Arkadi Kremer

Arkadi Kremer (Yiddish: אַרקאַדי קרעמער‎; also known as Aleksandr Kremer or Solomon Kremer; 1865–1935) was a Russian socialist leader known as the 'Father of the Bund' (the General Jewish Workers' Union in Lithuania, Poland and Russia). This organisation was instrumental in the development of Russian Marxism, the Jewish labour movement and Jewish nationalism.

Arkadi Kremer was born in Švenčionys in Vilna Governorate, Russian Empire (in present-day Lithuania), into a religious family. At age 12 he moved to Vilna, where he attended Realschule (Secondary School). Kremer subsequently studied at the St. Petersburg Technological Institute and the Riga Polytechnic. In the course of his studies, Kremer became involved in radical student politics and became involved in the Polish Marxist organisation 'Proletariat'. He was first arrested in 1889. After some time in prison he was condemned to administrative exile and banned from St. Petersburg. He returned to Vilna in 1890, where he joined one of the earliest Marxist circles.

In Vilna, Kremer quickly became the acknowledged leader of the Vilna Group, a circle of Jewish Social-Democrats from which the Bund subsequently emerged. He was instrumental in persuading Jewish Marxists (and Russian Social-Democrats more generally) to shift tactics from 'propaganda' to 'agitation' (i.e., from organising small clandestine study circles to fomenting a revolutionary mass movement and laying the groundwork for a mass party). Workers should be aided in their struggle for better working conditions, higher wages, etc. In the course of this struggle, they would develop a class consciousness and an understanding of the contradictions of capitalism, leading eventually to their political organisation and to the overthrow of the capitalist system. Kremer argued for this tactic in the influential pamphlet On Agitation (Ob Agitatsii), produced in 1893, together with the future Menshevik leader Julius Martov. This was known as the 'Vilna Programme' and greatly influenced the Russian Marxist movement and young Marxists like Vladimir Lenin. It also influenced the so-called 'Economist' faction, who, in contrast to Lenin and Martov, took from Kremer's pamphlet not the need to organise a workers' party but the need to concentrate on 'economic' struggles from which such a party might some day emerge. The conflict over 'Economism' was one of the first major controversies among Russian Social-Democrats and in some respects foreshadowed the Bolshevik/Menshevik split.

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