ABSTRACT
In the pre-Stalinist period, there was admiration, or at the very least sympathy and interest in the revolutionaries who wanted to "storm the heavens" to create a just society by means of social engineering and a new and higher type of human being—in Europe's most backward country. With the end of the romantic-revolutionary period many motives appeared that induced many Western intellectuals to ignore what later became known as the "cult of personality", political and cultural regimentation, the purges, the trials, and the terror. With Menshevism, the author mean not only card-carrying members of the Russian Social Democratic party in exile, but the whole liberal wing of the Russian emigration, including the Social Revolutionaries who edited Sovremennye Zapiski, the most important periodical in Russian published outside Russia between the world wars. The Mensheviks were right where so many others went astray because they had held democratic convictions which made it impossible for them to compromise either with fascism or Bolshevism.
