August 07, 2024
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Henryk Ehrlich (sometimes spelled Henryk Erlich; 1882 - 15 May 1942) was an activist of the Bund, member of the Petrograd Soviet, Warsaw City Council and member of the executive committee of the Second International. Ehrlich was also the son - in - law of the famous Jewish historian Simon Dubnow.

Social democratic activist since 1904. During the Russian Revolution of 1917 Henryk Ehrlich was member of Petrograd Soviet executive committee and member of Soviet's delegation to England, France and Italy.

 Since 1921 he was co-editor of the Warsaw Yiddish daily Folkstsaytung. In 1924 he was elected to the Warsaw kehilla council as one of 5 Bundists out of 50 members. He was then candidate for the chairmanship of the council, as unique counter - candidate to the Agudist Eliahu Kirshbraun, who was elected as well as Jacob Trokenheim, another Agudist, as vice president. The Bund did not take part in the 1931 kehillot elections, but won 15 seats out of 50 at the 1936 elections. After the elections, he caused an incident by accusing the Zionist leaders Grünbaum and Ze'ev Jabotinsky for being responsible for the recent antisemitic agitation in Poland stemming from their campaign urging Jewish emigration from Poland. This time again Ehrlich was a candidate for the presidency; he got 16 votes, the Zionist candidate Yitshak Schipper 10, and the Agudist Jacob Trokenheim won by a plurality of 19 votes.

 After the outbreak of World War II, Ehrlich made his way to the part of Poland which had come under Soviet control. He was arrested by the NKVD in Brest on 4 October 1939. On 2 August 1940, in Saratov, he was sentenced to death, but the sentence was later commuted to ten years in the Gulag. After the June 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union, he was released in 1942 as part of the Sikorski - Mayski Agreement of 30 July 1941 between the Polish Government in Exile and the Soviet Union. He was asked to join the newly formed Jewish Anti - Fascist Committee, headed by Solomon Mikhoels.

At about the same time Erlich was supposed to join Gen. Sikorski (the Prime Minister of the Polish Government in Exile) in traveling to London where he was supposed to join the Polish government. However, on the 4th of December, Erlich, together with Victor Alter were once again arrested by the NKVD in Kuybyshev. At the time of their arrest they both resided in the Polish embassy and no reason was given for their arrest. According to various sources at the time, they were charged with spying for “enemies of the Soviet Union”. The arrest of Erlich and Alter took place immediately after the Soviet government issued a declaration to the Polish government in exile on December 1, 1941, that Polish citizens of Belarusian or Jewish ethnicity would be treated as Soviet citizens and forbidden to enter the Polish Army (Anders Army) which was being formed at the time.

The imprisonment of two prominent socialist activists and leaders of the Second International by the Soviets caused a wave of protests among socialist circles in the West. Eleanor Roosevelt and Albert Einstein made direct appeals to Stalin for their release. However, Soviet authorities remained quiet throughout 1942, and only after the Soviet victory at Stalingrad announced that Ehrlich and Alter had been executed on Stalin's orders.

According to some sources Ehrlich, unlike Alter, was never executed, because he managed to commit suicide by hanging himself from the bars of his prison window. Other sources state that together with Alter he was shot in December 1942. As late as February 1943, letters from "Henryk Wiktor" (first names of Erlich and Alter) were being circulated in the Warsaw Ghetto.

On February 8, 1991, Victor Erlich, Henryk Erlich's grandson was informed that according to a decree passed under Russian president Boris Yeltsin, Victor Alter, together with Erlich had been "rehabilitated" and the repressions against them had been declared unlawful.

While the exact place where he was buried is unknown, a cenotaph was erected at the Jewish cemetery on Okopowa street in Warsaw on April 17, 1988. The inscription reads "Leaders of the Bund, Henryk Erlich, b. 1882, and Wiktor Alter, b. 1890. Executed in the Soviet Union". The establishment of the monument (as well as the publication of the full story of Alter and Erlich) was opposed by Poland's post war communist government and was only made possible because of the efforts of Marek Edelman (last surviving participant of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and a Bundist) and members of the Polish Solidarity Union. The commemoration ceremony was attended by over three thousand people.

 
Ivan Mikhailovich Maisky (also spelled Maysky; Russian: Ива́н Миха́йлович Ма́йский) (19 January 1884, Kirillov - 3 September 1975, Moscow) was a Soviet diplomat, historian and politician, notable as that country's ambassador to London during much of World War II.

Ivan Maisky was born Jan Lachowiecki to a Russified Polish family living in Imperial Russia. His early revolutionary activities led to his expulsion from St. Petersburg University in 1902. After internal exile in Siberia, he traveled in Western Europe, where he learned English and French. In 1912, he settled in London until 1917. There, he met and befriended Georgii Chicerin and Maxim Litvinov. As his English improved his circle of friends expanded to include George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells and Beatrice Webb.

At the outbreak of the Russian Civil War and the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion in Siberia, Maisky returned to Russia and settled in Samara, where he joined the local Komuch government, for which he was banished by the Mensheviks.

In 1921, he officially joined the All - Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) which started his career within the communist system of power in Russia. In 1922 he started working as a diplomat at various posts including London, Tokyo and Helsinki, but in 1924, he also served as the first editor of the Petrograd literary magazine Zvezda.

In 1929, he became the Soviet ambassador to Finland. A close collaborator of Maxim Litvinov, Maisky was an active member and the Soviet envoy to the Committee of Non-Intervention during the Spanish Civil War.

In 1932 he returned to London as the official Soviet envoy to the United Kingdom, a post he held until 1943. Before the outbreak of World War II, Maisky dealt with a number of crises including intense British hostility towards the Soviets as a result of the Winter War with Finland.

In 1941, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Maisky was responsible for the normalization of relations with the Western Allies. Among other pacts, he signed the Sikorski - Mayski Agreement of 1941, which declared the Nazi - Soviet Pact null and void. It also normalized relations between the Soviet Union and the Polish government - in - exile and allowed for hundreds of thousands of Poles to be released from the Soviet Gulag.

During these years in London, he reassured Joseph Stalin that Britain had no interest in signing a separate peace with Germany while pressuring Britain to open a "second front" against the Germans in northern France. He maintained close contact with Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden and personally visited the Foreign Office every day to get the latest news.

In 1943, he was recalled to Moscow, where he became the Deputy Commissar of Foreign Affairs, and led a number of commissions planning possible Soviet strategies for ending the war and for the immediate postwar world. Maisky's commission focused particularly on the dismemberment of Germany, heavy reparations (including forced labor), severe punishment of war criminals, and long term Soviet occupation. He also recommended maintaining a "viable Poland," albeit with significantly modified borders. In terms of postwar planning, Maisky envisioned a Europe with "one strong land power, the USSR, and only one strong sea power, Britain." His concerns about American ideological hostility led him to see Britain as a more viable long term partner because he believed they would be more conservative going into the postwar world. He anticipated a struggle between the two, which would push Britain closer to the Soviet Union. Consequently, he joined Soviet delegations to the conferences in Yalta and Potsdam.

In 1945, he retired from active service in Soviet diplomacy and devoted himself to history. From 1946 onward he was a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. In 1953, shortly before Stalin's death, he was arrested and sentenced to six years in prison for alleged espionage. In 1955, however, he was released, cleared of all charges and fully rehabilitated. In 1966 Maisky signed the so-called Letter of 25 Soviet writers, scientists and cultural figures, addressed to Leonid Brezhnev and expressing opposition to a possible rehabilitation of Stalin.


Julius Martov or L. Martov (Ма́ртов; real name Yuliy Osipovich Tsederbaum (Russian Ю́лий О́сипович Цедерба́ум)) (November 24, 1873 - April 4, 1923) was a Russian politician who became the leader of the Mensheviks in early twentieth century Russia.

Martov was born to a Jewish middle class family in İstanbul. In Russia, Martov was originally a close colleague of Vladimir Lenin and with him founded the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class in 1895. Both were exiled to Siberia for this but Martov was sent to Turukhansk in the Arctic while Lenin was sent to the comparatively warm 'Siberian Italy'. This was because Martov was Jewish while Lenin was a nobleman. Forced to leave Russia and with other radical political figures living in exile, Martov joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) and, in 1900, was one of the founding members, with Lenin, of the party journal Iskra. At the Second Congress of the RSDLP in London in 1903, there was a dispute between Martov and Lenin over who was to be considered a member of the RSDLP. Lenin had published his ideas for moving the party forward in his pamphlet What Is to Be Done?, which was considered to be a document putting forward the views of the entire Iskra group led by Lenin and Martov. However, in the London Congress of the party differing definitions of party membership were put forward by the two men, with Lenin arguing for a restricted membership of fully committed cadre while Martov argued for a looser interpretation of membership.

Both Martov and Lenin based their ideas for party organization on those prevailing in the European social democratic parties, in particular that of Germany. When the vote was taken on the disputed question, the group led by Lenin lost and split. However, they were referred to as Bolsheviks throughout the Congress and subsequently as they had won a vote to determine the composition of the Iskra editorial board, hence their adoption of the name Bolshevik which literally means 'person of the majority'. The minority or Menshevik faction adopted that title. Ironically, the vote on the editorial board was not seen as important by any of the disputants at the time, and in fact the Bolsheviks were generally in a minority but some delegates had not been present for the crucial vote who would otherwise have voted for the Mensheviks.

Martov became one of the outstanding Menshevik leaders along with George Plekhanov, Fedor Dan and Irakli Tsereteli. Leon Trotsky too was a member of the Menshevik faction for a brief period but soon broke with them.

After the reforms brought about by the 1905 Revolution, Martov argued that it was the role of revolutionaries to provide a militant opposition to the new bourgeois government. He advocated the joining together of a network of organizations, trade unions, cooperatives, village councils and soviets, to harass the bourgeois government until the economic and social conditions made it possible for a socialist revolution to take place.

Martov was always to be found on the left wing of the Menshevik faction and supported the reunification with the Bolsheviks in 1905. That fragile unity was short lived, however, and by 1907 the two factions had again split in two. In 1911 Martov notably wrote the pamphlet "Spasiteli ili uprazdniteli? Kto i kak razrushal R.S.-D.R.P.," "Saviors or destroyers? Who destroyed the RSDLP and how", which denounced the Bolsheviks for among other things, raising money by "expropriations," that is, robbing banks. This pamphlet was denounced by both Kautsky and Lenin.

In 1914 Martov opposed the First World War, which he viewed as an imperialist war in terms very similar to those of Lenin and Trotsky. He therefore became the central leader of the Menshevik Internationalist faction which organized in opposition to the Menshevik Party leadership. In 1915, he sided with Lenin at an international conference in Switzerland, but later repudiated the Bolsheviks.

After the February Revolution in 1917, Martov returned to Russia but was too late to stop some Mensheviks joining the Provisional Government. He strongly criticized those Mensheviks such as Irakli Tsereteli and Fedor Dan who, now part of Russia's government, supported the war effort. However, at a conference held on June 18, 1917, he failed to gain the support of the delegates for a policy of immediate peace negotiations with the Central Powers.

When the Bolsheviks came to power as a result of the October Revolution in 1917, Martov became politically marginalized. This is best exemplified by Trotsky's comment to him and other party members as they left the first meeting of the council of Soviets after October 25, 1917 in disgust at the way in which the Bolsheviks had seized political power: "You are pitiful isolated individuals; you are bankrupts; your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on — into the dustbin of history!" Martov silently walked away without looking back. He paused at the exit seeing a young Bolshevik worker wearing a black shirt with a broad leather belt, standing in the shadow of the portico. The young man turned on Martov with unconcealed bitterness: 'And we among ourselves had thought, Martov would at least remain with us.' Martov stopped and with a characteristic movement tossed up his head to emphasize his reply: 'One day you will understand the crime in which you are taking part.' Waving his hand wearily he left the hall.

For a while Martov led the Menshevik opposition group in the Constituent Assembly until the Bolsheviks abolished it. Later, on one occasion a factory section chose Martov as their delegate ahead of Lenin in a soviet election. Shortly afterwards the factory found its supplies reduced.

The Mensheviks were sporadically banned along with other political parties (except for the Bolshevik led Communist Party of the Soviet Union) by the Soviet government during the Russian Civil War, and permanently when the Civil War ended, The Communists showed by this that they were not prepared to allow for the possibility of being defeated in any open political struggle in Russia.

Martov supported the Red Army against the White Army during the Civil War; however, he continued to denounce the persecution of non-violent political opponents of the Bolsheviks, whether Social Democrats, trades unionists, anarchists, newspapers.

Speaking of the Red Terror, Martov said, "The beast has licked hot human blood. The man - killing machine is brought into motion.... But blood breeds blood.... We witness the growth of the bitterness of the civil war, the growing bestiality of men engaged in it."

In 1920 Martov was allowed to travel legally to Germany to speak at the Halle Congress of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany. He had not intended to stay in exile in Germany, and only did so because of the repression by the ruling Communist Party in Russia, which would not allow him to return to Russia. He died in Schömberg, Germany three years later. In the period before his last fatal illness, however, he was able to launch the newspaper Socialist Messenger which remained the publication of the Mensheviks in exile in Berlin, Paris and eventually in New York until the last of them had died. It has been rumored that Lenin, also on his deathbed at the time and worried about the rising Stalin, may have provided funds for this last venture of Martov.