N.A. ROZHKOV: HIS BOLSHEVIK YEARS AND THE ORIGIN OF HIS POLEMICS WITH LENIN

Revolutionary Russia Vol 18, No. 1, June 2005, pp. 1–22

John Gonzalez

It is ironic, to say the least, that for a long time now the little known name of Nikolai Aleksandrovich Rozhkov (1868–1927) has been used to substantiate a range of claims about the world’s most famous revolutionary – Lenin. Despite numerous one-line references, so little has been written about Rozhkov that readers are unable to evaluate the validity of any statement written about him or his relationship to others, including Lenin. This article attempts to begin to address this issue by providing a very brief biography of Rozhkov, with particular reference to his revolutionary work in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) and his relationship with Lenin up to 1908.

Painful though it is for Marxists to lose in the person of N. R-kov, a man who, in the years when the movement was on the upgrade served the workers’ party faith-fully and energetically, the cause must take precedence over all personal or factional considerations, and over all recollections, however ‘pleasant’.R-kov is not a phrase-monger; he is a man of deeds and, as such, starts at the begin-ning and goes the whole hog.Lenin on Rozhkov, 1911 While his name appears in numerous footnotes, a serious study of N.A. Rozhkov has yet to be written.

Nevertheless, everything from Lenin’s ‘policeman’s mentality’ to his cruel, misanthropic nature has been illustrated by his relationship to Rozhkov. Rozhkov has even been used to demonstrate Krupskaia’s loyalty to her husband. On 13 December 1922, despite having had two paralytic attacks and being in very poor health, Lenin ignored the advice of doctors and found the strength to summon his secretary Fotieva to his apartment in the Kremlin and dictated three letters to her.One of these was a letter to Stalin for the Central Committee Plenum in which he once again called for Rozhkov’s deportation.

Far from being an ‘arbitrary and wayward’ decision,Lenin’s perseverance to have Rozhkov deported, or at least to have him exiled to Pskov, stemmed not only from his determination to have the Politburo follow his instructions but from knowing Rozhkov and having kept track of his revolutionary work for over 16 years. Rozhkov has been dismissed as a ‘minor Menshevik historian with a Bolshevik past’ or even as just ‘another free-thinker’,
 but this is unfair. He was one of V.O. Kliuchevskii’s most gifted disciples and the most influential Russian Marxist historian of the late imperial and early Soviet period of Russia’s history.

Dr John Gonzalez

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Rozhkov Historical Research Centre
Department Member

Dr John Gonzalez is the Director of the Rozhkov Historical Research Centre in New South Wales, Australia. He has been studying and translating the work of N.A. Rozhkov for over twenty-five years and is a leading authority on Russian historiography. He has written numerous articles and has presented conference and seminar papers on Russian, European and Australian history. In 2011 he became a member of the editorial board of the Bulletin of the Moscow State Regional University's History and Politics Series. Dr Gonzalez is the author of Rozhkov's biography entitled "An Intellectual Biography of N.A.Rozhkov (1868-1927): Life In A Bell Jar" which is now available from Brill or major book stores. http://www.brill.com/products/book/intellectual-biography-na-rozhkov For further information visit the Rozhkov Historical Research Centre (RHRC) www.rozhkovcentre.org l