolution before the proletariat could properly act, which may have been his downfall. It casts him as an idealist, who tried to find compromises, but was unable to harness his own popularity and influence to enact much lasting change, and thus faded into obscurity. Really interesting book, really dives into the divides between the various socialist blocks in Russia at the time.

[Eric Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

If the Bolsheviks had never seized power a century ago this month, probably the most famous Georgian of the twentieth century would have been Irakli Tsereteli. Tsereteli was one of the leading figures in the Russian Social Democratic Party, and like his fellow Georgian Karlo Chkheidze, he wound up spending 1917 in Petrograd rather than Tiflis. Appointed to the provisional government led by Alexander Kerensky as one of handful of socialist ministers, where he first served as minister of posts and telegraphs, Tsereteli struggled to sustain the revolution under the pressure of the world war. After the Bolsheviks staged their coup d'etat, he returned to Georgia and played a key role in their diplomacy, especially in keeping up contact with the leaders of the Second International. He survived long enough in exile to see the death of Stalin and the beginning of the "thaw" in the Soviet Union, though not the renewal of Georgian independence. Sadly, this biography of him, the only one in English, has been out of print for decades.