A Menshevik who defended the revolution against its Bolshevik direction
After the June 1917 crisis, he called for firm measures against the Bolsheviks in the name of defending the revolution.
Born Mikhail Goldman, Mikhail Liber was a revolutionary who rose through the Bund, the Jewish workers’ movement, to become a leading Menshevik. At the 1903 RSDLP Congress he defended the Bund’s organisational autonomy, while in 1917 he tried to combine revolutionary democracy with a policy of revolutionary defensism. In the Petrograd Soviet and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee he supported coalition with the Provisional Government, and after the June 10 demonstration crisis he became a leading advocate of firm measures against the Bolsheviks. His opposition to the October uprising and to negotiations with the Bolsheviks was followed by repeated arrests and exile; executed in 1937, he was rehabilitated posthumously.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1896Joined the Lithuanian Social Democratic Party
- 1897–1902Founding-generation Bund activist; joined its Central Committee in 1902
- 1903Bund delegate to the Second Congress of the RSDLP
- 1905Executive Committee member of the St Petersburg Soviet
- 1907Elected to the RSDLP Central Committee
- 1917.02–06Petrograd Soviet Executive Committee member; Bund right-wing leader
- 1917.06–10Member, Presidium member and deputy chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee
- 1917.09–10Member of the Provisional Council of the Russian Republic
- 1922–1923Member of the Menshevik Central Committee Bureau
Related historical events
- 1905–1907The Revolution of 1905Executive Committee member of the St Petersburg SovietIn 1905 he served on the Executive Committee of the St Petersburg Soviet.
- 1917.02–07The February RevolutionMenshevik delegateAfter the June 10 demonstration crisis, he called for ruthless measures against the Bolsheviks.
- 1937–1938The Great PurgeMenshevik executed during the Great PurgeHe was executed on 4 October 1937.
After October: From Loss of Leadership to the 1937 Execution
Liber did not regard the October uprising as a democratic victory over the bourgeoisie, and he also opposed the line of the Menshevik majority that sought to negotiate with the Bolsheviks for an all-socialist coalition government. He reached the same conclusion as Lenin that a coalition of Bolsheviks with the moderate socialists they had just overthrown was politically impossible and would destroy the revolution. Because of this anti-Bolshevik line he lost his leadership positions in the Menshevik party and in the Bund.
Having spent most of the Civil War years in Ukraine, he returned to Moscow in 1920, and in 1922 he tried to defend A. R. Gots and his co-defendants against the death sentences passed at the Trial of the Right SRs. The security organs nonetheless struck him from the list of defence counsel. He was himself arrested soon afterwards and sentenced to internal exile, the first of several arrests over the next fifteen years. In 1922, held in Butyrka prison, he was sentenced to three years in a concentration camp; in 1923, ill with tuberculosis, he was transferred to the Suzdal political isolator. From 1924 until April 1928 he was in exile in Semipalatinsk, then settled in Kursk until 1930, when he was again placed in the Suzdal political isolator; in 1935 he was arrested once more.
Immediately before his final arrest he was living in Alma-Ata, working as an economic planner for the city housing authority. Arrested in Alma-Ata on 13 March 1937, he was entered on the execution list of 22 September that year, and on 1 (or 4) October the travelling session of the USSR Supreme Military Court sentenced him to the highest penalty on charges including membership in a counter-revolutionary organisation. He was executed on 4 October 1937; the place of burial is unknown. Soviet sources claim that he withdrew from politics, devoted himself to business and died of natural causes, which conflicts with the documented execution record. He was rehabilitated posthumously on this charge in 1958 and on other cases in 1990.