Mezhraionka: Learning the politics of working-class solidarity in the Russian empire, 1901-1917

How do we understand and develop a politics of solidarity in the workers’ movement? Earlier generations have tried to find answers to this by studying the Russian revolutionary era in the early years of the 20th century. Three things are often obscured in these studies. 1) The principal voice for solidaristic organizing in the Russian workers’ movement was a forgotten wing of socialists – the Mezhraionka (Interdistrict Committee). 2) The worker organizers in the Mezhraionka were obstructed in their work by the quite sectarian orientation of the much more well-known Bolsheviks. 3) The key organizer of the Mezhraionka – Il’ia Iurenev – was arguably able to rise above the sectarianism which dominated the Russian Left because of his teenage experience in the Pale of Settlement, working with the first and for many years the only mass workers’ movement in the Russian empire – the Bund (the General Jewish Workers’ Association [Bund] in Lithuania, Poland and Russia). When Iurenev took this method of solidaristic organizing into Petersburg between 1911 and 1917, he encountered sullen hostility from the existing workers’ leaders but enthusiasm from worker activists, allowing his political tendency to emerge as one of – if not the most – important current in the workers’ movement by the outbreak of world war. The paper is based on original translations of all of Iurenev’s key writings, of key documents from the era and a review of the relevant literature.