New Source about the History of Bund

The article is devoted to the analysis of a source about the history of the General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland and Russia (Bund). This source was found in the Central State Archives of Public Organizations of Ukraine. It were a memoirs «Bialystok period in the life of the Bund Central Committee (1900—1902)». The purpose of the research is to establish the authorship of this document and analyze some aspects of the Bund becoming. These aspects were insuffi ciently covered in historiography and other sources, but instead revealed there. On the basis of the application of comparative-historical and structural research methods (comparison of the document with the Bund Central Committee reports on the congresses and publications of Bund), it was proved that the author of the memoirs was P. Rosenthal, a member of the Bund Central Committee at the time. On the basis of the comparative study of the text of memoirs, references to other works, notes in the margins of the document, were approximate time to creation of this source: 1918—1921. The scientifi c novelty of the research is that the authorship and creation time of this document were found out. Were allocated a new facts from the history of the Bund: the creation of a Bund cipher for conspiratorial correspondence, the clash of thoughts regarding national program, the personifi cation of views on this question among the Bund leaders at the beginning of 20 century, the clash with the Independent Jewish Workers’ Party and lesser known groups that held similar views, attempts by the Socialist-Revolutionary Party in the person of G. Gershuni to establish cooperation with the Bund. The conclusions state that this document is valuable in terms of covering the daily life of the revolutionary organization: the creation of a cipher for conspiratorial correspondence, the organization of congresses, printing houses, meetings, transportation of illegal literature. The information in the memoirs allows reconstructing in details the ideological and organizational formation of Bund. The question about the publication of these memoirs in the early 1920s remains controversial. The Bund’s conspiratorial correspondence needs further research, especially we already have the Bund cipher.

Source: Hula V., Hula O. (2020) New Source about the History of Bund. Arkhivy Ukrayiny. 2(323): 58-71

Source web-site: http://au.archives.gov.ua/index.php/au/article/view/46/19