Physical Description:

Only edition, poster 178:535 mm., usual llight age staining, creased on folds.

Unrecorded - No copy major collections - Early Communist Poster.

Detailed Description:   

A poster announcing for all workers to join in the ranks of cooperation and a halt to exploitation by the Capitalist. It was the rallying cry of the revolt which resulted in the abdication of the Czar and the Capitalist by the Soviets.

In the Russian Empire, the year 1917 brought two revolutions, one that ended hundreds of years of tsarist rule and the other that inaugurated nearly three-quarters of a century of Bolshevik or Communist rule. Almost all Jews in the Russian Empire and abroad welcomed the first revolution, which came in February (new style, March), but initially, few were enthusiastic about the takeover of power by the Bolsheviks eight months later. Within weeks of the first revolution, on 22 March (new style, 2 April) the Provisional Government—in power until a Constituent Assembly could be called to determine the character of the successor Russian state—abolished all the legal restrictions on ethnic and religious communities, including Jews. For the first time since they had been admitted to the Russian Empire, Jews gained full equality with all other citizens. The tsarist regime had confined Jews to the Pale of Settlement and had severely restricted their opportunities in agriculture, the professions, military service, and education. It had completely closed off governmental and civil service positions to them, unless they agreed to convert to Christianity. During World War I the authorities had expelled thousands of Jews from their homes in the western part of the empire on the grounds that they might collaborate with the Central Powers invading from the west. Ironically, it was this expulsion that broke the confinement of Jews to the Pale, at least de facto, and brought large numbers of them to the interior of Russia. When the Provisional Government abolished the Pale de jure, large numbers of Jews made their way to the two capitals, Moscow and Saint Petersburg, as well as to other Russian cities and towns formerly closed to them.

During the violence that followed the October Revolution, Jews suffered along with millions of others economically, physically, and mentally. They experienced nearly four years of brutal conflict, the breakdown of the old economic order, and the anarchic conditions that prevailed in much of the former empire as a succession of governments and their opponents embarked on a multilateral civil war that was fought through 1920.

In May 1917 the Zionist Socialist and Jewish Socialist Labor Party, known as SERP, merged to form a United Jewish Socialist Workers Party (Fareynikte, or “Uniteds”). They were Marxist socialists who, unlike the Bund, favored the establishment of autonomous Jewish territories (this was their Zionism). SERP had advocated national-cultural autonomy with a parliament for each ethnic group in the state. This party had ties mainly to the Socialist Revolutionaries, as well as some connections to the Mensheviks.

The Po‘ale Tsiyon party was both more conventionally socialist and more Zionist than the Fareynikte. Inspired by Ber Borokhov’s determinist Marxism, which postulated that to normalize the Jewish social structure and create a peasantry Jews needed land, so that the territorial base advocated by Zionists was justifiable, this party eventually split into right and left wings, including an extreme leftist branch that, from its base in Poland in the interwar years, operated in Yiddish and advocated a Communist system in a future Jewish state in Palestine.

The revolutions of 1917 brought greater freedoms and opportunities to the largest Jewish population in the world than they and their ancestors had ever enjoyed. For a decade and more after the Bolshevik revolution, which shattered hopes for the emergence of a democratic Russia, Jews and others enjoyed educational and occupational opportunities denied to them under the tsars—unless, that is, they were judged to be of the wrong class affiliation or even origin. The number of Jews in governmental posts and higher education, as well as in cultural institutions, rose astronomically. But there was a price to be paid for this social liberation. The Bolshevik regime, partly through the instrumentality of the Jewish Sections of the Communist Party (Evsektsii) “revolutionized” the “Jewish masses” by depriving them of religious and Hebrew education, severely restricting and attacking religious practice, and, by 1921, forcing out of existence all political parties and movements throughout the country. The variegated political and cultural life created by the first revolution of 1917 was ultimately destroyed by the second revolution of that fateful year.

Hebrew Description:

http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Russian_Revolutions_of_1917