Mikhail Liber

Mikhail Isaakovich Liber (5 June 1880 – 4 October 1937), sometimes known as Mark Liber, was a leader of the General Jewish Workers' Union (the 'Bund'). He also played a role in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party (RSDRP) and among the Mensheviks. Liber was instrumental in the soviets during the February Revolution of 1917 but opposed to October Revolution. He was reportedly shot during the Purges. Liber played a defining role in the development of the Bund and helped shaped the policies of the leaders of the February Revolution.

Mikhail Isaakovich Goldman was born in the Lithuanian city of Vilnius, then part of the Russian Empire, into a secular Jewish family. His father was a poet and office clerk. Like his older brothers, Boris and Lev (known as 'Gorev' and 'Akim' respectively), Mikhail became involved in radical student politics and was drawn to Marxism. He took an interest in the plight of Jewish workers in the Russian empire and joined the General Jewish Workers' Union in Lithuania, Poland and Russia (Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bund in Lite, Poyln un Rusland, אַלגעמײַנער ײדישער אַרבעטער בונד אין ליטע פוילין און רוסלאַנד) in 1897. Goldman took the revolutionary pseudonym 'M. Liber', by which he became known. He soon rose to prominence in the Bund and was elected to its Central Committee in 1902.

The Bund competed, on the one hand, with non-Marxist Jewish socialist groups that were influenced by Russian populism and, on the other, with the emerging Jewish Zionist movement. The Bund rejected Jewish national separatism and eventually came out against the Zionist project of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. The Bund stressed that the struggle for Jewish emancipation in the Russian empire must be linked with the struggle of the Russian proletariat, and for that reason sought close relations with Russian Social-Democracy. Nevertheless, the Bund insisted on the cultural autonomy of the empire's Jews and, accordingly, the organisational autonomy of the Bund within a federal Russian Social-Democratic party. In internal debates within the Bund, younger Bundists like Liber placed greater emphasis on Jewish cultural identity than their more assimilationist elders (such as the Bund's founder, Arkadi Kremer), and on the need for propaganda in Yiddish aimed specifically at Jewish workers. In relation to the RSDRP, they argued for a looser, federal form of organisation, rather than a unitary centralised one.

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