Last Exit NOT to Brooklyn

During the 1970s and 1980s an international campaign was waged to "free" Soviet Jewry. Although previous campaigns by Jewish students and others had supported the rights of Jews in the Soviet Union to cultural expression and freedom from persecution, the new campaign focused on the right to leave the Soviet Union. Campaigners widely used the Biblical-derived slogan "Let My People Go!", and it became increasingly clear that the Jews who made this Exodus were expected to head for Israel.
Various groups and tactics were engaged in this campaign, from social fundraising, and lobbying political leaders to harassment of Soviet cultural tours and even (in the United States) terrorism. Not all those involved realised let alone questioned the politics in the background.

The campaign did succeed in bringing large numbers of Soviet Jews to Israel, not all of whom bcame willing right-wing settlers, and many of whom though welcoming political freedom found the Zionist state far from being a Land of Milk and Honey, or the standards of welfare and social justice they had hoped for. Others have made it to the traditional 'Goldiner Medina' in the United States, or even settled in, of all places, Berlin.

Meanwhile the campaign also led to such unpleasant sights - insofar as people have able or willing to see them - as Russian Jews being forced on to an Israel-bound plabe at Schipol, Amsterdam, some of them in handcuffs (so much for Zionist freedom); or of Russian-origin neo-Nazi skinheads,their parents having presumably posed as Jews, roaming  streets in Petah Tikvah and other places in Israel, assaulting Jews and Muslims.
 
The Soviet Jewry campaign has passed into history, and so has the Soviet Union - some like to think their activity in the former contributed to the latter's demise. This article from 1990, critically looking at an aspect of the campaign, is one I am now adding to my collection of Historical Passages.

Towards the end of 1988, it became apparent that the United States government was no longer assuring Soviet Jews refugee status and therefore settlement rights in the US, though it was still pressing the USSR to grant more exit visas. Some officials cited budget difficulties; others pointed to human rights improvements in the USSR to argue there was no longer a "well-founded fear of persecution" .

According to Philip Saperia of the long-established Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (BIAS): 'The policy is causing panic in the Soviet Jewish community here in the US and in the Soviet Union" (Guardian 7 December 1988). The Union of Councils for Soviet Jews claim that ~hundreds of Soviet Jews" had been denied refugee status in the past few months, and threatened that the issue would be an embarrassment for the incoming Bush administration.

In recent months, we have seen a spate of publicity given to Russian antisemitic organisations like Pamyat with its threats of pogroms. Some Jewish publicists affect to see escalating antisemitism even in parts of the Soviet Union where it has never existed,and claim widespread murders of Jews have begun. It would be dangerous to play down the threat of Russian fascism and Black Hundredism - and Jewish Socialist was one of the first publications to expose Pamyat. Of course, even if the threat is as serious as made out or genuinely feared (despite the racists' failure in the last election, though things could look different if the economic depression continues to worsen), our answers might still be different.

Present fundraising efforts emphasise panic and flight - in effect, telling Russian Jews they have no future in the country where they have lived for centuries, and for which they made sacrifices and shed blood, and tapping powerful emotional springs in diaspora Jews, prompting them to help the olim (immigrants to Israel) as refugees.

So what about entry to the United States? On 6 September 1989, the ]erusalem Post reported:

"American Jewish organisations that have been pushing hardest to get more Soviet Jews into the US on refugee status are now ready to accept limits on numbers. They are seeking a compromise with the administration that would channel more US aid to Israel to help it cope with an increased Soviet aliya (immigration to Israel)."

The report quoted Micah Naftalin of the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews as saying: "We acknowledge that there are finite limits to how many refugees the US can handle." But Naftalin rejected the policy of giving refugee status only to those with close relatives in the United States.

David Harris of the American Jewish Committee said limitations were inevitable, but the Bush administration was hoping to reach an accord with the Jewish community so as to prevent a fight with Congress, which was considering a bill giving all Soviet Jews automatic refugee status.

HIAS president, Ben-'Zion Leuchner, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that "the majority of federations (Jewish communities in each city) will not fight the government on this because of their own financial problems. Some Jewish communities are nearing the point where they can only fund family reunification cases." However, both Leuchter and Harris said the Jewish community would only support the administration in return for concessions.

Enter Shamir, far right

The Israeli government also had a view on Soviet Jews. Speaking to Likud Party veterans, Shamir declared that mass immigration of Soviet Jews was a "miracle", and that it required Israel to be big as well". They could not think of giving up the Occupied Territories. " We need the space to house all the people," he said, to applause (Jerusalem Post, 14 and l9 January 1990). The call for lebensraum has not gone unnoticed abroad, and not least by the Arabs, of course; but after a period of Intifada, and talk in Israel of a so-called "transfer", a more accurate interpretation might have been that  Shamir's Israel desperately needs more Jews if it is to hold the territories.

Shamir had been pressing the US government for some time to stop Soviet Jews entering, and he also wanted the Soviet authorities to permit direct nights to Israel so that people could not drop out en route.An earlier plan had been to have Soviet Jewish migrants fly to Israel via Bucharest, where Ceausescu might cu-operate in stopping dropouts, but circumstances intervened.

Back in 1982 the Jewish Agency bitterly attacked the Austrian government for placing a Russian language information poster at the Vienna transit centre, telling migrants the addresses of Jewish and non-Jewish organisations which would help them go to destinations other than Israel.'The Israeli ambassador in Vienna persuaded the Austrians to remove the poster. The Agency also sought the collaboration of US Jewish organisations in ensuring that only Soviet Jews with "first degree" relatives in the USA should be helped to go there (Jewish Chronicle, 15 January 1982).

Pressure was put on HIAS. and the Joint Distribution Committee to stop them helping Russian Jews. After attacks from the chair of the Jewish Agency, Arye Dultzin, and Anya director, Raphael Kotlowitz, HIAS, which had earlier claimed it was helping the "drop-outs" only to stop them falling into the clutches of the Satmar Hassidim {ultra orthodox anti-Zionists) or non-Jewish organisations, caved in to a plea from Begin. The board of governors of the American Society agreed by 13-3 to accept that it should help only those with close relatives in the US

(Jewish Chronicle, 9 Oct, 6 Nov, II Dec 1981).

Rich Uncle in the States?

Having said they couldn't afford to fund the settlement of Soviet Jews in America as one reason they backed down from challenging Bush over restrictions, American Jewish leaders are now calling upon their communities to cough up the cost of settling the Jews in Israel.

Likud Knesset member Michael Kleiner, chairman of the Knesset Immigration and Absorption Committee, told the Jerusalem Post's Asher Wallflsh on 14 January that Shamir and Pores must go to the US to raise the money for settling Soviet Jews in Israel. Criticising Jewish Agency targets of $1 billion from American Jewry (twice what they'd originally set) as inadequate, Kleiner said Israeli and diaspora Jews should agree to meet the eventual cost, whatever it was. Admitting that it could rise to between $6 and $10 billion, he said that Israel would have to shelve all national and municipal development budgets (hard luck, Hatikvah quarter) and that diaspora Jews must come in 50:50 (Jerusalem Post, 14 Jan 1990) .

At a press conference in New York attended by Natan Sharansky, honouring an announced $20 million housing fund for Soviet Jews in Israel set up by investment banker Joseph Gruss, David Sacks of the United Jewish Appeal said the Appeal might raise its $350 million pledge over one year, instead of three as originally planned. Asked about the overall $500 million, Sacks said: "I can see the possibility of doubling that figure."

Last February the Council of Jewish Federations (CJF), at its General Assembly in Miami, pledged that its members would deliver its financial commitment to Israel "whether or not we are successful in raising the full amount", according to executive director Don Felstein, who explained that if necessary federations would have to borrow the money, or cut other budgets. The U}A had meanwhile upped its target, to raise $420 million in one year (Jerusalem Post, 9 February 1990).

Rescue or aliyah?

According to Felstein, some delegates at the CJF's Assembly were concerned about Shamir's remarks on the need for a big Israel". The leadership had managed to calm their fears, saying that less than 1% of Soviet}ews were settling the West Bank.

Felstein said that what had helped convince delegates of the need to deliver the money was a set of articles in the New York Times about the growth of antisemitism in the Soviet Union. There was a general realisation in Miami that American Jewry has a chance in 1990 to do what it failed to do in 1939 (]erusalem Post, 9 Feb 1990).

This last remark is significant. We all know of the Jews who were turned away from America's shores in 1939 and after. In 1981 a commission was set up to examine the way American Jewish organisations had behaved during the years of Nazi mass extermination of the Jews of Europe. Among the questions posed was whether these organisations might not have saved thousands of lives if they had put pressure on the Roosevelt administration. The commission broke up in disarray at the end of 1982 without completing its work (Daily Telegraph, 5 }an 1983).

However, a privately circulated interim report stated: "In retrospect, one incontrovertible fact stands out above all others: in the face of Hitler's total war of extermination against the Jews of Europe, the Jewish leadership in America at no stage decided to proclaim total mobilisation for rescue" (New York Herald Tribune, 5 }an 1983) .

Whether pressure on Roosevelt might have worked, we can only guess. The American Jewish community did not feel so confident then. There was fear that America's own antisemites would use the prospect of mass Jewish immigration to stir up hatred against those already there. Later, American Jews would vent their feelings on Britain for restricting entry to Palestine. Leon Uris could write Exodus and Hollywood make the movie.

One can understand the remark about not repeating 1939, but have Don Felstein or the Jewish Federation read the history properly? Weren't guilt pangs over bowing down to the antisemites during the War assuaged by listening to other arguments?

"If Jews will have to choose between the refugees, saving Jews from concentration camps and assisting a national museum in Palestine, mercy will have the upper hand and the whole energy of the people will be channeled into saving Jews from various countries. Zionism will be struck off the agenda . . . If we allow a separation between the refugee problem and the Palestine problem we are risking the existence of Zionism," wrote David Ben Gurion in a letter to  the Zionist Executive in  1938, concerned lest other territories be found to take Jewish refugees (The Other Israel by Arie Bober, published by Matzpen).

The Goldberg commission's report noted that established Zionist organisations were "riveted to post-war plans" for a Jewish state and this was another reason not to demand entry for Jews to America. And today?

"Could Israel morally survive the appearance of 500,000 Jewish refugees heading for another galut(diaspora) were the gates of the USSR opened?" asked Mikhail Agursky and Alexander Libin, in the ]erusalem Post (6 October 1982). "The drop out phenomenon corrupted and demoralised Soviet Jewry", they claimed. The Zionist writers rejected any move to grant refugee status to Soviet Jews wishing to enter America.

More recently, Isi Leibler, vice-president of the World Jewish Congress and a leading Zionist figure in Australia (doubtless another over-populated little country that couldn't possibly find room for more }ews), said; 'The Soviet Jewry movement is not a travel agency, and transfer of one diaspora to another, even from a Communist society to a democracy, is not a pressing national Jewish objective. This is especially true if the overwhelming majority of Jews wanting to leave - currently over 90% - do not want to go to Israel."

Double bind

One problem with these arguments is that the Soviet Union today, whatever it is, is not Germany in 1939.Far from having been systematically persecuted and driven from public life as German  Jews were by state policy from 1933 on (and more especially from 1938), Soviet Jews are enjoying a new flowering of cultural and political freedom. The antisemites are menacing, but not yet much  more. There is violence, but not much greater than in, say, the United States (or, in a different way, in Israel). The Russian Nazi groups'votes were derisory.

This  is not to recommend complacency but to suggest that antisemitism in Russia can be fought and beaten. But in order to squeeze huge sums out of Jewish communities already facing cash  problems, the Zionist movement has had to hype up the Russian situation to make it sound as though Auschwitz is round the comer. "Shadow Of The New Nazis" screamed the headline to an article by Jane Moonman of BIPAC (Jewish Chronicle, 9 Dec 1988). "Never Again 1939" is the kind of sentiment being tapped into in the States.

The snag is, if people really believe it's that bad, mightn't they decide that what's needed is rescue rather than aliyah to Israel? Mightn't they press for open doors and refugee status?

On 15 February, Israel's Absorption Minister, Rabbi Yitzhak Peretz, shocked Zionist opinion by naively declaring; "Should the escape route of the Soviet Jews lead them to Western Europe or the United States, this is better than they they should stay in the Soviet Union." (Peretz is a member of the non Zionist orthodox Shas Party.) Shamir promptly told the Israeli press: 'There is no need to take note of the remarks made by Absorption Minister Yitzhak Peretz" (Ha'areiz, 16 Jan 1990).

Michael Kleiner, of the Knesset' s Immigration and Absorption Committee, complained that Peretz's remarks would be used by "HIAS officials, who don't care about the well-being of the Jews", but merely wish to keep going as an organisation by "disseminating untruthful propaganda about Israel and about the condition of Soviet Jewry . Kleiner went on to claim the Absorption Minister had "fallen victim to the propaganda and fear-spreading campaign conducted by vested interests who are striving to reopen the gates of the United States to Jewish immigrants" (Ha'aretz, 15 Feb 1990).

Jewish Agency chairman, Simha Dinitz, had revealed on 11 February that the Agency had approached American Jewish leaders some weeks before to ask them to stop HIAS opening an office in Moscow which might help Jews going to America and "sabotage immigration to Israel".

On 18 February, Michael Kleiner proclaimed; 'This cancerous growth called HIAS must be totally eradicated." Claiming that HIAS lobbying had persuaded the US government to grant 8,000 more refugee-entry permits to Soviet Jews, Kleiner accused the Jewish organisation of doing this just to maintain 'bloated bureaucracy and corrupt officials".

Furthermore, he accused; 'HIAS is preparing the ground for an upsurge of antisemitism in the United States," because, by "luring Jews who really want to settle in Israel to go to America instead," it was leading to the day when American Jewry would be accused of stealing the places of others" (]erusalem Post, 19 Feb 1990).

So how did the American Jews respond to this belligerent language and the threatening suggestion that Jews are to blame for a rise in antisemitism? Ben Zion Leuchner of HIAS denied that his organisation had asked the US to increase its ceiling on Jewish refugees. He pointed out that HIAS was actually reducing staff. He denied that it sought to persuade anyone to go to America: "To the contrary, our staff members are instructed to tell the relatives of Soviet Jews that the quickest way for their family to be resettled in freedom is to go to Israel" (]erusalem Post, 4 March 1990).

Martin Kraar, of the North American Council of Jewish Federations, reassured Kleiner that the 8,000 Jews who were being assisted had already been allowed for in October and that there was no intention of increasing the entry quota further. He further assured Kleiner that his Council would be keeping an eye on HIAS to "ensure it didn' t divert Soviet Jews to any other destination save Israel."

So once again language that would be rightly denounced as antisemitic on the lips of others is considered acceptable from Israeli leaders. And once again diaspora Jewish leaders kowtow to Israeli leaders, protesting their innocence of any charge that they are making demands on their own government to assist fellow Jews find freedom! No longer are they demanding: "Let My People Go," but: "Don't Let My People In"!


A useful memorandum on Soviet Jewish migration has
been produced by the Committee to Open Borders. Send a
large sae to Jewish Socialist, BM3725, London WCIN
3XX, for a copy.

The Man Who Was Friday (3) Triumph and Tragedy

HIS OLD FRIENDS. Lenin and Krupskaya. Lenin's widow protested when secret police tried to frame Piatnitsky. But she was unable to save him from the Great Purge.

Abroad again, Piatnitsky went to Liepzig, where the German Social Democrats' presses printed the Russians' literature. Once again it was his job to organise the smuggling. In 1912 he helped organise the Bolsheviks' conference in Prague. Lenin and Krupskaya visited him in Liepzig. The following summer he was invited to stay with them near Zakopane, and went hiking with Lenin in the Tatra mountains. The friends had their disagreements. Lenin ribbed Piatnitsky over his respect for the German Social Democrats, Piatnitsky warned Lenin not to trust Malinowski (who was later proven to be a police agent).


In 1914, having trained as an electrical engineer, Piatnitsky returned to Russia and took a job with the Siemens company in Moscow. They sent him to work in Samara, on a tramway project. The socialists there, Menshevik and Bolshevik, had a recreational society as a cover for political lectures. But once again the authorities were on Piatnitsky's trail, armed with a photograph which he guessed an informer called Zhitomirsky had supplied. Osip was arrested and sent to a fortress prison, and then away to a remote valley in Siberia.

He was out in the wilds on March 1917 when he heard that Czar Nicholas II had been overthrown. Somehow he reached Moscow, reported for party duty, and found work with the railway union. A few years after the revolution, party members were asked to write up their stories. Piatnitsky's account was published in 1925 and translated into German and French before it was published in English by Martin Lawrence as Memoirs of a Bolshevik, and in the United States bv International Publishers (1933).

The Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute in Moscow enthused in a preface: 'These Memoirs should serve as an excellent material for training our younger generation of workers who are joining the Communist Party. In this respect Comrade Piatnitsky's book might serve as a sort of textbook, and an excellent text book at that, which would help our comrades abroad, who are carrying on their revolutionary work in capitalist countries, to learn the methods of organising underground work and help them to become model Bolshevik party members.'


With its tales of true adventure, and the author's frankness and humour, Memoirs of a Bolshevik is also an enjoyable read. Yet for three quarters of a century it has been kept out of print. The Bund crops up repeatedly in the book, and not just in Osip's native Lithuania where it was particularly strong. Another thing that strikes the reader is how, despite differences and polemics, factions could work together against the autocratic regime, whether planning prison breaks, smuggling papers, or fighting off attacks.

On the eve of the First World War, Piatnitsky found that Zhitomirsky, whom he suspected was a police agent, had been investigated by a three-person committee, comprising one Bolshevik, one Menshevik and one Bundist. Such procedure might sound like common sense, but those of us who have experienced the 57 varieties of the British Left will know that sense is rarely common, and co-operation less so.

What is remarkable about Piatnitsky's book is its timing and its provenance. In the late 1920s, along with brutal forced collectivisation in the Soviet Union, came a period when revolutionary willpower could supposedly conquer everything -environmental, economic, or political. Soviet railway engineers who warned of limits on how much freight their system could carry were condemned as saboteurs. The 1929 crash was seen as the final crisis of capitalism. Failure to carry out revolution was the result of bad leadership. Any element of truth in this was distorted by Stalin, to imply not theoretical critique, but denunciations of left-wing opponents, even potential allies, as the worst-possible enemy.

'Fascism is the military organisation of the bourgeoisie, which leans upon Social Democracy...,' proclaimed Stalin, but'Social Democracy, objectively speaking is the moderate wing of Fascism!' If anyone thought this crude, over the top, or even contradictory, they knew better than to risk voicing their doubts and being branded a 'Trotskyist'. Social democrats and the unions they still led were dubbed 'social fascist', and left-wingers like the British Independent Labour Party (1LP), were 'left social fascists', a more insidious variety.

In Britain, the Communist Party had been growing since the 1926 General Strike and Ramsay Macdonald's abandonment of Labour. It had limited success with breakaway 'red' unions, and repelled valuable friends by its attack on the Left. In Poland, Communist Party members attacked the Bund and its institutions, as 'social fascist', thereby antagonising the very workers with whom they needed to unite in the fight against fascism.

In Germany, the Communist Party was bigger. Its hostility to the Social Democrats, seen as betraying the November 1918 revolution, was understandable. But in the face of Hitler's rise to power, it was suicidal. The Depression made workers who were still in the factories cling tightly to their jobs and their Social Democratic unions, while the Communists were outside competing with the Nazis for support from the unemployed.

At elections in May 1928 the Social Democrats gained 29% of the vote and the Communist Party 10.6%. The Nazis that year had a mere 2.6%. Two years and a slump later, the Social Democrat vote in September 1930 was down to 24.5%, while the Communists got 13.1%. But the Nazi vote had risen alarmingly to 18.3%. Had the two workers' parties combined their strengths, they could have gained wider support and blocked the Nazis on the streets as well as in the polling booths. The gap between them became the gateway through which Hitler marched, to destroy both.

All this time Osip Piatnitsky, promoted into the secretariat of the Communist International, had loyally transmitted the line to the German party and others. As treasurer, and head of the inner OMS, with a trusted person in each party, he could see they complied.

In 1928 he authored a paper snappily entitled 'The Bolshevisation of the Communist Parties of the Capitalist Countries by Eradication of the Social Democratic Tradition'. It was meant to turn them into efficient disciplined revolutionary organisations with militant workplace cells, modelled on an idealised Bolshevik Party, which Piatnitsky's memoirs show, never existed. In reality. 'Bolshevisation1 was about moulding the Comintern and its parties into tools of the Russian state. Stalin came to despise them as ineffective tools, to be disposed of when he could.


Even after Hitler took power in 1933, Piatnitsky's pamphlet 'The Current Situation in Germany', assured readers that the fascists would not last, that workers were resisting, and the Communist Party growing. Had the Nazis attacked social democracy too? They just wanted to give their own supporters good jobs. Of course the Party line had been right.

When workers experiencing the difference between fascism and democracy said there should he a united front, the Communist Party had offered one 'from below'. If the Social Democrat workers did not accept, that was because the leaders in whom they still had illusions held them back. Piatnitsky did admit mistakes. The party should lave made more of the national burden which workers bore. If they just repeated that Social Democrats were 'social fascists'", the Social Democrat workers felt affronted and concluded the Communist Party was not serious about unity.


This came close to what Trotsky had said, but Piatnitsky would not admit that Trotsky had been right. In his Memoirs, recalling Trotsky's past opposition to Lenin, he branded him a 'Liquidator'. As Comintern treasurer he could withold funding from the Canadian CP whose leaders didn't take up the fight against 'Trotskyism'. His criticism of the German party leaders did not acknowledge that they had faithfully followed the Moscow line.


All the same, Piatnitsky remained too honest to be trusted in his Comintern job. There was worse to ccme. As the Soviet leadership lurched towards 'popular front' diplomacy, with its beautifully democratic 1936 constitution, it also launched the purges and show trials in which lifelong communists 'confessed' to being in league with Hitler, the British or whoever, in plots to assassinate Stalin and destroy the Soviet Union.


Piatnitsky was no oppositionist, but he refused to accept the stories of ever widening conspiracies. He knew some of the accused, and had mentioned them in his Memoirs. At a party plenum he accused the NKVD secret police of fabricating evidence and using illegal methods to obtain confessions. Lazar Kaganovich and other Politburo members surrounded him afterwards, begging him to retract, but Piatnitsky replied that he had expressed his opinion and would not withdraw it.


Yezhov, the chief of the NKVD, alleged that Piatnitsky had been a provocateur in the pay of the Czarist secret police. But Piatnitsky was not arrested. He challenged Yezhov to confront him with evidence. Meanwhile the Gestapo and Russian White Guard officers abroad surreptitiously fed the Soviet authorities with material to be used against Piatnitsky. Piatnitsky underwent 220 hours of harsh interrogation but refused to confess anything, instead writing a letter to the Politburo protesting his innocence and loyalty as a communist.


At a night meeting in the Kremlin in May 1938, on Stalin's initiative, they produced a 'witness' from jail to testify that Piatnitsky had been plotting. 'He's lying! He is a fascist, he is a scoundrel!' exclaimed Lenin's widow Krupskaya. 'You know Piatnitsky well, he is after all the most honest man. Lenin loved and respected him very much.'


On 19th June 1938, Piatnitsky was accused of introuducing Trotskyist formulations' into Marxist literature - not quite putting glass in the butter -and of infiltrating Trotskyists into the Comintern. But without his confession to these dastardly crimes the authorities were frustrated in their plans to follow up their trials and purges of Bolsheviks and Red Army commanders with a Comintern trial. This did not stop them locking up many foreign militants like the Invergordon naval mutineer Len Wincott, or executing others, including British Communist Rose Cohen. But British CP leader Harry Politt, who made discreet inquiries in Moscow in 1938 about Rose Cohen's fate, may have been spared in the wake of it because Osip Piatnitsky, being tortured at the time, refused to 'confess'. Piatnitsky was finally executed on 30th October 1939. Yezhov, who had himself been purged in March that year was executed a few months later.


Piatnitsky was among those officially rehabilitated following Khrushev's 'secret speech' to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in 1956. But Memoirs of a Bolshevik has still not been republished.

I don't know why.

The Man Who Was Friday: 1) The Tailor's Apprentice

He was born on January 1882, in Wilkomir, a small town in the Pale of Settlement. His father and two elder brothers were carpenters, but young Osip Aaronovich Tarshis was apprenticed in a tailor's shop to learn ladies' dressmaking. At 14, he listened to the workers talking about socialists who had been deported back to their home town.

He wrote: 'From casual talk 1 learned that these socialists used to meet the local intellectuals and workers, teach the latter how to read and write, give them books to read, etc. Also they often talked in my shop about secret meetings that were held in the capitals of the different provinces - in Vilna, Kovno and Warsaw - and about arrests which were made there.'

More exciting, when his brothers came home at the end of the year, young Osip found out they were involved. By the end of 1897 Osip had a job in Kovno, where he lodged with his brothers. He sat in on the carpenters' illicit meetings, held in members' homes, and liable to be raided by the police at any time.

Soon Osip had a new job, besides his paid work in the tailoring shop. He was to carry political literature between Kovno and Vilna. This illegal traffic was to become his speciality. Meantime, trade unionism was growing. The garment workers went on strike for a reduction of hours - to a 12-hour day. But the employers had got young Osip's measure, and he was blacklisted in the Kovno area.

Leaving for Vilna, at the end of 1898, he entrusted the Rabochnaya Znaya (Workers Banner) printing press, which he had looked after, to a trusted comrade, a member of the Jewish Worker's Bund. A few years later when Osip returned to Kovno on a mission for Iskra (The Spark) the Bund asked his help in organising workers at a firm that shipped timber to Germany on the River Nieman.

The day he left for Vilna, Osip glimpsed the wider world of struggle. Weeping parents were at the station seeing off soldiers, sent to crush the Boxer Rebellion in China. Why should we fight the Chinese people, with whom we have no quarrel, Osip mused, when the same army is used to suppress us here?

Even the Czar's army had its uses, however. In Vilna, where Osip was recruited to the Iskra group, he discovered it had an Iskra Military Organisation, headed by an army doctor, which sent revolutionary literature through the army's own mail to contacts across the Czar's sprawling empire.

There were unions in several trades in Vilna, but none recruited workers regardless of nationality, according to Osip, nor did they have a central body. However the Bund brought workers together for May Day and other events, often held out in the woods. Osip and friends went to a celebration of Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press. The girls stayed in a one-room cabin, while the lads slept out on the porch. Next morning they found someone had stolen their clothes and shoes. They had to signal frantically to passers-by, who scoured the neighbourhood for cast-offs, so they could get home.

It wasn't always funny. A friend from Osip's home town, not a party member, Solomon Rogut, caught carrying illegal literature, was beaten unconscious and left for dead. The Bund in Wilkomir produced a pamphlet about Rogut. But Osip felt responsible for having involved his friend.

Workers found rough and ready ways to deal with scabs and informers, and battle the authorities. They had set up unofficial 'labour exchanges' where they could drop in, drink tea, hear news of any work, and discuss affairs of state. Hearing that three women had been arrested for distributing leaflets, workers from Osip's 'exchange' stormed the police station. After cutting its telephone wires, they fought sabre-wielding police to reach the top floor and free the women held there. Many of these workers were injured or arrested later, but all were proud of what they had done.

Osip himself was taken off a Kovno train and questioned by police in March 1902. They knew about his links with the Iskra group. He was held in Vilna for a week, then sent to Kiev. There was student unrest there, and the jail filled up with students. Moved to the political wing, Osip was able to do some reading, and had tutors. He acknowledges that a compositor, Joseph Blumenfeld, with whom he later had differences, helped him. He also mentions Nicolai Bauman, a Bolshevik whose murder by Black Hundreds in Moscow aroused huge anger there in 1905.

Future Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov was with Osip in the Kiev prisoners' escape committee. They practised human pyramids to the height of the wall, and celebrated birthdays to get the guards accustomed to drinking with them. They smuggled in sleeping powders for the guards and, through Osip's contacts, they obtained false passports and papers for themselves. They assembled a grapple and ladder, and tied sheets into a rope.

Getting over the wall one August night, Osip went from town to town posing as a student. At Zhitomir he was sheltered in the Bund's secret committee room. For a time he returned to his old trade, taking digs with a fellow worker. But the authorities were after him, and someone from the prison saw him at the market. A friend had his papers. They met in the woods and, accompanied by two Bundist women, went to Kamenets Podolsk. From there, wading across rivers, they crossed into Austria at night. Then it was on to Berlin, where Osip began the next stage of his career.

Revolution of 1905: (3) A new idea from Ivanovo-Voznesensk. And then Odessa - the dream and the nightmare.

What made strikes in Russia into revolution was not just their extent or the adoption of political demands, still less the violence and destruction (at which the forces of order always excelled), but the way workers progressed from immediate economic concerns to lead society, creating organs which took on functions normally reserved for government.

At Ivanovo-Voznesensk, a textile city north-east of Moscow, a government factory inspector advised discontented workers to form an assembly. In May they came out on strike demanding shorter hours, a higher minimum wage, paid maternity leave, factory nurseries, freedom to meet and the right to read newspapers during breaks. On 20th May they voted to set up a workers' militia to keep order and combat hooligans of the monarchist, antisemitic Black Hundreds.

The strike committee found itself called upon to regulate food prices in the shops and to decide if printers could produce official notices requested by the Governor. With Cossack reinforcements, the authorities tried to stop the workers from meeting. But the strike lasted until July, when employers agreed to pay rises, paid maternity leave and other demands. Meanwhile the workers' committee had adopted a new name: soviet, meaning 'council.

In Lodz, after soldiers shot demonstrators, workers led by the Polish Socialists, Social Democrats and the Bund resisted government troops for three days in June 1905. Some 300 people were killed and 1,000 wounded. Trouble spread across Poland and the troops had to be reinforced from 250,000 to 300,000.

Odessa in the south, a boom city in the late 19th century, had been quiet at the start of 1905. Two Bolsheviks who tried to start a strike in the railway workshops after Bloody Sunday were handed over to police. But that spring political unrest and union activity grew among dockers and doctors, sailors and seamstresses.

Many had come to Odessa in prosperous times, among them Jewish workers who found employment in factories and the waterfront. Bundist militants escaping police crackdowns in Vilna came too. Bolsheviks were gaining influence among the railway workers, and there were Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries too. At the urging of the workers, and on the initiative of the Bund, the different factions in Odessa began meeting to discuss a common strategy. Odessa city council, which had tried to send money to Bloody Sunday victims, asked Dr Mikhail Bogomolets to report on workers' conditions and health in the Peresyp district. His detailed report called for new sewers, improvements in factory conditions, enforcement of public health laws, workers' participation in safety measures, trade union rights and democratic local government. Dr Bogomolets, a Bolshevik, did more than recommend reforms. He and his colleagues saw to it that workers from the Peresyp came to the meetings.

Politics breathed fresh life into union activity. On 6th May over 10,000 workers walked out of Peresyp's
engineering plants and shipyards, and strikes spread. Demands included canteen facilities, sickness benefits, free medical care, an end to bosses using offensive language and an end to the war.

On 15th June, after clashes between striking workers and the police and Black Hundreds, which left scores dead and many buildings blazing, the Czar placed Odessa under martial law. Into this port sailed the battleship Potemkin, seized by its crew after a row over maggot-ridden food. They brought ashore the body of a comrade killed by the officers.

Konstantin Feldman, a student, went down to the port.
'Where are you going?'
'To the free revolutionary ship,' I answered.
'And who may you be, a Social Democrat?'
'Yes'.
'And what proof do you have to show?'
'Social Democrats don't have passports to show, they let us go to rot in Siberia and prison without them.'
'Well get in with us.

He stepped down into the cutter alongside the young sailor who had challenged him, a craggy-faced Ukrainian whom the men introduced as their commander, 25-year old Matyushenko. Two other agitators arrived on board the Potemkin, one of them a Bundist. The sailors gathered for a mass meeting. Feldman told them about the workers' struggles all over Russia, and said workers were dying with the slogan 'Death or Freedom!' It was taken up in thundering chorus. Then the Bundist spoke of brotherhood and equality, of the solidarity of the proletariat, of the Social Democrats marching at their head. 'And hand in hand with the proletariat of all lands, you sailors, their brothers, give a mighty cheer: Hurrah for socialism! Hurrah for freedom!' A mighty hurrah resounded.

But then the bell rang for dinner. The sailors invited us to join them. We were glad to accept their invitations, for we had eaten nothing all the morning. Surrounded by a dense crowd of sailors,
we went below. We were offered a little glass of vodka, then we were seated on long benches besides the sailors. The faces of all were excited. Our hearts too were throbbing joyfully. Can it be it's not a dream? Can the freedom of Russia be so near?

'I longed to shake hands; I could have hugged them all in a burst of holiday feeling. And at that instant I felt someone squeezing my hand. I turned round. It was the Bundist. He too was feeling as I did. We stood in silence, looking into each others eyes, and one of us murmured, "Can it be...?" That simple phrase said it all.'

Onshore, as Odessa citizens gathered to cheer the Potemkin, the powers that be ordered a massacre, troops shooting people down mercilessly on the steps as depicted in Eisenstein's famous film. Over 1,000 were killed. At the urging of Bolsheviks and Bundists, the Potemkin sailors replied by shelling a theatre where the reactionaries were meeting. But one ship could not take on the whole Russian army and navy, though when the Black Sea fleet steamed up, the Potemkin, signalling to them, 'Join us', was able to sail through.

The reactionaries had not finished. In October, even as the Czar proclaimed limited freedoms and a limited parliament, the Duma, they launched a bloody antisemitic pogrom in Odessa lasting three days, and killing 800 people. Neither old people nor babies were spared. 'The Jews want freedom? We'll show them what freedom is!' said Neidhardt, Odessa's City Governor. Such 'spontaneous' pogroms, better organised and better armed than the revolution, spread across Russia, though not where the socialists were stronger, Moscow or St Petersburg, where a young fellow called Bronstein, better known as Trotsky, was chairing the Soviet.

To change the world you not only had to down tools, but take up arms, to know what you were up against. Russia had given the world a glimpse of things to come: the dream of solidarity on Potemkin and the nightmare of the Odessa steps massacre and pogroms.

(first published in Jewish Socialist no.50, Summer 2005)

Revolution of 1905:(2) Shaking an Empire

BLOODY SUNDAY. Began with a peaceful petition.

The entire Russian Empire was shaken by Bloody Sunday in St.Petersburg, all the peoples' discontents bursting forth. "Comrades! On the streets of St.Petersburg the first barricades have been built... the great day has come! The revolution has come ... Arm yourselves!', urged Rafael Abramowitz, a leader of the Jewish Workers' Bund, who had left St Petersburg to report to a Central Committee meeting in Dvinsk.

On 10th January the Bund and its allies called a general strike. Workers were already out in St Petersburg and Moscow, and strikes rolled from Warsaw and Vilna (11th January), Riga and Kiev (12th January), Lodz, Minsk and other cities by the 13th, and, by the end of week as far as Batum and Tbilisi in the Caucasus, Samara and Kazan. Altogether, half a million workers went on strike - Russian and Pole, Jew and Lett, Georgian and Finn - and their unrest was shared by students and professionals.

In Riga, the Latvian capital, a meeting of Lettish, Jewish, Russian and Ukrainian Social Democrats resolved to campaign for a constituent assembly and political freedom. Some 15,000 people, some armed with pistols, marched on 13th January. Police and troops opened fire, killing at least 40 people and wounding 200. Crowds fleeing across the frozen River Dvina were drowned as the ice gave way.

In the latter part of the 19th century, capitalism, having spread unevenly around the whole world, entered a new stage. Great powers emerged. Small firms in national markets were overshadowed by giant combinations of industry and capital, commanding governments, their fleets and armies, to carve world markets and materials into empires. Bestriding continents with railways, telegraphs, soldiers and settlers, the United States and Russia reached the Pacific. US power crossed to 'liberate' Spain's Philippines colony, and eye China. Russian interests, keeping forces in Manchuria after the Boxer Rebellion, coveted neighbouring Korea, where they faced a new upstart rival: Japan.

The Russian Empire, though still feared in Europe, was backward. Its autocratic regime and army rested on the backs of poor peasants barely out of serfdom. Its institutions maintained outdated prejudices, notably the segregation and persecution of Russia's Jews. Russia's educated and business classes had little say in politics; its rapidly growing working class had no rights at all. Huge modern factories established by foreign capital stood surrounded by insanitary slums. Only the means of repression - secret police, prison exile, state-sponsored pogroms - foreshadowed later developments. That repression, and the advanced ideas, which spread among intellectuals and working people despite the efforts of police and priests, even secretly penetrating some army units and ships.

The brutal weight of repression was sometimes lightened by inefficiency, confusion and corruption. A police chief in Ekaterinoslav earned praise and promotion by uncovering and closing illicit printing presses each year, until it emerged that he kept setting them up to make his name with raids. Nowadays we'd say he was meeting targets.

The Japanese government sent a note to the Imperial Russian government about timber concessions that a retired officer turned speculator, Bezobrazov, had obtained along Korea's Yalu river, claimed by Japan. Bezobrazov had friends in the Admiralty and court, and the Russian government took no notice of the Japanese, trusting that its forces in Manchuria and warships at Port Arthur would hold them away.
On 26th January 1904, Japanese torpedo boats attacked Russia's fleet at Port Arthur, sinking or crippling most of it before sailing home. 'Asiatic treachery!' screamed the conservative St Petersburg press, vowing that Russia would soon be avenged. A Moscow University professor, Prince Trubetskoi, said Russia was defending Europe against the 'yellow danger, the new hordes of Mongols'. But the Japanese army was German-trained, and its Navy equipped and trained by Britain. Seeing what havoc its new Whitehead torpedoes had wreaked in Port Arthur, The Times said Japan's 'act of daring' would earn 'a place of honour in naval annals'. Who would foresee Pearl Harbour?

Russian officers called the Japanese 'yellow monkeys'. They assumed Russia's huge army and gold reserve would prevail. A brief mood of patriotism swept through the middle class, dreaming of'destiny in the east . But Russia's army was scattered across a huge empire, larger forces holding rebellious Poland and the Baltic areas than could be moved to the Far East. Economically, while British and American finance bankrolled the Japanese, Russia was devastated by the war. Firms profiting from military contracts were outnumbered by those hit by disruption of Asian trade. Workers were laid off, textiles left standing in the Trans-Siberian Railway's sidings as it struggled to convey military supplies.

Though some Russian units fought bravely, they were badly led and poorly equipped, and morale fell. Foreign observers reported that the only time senior commanders led from the front was fleeing ahead of their men after the Battle of Mukden (March 1905).

With one fleet lying at the bottom of the Yellow Sea and other ships bottled up in the Black Sea by Turkish batteries and international treaty, Russia despatched a fleet from the Baltic to the Pacific war zone. Panickv over rumours of saboteurs and Japanese gunboats, the Russians sank a British trawler in the North Sea, engendering war talk and harassment from shadowing Royal Navy ships, before sailing around Africa. With scarcely a port willing to shelter them for coaling, they endured tropical sickness, hardship and mutiny By the time they reached the Pacific, Port Arthur had fallen, on 20th December 1904, two week-before Bloody Sunday.

Heading for Vladivostok, the doomed fleet entered the Tsushima Strait and the jaws of the Japanese navy. It was destroyed on 14th May 1905 and its admiral was captured. Russia secretly accepted the good offices of US President Theodore Roosevelt to sue for peace.

Talk of Japanese agents in Europe was not entirely groundless. Colonel Akashi, former military attache in St Petersburg, had travelled to Sweden to meet Finnish, Polish and Russian revolutionaries. Finnish radical Konni Zilliacus saw the war as an opportunity. He urged a united manifesto to the Czar, propaganda among the troops, and arms for the revolution. He thought Japanese forces could free political prisoners from Siberia. Polish Socialist Party leader Jozef Pilsudski sought support in Japan to raise a Polish Legion.

More advanced than Russia in some respects, its western subject peoples smarted under social and national oppression. Poland's 11.3 million people, less than 8% of the Russian Empire's population, contributed 25% of its industrial output and 150 million roubles a year to the imperial treasury. But Poles were denied even local councils and were excluded from government jobs. The schools were forbidden to teach Catholicism or the Polish language. Some 60% of Polish army recruits could neither read nor write.
Wealthy Polish manufacturers and landlords tempered national resentment with appreciation of Russian order and markets, hoping to share in the spoils of empire. Dmowski's National Democrats (Endeks) opposed Pilsudski's adventurism, focusing their nationalism against Germans, or safer still, Poland's Jews, even though many Jews were serving at the front in Manchuria.

Besides those sent to war, some 100,000 workers in Poland were laid off when Asian markets closed and those still working faced wage cuts.

Following Bloody Sunday, the Polish Socialist Party (PPS), the more marxist Social Democratic Party of Poland and Lithuania, and the Bund called strikes. School students went on strike, demanding teaching in their own language. During a three-day general strike in Lodz, barricades went up and the Governor was captured until troops rescued him. With their leader's nationalist, military outlook, and hopes on Japan, PPS armed squads ambushed troops and police on Warsaw streets. This led to nervous, trigger-happy soldiers shooting people indiscriminately but did not provide workers with means to take power or defend themselves. Warsaw was placed under siege on 17th January; 64 people were killed and 69 wounded by government troops.

At the Socialist International Congress in Amsterdam in 1904, the veteran Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov embraced Japanese socialist Sen Katayama, to rapturous applause from delegates. If the Czarist government defeated Japan, Plekhanov declared, the losers would be the Russian people and the subject nations. As internationalists the social democrats could neither go along with liberal patriotism nor tie their hopes to Japanese victory. As it turned out, Russia's defeat could be entrusted to the rulers who had taken the country to war in the first place. But if the workers' struggle hastened an end to the war, so much the better. In that sense, socialists were 'defeatists'.

Revolution of 1905: 1) The First Bloody Sunday

FATHER GEORGY GAPON suggested petition to the Czar.

On Sunday 9th January 1905, columns of working men and women with their children set off to the Winter Palace in St Petersburg to present a petition to His Imperial Majesty Czar Nicholas II asking for better conditions and political reforms. Like the weavers who had assembled for their rights in St Peters Fields, Manchester, almost a century before, they came as if they were going on a holiday procession, whole families wearing their cleanest clothes.

They started the morning kneeling in prayer, amid lightly drifting snow. Forming up to march in orderly manner, they carried holy icons, national flags, and portraits of the Czar and Czarina, and sang not revolutionary songs but .favourite hymns. They were led by a priest, Father George Gapon, whom they trusted would receive a hearing from those in power.

A year before, Gapon, a former prison chaplain, had persuaded Interior Minister Plehve to let him to set up something which Moscow secret police chief Zubatov had introduced: a legal organisation
where workers could meet socially, organise mutual funds, even seek improvements in conditions, while remaining loyal to the Czar and safe from revolutionary influences. This Assembly of St. Petersburg Factory Workers excluded anyone who wasn't Russian and Christian. Numerous police agents ensured its assembly halls excluded troublemaking Jews, students and 'politics'. But, like the Zubatov unions before them, they could not exclude class struggle.

At the end of 1904, workers at St Petersburg's Putilov ironworks approached the management to negotiate over conditions and pay. On 2nd January, believing their representatives were being victimised, and finding that the bosses would not listen, the Putilov's entire 13,000 workforce swept out of the works, past the police who were trying to restrain them. With Gapon's help, workers drew up a list of demands, including an eight-hour day, increased minimum pay, better sanitary facilities and free medical aid. They wanted a recognised bargaining committee and no arbitrary dismissals. Groups of Putilov workers toured nearby shipyards and factories, persuading other workers to join them. By the end of the week, almost all St. Petersburg's manufacturing, from steel and textiles, furniture and chocolates, had stopped.

Father Gapon proposed that they should assemble at their halls and march to the Winter Palace with a petition. They would ask the Czar to grant popular representation, release of political and religious prisoners, freedom to form unions and co-operatives, state education at primary level, and
separation of church from state. They also called for an end to the unpopular war with Japan which had dragged Russia to ruin. 'Thy name will be engraved in our hearts and in those of posterity forever,' promised the petition, signed by 'George Gapon, priest,. Ivan Vasimov, worker', and thousands who could barely write their names. Otherwise, 'we will die here in this square.... Let our lives be a sacrifice
for suffering Russia.' This was to be the only wish the Czar would grant that day.

The authorities didn't rely on priests or prayers. As the working people marched peacefully, thousands of police and troops from elite guard regiments were in position and reinforcements arriving. Near the Narva Arch, the workers were ordered to halt; but they carried on, perhaps believing that their moral will would prevail. A cavalry squadron galloped in to disperse them but they regrouped. Riflemen fired eight volleys into the crowd before they fled, Father Gapon with them, leaving a dozen dead and more wounded. Across the capital, columns from the Vyborg and St Petersburg quarters converging on the Troitsky Bridge, had the same reception. Shocked and terrified, people ran for their lives, leaving comrades bleeding in the snow.

As people struggled home, some workers went to Palace Square where they were joined by students, supporters, and people who came to see what was happening. Troops were ordered to clear the area. People jeered that they should be fighting the Japanese or called on them to come over to the people. The Preobrazhensky Guards opened fire on the crowd and kept firing until everyone had either fallen or fled. People tried to help their wounded friends escape. The officers took their men to St Petersburg's main street, the Nevsky Prospect, concentrating their fire at the crossroads where the crowds were thickest. On Vasilevsky Island that afternoon some students threw up makeshift barricades and fought running battles with police. By evening, order was restored. The imperial capital was quiet except for the weeping of those who had lost dear ones. Officials estimated 96 dead and more than 330 wounded, one tenth of whom died later from their wounds. 'There is no God, and no Czar!' cried Father Gapon. A week of illusion was over. A century of wars and revolutions had begun.