Dan, Fedor Ilich

Dan, Fedor Il’ich 

(pseudonym of F. I. Gurvich). Born 1871; died 1947. One of the Menshevik leaders. Physician by profession.

Dan joined the Social Democratic movement in 1894. He was a member of the St. Petersburg Union for the Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class. He emigrated in the summer of 1901, and joined a group in Berlin that was assisting Iskra. In 1902 he took part in the preparations for the Second Congress of the RSDLP. In 1903 he aligned himself with the Mensheviks. He participated in the Fourth (1906) and Fifth (1907) Congresses of the RSDLP. During the period of reaction he was a leader of liquidationism, an editor of the newspaper Golos sotsial-demokrata, and a member of the Menshevik Organizational and Central committees. During World War I, Dan was a social chauvinist. After the February Revolution of 1917 he became the ideologue for the “revolutionary defensism” movement: he was also a member of the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet and the first convocation of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee. Dan supported the bourgeois Provisional Government and actively participated in the persecution of the Bolsheviks. After the October Revolution he worked as a physician in the system of the People’s Commissariat for Health. At the Seventh (December 1919) and Eighth (December 1920) All-Russian Congresses of Soviets, Dan spoke on behalf of the Mensheviks.

In 1922 he was exiled abroad as an enemy of Soviet power. In Berlin he headed the counterrevolutionary activity of the Mensheviks. In 1923 he took part in the creation of the Socialist International. He was deprived of Soviet citizenship in 1923. From 1941 to 1947, Dan published the anti-Soviet journal Novyi Put’, the organ of the Menshevik émigrés, in the USA.