The Influence of the ‘Polish Question’ on the Bund’s National Program, 1897–1905

Abstract

The history of the Bund in Czarist Russia has received considerable scholarly attention since the Second World War. Both party histories and academic studies have focused on the evolution of the Bund’s national program set against its struggle with the RSDRP. Little research, however, has been conducted on the Bund’s attitude to the ‘Polish question’ in the pre-First World War period, or to its relations with the PPS, with which the Bund fought a bitter struggle over the right to organizational and programmatic independence. The decidedly Russian orientation of the pre-First World War Bundist leadership has obscured the fact that Jewish workers in Czarist Russia lived to the west of the Russian ethnic frontier and consequently had little or no contact with either Russian workers or Russian culture. In the industrial pockets of the Warsaw and Lodz provinces, the Jewish worker operated in a decidedly Polish cultural milieu, while Vilna, the Bund’s birthplace, was a prominent center of Polish cultural life throughout the nineteenth century, and a city in which Poles made up a third of the population. Outside Vilna, Poles and Russians constituted small minorities within the Pale amidst a largely Belorussian- and Ukrainian- speaking peasantry.