What You Did Not Tell

by Mark Mazower

  Although the Bund’s leaders worried about how workers in the Pale would respond to the rupture with their comrades, the workers seem to have scarcely noticed and the Bund’s membership went from strength to strength. Growing confidence that Yiddish-speaking proletariat in the Pale would naturally gravitate towards them was the main reason why its leaders dropped their demand for formal recognition of their role in Jewish life; it was happening anyway. The Bund was by some considerable margin the largest and best-organized socialist movement in the empire, dwarfing Lenin’s quarrelsome band of followers. Unlike the Bolsheviks, the Bund successfully combined revolutionary agitation with organizing workers to improve wages and working conditions. In the summer of 1904, a year after the London congress, it had some twenty-three thousand members, a number that grew to about thirty-four thousand at its zenith during the 1905 revolutions. By comparison, the entire membership of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party at the start of 1905 numbered fewer than ten thousand, and of these the Bolsheviks were in a minority.

  A more urgent worry than arguments with comrades on the Left was escalating right-wing violence inside the Russian Empire. Backed by the Tsarist authorities, anti-Semitism was becoming increasingly murderous and 1903, the year of the Geneva meeting, was the worst for pogroms since the 1880s. That Easter a crowd in the town of Kishinev made international headlines when it went on a rampage with the cry “Kill the Jews,” leaving many dead and a trail of destruction. Some months later, in the small town of Gomel, five hundred kilometers southeast of Vilna, mobs of railway workers and peasants were joined by local detachments of infantry after their officers had harangued them on the need to defend the “Father-Emperor” against his internal enemies: Hundreds of shops were wrecked and more than a dozen people were killed.

  But among them, unusually, were some of the pogromists themselves: The attacked had fought back. The Bund rejected the terrorist tradition of Russian revolutionary activism, but it was certainly neither pacifist nor prepared to allow the terror unleashed by the authorities to go unchecked. Gomel had a large Jewish population and the Bund armed units ahead of time to protect Jewish neighborhoods—there were roughly two hundred men in the core groups, both Jews and Christians. After the pogrom was over, the details of what had happened were publicized in the widely circulated pamphlet The Truth About the Gomel Pogrom, which came out in the name of the central committee of the Bund. It was in fact written by Max and it is, I think, the first document we have in which we can fully hear his voice.

  The pro-government press had blamed the violence in Gomel on “the audacious attitude of the local Jews towards the Christians.” But Max picks apart the official version in forensic detail. It is likely that he had gone to Gomel immediately after the pogrom and talked to people there. (Someone from the Bund certainly had, as had several journalists.) He describes the detailed preparations that the local authorities had been making for months to arm and provoke Christians against Jews, hoping to use anti-Semitism to drum up loyalty to the tsar. He names the officials involved—the town’s captain of police, who had incited peasants from neighboring villages; the commander of the infantry regiment; the merchant Petroshenko; the notary Plakhov; the prison chief; and even some high-school students. The superintendent at the railway workshops had supplied the hammers, bars, and rods that were used to smash shops and beat people. Max also describes the extensive preparations Bund activists had undertaken for self-defense. When the pogrom broke out, everyone had been waiting. The row at the fish market that had ostensibly started things off had merely been the trigger. And it had only been when the troops fired on the rioters, instead of abetting them, that the looting and killing ended.

  What strikes me now, in light of what we know about Max later in his life, is his extraordinarily factual tone. But he certainly does not shy away from judgment. He identified the main culprits as the local authorities: “The edifice of the autocracy is built only on murder and lies. Every provincial satrap considers himself an autocrat in his own right and considers every insult to his own person to be a revolt against His Majesty the King.” But Max had little respect for the local Jewish community leaders who had taken it upon themselves to speak in the name of their co-religionists and been “overwhelmed by an attack of their usual cowardice and fearfulness.” Instead of helping arm Jewish fighters, they had sent a deputation to assure the local governor of their loyalty: The “Jewish bourgeoisie” had thus revealed its “enslaved, servile spirit.” All they had gotten in any case was a harangue for allowing the Bund to organize within their midst and a reminder that the Jews had been better off in the old days when they kept out of politics completely.

  The lesson Max drew from all this was clear: Only under the leadership of the “Jewish socialist-minded proletariat,” fighting under the “Social-Democratic flag” alongside the “proletarians of all nations” could a sufficiently powerful counterweight to the Tsarist regime be built. “Only the proletarian struggle will lead to a victory over Tsarist despotism and over the entire capitalistic world, with all the suffering that is bound up with it.” Whatever differences the Bund might have had with its comrades in the Social Democratic Workers’ Party, it was and remained a Marxist party, committed to solidarity among the workers of all nations and to the toppling of capitalism. The pamphlet was suffused with confidence; ethics and history were marching in step. The days of tyranny were numbered.

  Gomel was a propaganda victory because, thanks largely to the Bund, the Jews had for once not taken things lying down. “What had occurred was a fight … rather than a pogrom,” was how one Yiddish newspaper put it. “A newborn unprecedented type appeared on the scene,” wrote a participant later, “a man who defends his dignity.” Yiddish authors referred to Gomel as a time of renewed hope. “The youngsters intervened,” says a character in a story by S. An-sky, “the new type who, people say, are not Jews at all, who keep none of the commandments … and they saved the entire Jewish community.”12 The social democrats in Kharkov said that the events in Gomel had “taught the Russian workman, as dozens of good books would never have taught him, to respect his Jewish comrade as a fighter.” For their part, the Russian authorities were worried: They feared the spread of insurrection, and they were right to do so. Armed self-defense units, so-called kamf-grupe (fighting groups), were formed by the Bund in other towns as well, organized into core members and reservists. Soon there were probably between five hundred and a thousand core members in the Pale overall, and thousands more in reserve. Mostly they were Jewish, young men in workers’ blue shirts and caps, but they were joined by Russians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and Poles. With funds pouring in from London and the United States, the organization was able to smuggle in revolvers and upgrade its printing presses. It was more powerful than ever.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1905

  The revolution arrived sooner than anyone had anticipated. When Russia went to war with the Japanese in 1904, the campaign turned into a humiliating disaster, and the world watched in disbelief as a major European power was humbled for the first time by an Asian foe. At the start of the following year, as the struggle in the Pacific went from bad to worse for the Tsarist regime, demonstrators marching on the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg were brutally dispersed by bullets and cavalry charges, leaving hundreds dead. The events of Bloody Sunday and its aftermath triggered rallies and uprisings across Russia as protesters took to the streets and occupied factories. The parties of the Left were taken by surprise at first but they mobilized quickly. Max, who seems to have been working undercover in Warsaw, was now given the biggest assignment of his career: to help coordinate the Bund’s activities in Łódź. He never spoke a word about this afterwards in all his years in London, not to his son and probably not to anyone else either. Nevertheless, the weeks he spent there formed the climax of his life as an agitator—an epic struggle that nothing, not even 1917, ever eclipsed.

  An industrial city twice the size of Vilna, Łódź�
��with its numerous textile mills and large working class—had several nicknames: “the Polish Manchester” for one, “the city of chimneys” being another. One of the most densely populated and polluted urban spaces in Europe, it had been growing astonishingly fast—there had been a nearly fivefold increase in its population in just twenty-five years. It was close to the German border, on the western edge of the Russian Empire, and as a result, it was ethnically very different from the towns of the Pale. There was a large Polish population alongside the Jewish community and a sizable German minority as well. But the wave of strikes that broke out in 1905 crossed the lines of religion and involved some of the most extraordinary scenes of insurrection seen anywhere in Russia before the 1917 revolutions. What started as spontaneous protests soon turned into rolling factory sit-ins involving more than half the city’s workforce, bringing the economy to a halt and alarming local industrialists. The Bund mobilized thousands of Jewish workers and began coordinating with Polish socialists as well as with the Lithuanian Polish socialist party led by Feliks Dzerzhinsky. The Yiddish-speaking Dzerzhinsky had been a student in Vilna and had many Bundist friends. (Later he joined the Bolsheviks and created their secret police, the feared Cheka.)

  It is to this period of extraordinary tension, a time when it seemed that the entire Tsarist edifice might be toppled, that we can date the second major document we know Max authored, a single-sided proclamation in Yiddish that was pasted up on the walls of the city at the end of May.1 The events that precipitated it unfolded against the backdrop of news that the Japanese navy had annihilated the imperial Russian fleet at the Battle of Tsushima, a victory that would force the tsar’s government to sue for peace. In Łódź, Cossacks fired on a group of children and killed one of them on Wschodnia Street, a Bundist gathering place. Funerals were often revolutionary dramas in those days—it was for that reason Russian soldiers often buried fallen protesters secretly at night—and the bodies of the dead came to possess intense power over the crowds. Perhaps to forestall any attempt by the authorities to intervene, people gathered in front of the hospital where the boy had died and Bund activists went through the town encouraging workers to turn out. The cortege set off, at its head two hundred and fifty children, some in rags and barefoot, holding hands. An estimated ten thousand people marched behind them—Jews and Poles, men and women, workers and seminary students—and the sidewalks and balconies were thick with onlookers. A squad of Cossacks in civilian clothes looked on at the cemetery as the children raised a red flag and a black banner commemorating the dead, and there were speeches in Yiddish and Polish. It was a demonstration of unity against the regime. Afterwards, thousands of copies of Max’s description of these events were printed and circulated.

  “Proletariat of the world, unite!” it opens, for the Bund was completely committed to Marxian socialism:

  Great are the defeats which the autocracy suffered during the entire bloody [Russo-Japanese] war in the Far East. And do you really think it is weak? If that is what you think, it is not quite true, as anyone who was present on Wschodnia Street on Saturday, May 27, would readily attest. There the Tsarist regime fought the “internal enemy” and came out with a “thorough victory.” The Asiatic autocracy [i.e., the Tsarist regime] was able this time simply to destroy its enemy, and in fact quite easily. It’s true that the enemy was completely unarmed, had little acquaintance with the great arts of war, and what’s more, was small in number and posed no threat to the Tsarist throne of all Russia. The enemy consisted of a horde of little children who were outside in the carefree Sabbath daylight, making mischief, playing a little and imitating what the grown-ups do. The children lifted a red cloth as a flag and imitated and demonstrated, singing joyous revolutionary songs and shouting “Down with autocracy!” It is unbelievable but these are the facts. Young children were shot for no reason other than because they are living in a time of revolution.

  The children, writes Max, can’t understand why anyone would be afraid of them. But “that frantic and poisoned creature, autocracy” is restless and jumping at shadows. Recently, he goes on, the police also shot a “Christian member of the brotherhood of workers. Blood mixes with blood and flows from every corner of Russia to the murmuring ocean.” Then came the call to arms:

  But who among us can stand by, detached from this historical process, in which a population of 130 million people liberates itself from the capricious rule of Tsarist despotism? Only one who has lost all human feeling, one who is already entirely enslaved …

  Let anyone who possesses a spark of human dignity, anyone who does not wish to be adrift and who strives for a free life, join in the working-class struggle as soon as possible and stand under the red banner for the liberation of the proletariat, which means the liberation of the entire world.

  The new bloodshed that took place before our eyes is terrible. Our society is slavishly silent, as if nothing were happening at all. But we, the workers of Łódź, have not been able to keep silent and have poured out our protest in mighty demonstrations at the funeral of the late comrade Grabczynski and the small child, the terrible victims of absolutism. Sunday and Monday, May 28th and 29th, grieving Jewish and Christian workers, brothers together, protested mightily and openly before the entire world against such wild capriciousness and such a murderous political order.

  “Down with autocracy!” “Long live socialism!”—this has been our only answer.

  To step forth in the heroic struggle for our complete liberation continues to be our hard and fast decision.

  Honor the memory of the fallen comrades!

  Down with autocracy!

  Long live the revolution! Long live socialism!2

  In the days that followed, the authorities almost totally lost control of the city. After factory bosses appealed for reinforcements, several more regiments were sent in. But when a police volley killed a young Jewish girl haranguing the crowd from a box in the market, the last and most serious phase of fighting took place. Behind makeshift barricades, formed from market carts, boxes, and paving stones, Polish and Jewish worker militias armed with rocks, bottles, bombs, and pistols fought together under the red flag. Pitted against them were army and Cossack units, the gendarmerie, and local anti-Semitic groups. Schools shut down and shops were shuttered. By June 24, wrote a reporter,

  [Łódź] resembles Paris in the days of the commune … The streets are filled with the debris of demolished barricades. Blackened ruins of shops pillaged and burned by the rioters stand out in the darkness like sentinels of anarchy … Only the flickering fires of the soldiers’ camps in the squares light the streets. Desultory revolver shots, answered by quick volleys, are heard at frequent intervals in the city. Houses are barricaded, their doors and windows boarded up or filled with mattresses to ward off the bullets from Cossack carbines. For two days the streets of Łódź have been the scenes of battle. On the tsar’s side, ten regiments of Cossacks, dragoons, and infantry; on the people’s side, one hundred thousand striking workmen arrayed under the red flag. The fighting spirit of the people is fully aroused. They have tasted blood and want more. Today at Bałuty, a suburb of Łódź, four Cossacks were killed and sixteen others wounded by a bomb that was thrown into their barracks. Twenty-three of their horses were killed … The shooting was renewed late tonight. Cossacks are robbing the dead of jewels and money.3

  It took days of heavy fighting and the proclamation of a state of siege before the uprising was finally crushed. By the end of June, more than one hundred and fifty civilians lay dead—that was the official total; a more realistic figure is probably between one and two thousand—and hundreds had been wounded.

  In later years, Max’s aging comrades would regret that he had not written more, and one can understand why—his blend of irony and moral outrage must have made his proclamation powerfully effective. The movement’s socialist credentials are on vivid display in his words but the target is carefully chosen: neither capitalism in general nor the bosses, but the imperial reg
ime and the indiscriminate violence of those defending it. Socialism here means the emancipation of society in general, and the freedom for young children to have their innocence back and to be able to play in the streets without alarm. The tsar’s fear is what lies behind the violence, the fear—entirely justified in Max’s eyes—that history is against him. It is not a sectarian message, and it emphasizes in particular the necessity for cooperation between Jewish and Christian organizations that was such a striking feature of the Łódź events.

  The politics of it is not the only thing that strikes me now; there is some intensity of feeling behind it too. This was a call to arms triggered by outrage at the killing of children, at the cruelty of adults. Max had lost his own father and grown up fast. Perhaps as a result, when he became a father much later on, he was reserved, as if feeling his way into the role, and when Dad was a boy, Max was more or less incapable of demonstrating physical affection with him. Yet Dad never questioned that his father loved him, and felt both protective and proud of him as Max aged. Dad unquestionably sensed the real warmth of emotion that subsisted at some deeper level in a heart that had been enfeebled and acutely disappointed by history, that had taught itself to subordinate the personal to the political, and that later on could no longer easily show itself. To my knowledge, Dad never read his father’s writings for the Bund. But I do not think their passion and emotional energy would have completely surprised him.