The voices of the Menshevik past heard in this volume were originally recorded on tape in the course of a project on the history of Menshevism that I directed from 1960 to 1965 at the joint invitation of a group of Menshevik survivors and a number of specialists in Russian and Soviet studies teaching at various American universities.

The impulse for this effort had originated in 1959 with these survivors of the Menshevik Party themselves – more precisely, with nine members of its last coherent kollektiv, which was still functioning in New York after four decades in the emigration. Six of them – Gregory Aronson, David Dallin, Lydia Dan, Boris Dvinov, Boris Nicolaevsky, and Solomon Schwarz – were survivors of the RSDRP Delegation Abroad (Zagranichnaia Delegatsiia RSDRP), established by Julius Martov and his political associates following their expulsion from Soviet Russia by a decree of the Supreme Soviet in 1922. This group had continued to function uninterruptedly as a political entity, with representation in the Labor Socialist International – first in Berlin, until Hitler's rise to power, and later in Paris, until the German occupation of France in the spring of 1940. The other three members of the group – Leo Lande, Boris Sapir, and Simon Wolin – were survivors of the Mensheviks' Union of Youth (Soyuz molodezhev), which had maintained a shadow underground existence in Soviet Russia and contacts with the Menshevik Delegation Abroad until the mid-1920s. Most of these survivors were still active as contributors to Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik (The Socialist Herald), the journal launched by the Delegation Abroad immediately after its inception, which had continued publication even after the Delegation's dissolution in 1940.