ALLAN K. WILDMAN

Russian and Jewish Social Democracy

Much can be learned about the development and character of early Russian Social Democracy by observing its striking parallels with the Polish and Jewish Social Democratic movements. As the populist-type groups of these nationalities drifted toward middle-class national liberalism in the late 1880s, the more radical segments of their intelligentsias were attracted to Marxism and Social Democracy, which by contrast represented a more cosmopolitan, and at the same time more intransigent, revolutionary faith. Polish and Jewish Social Democrats viewed the tsarist autocracy as the oppressor of all workers and the patron of all capitalist exploiters, regardless of nationality. Their cognizance of the founding of the Second International (1889) and the dramatic gains of socialist parties in Germany and Belgium widened the context of their emotional identification, overcoming their particularistic concerns as members of repressed minorities.

In the latter half of the 1880s, Marxist study groups and worker propaganda circles spread throughout the Polish and Western border provinces of Russia, stealing the march on the Russian movement by perhaps three or four years. In 1888 floods in Poland stimulated nationwide political awareness and illicit political activity; their catalytic effect was indeed much like the famine of 1891 in Russia. The revival of revolutionary hopes spurred the Polish Marxists to address themselves directly to the masses, which was effected by the “Union of Polish Workers” (Zwiazek Robotnikov Polskich) in opposition to the older purely propagandist organization Proletarjat. Mounting strike campaigns reached a peak in the general strike at Lodz in 1892.

Mass agitation in the Jewish movement was undertaken by Vilna Social Democrats in 1894, unleashing a strike wave which spread through the predominantly Jewish regions of the Western provinces. The rapid development of the Jewish movement was soon followed by the Russian; a major textile strike in Belostok by both Jewish and Russian workers was followed by the stupendous strike of the St. Petersburg textile workers in 1896. Except for the shift toward national particularism, the Russian movement proceeded along the lines laid out by its predecessors; it lagged a year or so behind the Jewish, and several years behind the Polish movement.

In spite of the similarity in patterns, the relationships of the Polish and Jewish movements to the Russian were two entirely different orders. Whereas news of the Polish movement reached the Russian Social Democrats only as distant echoes, the influence of the Jewish movement was from the very start direct, personal, and intimate. Indeed, one could say that until the founding of the Bund in 1897, there was no fixed demarcation between the two movements: Jewish Social Democrats worked simultaneously in both without sensing the slightest conflict in loyalty. Even after the founding of the Bund there was much moving back and forth, while the Bund itself functioned as a constituent part of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, which it helped establish in 1898. The Russian movement matured more rapidly and moved with greater awareness into the era of mass organization precisely because of its close relationship to the Jewish movement.

The purpose of this brief study is to take a close look at the motive forces in the Jewish movement which produced this remarkable phenomenon and to assess its role in shaping Russian Social Democracy. It does not presume to give a total picture of either movement, but rather to focus on the character of their interrelationship.¹

In the south of Russia, an area which fell within the Pale of Settlement, many of the first generation Marxist intellectuals were of Jewish origin—D. B. Gol’dendakh (Riazanov) and Iurii Nakhamkes (Steklov) in Odessa, O. A. Kogan (Ermanskii) in Tiflis, M. A. Zaslavskii, E. G. Mundblit, and Teitel’baum in Ekaterinoslav, E. Abramovich, B. L. Eidel’man in Kiev, and F. A. Lipkin (Cherevanin) in Kharkov. Although several (Abramovich, Zaslavskii) had formerly been associated with Jewish groups in the western sector of the Pale, in the south they worked side-by-side with non-Jews in organizations that were exclusively Russian-oriented. With few exceptions they remained in the Russian movement. In addition, there were a number of Jewish students from the Pale attending universities and institutions in central Russia; not infrequently they became Social Democrats and were fully assimilated Russian intellectuals, unmoved by the problem of ethnic identity. If Jewish Social Democrats came into contact with Jewish workers (as happened in Odessa, Kiev, and Ekaterinoslav), they felt their background rather as an embarrassment, and often sought to shift their sphere of activity to Russian factories and large-scale industry (the Jewish “proletariat” consisted mostly of craft workers—tailors, locksmiths, printers, cabinet makers). North of Kiev the nationality problem seldom came within their field of vision.

Because of their variegated population—Jews, White Russians, Poles, Lithuanians, and Germans—the situation was substantially different in the western border provinces. Here Russianized Jewish intellectuals of Marxist persuasion had no choice but to turn to the Jewish workers, since they did not know the language of the other ethnic groups. Although Marxist circles sprang up simultaneously in Vilna and Minsk, the Minsk circle dissolved by the end of the 1890s as a result of arrests, emigration to America, and the distracting enthusiasm of some of its members for establishing artels (in essence, a defection to populism). Vilna, with its larger factory and artisan population, became the fountainhead of Marxism in the western regions of the Pale. Around 1888, L. A. Aksel’rod (later an Iskra collaborator and devoted philosophical disciple of Plekhanov, but no relation to Pavel Aksel’rod), in her salon for the local radical intelligentsia, sponsored a group of Marxist pupils, among them Timofei Kopel’zon, Leo Iogikhes (the famous “Tyshko,” lifelong collaborator and companion of Rosa Luxemburg), John Mill, and I. A. Aizenshtat (Iudin).² With this group providing the nucleus, a cohesive, enterprising Social Democratic organization sprang up in the next six to seven years, concerned principally with spreading the Marxist faith. Through propaganda circles, the Vilna Social Democrats provided Jewish and Polish workers with a complete “university education” in socialism (the Polish circles later broke away under the leadership of Iogikhes). They were often obliged to prepare their pupils in the Russian language before proceeding to substantive matters, as instructional literature in socialism was available only in Russian. To the Polish Social Democrats active in the same area, they were obnoxious “Russifiers,” beguiling future Polish citizens.³

Of more significance for this investigation was the systematic indoctrination the Vilna Social Democrats gave to large numbers of radically disposed youth, which the numerus clausus for Jews in Russian educational institutions (introduced in 1887) produced in abundance. A few of these young Jews managed to squeeze through and enter the Russian world of learning and culture, first in gymnasia (secondary schools) and later in the universities. The overwhelming majority, however, were turned back upon the ghetto, seething with resentment. A pitifully large number, having been refused admittance into gymnasia, continued to prepare themselves through private tutors for the diploma exams provided by Russian law, hoping subsequently to surmount the hurdle of university percentage norms. These so-called eksternaty were ripe material for indoctrination by older Social Democrats, though, conditioned by the ghetto milieu, their appropriation of Marxism was more primitive and more explosive. Unlike their tutors, they spoke fluent Yiddish, but their command of Russian was poor. Precisely because of their imperfect assimilation, they were better equipped than the older Vilna Social Democrats to appreciate the distinctive needs and traditions of the artisan classes, and thus became a potential source of nationalism in the movement. These eksternaty and kindred groups such as pedagogical and rabbinical students were known as poluintelligenty, regarded as second-class members in that enviable fraternity, the intelligentsia. Although this junior order of intellectuals was more effectively mobilized in Vilna than elsewhere, it became the model for groups on the periphery of Social Democratic organizations throughout the Pale for the following decade.

That this large-scale work in an exclusively Jewish environment did not sooner issue into a national movement was due to the strongly assimilationist outlook of the Vilna Social Democrats, who, unlike their Polish counterparts, thoroughly identified themselves with the Russian revolutionary tradition. Their Marxism was actually a latter-day expression of a cultural trend originating in the 1860s, when the Jewish bourgeois youth, admitted for the first time to Russian educational institutions in significant numbers, developed an enthusiasm for the classics of Russian literature and followed the idols of the radical intelligentsia from Herzen to the People’s Will.⁴ Whereas this first generation of educated Jews, not ceasing to be Russianized in habit and thought, reacted to the pogroms and senseless repressions of the 1880s by emigrating or by turning toward a “national” solution, the disaffected youth found the same catharsis in embracing the most radical creed of the dominant culture. To them “Palestinianism” or “Jewish Enlightenment” meant still to be imprisoned within the confines of Jewish particularism, whereas they sought a mode of identification with the general march of European civilization. To them Russian culture was an avenue to European culture, and Russian Marxism as expounded in the writings of Plekhanov happily combined their assimilationist and cosmopolitan yearnings. One of their number, Timofei Kopel’zon, thus reflected on their outlook of that time (1888-90):

We were assimilationists who did not even dream of a separate Jewish mass movement. . . . We saw our task as preparing cadres for the Russian revolutionary movement, and acclimatizing them to Russian culture.⁵

Not only did the Vilna Social Democrats regard their own organization as a constituent part of a future Russian movement; many of them saw their sojourn in Vilna as temporary and looked forward to transferring their sphere of activity to Russian industrial centers. After all, the Jewish “workers” whom they were indoctrinating were primarily craft workers in scattered storefront workshops, whereas in Russia proper there was a genuine “proletariat” in the giant textile and metallurgical plants of St. Petersburg, Moscow, Ekaterinoslav, and Ivanovo-Voznesensk.

The Vilna Social Democrats were, in point of fact, in active communication with Russian groups from the very beginning. Most of them had attended Russian schools at least for a brief time and had been sent back to Vilna because of illegal political activities. This meant they had friends and acquaintances in central Russia who shared their convictions. Soon gymnasium students indoctrinated by them moved on to Russian institutions of higher education—la. A. Liakhovskii to Kiev, Aaron Lur’e, L. B. Fainberg, and E. A. Levin to Kharkov, and B. I. Gol’dman (Gorev) to St. Petersburg. These Vilna graduates invariably joined Russian Social Democratic groups and brought back news on semester vacations. Relations with St. Petersburg circles were considerably strengthened in 1893 by the arrival of Iulii Tsederbaum (Martov), an active Social Democrat expelled from the capital; he chose Vilna as a place of exile precisely because of its reputation as a thriving Social Democratic center. Firm connections with Moscow were established through a gentile, E. I. Sponti, one of the founders of the Moscow Workers’ Union in 1893. At one time, Sponti had spent a term of military service in Vilna, and while there had actively participated first in Polish, then in Jewish Social Democratic work.⁶

Very early (by 1892), the Vilna organization performed two very special services for the Russian Social Democratic groups with which it was in contact: first, it helped fugitives who desired to go abroad to cross the border illegally; second, it served as an entrepot for propaganda literature smuggled in from abroad, particularly from Plekhanov’s Liberation of Labor Group. Since envoys from Russian organizations came to Vilna to pick up this literature, Vilna became a natural coordinating center for the Russian movement long before the latter was in a position to perform this function for itself. In fact, in early 1894 the Vilna Social Democrats took careful soundings of other Russian groups to see whether some sort of association or joint enterprise might be feasible. To their disappointment they found that the other Russian organizations were for the most part still in the embryonic stage and feared that ambitious undertakings would detract from the modest beginnings of their propaganda work. Vilna had no alternative but to turn toward its own internal affairs and wait for the Russian movement to catch up.⁷

At this point, a variety of considerations forced the Vilna Social Democrats to rethink their approach to practical activities. Quite independently of their activities, unrest among the artisan masses was growing. The miserably exploited journeymen, losing the possibility of becoming independent masters as the crafts became concentrated in larger shops, came to approximate a wage-earning proletariat and fought for their interests through strikes and mutual aid funds. The younger artisans, eager to settle accounts with the proprietors of their shops, felt little attraction to the intellectual rigors of the propaganda circles. The older workers, products of the “Russified” socialist education, disdained the crude protests of their ghetto-bound fellows, sometimes even actively sabotaging them. Moreover, many carefully trained worker-socialists escaped the frustrations of their milieu either by emigrating to America or by employing their cultural attainments (particularly their facility in Russian) to establish themselves as proprietors of their own shops. In the latter case they unhesitantly proceeded to hire and “exploit” apprentices and journeymen. Caught in an impossible dilemma, the Vilna Social Democrats made the momentous decision to abandon their painstaking former mode of work and adopted the cause of the masses as their own. The experience of the class struggle itself, it was felt, would prove a far better instructor in socialism than organized propaganda.

The theoretical justification of this revolution in tactics was worked out by Arkadii Kremer and Martov in the famous pamphlet Ob agitatsii (1894). The remarkable feature of this work was that, although designed to meet the crisis arising out of the specific conditions of the ghetto sweatshops, the theoretical arguments and practical guidelines were cast purely in general terms of Marxist theory, capable of universal application. Starting from the premise that the chief aim of Social Democracy should be to mold the consciousness of the working class as a whole, and that masses are moved “not by intellectual considerations, but by the objective course of events,” the pamphlet proposed activating the class struggle through strike agitation, which should concentrate at the outset on “everyday needs and demands.” This purely “economic” struggle would give the worker “confidence in his own strength and consciousness of the need for solidarity,” thus placing before him “more important tasks demanding resolution.” This more conscious form of struggle would “create the soil for political agitation, the goal of which is to change the existing political conditions to the advantage of the working class.”⁸ Since a relatively small ethnic group could scarcely hope by itself to change “existing political conditions,” it was clear the authors felt they were formulating the goals, not of the Jewish minority, but of the workers’ movement of Russia as a whole.⁹

Given its intention, the appearance of Ob agitatsii was quite timely, since the Russian movement itself was approaching a turning point. While Marxist instruction in propaganda circles was spreading at a steady pace, a series of industrial disorders broke out early in 1895 in Iaroslavl, Ivanovo-Voznesensk, and in both capitals. Taken by surprise, the Social Democrats looked for practical guidance, some favoring active intervention in the disorders, others opposing it. When news of the Vilna technique reached Russian organizations, it was a foregone conclusion that it would become the focus of the debate. Two Moscow Social Democrats, E. I. Sponti and S. I. Mitskevich, becoming familiar with Vilna methods through extended visits, brought news of it along with the precious manuscript to their own organization.¹⁰ Martov brought a copy to St. Petersburg in the fall of 1894, and it promptly evoked lively discussion among several Social Democratic circles, including the group known as the stariki (“old hands”), of which Lenin was a member. When Martov resettled in St. Petersburg in the fall of 1895 and joined forces with the stariki, the new program was introduced with determination and success. Although most of the stariki, including Martov and Lenin, were soon arrested, the idea took firm hold; new converts were drawn in from the student intelligentsia, who carried the efforts forward.

News of the Vilna technique soon spread to Kiev, Ekaterinoslav, Odessa, Nizhni-Novgorod, and Ivanovo-Voznesensk, and the issue was settled once and for all by the enormous impact of the St. Petersburg textile strike in 1896. For the next half decade, Ob agitatsii was the bible of the rank-and-file underground workers in Russia. Undeterred by never-ending waves of arrests and exile, local groups instigated one strike after the other, educating thousands of Russian workers in the essentials of socialism. That an entire epoch in the history of Russian Social Democracy owed its inspiration to the Vilna experience is eloquently attested by P. A. Garvi, who entered the Odessa Committee of the Party in late 1900.

Emerging from the narrow confines of the secret propaganda circles, the basic tactical problem of Social Democracy was to break through to the masses and embark on the path of leading the struggle of the working class by means of agitation. The well-known brochure Ob agitatsii clearly reflected the critical moment of the Social Democratic movement of Russia. It exercised on all of us, the party workers of that time, a tremendous influence. The experience of the St. Petersburg strikes, the strike movement in Poland, and particularly in the Jewish movement . . . was the best illustration of the correctness of the new tactical position of Ob agitatsii, which essentially did not “discover” the new strategy, but simply formulated and expressed an empirical change in local Social Democratic work.¹¹

The unanticipated success of the Vilna Social Democrats in launching a mass Jewish workers’ movement led to a rapid restructuring of its own organization. Trained agitators from Vilna were transferred to other Jewish communities where strike fever was spreading. Vilna thus became the natural coordinating center of the burgeoning Jewish movement. This sudden expansion in the scope of Vilna’s underground operations created a strong demand for the promotion of new organizational cadres from the ranks. Since agitation, in contrast to propaganda, had to be conducted in Yiddish, the new functions could most easily be performed by the large fringe of poluintelligenty, whose theoretical talents may have been weak, but who craved action and were thoroughly attuned to the plight of the artisan class. Day-to-day leadership and all technical functions in the Jewish movement soon passed into the hands of representatives of this stratum, assisted by the more energetic of the artisan workers. A few of their more cultured seniors, including Arkadii Kremer, M. D. Srednitskaia, and V. Levinson (Kossovskii), formed a special collegium for matters of high policy, such as communications with outside groups. Other Russian-educated leaders, finding their services no longer at a premium, looked beyond the Pale for more suitable application of their energies. When his term of exile ended, Martov returned to St. Petersburg, where he was joined by his Vilna acquaintance Liakhovskii; Aizenshtat settled in Odessa to revive a Social Democratic organization broken up recently by the police; Timofei Kopel’zon resettled in Warsaw, and later in Berlin, to facilitate the flow of agitational and propaganda literature into Russia. ¹²

Although it was felt most keenly by the older generation of Social Democrats, the urge to “emigrate” to the Russian movement filtered down to the poluintelligenty and gifted artisans who had “graduated” from the propaganda circles. A group of locksmith apprentices tutored by Martov, having obtained certificates of proficiency in their craft entitling them to the coveted “right of residence,” debated whether they ought not to resettle in central Russia to plant the seeds of “agitation.” On Martov’s advice, one of their number, M. Frankfurt, moved to the Volga region, while his comrades joined the intelligent Gozhanskii in “colonizing” Belostok, where the Jewish and Russian textile workers had just displayed their solidarity in the strikes of 1895. P. O. Gordon, a product of the Vilna pedagogical institute, accompanied Aizenshtat to Odessa. Moisei Dushkan, a bookbinder and pupil of Martov, settled in Ekaterinoslav with a dedicated group of tailors and locksmiths, to bring the gospel of agitation to that untouched locality. ¹³ Some, like Kremer and Mutnikovich, chose to remain with the Vilna organization and make their career in the Bund, while others, like Dushkan and A. Gel’fand (Litvak), after a period of “wandering” in the Russian movement returned to become prominent in the Jewish movement. A considerable number of those who crossed over to bolster up the budding Russian organizations remained there permanently and never felt themselves to be anything but “Russian” Social Democrats. In Vilna, the schooling of intelligenty, poluintelligenty, and workers alike had been oriented toward the Russian revolutionary movement, of which the Jewish contingent was viewed as a constituent part. If the Russian movement was lagging behind, then it seemed natural to offer one’s services.

Although the dispersion of Jewish practitioners of the faith to other parts of Russia originated in Vilna, the concurrent flowering of the Jewish movement soon set up secondary centers of the missionary impulse.

Vitebsk was one such prominent center of dispersion.¹⁴ Its founder and preceptor, Kh. Usyshkin, was later exiled to Poltava, where he provided a few services to Russian organizations and later became a Bolshevik. His pupils, a cohesive group of eksternaty and artisans, systematically scouted the south for a suitable locale in which to implement their carefully nurtured Marxist convictions; they finally settled on Ekaterinoslav, where they ran into the Vilna group brought by Dushkan. The Vitebsk group, being slightly more Russianized, decided to concentrate its efforts on the growing factory population, whereas the Vilna-ites continued their efforts among the Jewish artisan population. I. Vilenskii from Vitebsk and Dushkan from Vilna set up a secret printing press for Rabochaia gazeta, an organ sponsored by the Kievan Social Democrats to further unity in the Social Democratic movement and pronounced the official organ of the party at the First Congress of the RSDRP, in 1898. Later (1899) they performed the same service for Iuzhnyi rabochii, an exceptionally popular underground journal, which competed with Iskra in the south until it was disbanded by the Second Congress in 1903.

A second wave of emigration from Vitebsk soon followed the first. In 1898 a poluintelligent, A. M. Ginzburg, departed first for Kharkov, then Minsk, and finally Ekaterinoslav, making his contribution to local Social Democratic work in each of these centers. He eventually joined Vilenskii in the founding of Iuzhnyi rabochii and the two for a time (until their arrest) were the soul of the enterprise. A cabinetmaker from Vitebsk, Iosif Ioffe, migrated with Ginzburg to Kharkov, where police reports marked him as the most able and dangerous of the worker-agitators. Two years later he was a key member of the Odessa Committee of the party whom Garvi accounted an outstanding worker-revolutionary.¹⁵ Ginzburg expressed the sentiments of many of these fugitives from the Jewish movement.

I chose Ekaterinoslav out of definite party considerations. I decided to devote myself to agitational work among the Russian factory and industrial workers, which in my eyes had incomparably more interest and prospects for success than work among the artisan [i.e. Jewish] masses.¹⁶

Another center of infection was Gomel, of which General Novitskii, the chief of police of Kiev, exclaimed when arrests were made in 1901: “Not another from Gomel! What a rats’ nest! No matter where arrests take place in Russia, there’s always a gomelchanin .”¹⁷ The prominent Menshevik Grigorii Aronson, a participant in Gomel circles, best captured the climate which spawned this remarkable phenomenon. A group of Social Democratic gymnasium students (of which he was a member in 1902-1903) systematically organized and indoctrinated the numerous eksternaty who flowed into Gomel from surrounding localities in quest of education and culture:

They forsook their traditional-religious families and turned up with no means of livelihood, often no nook to live in. At times they were almost adults, in any event 18-20 years of age [i.e., older than their tutors]. The eagerness with which they threw themselves into Russian grammar, devoured Gogol, and Turgenev, was a wonder to behold. Popular works on science went from hand to hand. The majority of the eksternaty spoke Russian poorly, were ignorant of grammar, and understood little of what they read. . . . Many of them later became pharmacists, grammar school teachers, and Talmud scholars, but a chosen few passed their diploma exams and went on to the university, for the most part abroad.¹⁸

Although Aronson’s group initiated a goodly number into the Social Democratic faith, this was apparently the last generation to feel the cosmopolitan attraction of Marxism. The Kishinev and Gomel pogroms of 1903, with their police-inspired horrors, permanently shattered the lure of assimilation, and the privileged Jewish youth ceased to transmit Russian culture and ideology to their less fortunate peers, who in large numbers now turned to terrorism, Zionism, and the several varieties of Zionist socialism.

Odessa is another interesting case in point. In the ethnic potpourri of this port metropolis, the Great Russian element was minimal and the Jewish exceptionally large. The Social Democratic organizations of the 1890s in Odessa had always been predominantly Jewish and had carried on their activities primarily among the Jewish artisan and factory population.

Yet the Social Democrats of Odessa were thoroughly assimilationist and adhered exclusively to the Russian movement rather than to the Bund. P. A. Garvi, a product of the Odessa movement and the typical offspring of the impoverished Jewish middle classes (his father, unlike his prosperous uncles, had no talent for business and remained a miserably paid clerk), vividly portrays his beginnings.¹⁹ He and a group of fellow eksternaty, while preparing for diploma exams, put great zeal into working out a “world-view” which might promise deliverance from surrounding injustices. Though often going to bed with an empty stomach, he claimed he sensed his “debt to people” like a “repentant nobleman” (it goes without saying that he revered the heroes of the People’s Will and knew its legends by heart). His tutor and mentor, Evsei Kogan, who obviously had connections with some sort of conspiratorial organization, occasionally entrusted him with secretive errands such as delivering messages or hiding illicit materials.

After what seemed like an incredibly long apprenticeship, Kogan sponsored Garvi’s entrance into the Odessa Committee. Though he passed his diploma exams, he was denied entry into the university by the percentage norms for Jews. His only alternative was to continue his underground committee work, supporting himself by tutoring the sons of other impoverished Jewish families who hoped to force the narrow entrance to social advancement. Thus, Garvi and his companions were channeled into the career of professional revolutionaries before they reached the years of maturity. After completing the usual cycle of arrest, prison, and exile, Garvi fled abroad just after the party split, where he declared himself an adherent of the minority faction, thus beginning his long career in the service of Menshevism.²⁰

Though less so than in Odessa, most of the southern party committees (Kharkov, Ekaterinoslav, Kiev, Rostov, and Kremenchug) were predominantly Jewish in composition, due in no small measure to “emigration” from the western Pale. Their orientation, however, was entirely toward the Russian movement and remained so long after the founding of the Bund. They made use of Bundist practical experience, but their actions were directed solely toward the construction and solidification of a Russian Social Democratic party. It is remarkable that in almost all the ambitious undertakings in the Russian movement during these years (the operation of underground printing presses and the calling of regional and nation-wide congresses, for example) the drive and practical talent were supplied by offshoots from the Jewish movement. A numerical calculation of the Jewish contingent in Russian Social Democratic organizations would be a rather complex task; suffice it to say that it ranged from substantial to preponderant in the southern committees and was noticeably present elsewhere.²¹ Throughout the 1890s and well into the following century, Jewish Social Democracy continued to supply the thirsting Russian organizations with an abundant supply of talented, energetic committeemen and revolutionary entrepreneurs.

The emergence of a separate Jewish Social Democratic movement and the founding of the Bund in 1897 did not of itself signify a break with the former sympathies. Although the conversion to agitation in 1894 necessarily imparted a certain national coloration to the Jewish movement due to the use of Yiddish as the operating tongue and the involvement of the unassimilated artisan masses, genuine “nationalism” in theory and emotion made little headway in the Bund until the turn of the century. Tsive Gurvich, a well-schooled worker-socialist who was active in the Bund during these years, asserts that “we envied those who left for work among the Russian proletariat” and disclaims any signs of nationalism in the Bund except the use of Yiddish, to which he and other Russianized workers were originally opposed. He states that he heard the notion that the Jews constituted a “nation” and deserved political autonomy for the first time at the Third Congress of the Bund in late 1899, where its only defender was the emigre Bundist John Mill.²² Another comrade, Damskii (also apparently a worker), states that the “only thing that kept us from settling in Moscow or on the Volga was the difficulty in securing the right of residence.”²³ The only recorded expression of nationalism in this period was a speech by Martov at a May First gathering in Vilna in 1895, a lapse which Martov later sincerely regretted. He called for the formation of a Jewish Social Democratic party separate from the Russian on the grounds that Jewish workers, suffering from legal disabilities, could not depend upon their Russian comrades to fight for the particular interest of Jewish civil equality. This was a rather mild form of nationalism to be sure, but as a result Martov was reproached by his well-taught pupils, and this approach was quickly dropped.²⁴

Even after the Jewish movement had progressed far beyond the Russian groups in the scope of their endeavors, the Vilna center still aspired to found an All-Russian rather than a specifically Jewish Social Democratic party. Several times in the years 1895-97 the Vilna organization broached the question of coordinating efforts toward common goals. They carried on negotiations among others with Lenin’s stariki in 1895 and with Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kiev in 1897.

It is quite certain, therefore, that the founding of the Bund in the fall of 1897 was not consciously conceived as a break-away from the Russian movement; rather, its founding was intimately connected with the forthcoming First Congress of the Russian party, in the arrangements for which the Vilna Social Democrats were apparently already involved.²⁵ Tsoglin (“David Kats”), a participant in both affairs, insists that the major considerations were of a practical, not an ideological, character: first, it was felt that the Russian Central Committee should not be burdened with the problem of supplying literature (a major function of the projected Central Committee) in Yiddish; secondly, there was a feeling that the Russian Social Democrats were too lax in the rules of conspiracy, and therefore it was considered safer for the Jewish organizations to be related to the party indirectly through their own leadership rather than each one separately.²⁶ Probably the particularism of the Bund went a step or two further than this in the realm of sub-surface feelings: Vilna already enjoyed a practical, functioning hegemony in the Jewish movement and was undoubtedly reluctant to surrender this position to the uncertain vicissitudes of a wider party organization (“regionalism” on such grounds was not unknown in the Russian movement).

Shortly after the founding of the Bund, the Kievan and Bund leaders coordinated their efforts in planning the First Congress of the Russian party, and any rivalry between them seemed to disappear. It is significant that the Bund handled the physical arrangements (which demanded complete secrecy) and that the Congress took place in Minsk, the new seat of the Bund Central Committee. The Russians did not seem to be disturbed that three of the nine delegates were from the Bund, nor did they offer any objection to the Bund’s request to enter the party as “an autonomous organization, independent only in questions especially concerning the Jewish proletariat” (in all other matters presumably they were bound by general party decisions).²⁷ The phrase was designed primarily to allow the Bund to handle its own literature and to conduct its own campaigns in behalf of civil equality for Jews, to which the Russian comrades might devote insufficient attention. At the Bund’s request the party was designated as Rossiiskaia rather than russkaia to underscore its territorial, rather than its national, basis. It was felt that Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Georgians, and Jews could all feel at home in such a party. (The Bund did not come to regard the party as a federation of national units until its Fourth Congress in 1901, and then only after a bitter fight within its own ranks.) Kremer was one of the three elected to the Central Committee of the party and the only one to carry on his duties after the devastating arrests which followed the First Congress. He saw to it that the Manifesto of the party was printed by the Bund’s secret press, though he disagreed with its contents (for reasons unknown). He also made plans to revive the party organ Rabochaia gazeta and in a coded letter requested Lenin and Martov in Siberia to be collaborators. ²⁸

As a matter of course the Bund continued to play its role as the chief purveyor of literature from abroad and operator of the underground railroad, even though the high point of its association with the Russian movement was past. Still, old traditions lived on. Aaron Ginzburg, now representing Ekaterinoslav, approached the Bund in the summer of 1900 to discuss the possibility of reviving the Russian party. Lenin and Martov, whose plans to establish Iskra were known, were to be invited to edit the party organ. The effort was thwarted by crippling arrests and the unwillingness of the Iskra group to participate except on its own terms.²⁹ In 1902 Timofei Kopel’zon, now representing the Union of Russian Social Democrats Abroad, contacted the Bund and suggested that it arrange for a new party congress, its object being to offset the growing influence of Iskra. Although the congress duly met in March, 1902, in Belostok, the unexpected arrival of an Iskra emissary, Fedor Dan, obliged those present to declare the meeting an unofficial “conference” and to appoint an organizing committee for a congress on which Iskra, the Bund, Iuzhnyi rabochii, and the St. Petersburg Committee would be represented.³⁰ Although the Bund representative was the only one to survive the arrests which followed, his conscientious effort to get in touch with Iskra gave Lenin his opportunity to organize the Congress under Iskra’s auspices. To his agents in Russia Lenin wrote:

I just gave the Bund your contact address. This concerns the congress. . . . Act with authority, but with care. Take upon yourself the responsibility for as much territory as possible in making preparations for the congress, . . . and let the Bund for now limit itself to its own bailiwick. . . . The make-up of the committee must be as favorable as possible for us (perhaps you could say the committee has already been organized and you would be happy to have the Bund take part). . . . In short make yourself master of this undertaking.³¹

Although Lenin had already laid his plans for a showdown with the Bund over the nationality question, he was anxious that formal relations with it be proper in order to keep up the pretense of carrying on the work of the Belostok Conference and not to appear ungrateful to the Bund’s historical services. Lenin’s agents followed his instructions to the letter. One of them notes that at a planning conference the Bund “somehow didn’t show up” and that “it was therefore all the easier to make certain decisions and to draw in more of our own people.”³² The Bund was scrupulously notified of the proceedings and requested to accede to the decisions. A protest by the Bund in its emigre organ Posledniia izvestiia received a conciliatory reply in Iskra, expressing regrets for the misunderstanding and hope for the Bund’s full participation in the near future.³³ Just as hypocrisy is the tribute paid by vice to virtue, so Lenin’s cunning was his own peculiar way of acknowledging the unchallengeable contribution of the Bund and the Jewish movement to Russian Social Democracy.