Participation of Jews in the processes of Russian social-democratic movement
Authors: Bezarov Oleksandr 
Published: June 2022

The formation of social democracy in the Russian Empire was another stage in the «Russian reception» of the Western models of the socialist movement, the result of certain ideological contradictions on the Russian ground. Given the semi-feudal society of the Russian Empire, the paternalism of autocratic power, the absence of deep traditions of liberal culture, the Russian social democratic movement could hardly count on obvious success without a deep revolutionary renewal of the entire socio-economic and political system of the Russian state. Since Jews were an urban ethnic group, it is not surprising that the provinces of the Jewish Pale in the late 19th century proved to be the epicentre of the revolutionary energy concentration.Thus, in the late 19th century the processes of formation and development of not the Russian, but the Jewish social-democratic movement continued on the territory of the Jewish Pale, the prominent centres of which were the Belarusian and Ukrainian cities of the Russian Empire. Despite the low level of the industrial development in the north-western part of the Russian Empire, as well as police persecution, imprisonment, and exile of many activists, the Jewish Social Democratic movement grew qualitatively and quantitatively, got loyal supporters, and spread to other cities such as Minsk, Grodno, Bialystok and Warsaw. The Bund (the Union of Jewish Workers in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia) played a key role in organizing the Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) on March 1-3, 1898, at which the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) was founded which was supposed to unite revolutionary Marxist groups of the empire, regardless of their ethnicity. The processes of formation of the organizational and personnel structure of the Russian Social-Democracy continued during the First Russian Revolution. Jews took an active part in these processes. Their role in the organization of Russian social-democratic movement and in its staffing is difficult to overestimate. In particular, S. Dikstein, H.S. Khurgin, E.A. Abramovich, I.A. Gurvich, E.A. Gurvich, O. Belakh, L. Berkovich and many other Jewish activists found themselves at the origins of Russian social-democratic movement, and such distinguished Jewish figures of Russian social democracy as P. Axelrod and Yu. Martov in the early 19th century headed the Menshevik wing of the RSDLP.The author noted that until 1917 the model for the development of the social democratic movement in the Russian Empire was the European Social Democracy, among the recognized authorities of which were also Jews (F. Lassall, E. Bernstein, V. Adler, O. Bauer). Eventually, the Jewish origin of Marx, the founder of «scientific» socialism, canonized his doctrine in the mass consciousness of the urban Jewry of the Russian Empire, which awaited a new messiah who would «bring» them out of the ghetto of the Jewish Pale.At the same time, the theory of self-liberation of the Jewish proletariat, adopted by the Jewish Social Democrats of Vilno, Minsk, and Kyiv as opposed to the seemingly utopian ideas of the Zionists from Basel, Switzerland, became the leading ideology of the Russia’s first political organization of Jewish proletarian – the Bund, which emerged in the same 1897, when the First World Congress of Zionists took place.Thus, the intensification of state anti-Semitism, the Jewish pogroms, and the escalation of the political crisis in the Russian Empire on the eve of the First Russian Revolution pushed Russian and Jewish Social-Democracy to develop a common position on the proletariat’s participation in future revolutionary events, optimized the search for overcoming the internal party crisis that arose after the withdrawal of the Bund from the RSDLP. For the first time in its history, the Jewish Social Democrats tried to ignite the fire of the Russian revolution on the «Jewish street» and prove the political significance of the powerful revolutionary potential of the Jewish masses in the Jewish Pale for the all-Russian social democratic movement.