Aron Vainshtein

Aron Isaakovich Vainshtein, (23 November 1877 – 12 March 1938) known by the nom de guerre Rakhmiel, was a Jewish socialist activist and politician in Soviet Belorussia.[1]

Aron Vainshtein
Арон Исаакович Вайнштейн
Born(1877-11-23)23 November 1877
Vilna, Russian Empire
Died12 March 1938(1938-03-12) (aged 60)
Moscow, USSR
Other namesRakhmiel
CitizenshipRussian Empire, Soviet Belorussia
Occupationpolitician

In 1897, Vainshtein graduated from the Vilna Jewish Teaching Institute.[1] In 1898, Vainshtein, now based in Warsaw, joined the General Jewish Labour Bund.[2] He quickly emerged as the leading figure in the Warsaw Committee of the Bund.[3] During the early period of the Bund movement, Vainshtein's Warsaw faction opposed the line of calling for Jewish national rights of John Mill's Geneva-based leadership.[2] The fourth Bund congress in 1901 elected him to the Bund Central Committee.[1] In 1914 he was exiled to Siberia, where he remained until the 1917 February Revolution.[1]

The tenth Bund congress elected him as the Chairman of the Bund Central Committee.[1] Along with the rest of the Bund Central Committee, he shifted to Minsk.[1] He was elected as chairman of the Minsk City Duma.[4]

Inside the Bund, Vainshtein came to vacillate between centrist, rightist, and leftist positions.[1] On the question of World War I he placed himself in the centrist camp but he sided with the Bund right-wing in condemnation of the October Revolution.[1] As the Russian Civil War emerged and with the German Revolution of 1918–1919 he moved to the left.[1] As the Bund split at the April 1920 twelfth congress, Vainshtein and his sister-in-law Esther Frumkin led the pro-communist Kombund majority faction.[1]

During 1920 and 1921 Frumkin and Vaynsthteyn were the key leaders of the Kombund.[5] Vainshtein served as the Kombund representative in the Military Revolutionary Committee of Belorussia from August to December 1920.[1] In December 1920 he was named the acting chairman of the Belorussian Council of National Economy.[1] While heading this body, he was accused by the Yevsektsia (Jewish Section of the Communist Party) of implementing a petty bourgeois Bundist economic policy.[6]

Unity talks between the Kombund and the Communist Party lasted for months; in the end the Communist International ordered the Bund to dissolve itself.[7] At an Extraordinary All-Russian Bundist Conference, held in Minsk on March 5, 1921 the delegates representing some 3,000 party members debated disbanding the Communist Bund.[8][9][6] At the conference Vainshtein spoke in favour of disbanding the Kombund and merging with the Communist Party.[10]

In 1921 he was inducted into the Yevsektsia Central Bureau, where he remained until 1924.[1] He served as Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Kirghiz Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic from 1921 to 1922.[1] Between 1923 and 1930 he served on the board of the People's Commissariat of Finance of the USSR.[1] He was a board member of KOMZET, becoming its deputy chairman in 1928.[1] During the 1930s he headed the Moscow branch of OZET.[1]

Vainshtein was arrested in February 1938.[1] He reportedly committed suicide after ten days in detention.[1]

References
  1. YIVO Encyclopedia. Vainshtein, Aron Isaakovich
  2. Joshua D. Zimmerman (26 January 2004). Poles, Jews, and the Politics of Nationality: The Bund and the Polish Socialist Party in Late Tsarist Russia, 1892–1914. Univ of Wisconsin Press. pp. 115–116. ISBN 978-0-299-19463-5.
  3. Jonathan Frankel (8 November 1984). Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862-1917. Cambridge University Press. p. 219. ISBN 978-0-521-26919-3.
  4. Oleg Budnitskii (24 July 2012). Russian Jews Between the Reds and the Whites, 1917-1920. University of Pennsylvania Press. p. 56. ISBN 978-0-8122-0814-6.
  5. Andrew Sloin (13 February 2017). The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and Bolshevik Power. Indiana University Press. p. 39. ISBN 978-0-253-02463-3.
  6. Elissa Bemporad (29 April 2013). Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk. Indiana University Press. p. 55-56. ISBN 978-0-253-00827-5.
  7. Bernard K. Johnpoll (1967). The politics of futility: the General Jewish Workers Bund of Poland, 1917-1943. Cornell University Press. p. 103.
  8. explanatory note to Lenin, Vladimir I. (April 19 – May 6, 1920). "To Members of the Politbureau of the C.C., R.C.P.(B.)". Marxists Internet Archive. Lenin Internet Archive (2003). Retrieved 2009-11-10., from documents archived at the Central Party Archives, Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the C.C., C.P.S.TJ.
  9. Nora Levin (December 1990). The Jews in the Soviet Union Since 1917: Paradox of Survival. NYU Press. p. 63. ISBN 978-0-8147-5051-3.
  10. Baruch Gurevitz (15 September 1980). National Communism in the Soviet Union, 1918-28. University of Pittsburgh Pre. p. 35. ISBN 978-0-8229-7736-0.
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