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ABSTRACT
Among all the socialist strategies and responses to antisemitism, those developed and applied in Russia before 1917 command our attention because of the violence and ubiquity of antisemitism, and because of the principal role of socialists in promoting democracy and revolution in the Russian empire. A significant part of the socialist movement to in Russia was in the hands of Jewish socialists because of the disproportionately large number of Jews in Russian revolutionary parties. This was even more the case in the Pale of Settlement, where Russia's Jewish population was concentrated and where the first Marxist party in the Russian Empire, the Bund, flourished. Jewish members of socialist parties were, however, inhibited from pleading the case of Jews due to the internationalist, even anti-nationalist, political position of most socialists. Surh's article explores the response to antisemitism among Jewish socialists, primarily in the Pale, by considering the career of the revolutionary Social Democrat, Grigorii Aronson, in the period before 1914. Aronson joined and worked with the Bund for a short while but, for most of his career, he was a member of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party (RSDRP), first as a Bolshevik and, from 1917 until the end of his life, as a Menshevik. Although most Jewish socialists joined the Bund or a number of Zionist socialist parties, quite a number joined Russian parties including, besides the RSDRP, the Socialist Revolutionary Party and a number of anarchist groups. These are the parties whose attitude and stance towards antisemitism that Suhr's article explores through Aronson's biographical journey.
Notes
1 The Diaries of Theodore Herzl (1958), 395, cited in Leonard Schapiro, ‘The role of the Jews in the Russian revolutionary movement’, in Ezra Mendelsohn (ed.), Essential Papers on Jews and the Left (New York and London: New York University Press 1997), 300–21 (300, 321); Erich Haberer, Jews and Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995); J. L. H. Keep, The Rise of Social Democracy in Russia (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1963), 43–5; Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1967), 43–9. The social presence of Jews in the Pale provinces was greater than their 14 per cent share of the Pale's population due to their concentration in towns and cities and their strong role in commerce, scholarship and the liberal professions. Making revolution required the same skills of study, organization and risk-taking as those occupations.
2 Henry J. Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia: From Its Origins to 1905 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1972). Anti-nationalist in outlook and a member of the Second International, the Bund was targetted at Jewish workers and was founded in 1897, one year before the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party (RSDRP). ‘Bund’ was the abbreviation of the Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bund in Lite, Poyln un Rusland (General Jewish Workers’ Union in Lithuania, Poland and Russia).
3 Although the sources of radicalism among Russian Jews and their prominence in the revolutionary movement is a problem that continues to fascinate, the question being addressed here is more narrowly focused. For a recent, diligent attempt to address the broader question, see Liliana Riga, The Bolsheviks and the Russian Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2012), ch. 3, ‘The Jewish Bolsheviks’, 58–89. Riga's attempt to draw out the commitment of specific Jewish leaders to revolution and Bolshevism from their personal struggles with assimilation using thin, uneven and heterogeneous evidence leaves much unaccounted for and risks reductionism. The present essay similarly plumbs the individual psychology of a revolutionary activist, and may also raise questions of evidence and plausibility, although in this case the subject himself speculates about his own psychology, and the essay confines itself to suggesting how such ‘inside information’ may have applied to other Jewish activists.
4 Brendan McGeever and Satnam Virdee, ‘Antisemitism and socialist strategy in Europe 1880–1917: an introduction’, in these pages.
5 The RSDRP, the principal Marxist party in Russia, was founded in 1898 and divided into separate parties in 1912, colloquially known as Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Their principal disagreement concerned the strategy to be pursued in the Russian Revolution. The Bolsheviks rejected alliance with bourgeois parties and, ultimately, making too sharp a distinction between bourgeois and proletarian revolutions.
6 Grigorii Aronson, Revoliutsionnaia iunost’: vospominaniia, 1903–1917 (New York: Inter-University Project on the History of the Menshevik Movement 1961). This is the only biographical work Aronson produced, although he wrote a number of political histories and polemics of the period through which he lived.
7 In 1897 there were 20,385 Jews in Gomel’ in a total population of 35,775, or 57 per cent. A. Linden (ed.), pseud. i.e. Leo Motzkin, Die Judenpogromme in Russland, 2 vols (Cologne and Leipzig: Jüdischer Verlag 1910), II, 37.
8 I am persuaded by Lars Lih's insistence that Lenin's intention from the beginning was to establish a party in Russia like the German SPD, drawing heavily on the ideas of Karl Kautsky. See Lars T. Lih, Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? in Context (Leiden and Boston: Brill 2006).
9 In 1919 Iulii Martov is reported to have scolded Aronson for his suggestion that the party consider a neutral stance in the civil war because the Whites represented peasants and opposed Bolshevik oppression. Martov reminded him that, ‘in the past, when we had to make up our minds whether a political movement was progressive or reactionary, we found “Jew-baiting” was a pretty good acid test. Should I remind you, who are a Bundist, of this litmus-paper test?’: quoted in Israel Getzler, Martov: A Political Biography of a Russian Social Democrat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1967), 191. This encounter indicates not only how Aronson's anti-Bolshevism had come, by 1919, to trump his revolutionary consciousness, but also how Martov, like Aronson, an assimilated Jew and revolutionary socialist, found no problem in assuming that antisemitism was a ‘litmus-paper test’ for a group's politics and had always been.
10 For example, within one decade of the first legal settlement of Jews in Kiev, they constituted 75 per cent of First Guild merchants: Natan M. Meir, Kiev: Jewish Metropolis, A History, 1859–1914 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 2010), 38. On Jewish prominence in the industrialization of Novaia Rossiia (New Russia: comprising the south-central provinces of present-day Ukraine), see, for example, Susan McCaffray, The Politics of Industrialization in Tsarist Russia: The Association of Coal and Steel Producers, 1874–1914 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press 1996), 21, 29, 82; and Arcadius Kahan, ‘Notes on Jewish entrepreneurship in tsarist Russia’, in Arcadius Kahan, Essays in Jewish Social and Economic History, ed. Roger Weiss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1986), 82–100.
11 On the Bund, see Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia. On Jewish self-defence in 1905, see, inter alia, Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 1981), 153–5; Gerald D. Surh, ‘Jewish self-defense, revolution, and pogrom violence in 1905’, in Felicitas Fischer von Weikersthal, Frank Grüner, Susanne Hohler, Franziska Schedewie and Raphael Utz (eds), The Russian Revolution of 1905 in Transcultural Perspective: Identities, Peripheries, and the Flow of Ideas (Bloomington, IN: Slavica 2013), 55–74; and Iu. N. Lavrinovich, Kto ustroil pogromy v Rossii? (Berlin [1908?]), 43–50.
12 Russian populists or narodniki were the first organized socialists in the Russian Empire, emerging in the 1870s to raise the peasantry to revolution. They split by 1879 into Blanquist and gradualist varieties but, after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, assumed a splintered, underground existence. After Marxist ideas and parties took hold, a neo-populism emerged with the founding of the PSR in 1900.
13 The group was soon to be transformed into the first Russian Marxist organization, Osvobozhdeniye truda (Emancipation of Labour).
14 Akselrod's quandary is skilfully described in Abraham Ascher, Pavel Akselrod and the Development of Menshevism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1972), 69–78; and Abraham Ascher, ‘Pavel Akselrod: a conflict between Jewish loyalty and revolutionary dedication’, Russian Review, vol. 24, no. 3, 1965, 249–65. On the Russian populists and the 1881 pogroms more broadly, see Simon M. Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day, trans. from the Russian by I. Friedlaender (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1918), II, 279–80; Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 97–107; and John D. Klier, Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881–1882 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 2011), 166–77.
15 Surh, ‘Jewish self-defense, revolution, and pogrom violence in 1905’.
16 On the pogroms of October 1905, see Linden (ed.), Die Judenpogromme in Russland. On estimates of their number, see Daniel Pasmanik, ‘Pogromy’, in Evreiskaia Entsiklopediia: Svod znanii o evreistve i ego kul’ture v proshlom i nastoiashchem, 16 vols (St Petersburg: Izd-vo Brokgauz-Efron [1906–13]), XII, cols 611–22; A. Linden, pseud. i.e. Leo Motzkin, ‘Die Dimensionen der Oktoberpogrome (1905)’, in Linden (ed.), Die Judenpogromme in Russland, I, 187–223; and Shlomo Lambroza, ‘The pogroms of 1903–1906’, in John D. Klier and Shlomo Lambroza (eds), Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History (Cambridge, New York, Melbourne and Sydney: Cambridge University Press Cambridge 1992), 195–247; and Shlomo Lambroza, ‘The Pogrom Movement in Tsarist Russia, 1903–1906’, Ph.D. thesis, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, 1981. Of course, if ‘pogrom’ is defined as any incident that inflicts physical harm on Jewish life or property, a number larger than that given above would be warranted, as many such incidents undoubtedly went unrecorded and/or uncounted.
17 Aronson, Revoliutsionnaia iunost’: vospominaniia, 13. Translations from the Russian, unless otherwise stated, are by the author.
18 For instance, he notes that the pogrom began when Russians attacked Jews, not mentioning that the attacks followed a marketplace altercation in which Jews killed a Russian. Aronson, Revoliutsionnaia iunost’: vospominaniia, 14. See also the eyewitness account of Philip Amron: YIVO Archives, New York, American-Jewish Autobiographies, RG 102, File 314.
19 Aronson, Revoliutsionnaia iunost’: vospominaniia, 16. Aronson's father was attacked and wounded during the pogrom, but he recovered. For a comparable emotional reaction to anti-Jewish violence by another Jewish youth from an assimilated family who denied his Jewishness, see the memoirs of the Bund leader, Vladimir Medem, The Life and Soul of a Legendary Jewish Socialist: Vladimir Medem, trans. from the Russian by Samuel A. Portnoy (New York: Ktav Publishing House 1979), 91.
20 Abraham Ascher mentions only one exception to this, a statement that revealed something of Akselrod's Jewish consciousness. In response to a foreign correspondent's question, he expressed sympathy for the Zionist project in Palestine out of pity for Jewish suffering: Ascher, Pavel Akselrod and the Development of Menshevism, 340. If there were there other instances revealing more of Akselrod's feelings or views on Jews, Ascher may be relied on to have found them.
21 Ibid., 78.
22 Aronson, Revoliutsionnaia iunost’: vospominaniia, 34, 43.
23 V. I. Lenin, ‘Chernyye sotni i organizatsiya vosstaniya’, in V. I. Lenin, Polnoe Sobranie Socheniniia, 5th edn, vol. 11 (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury 1960), 189–93. Originally published in Proletarii, no. 14, 16 August 1905.
24 See, for instance, Lenin, Polnoe Sobranie Socheniniia, vol. 7, 154; vol. 8, 330, 336, 343; vol. 9, 89; vol. 10, 94, 223, 246; vol. 14, 277; vol. 21, 12, 19, 345.
25 RSDRP leaflets published in the massive document series, Revoliutsiia 1905–1907 gg. v Rossii: Dokumenty i Materialy (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR 1955– ) are notoriously silent on anti-Jewish violence during the revolution. My 1995 survey of RSDRP leaflets from 1900–4 at the former Institute of Marxism-Leninism in Moscow corroborated the accuracy of this observation, as did the examination of Bund leaflets at Amsterdam's International Institute for Social History.
26 I have no data on the frequency of such cooperation of the Russian parties in the defence of Jews, but my impression is that it was episodic and infrequent. Nor am I aware of any central policy or directive that the parties should engage in such activity. Indeed, the import of Lenin's article was to encourage party committees to draw the double benefit of arming themselves against a Black Hundreds threat, not to encourage them actually to intervene in pogroms on behalf of Jews.
27 The term ‘sometimes’ denotes uncertainty and controversy surrounding the degree of worker participation in pogroms. The Russian term for ‘workers’ in use around 1900, rabochie, included both the skilled and the unskilled. I have argued against applying the blanket term in describing the social composition of pogrom participants without distinguishing skill level. In sources I have examined that specify the occupations of the workers who took part in pogroms, they invariably refer to unskilled workers such as miners, dockers, millers, day labourers, drayers and cab drivers. Skilled workers were more likely to heed the words of socialist organizers who condemned pogroms. See Gerald Surh, ‘Ekaterinoslav city in 1905: workers, Jews, and violence’, International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 64, October 2003, 139–66. However, not all skilled workers were exposed to socialist teachings, even in 1905, and surely some unskilled workers were so exposed. The question of the exact degree of support for pogroms among Russian (and other) ‘workers’, especially skilled categories, remains open. For a less critical definition of ‘workers’ and blunter attribution of pogrom violence to ‘workers’, see Charters Wynn, Workers, Strikes, and Pogroms: The Donbass-Dnepr Bend in Late Imperial Russia, 1870–1905 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1992).
28 Aronson, Revoliutsionnaia iunost’: vospominaniia, 69–70.
29 Grigorii Aronson, Rossiia nakanune revoliutsii: Istoricheskie etiudy (New York: Rausen 1962); Grigorii Aronson, Rossiia v Epokhu Revoliutsii: Istoricheskie etiudy i memuary (New York: Waldon Press 1966); Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1999), 22–3, 145–50; Oleg Budnitskii, Russian Jews between the Reds and the Whites, 1917–1920, trans. from the Russian by Timothy J. Portice (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2012), 216–19.
30 See, for example, Grigorii Aronson, ‘Ideological trends among Russian Jews’, in Jacob Frumkin, Grigorii Aronson and Alexis Goldenweiser (eds), Russian Jewry 1860–1917, trans. from the Russian by Mirra Ginsburg (New York: Thomas Yoseloff 1960), 144–71; the second volume, translated some years later, Jacob Frumkin, Grigorii Aronson and Alexis Goldenweiser (eds), Russian Jewry 1917–1967, trans. from the Russian by Joel Carmichael (New York: Thomas Yoseloff 1969); Grigorii Aronson, Evreiskaia problema v Sovetskoi Rossii (New York: Izd. Sotsial Ferbanda 1944); and Grigorii Aronson, Rusish-Yidishe Inteligents (Buenos Aires: Farlag Yidbukh 1962). This list is illustrative only, not exhaustive.
31 For example, Rusish-Yidishe Inteligents consists of eighteen portraits of Jewish intellectuals. I am grateful to Selma Marks for translating a part of this book. Aronson's appreciation of the genius of individual Jews was also evident in his contribution to the introduction to Petr A. Garvi, Vospominaniia Sotsialdemokrata (New York: Fond po izdaniiu literaturnogo nasledstva P. A. Garvi 1946), xli–liv.
32 Aronson's other contribution to the collection Russian Jewry 1860–1917, for instance, was the essay ‘Jews in Russian literary and political life’, 253–99.
33 Within the RSDRP, Karl Kautsky's position on Jews and antisemitism was broadly accepted: assimilation, anti-Zionism and opposition to anything else that separated the Jewish proletariat from other workers. Jack Jacobs, On Socialists and ‘the Jewish Question’ after Marx (New York and London: New York University Press 1992), 5–33.
34 Aronson, Revoliutsionnaia iunost’: vospominaniia, 9–11.
35 See a leading Bundist's passionate objection to the bland assimilationist formula of the RSDRP in Medem, The Life and Soul of a Legendary Jewish Socialist, 234–6.
36 Despite the Bund's continuing struggle against anti-Jewish violence and the revival of its membership during the 1917 Revolution and civil war, the violence of that disordered period was so much greater that the Bund's struggle against it made less of a difference as, indeed, did that of other parties.
37 As occurred in Ekaterinoslav, when a group of suburban factory workers came to town to combat pogromists (Sotsialdemokrat, 4 August 1905) or in Orsha when Russian and Jewish workers from neighbouring towns intervened in Orsha's pogrom; Delo o pogrome v Orshe, 21–24 oktiabria 1905 goda: Obvinitel’nyi akt i sudebnoe sledstvie (St Petersburg: Tip. Busselia 1908), 16–18, 23–5.
38 The struggle against antisemitism had more prominence and was more of a unifying issue among Kadets and other moderate leftists. Witness the special investigation of the June 1906 pogrom in Bialystok organized by deputies in the First Duma: Gosudarstvennaya Duma: Stenograficheskie otchety. Pervyi sozyv/ Sessiia pervaia/ 27.4-4.7 1906 (St Petersburg 1906). The Duma debate is described in Shmuel Galai, ‘The Jewish question as a Russian problem: the debates in the First State Duma’, Revolutionary Russia, vol. 17, no. 1, 2004, 31–68.
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Gerald D. Surh
Gerald D. Surh is Associate Professor Emeritus of History at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina.