Aron Isaakovich Vainshtein, (23 November 1877 – 12 March 1938) known by the nom de guerre Rakhmiel, was a Jewish socialist activist and politician in Soviet Belorussia.[1]
Aron Vainshtein | |
|---|---|
| Арон Исаакович Вайнштейн | |
 | |
| Born | 23 November 1877 Vilna, Russian Empire |
| Died | 12 March 1938 (aged 60) Moscow, USSR |
| Other names | Rakhmiel |
| Citizenship | Russian Empire, Soviet Belorussia |
| Occupation | politician |
In 1897, Vainshtein graduated from the Vilna Jewish Teaching Institute.[1] In 1898, Vainshtein, now based in Warsaw, joined the General Jewish Labour Bund.[2] He quickly emerged as the leading figure in the Warsaw Committee of the Bund.[3] During the early period of the Bund movement, Vainshtein's Warsaw faction opposed the line of calling for Jewish national rights of John Mill's Geneva-based leadership.[2] The fourth Bund congress in 1901 elected him to the Bund Central Committee.[1] In 1914 he was exiled to Siberia, where he remained until the 1917 February Revolution.[1]
The tenth Bund congress elected him as the Chairman of the Bund Central Committee.[1] Along with the rest of the Bund Central Committee, he shifted to Minsk.[1] He was elected as chairman of the Minsk City Duma.[4]
Inside the Bund, Vainshtein came to vacillate between centrist, rightist, and leftist positions.[1] On the question of World War I he placed himself in the centrist camp but he sided with the Bund right-wing in condemnation of the October Revolution.[1] As the Russian Civil War emerged and with the German Revolution of 1918–1919 he moved to the left.[1] As the Bund split at the April 1920 twelfth congress, Vainshtein and his sister-in-law Esther Frumkin led the pro-communist Kombund majority faction.[1]
During 1920 and 1921 Frumkin and Vaynsthteyn were the key leaders of the Kombund.[5] Vainshtein served as the Kombund representative in the Military Revolutionary Committee of Belorussia from August to December 1920.[1] In December 1920 he was named the acting chairman of the Belorussian Council of National Economy.[1] While heading this body, he was accused by the Yevsektsia (Jewish Section of the Communist Party) of implementing a petty bourgeois Bundist economic policy.[6]
Unity talks between the Kombund and the Communist Party lasted for months; in the end the Communist International ordered the Bund to dissolve itself.[7] At an Extraordinary All-Russian Bundist Conference, held in Minsk on March 5, 1921 the delegates representing some 3,000 party members debated disbanding the Communist Bund.[8][9][6] At the conference Vainshtein spoke in favour of disbanding the Kombund and merging with the Communist Party.[10]
In 1921 he was inducted into the Yevsektsia Central Bureau, where he remained until 1924.[1] He served as Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Kirghiz Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic from 1921 to 1922.[1] Between 1923 and 1930 he served on the board of the People's Commissariat of Finance of the USSR.[1] He was a board member of KOMZET, becoming its deputy chairman in 1928.[1] During the 1930s he headed the Moscow branch of OZET.[1]
Vainshtein was arrested in February 1938.[1] He reportedly committed suicide after ten days in detention.[1]