Paradoxically, tsarism encouraged the industrial development of Poland as a ‘shop window’ and in a vain attempt to head off the nationalist movement. But the very development of industry was undermining the regime and creating a fever of discontent in the towns and cities of Russia’s western borderlands. Conditions and wages were appalling, but profits of 40-50 per cent were usual, while profits of 100 per cent were not uncommon. The super-exploitation of the workers created favourable conditions for the spread of socialist propaganda. In the midst of this lunar landscape of bleak reaction, the party known as Proletariat – the “hopeful forerunner of the modern socialist movement in Poland” (P. Frölich, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 20.) – was launched by the student Ludwig Warjinski. Warjinski’s group of socialist students formed circles of workers and embryonic trade unions. In 1882, the different groups coalesced to organise Proletariat, which led a series of strikes, culminating in a mass strike in Warsaw, which was violently put down by troops. Many of the leaders of Proletariat were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. Four were hanged. Warjinski himself was not so fortunate. Sentenced to 16 years hard labour in the notorious Schlisselburg Fortress near St. Petersburg, he died a slow death.
After the arrests, Proletariat practically fell to pieces. By the time the young Rosa Luxemburg joined the movement, only remnants were left. Leo Jogiches, the son of a wealthy Jewish family, used his considerable personal income to finance the setting up of a new socialist group in Vilna in 1885. The Vilna Social Democrats later played a pioneering role, developing the technique of mass agitation among the workers, which was later taken up by the Marxists all over Russia. The young forces of the Polish proletariat received a powerful impulse from the newly awakened forces of the Jewish working class.
The majority of Jews lived in Poland and the western provinces, which were declared from 1881 to constitute the only place where Jews were allowed to live. Jews were dismissed en masse from all administrative posts and excluded from most professions in 1886. Only 10 per cent of Jews were allowed to go to university (five per cent in Moscow and St. Petersburg). From 1887, the same rule was applied to secondary schools. In 1888, all Jews in receipt of government scholarships were registered as Orthodox. Children were baptised against the wishes of their parents. Jews who became Orthodox were given a divorce with no questions asked. Special taxes were imposed on synagogues and kosher meat. As a means of dividing and disorienting the workers, the authorities organised bloody pogroms against the Jews; houses were sacked, and men, women, and children killed and maimed by lumpen-proletarian mobs in connivance with the police.
The sizeable Jewish population in these areas, with its numerous artisans and small businesses, lived permanently on the brink of the abyss. The most oppressed layer of society, the Jewish workers and artisans, naturally provided fertile ground for the spread of revolutionary ideas. Not by accident, Jewish revolutionaries provided the Marxist movement with a number of leaders out of all proportion to their specific weight within society. Cosmopolitan Vilna, with its large concentration of Jewish workers and artisans, was one of the earliest strongholds of Social Democracy in the Russian Empire. From 1881 right up to the October Revolution, the outbreak of these barbaric acts of racial savagery were a permanent threat hanging over the heads of the Jewish people. The pogromists stirred up the backward Polish and Russian peasants against the Jews, making use of religious prejudice (the most common time for pogroms was Easter), and the hatred of the Jewish trader and moneylender. But the overwhelming majority of the Jews were poor workers and artisans. In 1888, a government commission reported that 90 per cent of Jews were “a mass that lives from hand to mouth, amidst poverty and most oppressive sanitary and general conditions. The very proletariat is occasionally a target of tumultuous popular uprisings [i.e., pogroms]…” (N. Levin, Jewish Socialist Movements 1871-1917, p. 16.)
The Jewish workers’ movement in western Russia, Poland and Lithuania had a long history. The strike wave which swept through these regions beginning in 1892 produced a ferment among all oppressed nationalities, especially the Jews, who suffered the most extreme national oppression. Cultural life began to stir in a kind of national renaissance. Breaking free from the dead weight of a culture fossilised for 2,000 years, the Jewish intelligentsia became open to the most radical and revolutionary ideas. In place of the old exclusivism and isolationism, they eagerly sought contact with other cultures, particularly Russian culture. As early as 1885, a section of the poor yeshivah students, training to become Rabbis, helped to launch the Narodnik revolutionary organisation in Vilna. Now Jewish workers joined the struggle, eagerly learning Russian in order to read books and discover the new ideas for themselves.
Jewish workers had organised friendly societies or kassy, which collected funds for mutual benefit for as long as anyone remembered – possibly ever since Jews were expelled from the guilds in Germany and Poland. The structure of these societies recalled that of the mediaeval guilds themselves, or the early British craft unions, with their solemn initiation rituals, annual guild holidays, and strict secrecy concerning all their affairs. The artisans and workers organised in the kassy were conservative in outlook, hostile to socialist ideas and usually connected with the synagogue. Yet, the double burden which the Jewish workers had to bear, being oppressed as workers and as Jews, created exceptionally favourable conditions for the spread of revolutionary and socialist ideas. “A spontaneous movement,” wrote Akimov, “swept like a strong wind through the lower depths of Jewish society, through strata which had seemed immobile and incapable of comprehending or guiding themselves by any conscious ideas.” (V. Akimov, On the Dilemmas of Russian Marxism 1895-1903, p. 209.) Precisely because of this, the Jewish socialist workers and intellectuals played a role in the Russian Revolutionary movement out of all proportion to their numbers.
The funds raised by the kassy were originally used not just for sick benefits and the like, but for clubbing together to buy a copy of the Torah! However, in the new climate of class struggle, the workers’ funds were used increasingly for labour disputes. The first documented strike of Jewish workers took place in Vilna in 1882 – a strike of hosiery workers in which, significantly, the women played a major role. The most active elements were the Jewish craftsmen and artisans – jewellers, stocking makers, locksmiths, tailors, carpenters, printers, shoemakers. By 1895, there were 27 craft organisations in Vilna alone, with a total membership of 962. “Within the Jewish labour movement itself, it was the craftsmen who pioneered, and the cigarette and match factory workers who lagged behind.” This class composition of the Jewish labour movement, no different to its fraternal organisations in the rest of Russia, was undoubtedly a factor in the conservative role played by the Bund, the Jewish organisation, in the early years of the RSDLP. The most advanced sections of Jewish society were far from being affected by the kind of Jewish nationalism later advocated by the Zionists. On the contrary, they saw the salvation of the Jewish people in the rejection of the age-old, hide-bound traditionalism and entry into the mainstream of Russian cultural and political life. “We were assimilationists,” wrote a socialist activist of this period, “who did not even dream of a separate Jewish mass movement. We saw our task as preparing the cadres for the Russian Revolutionary movement, and acclimatising them to Russian culture.” (Quoted in N. Levin, Jewish Socialist Movements 1871-1917, p. 226 and p. 234.) The Jewish Social Democrats wore Russian dress, carried Russian books and spoke Russian as much as possible.
In the socialist circles, a whole generation of Jewish youth was awakened to political and cultural life. Particularly striking was the courage of young Jewish girls from working class backgrounds, determined to participate in the movement, despite the implacable hostility of their elders:
I see them now, crate makers, soap workers, sugar workers – those among whom I led a circle… Pale, thin, red-eyed, beaten, terribly tired.
They would gather late in the evening. We would sit until one in the morning in a stuffy room with only a little gas lamp burning. Often little children would be sleeping in the same room and the women of the house would walk around listening for the police. The girls would listen to the leader’s talk and would ask questions, completely forgetting the dangers, forgetting that it would take three-quarters of an hour to get home, wrapped in a cold, torn remnant of a coat, in the mud and deep snow: that they would have to knock on the door and bear a flood of insults and curses from their parents: that at home there might not be a piece of bread left and they would have to go to sleep hungry… and then in a few hours arise and run to work. With that rapt attention, they listened to the talks on cultural history, on surplus value… wages, life in other lands… What joy would light their eyes when the circle leader produced a new number of Yidisher Arbayter, Arbayter Shtimme, or even a brochure! How many tragedies young workers would suffer at home if it became known that they were running around with Akhudusnikers, with the ‘brothers and sisters’, that they were reading forbidden books – how many insults, blows, tears! It did not help. “It attracts them like magnets” mothers wailed to each other.
Here, in Lithuania and Belarus, the Jewish workers and the wholly Russified Jewish intelligentsia were carrying on a kind of agitation which was far more broadly based than the limited propaganda activity common in Russia proper. They published leaflets written in the language of the mass of Jewish workers – Yiddish – which dealt with the immediate demands of the masses. At this time, a 19-year old student called Julius Martov, expelled from St. Petersburg for revolutionary activity, arrived in Vilna, already a thriving centre of the Social Democracy. Martov recalled how the issue of agitation was raised by the workers themselves, compelling the Marxists to go beyond the limits of circle work:
In my work, I twice detailed talks on the aims and methods of socialism, but real life kept interfering… Either the members of the circle would themselves raise the question of some event that had occurred in their factory… or someone from another workshop would appear and we would have to spend the time discussing conditions there. (Ibid., p. 240 in both quotes)
The success of the Vilna group led them to publish a pamphlet which caused quite a stir at the time: On Agitation, written by Arkadi Kremer and Martov, became known as ‘The Vilna Program’. Despite traces of ‘spontaneism’, the document, with its central idea that the task of the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the workers themselves, aroused a lot of interest in the period 1893-97, when furious discussions were taking place everywhere on the turn to agitation. It basically represented a healthy reaction against the narrow ‘small circle’ mentality and a desire to forge contacts with the masses. The new pamphlet threw down a bold challenge to existing conditions: “The Russian Social Democratic movement is on the wrong path,” it proclaimed. “It has locked itself up in closed circles. It should listen for the pulse beat of the crowd and lead it. Social Democrats can and must lead the working masses because the proletariat’s blind struggle inevitably leads it to the same goal and the same ideal which the revolutionary Social Democrats have consciously chosen.” (Ibid., pp. 240-241.)