Moisei Markovich Goldshtein (December 11, 1891 – June 20, 1918), best known by his underground pseudonym V. Volodarsky, was an ethnic Jewish Marxist revolutionary and Soviet politician.
Volodarsky, a prominent public speaker, newspaper editor, and top government official for the Bolshevik Party, was assassinated by Nikita Sergeyev, a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in June 1918.
Volodarsky's death increased political tension in Petrograd amidst economic collapse and worsening civil war, and was a contributing factor to the Red Terror which erupted around Soviet Russia during the second half of 1918.
Biography Early years
Moisei Goldshtein (V. Volodarsky) was born to the family of a poor Jewish craftsman in Ostropol, in the Volhynian Governorate of the Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine)."V. Volodarsky (1891–1918)," funeral-spb.narod.ru/ (In Russian.)
In 1905, he became involved in revolutionary activity within the General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland and Russia, but soon joined Spilka, the Ukrainian Social Democratic organization which aligned itself with the Menshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party.
After the defeat of the 1905–07 revolution, Volodarsky was briefly imprisoned in 1908. After his release he returned to underground political activity in Volhynia. This led to a further arrest and in 1911 to a sentence of internal exile to the northern city of Arkhangelsk, but he dodged this fate through inclusion in the general amnesty of 1913.
Continued persecution led him to emigrate to the United States, settling in Philadelphia and taking a position as a cutter in a garment factory.Jean-Jacques Marie, "V. Volodarsky (pseudonym of Mosey Markovich Goldstein)," in George Haupt and Jean-Jacques Marie, Makers of the Russian Revolution: Biographies of Bolshevik Leaders. C.I.P. Ferdinand and D.M. Bellos, trans. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974; p. 418. This brought him into contact with the trade union movement, and he quickly took a leading role as a union activist with the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union and journalist. He also became active in the Socialist Party of America, eventually relocating to New York City to work on the staff of the Russian-language socialist weekly there, Novyi Mir [New World].John Glad (ed.), "A Chronology" in Conversations in Exile: Russian Writers Abroad. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993; p. 275
Return to Russia
Following the February Revolution and the overthrow of the Romanov dynasty, Volodarsky returned to Russia. Arriving in April 1917, he joined the Mezhraiontsy group,Marie, "V. Volodarsky," p. 419. an anti-war party closely associated with Leon Trotsky that took an ideological position midway between the feuding Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. He was also elected to the Petrograd City Duma. He was not long in switching affiliation to Lenin and the Bolsheviks, however, joining the Bolshevik Party in May, several months ahead of the formal merger of the mezhraiontsy with the Bolsheviks in August — a merger which he helped to broker.
Volodarsky was named to the Petrograd Committee of the Bolshevik Party as soon as he joined the organization and was made a member of that group's Executive Committee not long after.
The October Revolution
One of the Bolsheviks' most effective public speakers. Anatoly Lunacharsky, who met Volodarsky for the first time in the spring of 1917, was effusive about Volodarsky's ability as a public speaker in a short 1923 biography:
"From a literary standpoint Volodarsky's speeches were not remarkable for originality of form or for that richness of metaphor with which Trotsky regaled his audiences in superabundance. In this respect Volodarsky's speeches were on the dry side.... His speeches were like a machine: there was nothing superfluous, every component meshed with the next, everything was metallic glitter, everything throbbed with an inner charge of electricity. Perhaps this was the American style of eloquence; but America, which sent back to us so many Russians who had been through her iron school, produced no other orator to compare with Volodarsky.
His voice seemed to print the words — it had a graphic, poster-like quality with a metallic ring to it. The sentences flowed remarkably evenly and with an unvarying pressure which was only occasionally heightened. In its clarity and regularity the rhythm of his speech reminded me more than anything else of Mayakovsky's style of declamation.... His speeches were spell-binding. they were not long, they were unusually easy to understand, each one a whole armory of slogans, of sharpm well-aimed verbal shafts." Anatoly Vasilievich Lunacharsky, Revolutionary Silhouettes. Michael Glenny, trans. New York: Hill and Wang, 1968; pp. 112–113.
Volodarsky focused his activity in the Peterhof area, which included the massive Putilov works. He was instrumental in bringing the majority of that 30,000 member workforce over to the Bolsheviks in the summer of 1917. He was assigned by the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party to dissuade the First Machine Gun Regiment from participating in spontaneous street demonstrations during the first week of July. This proved unsuccessful, however, and the chaos of the so-called July Days riots prompted a backlash by the Provisional Government against the Bolshevik Party, who was blamed for the spontaneous uprising.
During the repression that followed in July and August, Volodarsky continued to speak on behalf of the Bolsheviks in the semi-illegal conditions which prevailed.
He was a fierce opponent of the political line favored by Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, who sought a multi-party socialist government as the only sustainable option rather than the insurrection and overthrow of the Provisional Government and dispersal of the elected Constituent Assembly, the tactic insisted upon by party leader V.I. Lenin.Marie, "V. Volodarsky," p. 420..
Journalist and censor
At the Second Congress of Soviets on October 26, Volodarsky was elected to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK). He was appointed editor of the Red Gazette in Petrograd and chief of the press division of the Executive Committee of the Union of Northern Communes, making him in effect the commissar for press, agitation, and propaganda — with broad censorship powers — for the northern region.Rabinowitch, The Bolseheviks in Power, p. 314.
As Commissar for Press Affairs, Volodarsky oversaw a censorship which shut down for political reasons approximately 150 Petrograd newspapers with a combined circulation of over two million copies. He thereby became a public official gaining personal enmity of political opponents of the Bolshevik regime.
On February 23, with the Army of Imperial Germany advancing against a thin and disorganized defence, the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet conducted a mass campaign of military recruitment meetings in the theaters around the city.Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power: The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007; p. 186. Volodarsky joined other prominent Bolshevik orators, including Lunacharsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Nikolai Bukharin, Fyodor Raskolnikov, as well as several leaders of the allied Left Socialist-Revolutionaries in making appeals for Petrograders to join the ranks of the Red Army in preparation for its defense against the German invasion.
This emergency campaign generated few recruits as, in the words of historian Alexander Rabinowitch, "revolutionary enthusiasm did not translate into a willingness to fight." Those previously supporting Leon Trotsky's bold slogan of "neither war nor peace" with Germany, hoping that the Kaiser would focus his forces elsewhere, appeared defeated as the enemy wave continued to advance unabated.
Volodarsky, an ultra-radical "Left Communist" in 1918, was an outspoken opponent of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, the one-sided surrender deal scorned by Trotsky which called for the permanent massive loss of Russian territory to Germany.Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power, p. 178. However, in the early morning hours of February 24, a mere two-and-a-half hours before expiration of a German ultimatum, Volodarsky and a number of other prominent Left Communist members of the (multi-party) Central Executive Committee maintained party discipline and voted to sign the onerous surrender document, which was approved by a final vote of 116 in favor to 85 opposed, with 26 abstaining.
Background
May and June 1918 was a time of tumult in Petrograd, with more than 70 worker protests of various kinds erupting in Soviet Russia, including 18 strikes or work stoppages in the former capital city.William G. Rosenberg, "Russian Labor and Bolshevik Power after October," Savic Review, vol. 44 (1985), pp. 233–234. Cited in Smith, Captives of Revolution, p. 55.
Although the Bolsheviks initially governed in coalition with the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, a radical split group which broke with the main PSR organization in 1917, Socialist-Revolutionary Party regulars — the leading group in the deposed Constituent Assembly — were deeply hostile to the Bolsheviks' armed overthrow of the government. Successors of the terroristically-inclined Narodnik movement, the PSR retained the use of coordinated individual violence as part of its revolutionary repertoire and had debated internally whether such action should be taken against the Bolshevik interlopers.
New elections to the Petrograd Soviet were demanded, with the Bolsheviks scrambling to retain control of the Petrograd Soviet. On May 20 at a meeting of Petrograd Bolshevik activists, Petrograd party chief Grigory Zinoviev proposed a scheme allowing Red Army soldiers equal representation to workers at preliminary district conferences which would then elect new members to the Petrograd Soviet.Scott B. Smith, Captives of Revolution: The Socialist Revolutionaries and the Bolshevik Dictatorship, 1918–1923. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011; p. 56. As the Red Army remained a bulwark of support for the Bolsheviks, this two-stage election system increased the likelihood of the Communists retaining power through a regular election process. This system drew criticism and was rejected by the Bolshevik Party itself, however, since the election statute called for direct elections on June 15, and the change was seen as something that would undermine the entire Soviet system.
On May 27 large meetings were held at large factories throughout the city focusing on food supply, rationing, and Bolshevik plans to organize food requisitioning detachments to take by force the grain that was not being sold to the state for rapidly depreciating paper money.Smith, Captives of Revolution, p. 55. The democratically-elected Constituent Assembly had been shut down by the Bolsheviks in January, press censorship had interfered with production of non-Bolshevik newspapers, and workers at the Nicholas and Alexandrov locomotive works and the Obukhov works — many of whom were former peasants with roots in the village and loyalty to the Socialist Revolutionary Party (PSR) — were in a fighting mood.
Instead of the two-stage elections advocated by Zinoviev, the Bolsheviks pinned their hopes on the fact that only 260 of 677 seats on the Soviet were designated for workers of functioning enterprises, with the rest assigned to organizations and institutions more favorable to the current regime.Smith, Captives of Revolution, pp. 56–57. The subsequent weeks were consumed by an electoral campaign, with the Bolsheviks attempting to make the claim to workers that the choice was between their own party's hegemony and right wing military dictatorship presaged by the Kornilov Revolt of the previous August.Smith, Captives of Revolution, pp. 57.