HISTORICAL DICTIONARY A–Z - Russia: A Reference Guide from the Renaissance to the Present - page 105

1937. The following year, he became deputy
chairman of the Sovnarkom for the entire Soviet
Union, a post he held until 1941. Bulganin spent
the first part of World War II as a traveling polit-
ical commissar, before being promoted to deputy
commissar of the Defense Ministry and member
of the State Defense Committee. He continued
his rise in the army and party bureaucracies after
the war, obtaining the rank of marshal in 1947
and a seat on the party's Politburo in 1948. In the
power struggle that followed Stalin's death in
1953, Bulganin sided with Khrushchev and ben-
efited from his eventual victory, becoming
defense minister in 1953 and prime minister
(premier) in 1955. In 1957, however, he threw
his lot in with the unsuccessful “ ANTI - PARTY
GROUP ,” led by MOLOTOV , MALENKOV , KAGANOVICH ,
and Voroshilov, which sought to remove Khrush-
chev from power. Unlike his co-conspirators,
Bulganin was not punished by Khrushchev until
1958, at which time he lost his seat on the Polit-
buro and his military rank of marshal, in addi-
tion to being fired as prime minister. For the
next few years he worked at minor economic
posts, first in the State Bank and then in the
southern province of Stavropol as chairman of
the local Council of the National Economy. He
retired in 1960 and lived near Moscow in politi-
cal obscurity until his death.

empire and had played an important part in the
foundation of the Russian Social Democratic
Labor Party (RSDLP) in 1898. Despite their com-
mon allegiance to Marxist principles, conflicts
soon arose between the two parties, especially
with Vladimir LENIN . They clashed over the
Bund's emphasis on Jewish interests and over
the nature of the party, with the Bund rejecting
Leninist organizational principles in favor of a
broad-based mass party modeled on the German
Social Democratic Party. As a result of these
broader disagreements and the Bund's demands
to be recognized as the sole representatives of
Jewish workers and its demands for internal
autonomy within the RSDLP, the Bund seceded
from the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party
in 1903. The Bund rejoined the party in 1906
and thereafter generally sided with the Menshe-
viks. Like other Russian socialist parties, the
Bund's fortunes declined in the period between
1907 and 1914 as a result of repression, emigra-
tion of many of its members, and a reduced
commitment after the heady days of the 1905
Revolution. World War I particularly affected the
Bund, since its traditional areas of recruitment
were now the sites of the heaviest fighting with
Germany. Bund leaders supported the platform
of the Zimmerwald Conference of 1915, calling
for peace without annexations or indemnities
and for an emphasis on proletarian internation-
alism rather than patriotic nationalist demands.
It supported the Provisional Government in
1917 but decided not to join it, following the
general policies of the Petrograd Soviet. The
majority of the party opposed the Bolshevik rev-
olution, but the civil war further splintered the
Bund organizationally and ideologically. The
creation of an independent Poland in November
1918 broke up the unity of the prerevolutionary
Bund, and with the formation of a Polish Bund,
a substantial part of the party was now drawn
into Polish interwar politics. In 1920, the Bund
in Soviet territories split with a majority, led by
M. Rafes, choosing to join the Communist Party
and a minority, led by Rafail Abramovich, con-
tinuing as a separate Social Democratic group

Bund
Political party. Derived from the Yiddish term for
union, the Bund, or Jewish Bund, formed in
Vilna in 1897 and was formally known as the
General Jewish Workers Bund in Russia and
Poland (after 1901, Lithuania was added to the
title). By the time of its establishment, its acti-
vists, drawn mostly from the Russified Jewish
intelligentsia who had benefited from the GREAT
REFORMS of the 1860s, had a decade's worth of
organizational and agitational experience. Its
general aims were an end to anti-Jewish discrim-
ination and a reorganized federal Russian Empire
within the framework of socialism. By 1900 it
was the most powerful socialist body in the