FRUMKIN, BORIS MARKOVICH

FRUMKIN, BORIS MARKOVICH (1872–after 1939), pioneer of the *Bund and among its most prominent publicists; first historian of the Jewish labor movement in Russia. He graduated from Geneva University. From the middle 1890s, Frumkin ranked among the leading ideologists of the Jewish Social Democrat circles in Minsk. He was the editor of the Arbayter Bletel of Minsk (1897), the first periodical published by the Jewish Social Democrats in Russia. He helped to organize the Bund in Lodz, where he was imprisoned in 1898 for revolutionary activity. In 1906 he left Russia and became a member of the "Committee Abroad" of the Bund and secretary of the Organization of Workers' Societies and Relief Groups for the Bund Abroad. After his return to Russia, he was again active in Lodz and edited (1913–14) the principal legalized organ of the Bund in St. Petersburg, Di Tsayt, Undzer Tsayt. After the February 1917 Revolution, Frumkin wrote for the Bundist press. During the split in the Bund in 1920–21 he joined the Combund (the faction that later joined the Communist Party). He was seen in Moscow in the mid-1930s. Later, he disappeared from the literary and public scene. He appears to have been still alive on the eve of World War ii, but there is no information available on his end.

Frumkin's historiographical writings include: "Iz istorii revolyutsionnogo dvizheniya sredi yevreyev v 1870-kh godakh" ("From the History of the Revolutionary Movement among the Jews in the 1870s"), in: Yevreyskaya Starina, 4 (1911), 221–48, 513–40; "Ocherki iz istorii yevreyskogo rabochego dvizheniya v Rossii 1885–1897" ("From the History of the Jewish Labor Movement in Russia 1885–1897"), ibid., 6 (1913), 108–22, 245–63; and "Zubatovshchina i yevreyskoye rabocheye dvizheniye" ("The Zubatov Movement and the Jewish Labor Movement"), in: Perezhitoye, 3 (1911), 199–223. Over the signature of "B. Gorenberg" he wrote the Bund's report on the problem of emigration, Zur Emigrationsfrage (also Yid., Emigratsye un Imigratsye) for the Stuttgart congress of the Second International (1907). He was coauthor of "Der 'Bund' in der Revolutsye fun 1905–06" ("The 'Bund' in the Revolution of 1905–06," 1930), which also appeared in Archiv fuer Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik.

bibliography:

F. Kursky, Gesamlte Shriftn (1952), index; Di Geshikhte fun Bund, 2 vols. (1960–62), indexes.

[Moshe Mishkinsky]