Kossovsky, Portnoy and Others: the Role of Members of the Bund’s Founding Generation in the Interwar Polish Bund

Abstract

The history of the Bund is generally divided into the period before and the period after 1918, and the question of change and continuity between the Bund in the Russian Empire and that in the Polish Second Republic is very seldom posed. The division of the Bund’s history into two parts is doubtless justified in several respects, particularly in regard to the respective states in which the Bund acted, and to the world- historical watershed of the year 1918. Such an approach, however, overlooks the partial overlap and continuity of personnel between the Bund in the Russian Empire and in interwar Poland. Thus, for example, the revolution of 1905 played a major role in the early political socialization of Henryk Erlich (born 1882) and Victor Alter (born 1890), the Bund’s undisputed leaders in interwar Poland. Both participated actively in the Russian Revolution of 1917 – Henryk Erlich as a member of the executive committee of the Petrograd Soviet and Victor Alter in Moscow and the Ukraine. Yet Erlich and Alter, like most other leading Bundists of the interwar period, did not belong to the legendary ‘veteran generation’ who had founded the Bund in 1897 and struggled through the repressions of the Czarist era to make it an effective party organization with a large membership.KeywordsCentral CommitteeEditorial StaffInterwar PeriodOctober RevolutionRussian RevolutionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.