A “Museum of Bad Taste”?: The Jewish Labour Bund and the Bolshevik Position Regarding the National Question, 1903-14

Abstract

This article discusses the debates on the national question between the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDRP), led by Vladimir Lenin, and the Jewish Labour Bund, then an integral part of the RSDRP, from 1903 to the First World War. The escalating conflict and competition between the Bolsheviks and the Bund shaped both groups’ position regarding national minorities, at a time when the former were striving to gain control of the Russian Marxist revolutionary movement. I examine Lenin’s and Joseph Stalin’s fierce criticism of the program of national-cultural autonomy advanced by the Bund and the Austro-Marxist theorists Karl Renner and Otto Bauer and show how Lenin and the Bolsheviks adopted the formula of “right of nations to self-determination” partly as a result of tactical considerations during their decade-long debate with the Bund. The Bolshevik leaders, Lenin and Stalin, formulated their ideas on nationalities in opposition to the Bund; the Bund thus played a role, even if a negative one, in the long-term development of Bolshevik ideas and policy.