The Bundist conception of history: criticism and self-criticism of Avrom Yuditski

This paper illustrates a polemical exchange that took place in Kyiv in February 1932 between Yoysef Liberberg and Avrom Yuditski, both members of the Institute for Jewish Proletarian Culture. The event was part of a series of self-criticism sessions sponsored by the Institute and prompted by Stalin’s tightening grip on Soviet historiography. Liberberg attacks his colleague for idealizing the Bund and conflating it with the Jewish labor movement as a whole. In doing so, he outlines what Liberberg sees as a truly “Bundist conception of history,” that is, the idea of an independent Jewish history autonomous from the general Russian and revolutionary history. Yuditski’s response encapsulates some recurring themes of Soviet self-criticism. The episode reveals how Soviet anti-Bundism in the early 1930s transcended a purely anti-Jewish function, and operated as a terrain of double accreditation: of the individual to the party, but also of Bolshevism on the Jewish street.