Central Committee of the Bund

The Central Committee was the chief executive organ of the General Jewish Labor Bund, and in the first two decades of the party’s existence, the Central Committee exercised clear control over all Bund organs and positions. In 1897, when The Bund was founded, Arkadi Kremer, Vladimir Kossovsky, and Avrom (Glyeb) Mutnik constituted the first Central Committee. It may be assumed that some or all of those founding figures had a hand in composing The Bund’s response to the unprecedentedly brutal Kishinev pogrom in spring 1903. In 1906, the Committee came to include Vladimir Medem, who played a central role in developing The Bund’s ideological doctrines in those years. In The Bund’s second great iteration, in interwar Poland, the structure of power was considerably different and the Central Committee did not play the same determining role.