General Jewish Labour Bund
유대인 노동자 총동맹
A secular Jewish socialist party founded in Vilna in 1897 in the Russian Empire. Commonly called the Bund, it sought to unite the Jewish workers of Lithuania, Poland and Russia in a single socialist party, promoted Yiddish culture and national-cultural autonomy, and opposed Zionism. The majority of the Russian Bund dissolved itself in 1921 and joined the Russian Communist Party, while the Polish Bund, which had split off in 1917, remained active until 1948.
In depth
The Bund grew out of study circles and strike funds formed among Jewish artisans and workers in the western provinces of the Russian Empire in the early 1890s. Its founding congress met in Vilna; the English-language source dates it to 7 October 1897, the Russian-language source to 25–27 September 1897. Thirteen delegates from organisations in Vilna, Minsk, Białystok, Warsaw and Vitebsk adopted the name ‘General Jewish Labour Bund in Russia and Poland’ and elected Kremer, Mutnik and Kossovsky to the Central Committee. In 1898 the Bund was a founding member of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party at its First Congress in Minsk, joining as an organisation autonomous in Jewish matters, and in 1901 it added ‘Lithuania’ to its name.
At first the Bund demanded only civil rights for Jews, but its Fourth Congress in 1901 called for equal national rights and national autonomy independent of territory, and national-cultural autonomy then became part of its programme. It promoted Yiddish as the Jewish national language and, on the principle of doikayt (‘hereness’) — that Jews should develop their culture where they lived — opposed Zionism and emigration to Palestine. According to the English-language source, women made up more than a third of the membership.
When the Second Congress of the RSDLP in 1903 rejected the Bund’s demand to be recognised as the sole representative of Jewish workers, the Bund delegation walked out and left the party. The Bund rejoined at the Unification Congress in Stockholm in April 1906 and thereafter generally sided with the Mensheviks. During the 1905 Revolution it led the revolutionary movement in the Jewish towns of the western provinces, particularly in Belarus and Ukraine, and organised self-defence against pogroms. The sources give different figures for its size: the English-language source estimates about 30,000 members in 1903 and 40,000 supporters in 1906, the Russian-language source about 34,000 members in 274 organisations in 1905–1907.
The Bund welcomed the February Revolution of 1917 and worked within the soviets, and leaders such as Mikhail Liber were prominent in the Menshevik leadership. It opposed the October Revolution, but amid the Civil War and the pogroms its Eleventh Conference in March 1919 recognised Soviet power, and in April the Central Committee mobilised members for the Red Army. In Ukraine the majority formed the Communist Bund (Kombund) in February 1919. At the Twelfth Conference in 1920 the majority adopted a communist position and the minority broke away as the Social Democratic Bund; the English-language source places that conference in Gomel in April, the Russian-language source in Moscow in March–April. After the Comintern ordered its dissolution, the Bund disbanded following an extraordinary conference in Minsk in March 1921, and some of its members joined the Russian Communist Party. The Bund organisations in Poland had reconstituted themselves as a separate party in Lublin in December 1917 and remained active until 1948. Many former Bundists, including Liber, perished in the purges of the 1930s.