Boris Nicolaevsky

in Belebey, Bashkiria, then part of the Russian Empire the oldest of seven children of an Orthodox priest of Greek origin.

"[1] His family then moved to Ufa, where he joined the Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, though he switched to the Mensheviks when he was still a youth.

[3] Nicolaevsky settled in Berlin, where he was a member of the Foreign Delegation of the Menshevik party, and established himself as one of the leading historians of Soviet communism.

In March 1936, he had several long meetings with Nikolai Bukharin, who had been sent by Joseph Stalin to negotiate the purchase original manuscripts by Karl Marx, which Nicolaevsky had smuggled out of Germany.

Their conversations stretched through two months, and formed the basis of Nicolaevsky's Letter of an Old Bolshevik,[4] which Bukharin's biographer described as "a remarkable document and the source of much of our knowledge about Soviet politics in the thirties".

Nicolaevsky emigrated to the United States in 1942, where he remained until his death, lecturing at various American universities and serving as the curator of the Hoover Institution Archives.

[2] His extensive collection of revolutionary documents is now held by the Hoover Institution Archives in Palo Alto, California.