by Mark Mazower
That Max was aware of the irony of this situation we know thanks to the story told later by one of his comrades, a man called Sholem Levine. He was a young Bundist who came to Vilna in the winter of 1899 to set up an illegal printing press. When he ran short of the money to rent an apartment, his girlfriend had an idea: They should tell her family they were getting married and use the dowry her well-off brother had promised her. In his memoirs Levine goes on to describe how as a member of the Vilna central committee, Max was asked to approve the scheme. He did so, commenting wryly: “It is a blessing [mitzvah] to take money from a bourgeois in order to set up an illegal printing shop.” It’s the only sound of his voice we have from these first years, practical, joking, and authoritative at the same time. At the age of twenty-five, he was already, only two years after the Bund’s founding, a member of the directorate running the organization in its most important town.4
Because his employer, the Nadezhda Trading Company, was based in St. Petersburg and involved in shipping goods across the empire, it offered the perfect cover. The Vilna Bundists were respected in the party for their tight security procedures, and thanks to their caution and discipline, penetration by police agents was limited. As a result, the authorities were usually one step behind them, something which was not true in other cities. By the time of his arrest in 1901, Max had in fact been responsible for at least five years for printing and distributing illegal literature in Yiddish across the region from Warsaw to Białystok and Vitebsk; he was also supervising the publication of an illegal journal, Der Klassen Kampf (Class Struggle), an organ of the Vilna committee. And there were other tasks: forging passports on forms stolen from municipal offices; buying guns; purchasing printing equipment abroad and getting German technicians in to help them operate it. Vilna was the revolutionary hub for northwestern Russia and Max was at its center. Known to the agents of the Okhrana, the Tsarist secret police, who shadowed him, as “the Handsome One,” to distinguish him from his brother Zachar, Max was the consummate organizer, a figure of the shadows, someone who seems never to have sought the podium but knew what to do when a new press was needed, an activist smuggled in or out of danger, or workers brought out on strike.5
Along with smart clothes and the outlook of a member of the intelligentsia, Max acquired a cover name, an integral part of revolutionary culture in all the underground parties in those days. In the Bund alone we find all kinds of pseudonyms deployed: References to hair color—“Red,” “Black,” “Max the White”—were common. A glutton was known as “Gravy”; “the Philosopher,” “the Madman,” and “the Fighter” were self-explanatory. Often people went simply by some version of their first name, suggesting that it was not security that motivated them so much as the desire to join in the intimate circle of those on first-name terms.6 In Max’s case, security was clearly a consideration, and it is not at all easy to figure out the name he had used: Indeed even Frouma, his wife, got it wrong after his death. The main problem is that Bund correspondents, whether in letters or party documents or newspaper articles, avoided mentioning one another by their real names, so it is often hard to figure out which nickname refers to whom. In a much later work, however, Jacob Hertz, a chronicler of the movement, identifies Max as the author of several articles under the pseudonym “Daniel,” and a file found recently in the Moscow archives confirms this. In 1904, an agent for the Okhrana was tracking letters sent from a Bundist official in Vilna called “Wolf” to a certain “Daniel,” in Warsaw. Wolf was part of a network in Vilna that included Max’s brother Zachar, and Daniel was obviously an experienced Bundist operative because his security procedures were tight. He made sure that the letters were not sent to him directly but to a drop-off point, a haberdashery in Warsaw. Even then they were not picked up by him but by a third party, a young nurse who was a relative of the shopkeeper; she then presumably passed them on. The letters themselves had mostly been intercepted and appeared to concern deliveries of clandestine pamphlets to the Polish capital, although it was hard to tell because they were in a code the police could not break. But they had, the agent reported to his superiors in Moscow, been able to figure out who Daniel was: the eldest of the Mazower brothers, Max.7
He had not chosen the name by chance: It was a nod to his roots back in Grodno, and perhaps also to his hopes. The original reference was to the Old Testament prophet who is promised a revelation of what the future holds when the kings of the age have been defeated. But it had been adopted as a pseudonym by a figure from the previous generation, Aaron Lieberman, whom some called the father of Russian socialism. Like Max, Lieberman came from the Grodno region and he too had received his education in study circles in Vilna some years earlier. Like Max, his primary concern was to spread socialism among the Jewish laboring classes and he too rejected nationalism, believing that “Jews are an integral part of humanity and cannot be liberated except through the liberation of humanity.” In 1876 Lieberman had fled Tsarist persecution. He had founded the first association of Jewish socialists in the East End of London before emigrating to the United States, where he died in 1880, a still-young intellectual and an activist whose memory was revered not only by Max but by many others.
Lieberman’s generation had little time for Yiddish, the earthy fusion of medieval German, Hebrew, and Slavic that was the language spoken by most Jews in the Pale. Russian was the language of education, as they saw it, and of the socialist culture to which they aspired. Lieberman himself often wrote in a rather complex Hebrew. Unlike others, however, Lieberman had encouraged the use of Yiddish, and this may have been the most important thing of all for Max and his milieu, for whom reviving “the jargon” was at the heart of their politics. The reason was eminently practical: Successful agitation required going to the masses, and as more than ninety-five percent of Jewish workers in the Pale could not understand Russian—knowing how to speak it, as Max could, was already a mark of distinction—this meant reaching out to them in a language they could recognize. Yet Yiddish was at that time a spoken language not a written one, so the early Bundists became translators, poets, and playwrights.
In Vilna they formed a “Yiddish committee” that met secretly in respectable apartments belonging to sympathetic pharmacists and doctors. This group looked for materials that would promote “socialist feelings” and awaken the spirit of protest; its members sometimes wrote stories of their own, or they chose short stories from Russian and other languages, novels as well as classics of Marxist political economy. Many of these works would not have passed the censors so they had to be handled carefully. Max was a member of the committee, chiefly responsible for printing and distribution. Although he had almost certainly been speaking Yiddish in Grodno before he learned Russian, I am not at all sure that he ever spoke the language of his childhood once his work with the Bund was over—as an educated man, his preferred language was always Russian. But at this time, alongside his help with the administrative arrangements, he translated short stories and reviewed Yiddish plays, and he numbered several writers among his friends. On one book in particular he must have spent a good deal of time because he translated it in its entirety: a radical fin de siècle English novel called The Gadfly.8
The Gadfly was the work of the Anglo Irish writer Ethel Voynich, who was involved with the anti-Tsarist London newspaper Free Russia and was active in radical circles. A Russian speaker, she was the daughter of the logician George Boole and had married a Polish exile who became one of the great antiquarian bookdealers (scholars today remember him as the man who discovered the mysterious and still-undeciphered Voynich manuscript). But Voynich was just as remarkable as either of these men and her novels made her, for a time, a household name. Set in Risorgimento Italy, The Gadfly featured a fugitive freedom-loving hero who writes incendiary tracts and satires. Loosely based on the figure of Giuseppe Mazzini, the famous Italian republican of the mid-nineteenth century, the novel offered an obvious allegory of the struggle for liberty in Russia. It was a success in England—eno
ugh to annoy Joseph Conrad, who was already thinking about the themes that would later result in The Secret Agent, his remarkable study of terrorism—and it appealed enormously to the Left elsewhere too. Not only did it circulate widely among socialists in a Russian translation but its popularity continued to soar after 1917, and during the twentieth century it became a communist publishing sensation, reckoned to have sold more than four million copies in the USSR alone.
It had an equally dramatic if more indirect success in the capitalist West. Sidney Reilly, the famous British “Ace of Spies,” is supposed to have modeled himself on Voynich’s hero, although separating fact from fantasy in the case of Reilly is hard. He claimed to have had an affair with the author, though like most of his claims, this one was probably false. All we know for sure about Reilly is that his real name was Rosenblum, that he was Jewish and born in Russia around the same time as Max, that he worked for the British Secret Intelligence Service trying to overthrow the Bolsheviks after 1917, and that he was shot by the OGPU in 1925.9 Many years later, Ian Fleming, who was fascinated by Reilly, used him as the model for James Bond, making The Gadfly an unlikely source of inspiration for the most famous spy of the Cold War.
Max and Reilly evidently shared a fascination with the book. But for all the air of mystery that surrounded him in later life, Max was a very different kind of character from the colorful Reilly. The latter was an adventurer and a womanizer, a man who seems not to have shied away from murder, lied with abandon, liked the good life, and had few evident political principles. What I think appealed to Max in Voynich’s work was something that would have been secondary for Reilly: its idealization of the selflessness and suffering of the revolutionary life. Serious about educating himself and others, Max wrote a long historical introduction to his Yiddish translation. It is a dry piece of work, the style in keeping with what we know of some of his other writings, but Voynich’s novel was anything but. Did he choose that particular book because it articulated, in a way he could not himself, the passion and pathos of the lonely path he had chosen?
By the time the translation of The Gadfly appeared—published in Vilna in 1907—Max had already been tested more than once by arrest, imprisonment, and flight. His name had been on the radar screen of the Okhrana since the mid-1890s and there had been that incident in 1901. With the Bund growing in power, it was only a matter of time before he was arrested. In February 1902 he was again detained and this time was sentenced to three years’ exile under police supervision in the remote village of Uyarskoe near the town of Kansk, a destination that lay more than three thousand miles to Vilna’s east along the Trans-Siberian Railroad.
Something of the rigors of that experience, which Max never spoke about, can be gleaned from the memoirs of Marie Sukloff, another Jewish socialist from the Pale who ended up not far away. In them, she describes an exhausting, unpredictable journey lasting many days in crowded, freezing convict cars, broken only by stops in the filthy, typhus-infested forwarding prisons that lined the route, prisons that generally required marches under guard from the train down roads covered with ice and snow. In Kansk, political prisoners were held in unheated barracks even through the winter months, and then sent on by foot through the snowbound Siberian woods to the isolated peasant communities that were their ultimate destination. Books were scarce, alcohol was the chief distraction, and the illiterate villagers tended to be both suspicious and respectful of the “noble” strangers in their midst. Confined amid the forests of the Yenisey River, Max bore it for only a few months. On July 13, 1902, he escaped and the police issued an alert for “Mazover, Mordkhel Ioselev, a commoner from the town of Grodno.” Officers were told to look out for a man with “dark blond hair” and brown eyes, five foot five inches tall. It was too late. The Voynich’s periodical Free Russia mentions in its November 1902 issue that among the five Bundists reported recently to have fled Siberia for “freer countries” was a certain “M. Mazover.”10 His destination was Germany, where he joined a circle of Bundist students at the university in Berlin. Trotsky’s sister was there, as were many future luminaries—and opponents—of the Bolshevik state.
Penetration of the Bund by Tsarist spies was always a threat; indeed a wave of arrests had nearly killed off the movement in the first months of its operations, and although it recovered quickly, the reverberations lingered. The organization in Vilna took steps to guard against infiltration and did not shy away from punishing informers when it unmasked them. After a Bundist tried to assassinate the governor of Vilna in 1902, there was a massive clampdown. But the Russian authorities were not the only enemy. Devout members of the Jewish community regarded the Bundists as godless materialists and terrorists, and they particularly did not like the fact that there were young women activists in their midst. For its part, the Bund spoke the language of proletarian revolution and regularly castigated the cowardice of the wealthier Jews who thought their money could buy them security. Bund cadres were known to burst into synagogues to make socialist speeches, and as a result rabbis denounced the organization in their sermons. The movement also combatted Jewish gangs from the criminal underworld, which were linked to the prostitution and gambling rackets that flourished in the towns of the Pale because they had strong ties to the police and employers, who used them as strikebreakers.
But the most significant enmity for the future came from the Left. Although Lenin had initially been impressed by the Bund’s achievements, in the early years of the new century he came to see it as a threat and started to oppose the idea that Russian Jewish workers needed their own movement. A serious rift between Lenin and the Bund developed as a result, one that would never heal. The Bund’s insistence that it spoke for the empire’s Yiddish-speaking Jewish proletariat was anathema to Lenin’s vision of a tightly centralized single Social Democratic Workers’ Party reliant on the Russian language and controlled by him. Behind this was the larger question of how the numerous nationalities within the Tsarist empire should be brought into the revolutionary fold, especially when many of them did not speak Russian. Confronted with the power of the Bund, Lenin immersed himself in its arguments, read its publications, and began—respectfully at first, then with increasing impatience—to hammer out his objections.
It was a theoretical argument but it was also a personal one, conducted at close quarters, for in these years both Lenin and several of the leading Bundists in exile were living in the small Swiss town of Bern, so the Bundists had ample opportunity to see their opponent and get to know him. “Outwardly he failed to make a good impression,” recalled the Bundist theoretician Vladimir Medem. “From what I had heard, I envisaged a towering revolutionist … one of the ‘big guns.’ But what I saw before me was a little animated individual … with a small flaxen beard, bald head and tiny brown eyes. A clever face but not an intelligent one. He reminded me then, and the comparison came instantly to mind, of a crafty Russian grain dealer.” Lenin was not a forceful or imposing speaker, but Medem could not help being struck by two things: his iron will, and his distrust of people.11
Max was caught up in the growing antagonism at first hand because shortly after his escape he was invited to participate in one of the Bund’s most critical meetings—a closed session of top party leaders that was held in Geneva in the spring of 1903. Lenin had just published another direct attack on the Bund in an article entitled “Does the Jewish Proletariat Need an Independent Political Party?” and his answer to his own question was predictably negative. The meeting was called to formulate a response. Only about ten people were present, including several Bund founders, so Max’s presence is an indication of his respected position inside the organization. There was the chain-smoking Arkadi Kremer, the “father of the Bund,” a theoretician of revolutionary agitation whose pamphlet on the subject had a huge influence on Lenin; John Mill, whose English-sounding name disguised one of the Bund’s most important figures, was the founder of its powerful foreign committee; and Evgenia Gurvitz, one of several women in prominen
t positions. Max represented the Vilna committee, alongside another comrade, Julius Lenski, who had escaped from Siberia with him. (Later on, Lenski would join the Bolsheviks and then, according to one inside source, become a senior figure in the Cheka, the precursor of the KGB.)
The Geneva participants reaffirmed that Jewish workers did indeed need their own political movement and vowed to resist efforts to dissolve the Bund within the larger Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party. Thus matters came to a head. At its congress later that year, the party famously bifurcated into Menshevik and Bolshevik factions. Less commonly remembered is that at the same time the Bundists accused Lenin and his followers of dictatorial tendencies and withdrew entirely. They insisted on being accepted as the sole representatives of Russian Jewish workers in the party, and they also demanded that the party sign on to the idea of cultural autonomy for different national groups within the empire. A few years later, the party agreed to the second condition and the Bund agreed tacitly to drop the first and was readmitted. Over time it became aligned increasingly with the party’s Menshevik wing, which is why many former Mensheviks turn out to have started in the Bund, and why Max preserved close friendships over the years with Menshevik comrades and their families. There can be no doubt that his knowledge of Bolshevism—and his mistrust of its authoritarian leader—went back to this time, long before the revolution, when Lenin had regarded the Bund as one of the greatest threats to party unity.