by Mark Mazower
In Vilna, the Bund hung on for longer. The city had become, for the Bundists, “our Vilna” in which revolutionary meetings were held openly and orators kept crowds spellbound. Max returned from Łódź to a new assignment, and so, after nearly fifteen years, he finally left Lazar Rapoport’s employment to run the first more or less legal Bundist newspaper, Folks-Tsaytung (People’s Journal). Rapoport had been Max’s staunch defender, one of those indispensable protectors to whom Russian revolutionary organizations owed so much: The St. Petersburg shipping company he ran had given the Bund enormous assistance. In abandoning his double life in favor of full-time political work, Max likely felt it was now or never, that the Tsarist autocracy was on the way out. If so, he had it wrong and must have soon realized his mistake. The tide was in fact slowly turning the other way, against revolution, as the authorities in Moscow and St. Petersburg regained their nerve and the arrests began again in greater numbers than ever.
In the summer of 1906 Max sent in his last report. It was from the town of Bila Tserkva, near Kiev, a region into which the Bund was trying to expand. His article is dry, matter-of-fact, analytic, downplaying his own role—he had probably gone primarily not as a journalist but as an agitator among the workers. A strike had started there, he tells readers, with “thirty old Jews,” rope-makers, who acted spontaneously and then came to the Bund for help in formulating their demands. Other trades and industries followed—hairdressers, carpenters, bakers, workers in a paper mill: All demanded a pay increase, and in each case, Max reports, they prevailed. The “organization,” as he calls the Bund, took the opportunity to encourage the workers to form unions, and the result was that more than one hundred of them joined the Bund. He comes across as the accountant of revolutionary potential, totting up successes, helping patiently to make the movement grow. This was the Bund’s way, expanding through its practical support for underpaid laborers. For Lenin and the Bolsheviks, they were just “organizing weakness,” mistakenly focusing their efforts on a section of the population that by itself would never bring about revolution. The Bolsheviks thought this was “economism”—as if fighting for higher wages alone could bring the end of capitalism. They preferred to change political consciousness through a nucleus of committed party cadres. The Bund saw things differently: For them the whole purpose of what they were doing was to make ordinary workers conscious of their strength by helping them to organize. It was a strategy that had paid off in the preceding decade. But it was to pose an impossible problem once the Tsarist regime, shocked by the events of 1905 and 1906, clamped down on any form of unrest with unprecedented severity.
Max had been an organizer par excellence—this was where his revolutionary talents lay. Writing was secondary; he was neither a rhetorician nor a lover of the limelight, and it is not a coincidence that he published nothing at all under his own name. His systematic mind and bent for facts and figures had been devoted to problems of distribution, supply, communication. The scope for him to work in this way now vanished. Early in 1907, as the roundups intensified, the police caught up with him once more, and after being arrested, he was sent back to Siberia, this time to live with a peasant family outside the city of Tomsk. It was one of the very few episodes from his life in Russia that Max spoke about later, perhaps because it had marked his exit from active politics. Dad always remembered the story of his father’s escape, how Max had been supposed to register at the police station every day, and how he got the local policeman to trust him by playing chess with him—the policeman, stuck in that remote backwater, had nothing much to do. Gradually Max was allowed to come in every two days and then every week, until one day he calmly came in, played his usual game of chess, and boarded the train to Tomsk. He passed swiftly through Moscow and Vilna, narrowly escaping another police trawl there, before realizing the city was no longer safe and making his way abroad. His Vilna years were over. Henceforward, he would put his resourcefulness, his administrative expertise, and his deep-rooted caution towards building a new life and looking for a new home.
CHAPTER THREE
The Yost Typewriter Company
The initial months Max spent in exile following his escape from Russia are a blank, but it must have been sometime later when he was lodging with a revolutionary comrade in Dresden that his eye was caught by a job advertisement in the newspaper: The London office of a well-known American typewriter firm was looking for a marketing manager with a knowledge of Russian. He answered it and was invited to interview, and in November 1909 he crossed the Channel and arrived at the Holborn headquarters of the Yost Typewriter Company. It was almost certainly his first time on English soil.
At thirty-five, Max had reached a turning point. From the perspective of younger Bundist activists, he was already an old man, a zokn. For more than a decade, he had been living a semi-clandestine existence, under constant police surveillance. Since 1901 he had been sent twice to Siberia, escaping both times; he had lived an exile’s life in Switzerland and Germany; and he had directed Bund operations in Vilna, Warsaw, and Łódź. He had been on the run, arrested, and questioned many times over, and he had sacrificed the prospect of domesticity for the cause of socialism. In Russia the Tsarist repression was in full swing: The second Duma was dissolved in the summer of 1907 and the prime minister, Pyotr Stolypin, was presiding over mass arrests and courts-martial, sending tens of thousands of his opponents to Siberia. The kind of union organizing that had been the source of the Bund’s strength was in these circumstances impossible. Having fled the country, Max seems to have felt, like other Bundists of his generation, that the revolution was over for good. Many members felt the same and the party itself shrank fast; by 1910 its numbers had dropped dramatically, to about two thousand or so. Some of the other mass parties suffered similarly: the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, a major force in Russian Poland, collapsed from some forty thousand members in 1907 to around a thousand by 1910.
Berlin, Geneva, Paris, New York, and Munich were the most important centers of Russian political activism in these years and the obvious destinations for those fleeing Tsarist persecution. England was less popular, a way station to the United States for some of the million or so Eastern European Jews who emigrated after 1880 from Russia and the Hapsburg empire. In London’s East End, amid the roughly ninety thousand poor Jewish immigrants crowded into its slums and tenement buildings, there was a small Bundist presence. They had been sending funds to Vilna, which Max would have known about and perhaps handled, and he would have read articles in the Yiddish press about the workers’ movement there. He may also have had some London contacts of his own: Ethel Voynich’s Free Russia had reported his earlier escape in its pages and several Vilna-born socialists whom he kept up with in later life were already living there. In other words, the British capital was probably not an entirely unknown quantity to him. Yet Max knew so little English when he answered the Yost Company’s advertisement that his first correspondence with them was in German, and he had so little money that he’d had to ask a relative back in Grodno to send him enough for a new suit for the interview. The firm was run by cosmopolitan men, however, and he must have impressed them. The managing director was Milton Bartholomew, a dynamic and ebullient Englishman who was keen to expand Yost’s business into the Tsarist lands. The office manager, Samuel Wechsler, was a Jewish immigrant born in Bessarabia who had achieved Edwardian respectability and a house and family of his own in Cricklewood within a decade of arriving in London. Bartholomew and Wechsler liked Max; they gave him a position as Traveler and the job of opening up the Russian market at a modest salary of £100 a month, which would be supplemented by commissions if he did well. He would be going back to Russia not as a revolutionary but as a kind of glorified salesman. Most likely he was at this point able to return legally—either through an amnesty or because a sufficient period had elapsed since his original sentence—but possibly he was simply confident of being able to reenter the country illicitly. A series of rented roo
ms in North London became his base while he spent most of the year abroad.
A picture of Max’s guarded, sensitive face stares down at me from the wall in my office each day, and it still strikes me as hard to imagine him ever selling typewriters. Yet he worked for Yost for a decade—a tumultuous one that spanned the First World War and the Russian Revolution—and in that time he turned out to be much better at his job than anyone could have imagined. Dad once came across an old-model Yost in a Cotswold museum and it was like a fish out of water: “What it was doing there, God alone knows.” But the more I looked into it, the more sense the typewriter made. For there had been a time when this epitome of yesterday’s technology had once conveyed all the excitement of the future and Max, coming out of a world where typewriters were still scarce and print was revolutionary, had understood how to seize the opportunity it presented.
In the typewriter competition held at Pavia, Italy, during May, the Yost won first prize in the Hors Concours—or extraordinary typewriter competition. Mr. Warren, the operator on the Yost, did 1,881 strokes in three minutes, or about 170 short words per minute. Warren also carried off the second prize in the precision competition, which meant an hour’s work for making up a balance sheet. In all, the Yost carried off about seven medals from the competition.
—“Yost Happenings,” Typewriter Topics (1907), 176
George Washington Newton Yost was an American inventor, a big figure in the rise of the typewriter. The introduction of this machine, along with the telegraph, the telephone, the moving picture and the motorcar, marked a moment in the emergence of modern life nearly as important as the earlier invention of print itself in the decisive move away from a society based on the handwritten word. Starting out as a designer of farm equipment and then a salesman for the Remington arms company, which pioneered the first popular models of the Type-Writer, Yost had gone on to found the firm that bore his name, and its fame grew so fast that the deceased spiritualist Helena Petrovna Blavatsky is said to have specified the use of a “new Yost machine” when she dictated her memoirs from the spirit world in 1896. A decade after Yost’s death, the company was expanding all over the world. In their London showroom near the Holborn Viaduct, smartly dressed young women sat at rows of machines, a vision of independent, wage-earning, white-collar femininity that captivated more than one Edwardian novelist and plenty of young girls of the time as well.
It was boom time in the typewriter business. The U.S. government had begun ordering thousands of typewriters a year in the 1890s, but it took Europe a decade to catch up. Public typewriter contests took place as ways of advertising the machine’s virtues, and more than five thousand spectators watched a so-called “endurance contest” in Paris between teams of rival typists. The Yosts were technically innovative, elegant, and efficient, although they faced competition from more established makes. Max’s task of establishing a network of sales offices and buyers in Russia meant he had to be abroad about nine months of the year. In his first year he sold more than £12,000 worth of goods as he traveled across the Russian Empire, returning to London where, along with the company’s other “Continental managers,” he posed for a group picture, standing characteristically to one side. He cuts an elegant figure, smart, quietly dapper, but his hands are by his sides, a man prepared. The following years he ranged across Russia as far as Kirghizia. And then came the war, a new kind of test. Somehow he managed to go on working for Yost throughout. His sales figures for the imperial market shot up astronomically as the needs of the war prompted the Russians to buy more machines. Never again would he be as successful as he was at that time. In 1916 alone he earned enough in commissions to double his income, which is how the once poor revolutionary saved up the capital to buy a house and make possible the family life he later established in London.
Doing business in the middle of a world war that was followed by a revolution and civil war demanded a willingness to gamble and confidence in one’s own judgment. Many of the usual business methods were suspended and prewar trading routes by land were blocked, which made St. Petersburg (or Petrograd, as it was called in the years after) more important than ever, since all imports into Russia from Europe had to go through there. At first Max stayed with his youngest brother, Semyon, behind the Moskovsky railway station. Semyon, who printed clandestine pamphlets for the Bund and other Russian social democrats, had moved from Vilna to St. Petersburg at about the same time Max had gone to London. As his business at Yost boomed, Max opened an office on the Nevsky Prospect, which became his base for the war years. When his stock of typewriters ran low, he dealt in thermos flasks, paper, pens, and other office supplies, and several times, faced with the difficulty of remitting foreign exchange, he simply used the company’s profits to buy other goods that he exported to London for sale there, leaving his bewildered bosses to dispose of pigs’ bristles, eggs, and other unexpected items. Max had turned out to be exactly the kind of resourceful yet utterly dependable entrepreneur the managers of the Yost Typewriter Company relied on, and at the start of 1918, having been in Russia for several years without a break, he received a letter from his head office congratulating him on his work: “The Directors of this Company … feel that you have really done remarkably well under what are probably trying circumstances—hitherto unexampled!” This was something of an understatement: The regime of Tsar Nicholas II had collapsed, as had the Provisional Government, and the Bolsheviks had just seized power. The Romanov dynasty was defunct, Russia was in turmoil, and the imperial German army was poised to invade from the west.
With its heavy restrictions on trade and heightened suspicions of foreign capitalists, counterrevolutionaries, and spies, the October Revolution left Max doubly vulnerable. Not only was he working for a British company but there was also his Bundist past, which obviously counted against him with the Bolsheviks. The bitterness that dated back to 1903 had not healed. Indeed the events of 1917 made it worse because although the Bund’s members hailed the first revolution that spring, and many were elected to the new workers’ councils, they were of two minds about Lenin. Quite a few Bundists went over to the Bolsheviks, but the vast majority (including Max and his brothers) did not, believing they were dictatorial and dangerous. The Bolsheviks reciprocated their suspicion. In August 1918, a ham-fisted British attempt to mount a pro-Tsarist coup frightened the wits out of the country’s revolutionary rulers, although the Cheka dealt with it easily enough in the end. But then came two serious acts of terrorism. In the first, an assassin shot dead the Cheka’s Petrograd head, Moisei Uritsky, and because Uritsky was a former Bundist, the investigators of his murder erroneously assumed at first that he was targed by Bundists or some other Jewish activists as punishment for leaving them. On the same day, there was nearly a second, much more consequential assassination, when the half-blind Jewish revolutionary Fanny Kaplan shot at Lenin in Moscow and came close to killing him. The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Speculation—to give Dzerzhinsky’s Cheka its full name—now went into overdrive. For several months, it mounted a kind of Red Terror, and among those it arrested were many Jewish activists. On October 20, 1918, Max’s offices were raided and the goods impounded. Suspicion and uncertainty were at their height, and the Cheka was the most feared agency in revolutionary Russia, operating virtually without restraint and executing thousands of people without trials. If the numbers of those killed were small compared with what was to come under Stalin, they dwarfed the numbers of the victims of the Tsarist secret police and presaged repression on a new scale. Max was arrested but fortunately he was not detained for more than a few months at the most, because by February he was free and able to pay off his office staff. He began operating again from other premises, before the Cheka found that too.
He clearly had sangfroid, but I wonder also about those contacts of his from prewar days who may have helped keep him alive. As he explained later to his employers back in London, the revolution had elevated the fortunes of many o
f his former comrades. There was the Bundist Mark Liber, for instance, a man Max had known for at least fifteen years, who had a personal connection to the Cheka’s head. (Feliks Dzerzhinsky had once been engaged to Liber’s sister until her untimely death left him devastated.) One of Dzerzhinsky’s aides had been a Bundist from Vilna, and he too was a man whom Max knew well. Max may even have known Dzerzhinsky, if not from Vilna in the 1890s then from Łódź in 1905. And that was just the leadership of the Cheka; there were Bundists and Mensheviks in other government agencies as well. In fact, the influx was so great that many Bolsheviks were worried, and a few years later a functionary in Minsk complained that “one has the impression that the Bund, and not our party, is in power.”1
Released from the clutches of the Cheka, Max took precautions. He joined the All-Russian Union of Cooperative Societies, an organization which was not yet under Bolshevik control and which was to play a central role in Soviet trade and diplomacy in the coming years. He sensed that the Bolsheviks were too powerful to be toppled. At the same time, he could tell that despite its hatred of capitalism and the ongoing civil war, the revolutionary government needed to organize exports in order to acquire the foreign currency it badly needed. As a Russian speaker familiar with British business practices Max had the kinds of skills they depended upon to begin trading again, so his interests as a merchant and the union’s interest in exporting Russian goods dovetailed. An additional advantage for him was that working for the union gave him a cover that would stand him in good stead if he needed to leave the country suddenly. That moment came soon enough. When the Bolsheviks began registering the names of the managers of all foreign firms in the country, he decided it was no longer safe to stay. Tipped off that he was about to be arrested for espionage, he obtained permission to travel to Polotsk in western Russia on co-op business. He closed down his office in Petrograd, handed the company accounts over to his brother, and in early December 1919, after undergoing what he tersely described to his employers as “more severe experiences and much risk,” he left. He was headed for the border.