Joshua Meyers. Jewish Social Studies. Volume 24, Issue 2, Winter 2019.
Most histories of the Russian Revolution in 1917 emphasize the Bolshevik conquest of Russia. As important, but not nearly as well understood, was the success of Lenin’s Bolshevik Party and its Communist successors in conquering the hearts and minds of their opponents. From their absorption of Trotsky’s Mezhraiontsy (Interregionalists) in the summer of 1917 through the consolidation of Communist rule in 1922, Lenin’s party demonstrated an uncanny ability to win over and absorb members—particularly leaders—of rival organizations. These leaders played crucial roles in building the Soviet state, industry, and military in the years leading up to World War II and in some cases even beyond. Some, like Trotsky, fell afoul of the Soviet regime early on. Others survived until the Great Purges. A few even lived long enough to die of old age, years after World War II. Within the Jewish community, these individuals proved especially influential, redefining Jewish life in the Soviet Union in the interwar period.
As important as this phenomenon was, little work has been done to attempt to understand these individuals or their experiences. Zvi Gitelman and Elissa Bemporad have done much to expand our understanding of Jewish leadership in the early Soviet Union, yet we still have not grappled with how those leaders entered the Soviet system to begin with. This is especially true regarding Jewish leaders in Ukraine, home to the largest share of Jewish socialists—whether in the Bund (the largest Jewish Marxist party in Russia) or other parties—during the Russian Revolution. To go from being a bundist to a Bolshevik was not merely an act of exchanging party cards. These parties had vastly different understandings of history, revolution, and society; the act of transition required a significant transformation of worldview, akin to religious conversion. Conversion, whether political or religious, may be the result of any of a number of factors, from sincere changes in faith to more practical concerns, including the desire to come close to the victorious government and the safety it provided in a time of war and terror. This article, by studying one perplexing convert, will offer an exploration of this process and its significance and will shed light on those who made the leap to Bolshevism during the defining revolution of the twentieth century.
The subject of this article is a figure named Dovid Lipets. Alternately characterized by his comrades as heroic, self-serving, charismatic, and narcissistic, Lipets’s transformation from anti-Communist leader to Soviet apparatchik was both criticized and rationalized by his comrades. Living at a time when everything, both good and bad, seemed equally possible, Lipets, like so many of his comrades, struggled to reconcile his deeply held convictions with the unimaginable promise and record of accomplishments offered by the Soviet regime. Ukraine, where he spent much of 1917-19, is especially important to his story. It was the setting for unimaginable butchery in 1919 and was also home to approximately half of the Bund’s total membership during the Russian Revolution. Though many of Lipets’s comrades chose different paths, they were responding to the same reality. Understanding Lipets’s story is thus helpful in understanding the story of his entire generation of bundists.
That Lipets’s experience was not especially unusual makes him all the more interesting. After years of stalwart loyalty to the Bund in the face of constant repression, much of the party’s senior leadership, including many of its most influential members—Ester Frumkin, Moshe Rafes, Ar on Vaynshteyn, and Dovid Zaslavsky—joined the Russian Communist Party (RCP) in the years following the 1917 revolution. The historical antipathy between the Bund and the Bolsheviks rendered this development all the more surprising. Relationships between the various Russian Marxist parties were often acrimonious, but those between the Bund and the Bolsheviks were particularly toxic. It had been Lenin who led the campaign against the Bund at the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) in 1903, and he and his followers had in the years since then repeatedly denounced the Bund’s effort to offer a vision for national revolution.
Bundists were not likely candidates for political conversion. Russian revolutionaries were a committed lot, yet even in comparison to their comrades in the RSDLP, the Bund’s members stood out for their loyalty. When Jonathan Frankel compared the Bund to a family rather than a party, he may have been understating the phenomenon. Though the Russian workers’ movement underwent a series of splits in the years leading up to 1917, the Bund alone entered the Russian Revolution as a unified organization. When the party did split, in 1919, the result was traumatic. Forty years after the Revolution, bundist veterans in New York would publish a three-volume biographical dictionary of the Bund. All those who joined the Communists were left out, no matter their role in the party’s history. And yet these individuals did play a role, not only in the history of the Bund but in the history of the Soviet Union as well. Bundist involvement in the Evsektsiia (Evreiskaiia Sektsiia Rossiskoi Kommunistskoi Partii, or Jewish Sections of the Communist Party) was such that the latter was often seen as an extension of the former. In the Soviet Union and abroad, bundists remade both the Jewish world and the global left.
Like many of those recruited into the Bund at the turn of the century, Lipets was neither an authentic proletarian nor a rebellious intellectual. Born in the provincial city of Berdichev in 1886 to a family of well-off merchants, he fell into a category known as polu-inteligentsii, or semi-intellectuals. Possessing educations that were more than rudimentary but less than advanced, fluent in both Russian and Yiddish, and frustrated by the opportunities denied them by Russia’s antisemitic regime, they were ripe for political radicalization. This class proved the source of many of the party’s finest activists and leaders, including those who would dominate the party’s upper ranks in 1917. We do not know if Lipets had a specific reason for joining the Bund, but his joining was a family affair. Along with his sister Fanie, he joined the Bund in 1902, at the tender age of 15 or 16, on the eve of the party’s ascent to prominence in the Jewish community. Lipets’s first steps in the Bund were not especially auspicious. Because of his large nose, a prominent feature that his fellow bundists quickly seized upon, he became the recipient of several teasing nicknames, including Maks der Noz (Max the Nose) and Maks di Kharpa (Max the Shame). To escape such ridicule, Lipets invented a new persona—Max Goldfarb—by which he would become known to much of the Yiddish-speaking world. As Goldfarb, he rose quickly through the ranks of the Bund; by the 1905 revolution, he was a member of the organization’s Central Committee and a key element of the party’s leadership and intelligentsia.
During the Revolution of 1905, both Goldfarb and the Bund reached their mutual apogees. Enjoying a near monopoly on work in the Jewish community, the Bund surged in popularity. The Bund’s combat detachments gained fame for their role in defending Russia’s Jews against the wave of pogroms carried out by the counter-revolutionary forces. Henry Tobias has described how the party took on the role of a state within the state, emerging as the de facto source of authority in many Jewish communities. As state authority crumbled under the strain of revolution, the Bund filled the ensuing vacuum, adjudicating business disputes and divorces. During these years, Goldfarb shone. An entrancing, fiery speaker, he emerged as one of the Bund’s leading orators; numerous accounts praise his eloquence. Working primarily with youth in the Dvinsk region, Goldfarb became a popular figure at rallies; fellow bundist Leib Blekhman, better known under his pseudonym Avrom der Tate, recounted in his memoir how people would flock to events where Goldfarb was on the program only to hear him speak. In 1906, at the age of 19, Goldfarb served as chairman of the Bund’s Seventh Party Conference, presiding over efforts to make sense of the events of the previous year. Although he was arrested at the conference by tsarist authorities, Goldfarb was released three months later during the 1906 amnesty, and he quickly resumed his activities among the Bund’s leadership. In 1907 he joined the Bund’s delegation to the RSDLP’s assembly in London, when the schism between the Menshevik and Bolshevik factions became permanent. In no rush to return to Russia, he remained in western Europe and earned a Ph.D. in economics from the Free University of Belgium. He spent the years after 1907, when the tenure of Pyotr Stolypin as prime minister of Russia nearly spelled the death of Russia’s radical movement, engaged as a writer, speaker, and Central Committee member.
Often considered imperial Russia’s last great statesman, Stolypin was appointed prime minister in 1906 and given a broad mandate from the tsar to prevent a recurrence of the revolution that nearly brought down the empire. Among the steps he took was a harsh crackdown on Russia’s radicals. No party was spared; thousands of activists were executed, imprisoned, or exiled. After two years of revolt, the Russian revolutionary movement was already suffering from fatigue; now many activists considered the price of participation too high, and it seemed that Russia’s entire revolutionary movement might fade into oblivion. During this period, which was cursed by bundist A. Litvak (Khayim Yankl Helfand) as “the bad years,” all of Russia’s revolutionary parties saw their membership decline; the Bund’s membership dwindled from approximately 40,000 in 1905 to only a few thousand in 1910. Goldfarb was one of those few who remained in the party through 1912, when a massacre of striking gold miners in Siberia gave new life to the Russian workers’ movement. Riding a wave of popular fury, the movement regained its momentum, and the Bund’s membership returned to approximately 30,000.
With resurgence, however, came repression. In 1913, Goldfarb, fearing that he was marked for assassination by right-wing militias, left for America as a bundist emissary. There he would remain for the next four years. Upon his arrival, Goldfarb easily integrated into the Jewish labor movement in America. He began by writing for Der yidisher sotsyalist, published by the Jewish Socialist Federation (JSF), and he built up close relationships with many union leaders, including the former bundist Sidney Hillman, who would become the leader of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, one of the largest unions in New York City’s heavily Jewish garment sector. In the spring of 1915, Abraham Cahan created the position of labor editor at Forverts specifically for Goldfarb. For the next two years, Goldfarb took his duties seriously, covering proceedings in the labor movement, with special attention paid to the garment unions. However, Goldfarb proved a better revolutionary than journalist. His fact-laden and methodical writing style had worked well for his activist colleagues, who were well schooled in revolutionary theory, but it came across as pedantic in a popular newspaper such as Forverts. Goldfarb’s colleagues mocked him as someone who merely “pretended” to be a writer.
Even as he struggled to gain respect as a writer for Forverts, Goldfarb’s time in New York proved a boon to him as an activist. For Jewish radicals, New York of the early twentieth century was as fine an exile as could be found. Although there had been some initial coolness between bundists and American Jewish socialists, by the time of Goldfarb’s exile, relations had warmed considerably, and the JSF had come to function as a sort of Bund in America. Goldfarb befriended many other radicals; two relationships proved particularly fateful. The first was with Moissaye Olgin, a staff writer at Forverts who would later lead the pro-Soviet newspaper Morgen Frayhayt. The other was with Leon Trotsky. Goldfarb and Trotsky were not only friends but housemates; the two lived together in the Bronx during the latter’s brief sojourn in America in early 1917, and the friendship would prove pivotal in Goldfarb’s future ascendance in the Soviet Union.
Goldfarb accepted his exile. The revolutionary movement in Russia seemed moribund, with nearly the entire revolutionary leadership either exiled or imprisoned. Rather than nursing dreams of returning to Russia, Goldfarb made a place for himself in New York’s left-wing political arena. He found himself at home in organizations with ideas and constituencies similar to those of the Bund, such as the JSF, the Forward Association, the Arbeter Ring, and the garment unions. Goldfarb emerged as a leader of the American labor movement’s radical wing, criticizing the American Federation of Labor for focusing on the economic improvement of workers’ conditions and neglecting the cultivation of their political consciousness. Goldfarb saw the labor movement in spiritual terms, proclaiming Brownsville, a neighborhood in Brooklyn with high levels of union membership, a “modern Jerusalem” in which organized labor fulfilled the role of the “temples” for the working class. Goldfarb encouraged his readers to see unions as a means of enlightening the working class, pointing to a vest-makers union that built a center in the countryside where art and music classes were offered in Yiddish, creating a space for both relaxation and edification. New York City offered plenty of battles for a radical Jew; Goldfarb was at home.
When in 1917 a bread riot in Petrograd turned into a revolution that overthrew the Russian monarchy, many exiles hurried back to Russia. Goldfarb remained in New York, content to view the revolution from afar. Making use of correspondence and reading Russian newspapers shipped to the United States, he attempted to explain the unfolding events for his audience in Forverts. Quickly grasping the extent of the unrest in Russia, Goldfarb exulted that it was “not a simple overthrow of the government, [but] a true, great, revolution.” Seeing that the working class in Russia in 1917 was much stronger than it had been in the French Revolution or the Revolution of 1905, and deeply impressed that many of the soldiers in the Russian army had transferred their loyalty to the revolutionary Soviets, which they had not done in 1905, Goldfarb expected that the proletariat would emerge as the dominant class in Russia. Convinced that the March revolution represented “the time of the messiah” itself, Goldfarb praised the land he had fled four years prior.
However, not all Goldfarb’s expectations for the Russian Revolution were so positive. Drawing on his experiences in 1905, Goldfarb feared that counterrevolutionary forces would use “Jewish blood” to “quench the fires of the Russian Revolution.” Russia’s old regime had long exploited internal divisions to keep the population in check. Although the Provisional Government was dominated by moderates who had lifted all anti-Jewish laws, Goldfarb feared that antisemitic sentiment might remain a powerful force among the masses. In Russia, he feared, “freedom and Jewish pogroms [had] a strange connection, a wild insanity.” Given the high stakes for Jews, Goldfarb saw the Bund’s importance as paramount. Recycling the sacred rhetoric he had applied to labor unions in America, Goldfarb argued that the Bund was more than a mere party or political organization: it was a “temple,” a “trailblazer,” and a “fortress” for the Jewish proletariat, a means for Jews to participate in the revolution as Jews. In Russia specifically, Goldfarb believed that the Bund, which had joined the emerging soviets of workers’ deputies, was the “only hope of the Jewish workers in the shop and on the … street.”
On May 25, 1917, some three months after the revolution, Goldfarb went to participate. Free from all tsarist oppression, the Bund was growing rapidly in Russia and desperately needed experienced hands to guide the party. Hoping that he might assume a leadership role, the Bund had requested that Goldfarb return to Russia, and the veteran activist had obeyed. Upon his departure, Goldfarb received a front-page sendoff from Forverts, thanking him for his service and wishing him luck in his revolutionary endeavors. Traveling on the SS Oscar II to Sweden and then on to Russia, Goldfarb joined some eight hundred other “children of Russia” jubilantly returning home to Russia from their various exiles.
When Goldfarb arrived in Russia in June 1917, he passed through Petrograd, where he encountered his old acquaintance Daniel Tsharni, now a Yiddish cultural critic. In his memoir, Tsharni described how Goldfarb, basking in the glory of his triumphant return to a free Russia after years of exile, “majestically marched through the erupted streets of Petrograd, like a general who had led his victorious army into a newly conquered land.” Unwilling to continue living the life of dissemblance forced upon him prior to the revolution, Goldfarb shed his nom de guerre, reassuming the name that he had been born with: Dovid Lipets. Goldfarb survived only in articles published in the United States by Forverts, for which he continued writing as a correspondent. In the new Russia, he neither wanted nor needed the false identity of the underground. Lipets was not alone in this. Throughout the Bund, activists shed their pseudonyms and false identities: Vaynshteyn stopped using the name Rakhmiel, Mark Liber attempted to return to Mikhael Goldman, and Raphael Abramovitch tried to resume his life as Raphael Rein. In some cases, this effort failed; Abramovitch and Liber were so well-known under their assumed identities that the Jewish masses could not recognize them under their real names. Lipets was one of those who made the change successfully.
Lipets’s return to the Bund occurred at a critical moment in the party’s history. The organization was enjoying a tremendous renaissance in Russia. The veteran Lipets was struck by the passion and skill demonstrated by the younger bundists in organizing local elections throughout the former Pale of Settlement. As he traveled through Belarus and Ukraine giving speeches, Lipets remarked on the enthusiasm and adaptability of the party’s new recruits. It was to them that he attributed the Bund’s successes in many local elections in the former Pale. Lipets himself emerged as an important regional operator in Ukraine and a member of the South Russian Regional Committee. Lipets does not seem to have been bothered that he was not assigned to the more prestigious Central Committee; rather, he seems to have enjoyed the opportunity to work on the ground. In a time and place in which publishing resources were scant, Lipets’s skill as an orator made him a vital asset to the Bund.
His presence was sorely needed. In the struggle for political dominance over the Jewish community, the Zionists, the Bund’s archrivals, seemed unstoppable. Even before the war, they had generally been the most popular party among Russia’s Jews. Now, drawing on the political support they received from the British Empire and the success of the British military in the Middle East, they surged ahead of the Bund. In June 1917, the Zionists would count over 140,000 members and several times as many supporters. The Bund’s 30,000 members, though close to their 1905 numbers and more impressive considering that they had mobilized such a number following the loss of Poland and its Jews to Germany, simply proved inadequate to rivaling the Zionists.
Lipets alone could not turn back the Zionist tide, but he did win a few important battles. He was elected mayor and chairman of the local kehillah (Jewish community) of Berdichev, his hometown and the fourth-largest city in Ukraine, a victory made all the more remarkable by Berdichev’s history as a Zionist stronghold. We do not know how Lipets overcame Berdichev’s Zionist inclinations, but his status as a charismatic native son could hardly have hurt his campaign. He also joined the Ukrainian Central Rada, the semiautonomous government of Ukraine proclaimed upon the abdication of Nicholas II. The Rada, founded by socialists, was a comfortable workspace for bundists. Lipets in particular was known for using the Rada to agitate for Jewish interests, holding the body accountable to its own stated ideals of national pluralism and internationalism.
However, despite his own success, Lipets became increasingly pessimistic as the sheer scale of Russia’s problems became clearer to him. World War I had brought unprecedented destruction to Russia’s heavily Jewish western borderlands. Throughout the Russian Empire, the war had pushed the infrastructure and economy to the brink of collapse; even though food could be found in the countryside, there was little way to transport it to the towns and cities, much less to pay for it once it was there. Adding to Russia’s miseries was the nationality question, as national minorities sought greater autonomy from Russia or even outright independence. The Provisional Government, desperate to defend the integrity of the borders of the Russian Empire, was loath to grant either. In Ukraine’s case, the issue was further complicated by the lack of clear borders delineating Ukraine from its neighbors; Lipets bewailed that even the Rada seemed uncertain as to which governorates constituted Ukraine and which belonged to neighboring countries. Lipets began to fear for the future of the Provisional Government, worrying that it relied too heavily on an increasingly fragile center that was failing under the strain of ever more powerful extremes. Only the specter of counterrevolution, Lipets despaired, was keeping the various factions vaguely united.
Lipets’s fears proved well founded when, in October, Bolshevik militias seized control of Petrograd and Moscow, bringing Lenin to power. In elections for the Constituent Assembly soon after, the Bolsheviks won commandingly in Russia’s cities and military garrisons. The Social Revolutionary Party won the largest number of votes but split into left- and right-wing factions. The former had aligned with the Bolsheviks. With strong support from the military and in the face of a divided opposition, the Bolsheviks’ hold over Russia was secure. For the moment, at least, the Bolsheviks ruled Russia, and their creed of heady utopianism and accelerated social development became official state policy. The October Revolution placed Lipets in an uncomfortable position. He had come to be sympathetic toward the Bolsheviks, praising them as “righteous” for their uncompromising opposition to Russia’s involvement in World War I and contrasting them to the “evil ones of social-patriotism,” Social Democrats who were swayed by Russia’s emergence as a revolutionary state to support Russia’s war effort. At the same time, the means used by the Bolsheviks to take and hold power horrified Lipets. As he saw it, the Soviet government was the product of a military coup rather than a mass uprising. Without popular support, he feared, the revolution would lead not to social democracy but to pogroms and lawlessness, a tragically accurate prediction.
The Constituent Assembly proved especially heartbreaking for Lipets. The assembly had long been a dream of Russian radicals: an institution capable of reconstructing the very foundation of the Russian state through democratic means. Many revolutionaries, Lipets among them, saw the Constituent Assembly as the apotheosis of the revolution. However, it soon became clear to Lipets that the Bolsheviks would not allow the assembly to live up to its potential. Rather, Lipets lamented, the assembly took to rolling around in “blood and filth,” hanging “in the air, weakly, without blood and without power.” When, in the early hours of January 6, 1918, a chorus of tired and drunken soldiers forced an end to the first and only meeting of the Constituent Assembly, barring the doors to those who attempted to resume its meeting the next day, Lipets mourned how the assembly, at the hands of the Bolsheviks, had become no more than a “pale shadow of a beautiful dream.”
While Lipets mourned the fall of the Constituent Assembly, many of his comrades began looking positively toward the Communist Party. The fact that the RCP, it seemed, had successfully taken power led many to forgive its theoretical unorthodoxies. Moreover, the RCP had changed from the organization that had opposed the Bund so adamantly before the war. In July 1917, the Bolsheviks accepted the Bund’s proposal made at the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets to grant all nations autonomy and, as Brandon McGeever has demonstrated, vigorously participated in efforts throughout that year to combat antisemitism. In early 1918, the RCP had formed a Jewish commissariat to oversee an autonomous Jewish community in Russia, and later that year it established Jewish sections within its own ranks, providing bundists with an arena in which to continue their work in the Jewish community. By doing so, the party of Lenin managed a remarkable transformation in the eyes of many bundists, from an implacable foe to a potential vehicle for the Bund’s apotheosis.
Despite these developments, bundist recruitment into the RCP was slow until the outbreak of the German Revolution in late October 1918. The Bund’s heartland in Ukraine and Belarus had spent much of 1918 under German occupation, and the outbreak of a revolution in that country accelerated the flow of bundists into the RCP. The spread of revolution to heavily industrialized Germany, long the focus of the Marxist imagination, made it seem that the Communists were right and that the collapse of the capitalist system was at hand. For bundists already leaning toward the Communists, this was the push they needed. In Ukraine, Moshe Rafes, chair of the Bund’s South Russian Regional Committee and future historian of the party, argued that the German Revolution drove all “shopkeeper elements” from the Bund while invigorating “the left—the truly revolutionary elements, for whom socialism was not only a beautiful theory but a concrete task of class struggle.” As a result, he recalled, “from November 1918, the Bund was without fear to revisit its entire ideology,” including its attitude toward the Communists. Abramovitch noted a similar process in Belarus, where he found Vaynshteyn and Frumkin, once stalwart opponents of Lenin, utterly transformed by the outbreak of revolution in Germany, the same change he saw unfold for Rafes in Ukraine.
The result was a rift in the party. In November 1918, two bureaus of the Bund emerged in Kiev. Rafes, who had been a leader of the Bund’s right wing at the outset of the revolution, led the larger, pro-Communist faction. The second, smaller, anti-Communist group emerged under the leadership of Litvak, Lipets, and Sore Foks, a fiery young activist from Kiev who, with her background as a seamstress, was seen as one of the Bund’s few authentically proletarian leaders. Known as the Social Democratic Bund, or Bund-SDs, this faction was emboldened by the successful coup by a group associated with the Rada against German-backed Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskii in November 1918. Looking to an independent Ukraine as a possible alternative to the Soviet state, the Bund-SDs pledged their support to the new government. This new government, known as the Directorate, became a beacon for the Bund in Ukraine, which hoped it would continue in the politically progressive and nationally pluralist vein of the Rada.
At first, the two bureaus tried to avoid any actions that would formally split the party, including any official declarations of loyalty or opposition to the Communist Party, but this could not last. Upon the Red Army’s conquest of Kiev in early 1919, a resolution by Rafes declaring the Kiev organization of the Bund to be the Jewish Communist Workers’ Bund passed by a vote of 135-79. The Bund-SDs proceeded to form an independent party, which maintained control over the Folkstsaytung and, under the new name Tsayt-Fragen, in February 1919 published a number of pamphlets attempting to marshal support for their cause. The faction led by Litvak and Lipets attempted to resist Soviet power in Ukraine, protesting the mass confiscations and arrests emblematic of War Communism while pleading with the Bund’s members to join their cause in fighting for a “Social Democratic” platform rather than a “Communist” one.
Unfortunately for the Bund-SDs, the state they had hoped would provide an alternative to the emerging Soviet state proved a horrifying disappointment. Although nominally heirs to the Rada, the Directorate’s rule was marked by a variety of nationalism that became only more brutal through the course of fighting. The result proved devastating for Ukraine’s Jews, a slaughter exceeded only by the Holocaust. In the middle of the bloodletting was Lipets, still serving as mayor of Berdichev. In his own accounts of the slaughter, Lipets described his sorrow as Ukraine, which in early 1918 had risen “as in a fairytale… and set off on a campaign for the bright future,” dedicating itself to creating a brotherhood of nations, mere months later played host to “a wild dance of the dead.”
The history of the pogroms during the Russian Civil War is fraught. Oleg Budnitskii has placed the origins of the pogroms in the antisemitic attitudes of the Russian military, attitudes disseminated broadly throughout Russian society through the mass mobilization carried out during World War I. The 15 million persons conscripted into the Russian military as part of the wartime mobilization entered an organization that was suspicious toward Jews during the best of times and murderous toward them during World War I. These veterans, indoctrinated in antisemitism, became the backbone of the armies of the Russian Civil War, all of which committed pogroms similar to those committed by the imperial army during World War I. However, they did not commit them equally. In the case of the Red Army, the leadership publicly opposed pogroms and punished the perpetrators in the relatively rare event that their forces committed pogroms. In the case of the Directorate, the situation was otherwise. As Christopher Gilley has demonstrated, the Directorate did much to encourage antisemitism, and the Ukrainian People’s Army and its militias correspondingly committed a far greater share of the total number of pogroms.
These pogroms did not save the Directorate. The Red Army easily defeated the Ukrainian forces, which engaged in still more pogroms as they retreated, sowing further destruction in the already devastated Jewish communities of central and western Ukraine. Travel became increasingly dangerous for Jews; Lipets reported that those who dared take the train would be “robbed, tortured, and killed” by roving gangs of pogromists. In an effort to count the dead, Lipets estimated that by the first week of January 1918, approximately 50,000 Jews had died, twice as many had been wounded, and some 100,000 had been made homeless. Historians have since estimated that approximately 30,000 Jews were murdered during the pogroms and another 120,000 died of indirect causes, including injuries, disease, and exposure. All told, some 150,000 Jews, 10 percent of the Jewish population of Ukraine, died in the pogroms between 1917 and 1921, the largest share at the hands of the forces of the Directorate in the winter of 1918-19. The role of the Red Army in defeating the nationalist and White armies that bore responsibility for the pogroms accelerated the movement of bundists into the Communist Party. In Ukraine, where the antisemitic violence of the Russian Civil War reached its most lethal heights, most of the Bund’s members flocked to the Communists and the protection offered by the Red Army and Cheka (Chrezvychainaiia Kommissia, or Extraordinary Commission), both of which were instrumental in defending against the pogroms that the Ukrainian and White armies had unleashed.
Lipets’s opposition to the Communists did not protect him, nor did his associations with the Ukrainian national movement. On January 4, 1919, this reality was brought home to Lipets directly when a special strike detachment of the Ukrainian People’s Army led by Colonel Palienko arrived at the Berdichev train station. The battalion had been recruited out of the prisons of Kiev and consisted largely of men who had been imprisoned for insurgency against the Skoropadskii regime. Upon arrival, they immediately began attacking Jews, using one railroad car to store corpses and two others to hold prisoners.
On the first day, the violence was restricted to the train station. However, at seven o’clock the next morning, Berdichev’s police chief, by the name of Suprunenko, warned Lipets that Palienko’s unit was advancing on the city with “a firm intention to crack down on [the] local Jewish population” and that Berdichev’s own militias lacked both the military strength and the legal authority to stop them. Suprunenko did, however, offer to do what he could for Lipets and his family. The pogrom in the city itself began at noon on January 5. Palienko’s forces seized control of the main streets and small detachments split off into the neighborhoods. The first victims were the city militia, who were disarmed; Jewish members of the militia were subjected to especially brutal beatings. Lipets recalled that the few soldiers in the city who tried to resist the pogrom were driven off with an armored car. The battalion then proceeded to plunder the Jewish community, beating the men and raping the women. Killings, Lipets noted, were generally rare. Some Jews were taken back to the train station and placed in railway carriages, where they were kept while Ukrainian troops starved and beat them, torments accompanied by chants of “death to the Jews!” Non-Jews who tried to intervene were warned off by the troops, who assured the townspeople that they were only interested in the Jews.
Eventually, Palienko’s troops reached Lipets. “A small detachment of haidamaki [Ukrainian nationalist militias], armed to the teeth, burst in [to the apartment], with wild cries of ‘death to the kikes, where are the Jewish militiamen, where is the money?'” Lipets recalled. He and those with him considered resisting; they had a number of men and possessed at least one rifle and a revolver. However, a well-organized detachment of Palienko’s forces was outside with a machine gun and an armored car, dimming the prospects of resistance significantly. Instead, Lipets bribed them to go away, paying them 1,500 rubles to leave them alone. However, the violence continued in the rest of Berdichev. By 3:00 p.m., Lipets recounted, the entire city was filled with the sound of shooting while the battalion’s choir sang grotesquely along. By 5:00 p.m., Palienko’s forces had returned to the train station, but local bandits, joined by members of the local garrison, continued the looting. By the time the violence abated, 17 Jews had been killed, approximately 40 severely wounded, and an untold number robbed and beaten. Even those who survived without physical wounds found themselves bearing emotional scars from the experience. Shakhne Epshteyn, a close friend of Lipets, wrote that before the pogrom, the latter had always been “full of life and initiative” but after had “utterly collapsed.”
The next day, Lipets asked the commander of the Northern Group of the Ukrainian People’s Army, Major General Volodymyr Oskilko, to order the release of all Jews taken prisoner during the pogrom, to punish those responsible for the pogrom, to compensate the victims, and to provide weapons to the Jewish community for self-defense. Oskilko declined. Instead, the general blamed the local soviet for provoking the pogrom, claiming that the Ukrainian forces had been fired upon from the soviet’s headquarters and warning that the city should never have allowed Jews in their local militia. On January 9, a funeral was organized for those killed in the pogrom. Ukrainian soldiers fired into the crowd, killing two more and wounding three.
Following the funeral, Lipets went to Kiev to bring his grievances directly to Volodymyr Vynnychenko, president of the Directorate. In hindsight, it may seem naive for Lipets to have thought that he could successfully appeal to law in a time of chaos. However, even in the emerging havoc, the government retained significant power. Lipets’s history in Ukraine emboldened him further; not only had he been involved in the Rada, but he had also followed the Ukrainian government when it fled Kiev for Zhitomir during the first Communist invasion in January 1918, one of the few nonethnic Ukrainians to do so. It made sense for Lipets to think the government might be able to intervene on behalf of the Jews of Berdichev. His optimism was rewarded. Vynnychenko gave his word to punish the perpetrators of the pogrom and prevent future attacks against the Jewish community. Those imprisoned by Palienko’s troops were released, albeit slowly.
Vynnychenko’s actions proved sufficient to keep Lipets from reconsidering his allegiances. Even as many of his colleagues flocked to the Soviet regime, Lipets remained skeptical of the Communists. That February, along with Sore Foks and A. Litvak, he signed a circular, published in the Bund-SD newspaper Naye tsayt and addressed to all bundist organizations and personnel in Ukraine, urging them to reject Bolshevik authority. Protesting the mass confiscations and arrests emblematic of War Communism, the three pleaded with the Bund’s members to fight for a Social Democratic future and against the Communist one offered by the advancing Red Army. Accusing the faction of the Ukrainian Bund supporting the RCP, now known as the Communist Bund or KomBund, of driving a wedge into the party, they called on all bundists “to only defend the Bund” from its enemies.
The pivotal moment in Lipets’s journey to Communism occurred in April. We do not know why he converted, but three events occurred in February and March that likely played a role in changing his views. The first was that Vynnychenko, who had proven so helpful after the Berdichev pogrom, stepped down as president of the Directorate on February 10. He was replaced by Semyon Petliura, the chief of the military forces responsible for the antisemitic carnage in Ukraine. Underscoring this was the second factor, a particularly horrific pogrom in Proskurov, a town approximately 175 miles southwest of Kiev. The attack occurred on February 15, days after Petliura’s ascension to the presidency, when Ukrainian forces under the command of Ivan Semesenko killed between 1,500 and 2,000 Jews in the space of three hours. To save ammunition, the troops preferred swords and bayonets. Semenko’s order to his soldiers commanding the pogrom was explicitly issued in the name of Petliura. Troops who refused the order were either threatened with execution or dismissed. The horror of the pogroms, combined with the impact of the German Revolution, accelerated changing attitudes toward the RCP throughout the Bund. In March 1919, the Bund held its Eleventh Party Congress in Minsk, where the party, led by activists such as Vaynshteyn and Frumkin, voted to support the Communist Party. Joining the Communist Party now received the stamp of approval from the Bund’s highest organs and most-respected members. That April, Lipets fled to Kiev and met with General Mikhail Frunze, one of the Red Army’s most capable commanders. There is no known record of the conversation between the two; what is known is that when it was over, Lipets, along with his sister and brother-in-law, Fanie and Dovid Nirenberg, also members of the Bund-SDs in Ukraine, joined the Communist Party.
That the RCP had created a government and an army that was both able and willing to protect Jews was certainly a practical concern for Jews, but the party represented something else as well, especially for radicals. From a theoretical standpoint, it demonstrated the viability of Soviet internationalism. Much else had changed as well. The Bund had decisively soured on democracy; the experience of the civil war had taught them only how easily the masses could be attracted to the Petliuras of the world. Elections had lost their luster, and the use of military force against one’s opponents was no longer as inconceivable or as distasteful as it had been in the halcyon days before the civil war. Lastly, as Zvi Gitelman has argued, by 1919, the prospects of a Menshevik government were nonexistent—one supported either the Soviets or the Whites.
Lipets remained committed to the idea of the Ukrainian Directorate for longer than one might think possible. Ultimately, however, he could not ignore that the Soviets had come to represent the greatest opportunity for advancing revolution or that the Directorate, which only a few months earlier had been held up as an alternative to the Soviets, had proved unable or unwilling to stop the tide of antisemitic violence committed in its name. And so, the man once known as both Max Goldfarb and Dovid Lipets oriented his political ideology away from the faith of his youth and toward the new reality in Russia. Setting aside his old identities, he reinvented himself as David Petrovskii, and he entered the ranks of the Communist Party. The change in loyalty came at a price. By entering the Communist Party, Lipets cut himself off from what remained of the Bund. A man who had been exiled and imprisoned for his role in the Bund, who had once described the Bund as a “temple” for the Jewish worker, was erased from that party’s history.
Petrovskii enjoyed a rapid rise in the Communist Party. He was a talented activist, and his friendship with Trotsky, now the people’s commissar of army and navy affairs, ensured that his talents were not wasted. Immediately after his conversion, Petrovskii began working as a political agitator in Kiev for the Red Army. When White forces commanded by General Anton Denikin captured Kiev in the summer of 1919, Petrovskii was sent to the Red Army’s military academy in Moscow to lecture to army commanders, a group drawn from the lower ranks of the tsarist army to replace the tsarist officers on whom the Red Army still relied, a task he began in the autumn of 1919. Petrovskii became the director of political affairs of the War College soon after arriving in Moscow in 1919 and held onto that post until March of 1920, when he received a promotion to become the director of the military academy itself, where he served until April 1924.
It was in this position that Petrovskii’s transformation into a Communist reached its highest point. His position as director of the War College was not only secure but was glamorous as well. When a group of American labor activists, including Petrovksii’s old friends Sidney Hillman, Benjamin Shlesinger, and Moissaye Olgin, visited Moscow in 1920, they were shocked to see the man they had known as Max Goldfarb, the pedantic writer and charming speaker from New York, leading a parade in Moscow. Still more astounding was the sight of Alexei Brusilov, the famed tsarist general who now served in the Red Army, riding up on a white horse and dismounting before their old friend, who was now Brusilov’s superior officer. The sight of a general of the old regime deferring to their comrade struck all three of the Americans, none more so than Olgin. Until this point, Olgin had been a critic of Communism, accusing Lenin of overreaching in his efforts to force a revolution on an unready population. However, as Tsharni, who was also at the parade, recalled, the interaction between Petrovskii and Brusilov had “awakened the evil inclination for Bolshevism,” setting Olgin on the course toward becoming a lifelong supporter of the Soviet Union and a leading figure in the American Communist Party.
Ironically, it was a conflict with Frunze and Trotsky that led to Lipets’s downfall. The RCP faced a fierce divide in attitudes toward the Red Army. Petrovskii hoped that the Red Army could be something other than a conventional military, an unproductive body brought out for war and confined to the barracks in times of peace. He hoped to build a force for both conventional and class warfare, a body of politically conscious leaders able to direct the workers in advancing the revolution in war and peace. By integrating the commanders into the civilian world, Petrovskii hoped to create a self-sufficient military leadership, avoiding the social “parasitism” of a professional officer corps. In contrast, Frunze and Trotsky remained convinced that a conventional, professional officer corps was required to ensure the security of the Soviet Union in an uncertain world. Grigori Zinoviev and Lenin, compelled by their experiences during the Russian Civil War, sided with Frunze and Trotsky. In April 1924, with little regard for his contributions to the Red Army during the civil war or for his prestigious position at the War College, Petrovskii was reassigned to the Communist International (Comintern). He was dispatched to London under the pseudonym A. J. Bennett, a clear demotion. Again, Petrovskii reinvented himself. With no evident ill will toward those who ignominiously removed him from the project he had dedicated nearly five years of his life to, he devoted himself to his career in the Comintern. Petrovskii did well there and gained back much of his old influence and stature. After serving in England, he returned to the Soviet Union in 1927 and the following year was appointed to the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI), as head of the Anglo-American Department; his time spent in America served him well in his interactions with that country’s radical circles.
However, his past began to catch up with him. Many American Communists, including Max Bedacht, a rising figure in the American Communist Party, continued to hold Petrovskii’s scathing criticisms of Lenin and the Bolsheviks against him. Arguing that it was impossible for the Comintern to function under Petrovskii’s leadership, Bedacht wrote a bitter letter in February 1929 to Bertram Wolfe, the American Communist Party’s delegate to the ECCI. Claiming to speak for the American party as a whole, Bedacht accused Petrovskii of having utilized “gangster tactics” against left-wing socialists and stated that it was “a bitter experience” for American Communists who had “gone through the struggle against the Goldfarbs here [in America] … to be treated like schoolboys by the same Goldfarb, posing as a schoolmaster of Bolshevism.” Ultimately, Bedacht claimed that the appointment of Petrovskii to a senior position overseeing the American Communist Party constituted “deceit and hypocrisy” and charged that it would “lead to a crisis in our Party which can only end in disintegration and weakening of the Comintern itself.”
Bedacht’s letter seems to have had the desired effect, although perhaps not in the manner Bedacht had intended. In 1930, Petrovskii was removed from the Comintern, but by way of promotion. He ascended to the presidium of the Supreme Council of the National Economy and served in senior positions in the People’s Commissariat of Trade and Industry and the Main Department of the Educational Institution of the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry. Together with his wife Rose, whom he had met in London, he lived a glamorous life in Moscow, in a sizable four-bedroom flat on First Kopitelskii Lane, just north of the Sadovaya Spaskaya section of Moscow’s Garden Ring. Yet, as impressive as his rise was, it was not fast enough to outrun his past, which returned to haunt him as paranoia began to sweep the Soviet Union in the mid-1930s. Interestingly, the likeliest source of his downfall, his close affiliation with Trotsky, seems to have played a minimal role in his being purged. His affiliation with the Rada and opposition to the Communists in the years immediately following the revolution appear only briefly in official documents concerning Petrovskii’s 1934 reprimand for having supported the Ukrainian Rada and for harboring “petit-bourgeois tendencies.”
Yet Petrovskii was aware of the danger emerging in the Soviet Union following the murder of Sergei Kirov in 1934, the assassination that functioned as the catalyst for the Great Purge. His sister Fanie, who had joined the Communist party along with her brother and husband in 1919, had since emerged as a state prosecutor in the Soviet Union. Though she could not have known the extent of the oncoming Great Purge, she does seem to have known that a purge similar to those experienced in 1929 and 1933 was on the horizon. Petrovskii had an instinct for knowing when to leave, one that had served him well in 1907 and 1913. Again sensing the danger in staying, he and his wife made plans to go. Petrovskii had planned a business trip to America, and Rose in fact did go to visit her sister in London; it seems that the family hoped to use their travels as an opportunity to defect. However, they had failed to acquire an exit visa for their son, Alexei. Unwilling to leave without him, they remained in the Soviet Union. On March 11, 1937, agents of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (Narodnyy Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del, NKVD) arrested Petrovskii, and a Soviet court condemned him to death for “sabotage and terrorism” and for membership in an anti-Bolshevik organization during the revolution. That September, he and his wife were executed, their property seized by the state, and their son sent to an orphanage.
The arbitrary brutality of the Russian Revolution shattered both lives and parties. The Bund in Russia was destroyed, its members having joined the Communist Party, fled into exile, or died over the course of the revolution. Having lost its entire organization in Russia, the Bund survived only in Poland. Members of the Bund in Russia suffered a myriad of fates, most of them tragic. Foks, who had worked closely with Lipets through the revolution and the civil war, remained staunchly opposed to the Communist Party. The Cheka repeatedly arrested and interrogated her until, mentally and emotionally broken, she threw herself off a bridge into the Dnieper River on July 24, 1919. Litvak, who had loved Foks, returned to his exile in the United States a bitter and angry man. Abramovitch and Liber were both arrested as well; the former was forced into yet another exile abroad, and the latter was sent to Siberia. Even the children of those who resisted the Communist Party found themselves targeted. Abramovitch’s son, a journalist, was captured by Soviet agents in Barcelona while covering the Spanish Civil War, brought to Moscow, and executed. Those who joined the Communists also suffered. Frumkin, Rafes, and Vaynshteyn found themselves in the whirlwind of the purges in the late 1930s. The first two died in the gulags, Vaynshteyn by his own hand in a prison cell in 1938.
Alone, Lipets can be dismissed as an aberration, his conversion the act of a desperate individual trapped in the most horrifying of circumstances. But Lipets was not alone. The majority of the Bund in Russia, including a great many senior activists, made the same journey. That few bundists actually joined the Communist Party, as noted by Gitelman and Agurskii, says less about the will of the Bund’s membership than about the changing nature of the Communist Party. The Bund aspired to be a mass organization, and its membership reflected this. Both Abramovitch and Fuks complained about the lack of devotion and discipline among those joining the Bund in 1917. Nevertheless, beginning with its Eighth Party Congress in March 1919, the Communist Party actively transformed itself into the professional apparatus of a modern state. Any bundists considered insufficiently loyal or proficient would not have been considered for membership or would have been quickly removed from their positions. This explains why few young bundists successfully joined the RCP, whereas individuals such as Frumkin, Lipets, Rafes, and Vaynshteyn, all fiercely devoted bundists, went on to successful careers in the RCP, befitting their status as revolutionaries par excellence. Both the South Russian Regional Committee and the Bund as a whole voted to support the Communist regime. In neither case did any of the anti-Communist leaders suggest any electoral dishonesty, and we must take the votes in Ukraine and Minsk as the sincere will of the party.
It is tempting to ascribe their transformation to careerism. In 1939, in an obituary for Lipets and Frumkin, Noam Khanin described the former as an authentic revolutionary, albeit one who was likely to align with the majority in order to advance his own cause. Shmuel Agurskii made a similar criticism, claiming that Lipets had joined the Communists because they offered greater opportunities for advancement. I do not consider these answers convincing. Lipets did not convert when the Bolsheviks seized power, nor did he do so when it became clear that the Bolsheviks would win. Far from it. He joined the Communist Party at a time when the survival of the Soviet regime was very much in jeopardy, when the White forces were gathering for offensives against Moscow and Petrograd. To the extent that the prospect of power played a role in Lipets’s conversion, it seems that it was a hunger less for power or glory than for what power offered—the opportunity to reconstruct Jewish life in Russia. Moreover, the fact that the Communists were offering power to bundists was itself a forceful theoretical statement, demonstrating that the nascent Communist state was one in which Jews could be placed in positions of power, even in sensitive positions in the military.
The interest of bundists in the Soviet regime, the one actor in the Russian Civil War both willing and able to combat the pogroms, is seemingly obvious. Combatting pogroms was an essential aspect of bundist identity; it was in that role that the Bund had gained the admiration of so many of Russia’s Jews beginning in the early twentieth century. It seems only natural that Jews would flock to the force most involved in their protection in the bloody years following the Russian Revolution. Even Litvak, an avowed anti-Communist, lent his support to the Red Army when Denikin’s forces captured Kiev in June 1919.97 All this is true, but by stopping the inquiry here, we miss the most important point of all: Communist suppression of pogroms was important not only for utilitarian reasons but also for theoretical ones, in that it proved the Soviets right. The role of the Red Army and the Cheka in defending Jews made the powerful political statement that the Communist Party’s ideas and methods, though far removed from traditional social democracy, had proven themselves in the heat of battle. The Soviet defense of the Jews spoke to the RCP’s commitment to the pursuit of a socialist federation of nations in which minorities were guaranteed a broad set of rights, including the most important right of all, the right to live in safety and dignity. Bundists joined the Communist Party not in spite of the Bund but in pursuit of the ideas that the Bund had fought for, ideas that the Soviets promised to realize.
The process of transition was never easy. It took as much as it gave, and often far more. Nor was this process limited to the years between 1917 and 1922, years crucial to the establishment of Soviet rule in Russia. Many radicals, including Lipets, had joined the revolution long before a bread riot in Petrograd deposed the tsar, and they continued living in its midst long after the Soviet Union was firmly established. The identity of revolutionaries was always in flux, as circumstances forced them to renegotiate their relationship with the parties and organizations that defined their lives. What the Russian Revolution did do was unmoor them, providing a moment of both horror and beauty that broke Lipets and so many of his comrades free from their past identities, allowing them to redefine their political lives to an extent unimaginable in the world before or after. In a moment when both Eden and Armageddon seemed equally possible outcomes of the revolution, identities became fluid, and even the most unlikely transformations became possible. Through their transformations, these converts to Communism played essential roles in building and strengthening the Soviet military, economy, and society in the interwar period. Yet the loyalty of these partisan nomads was to the revolution, not to the state. When it became clear to them in the mid-1930s that the Soviet Union had begun to devour its own children, some of them were willing to leave. But for many, it was already too late.