Moissaye Olgin

Born in Buky, Russian Empire (today in Ukraine), Moissaye [Moyshe] Joseph Olgin received a traditional primary education with some some exposure to Haskalah literature. In 1900, he entered Kiev University to study law, becoming involved with the revolutionary student movement there. Moving to Vilna in 1904, Olgin joined the leadership of The Bund, helping to edit the organization’s main organ Arbeter-shtime and writing several of its central committee’s declarations during the 1905 Revolution. In the years between Russia’s revolutions, he also emerged as an acute reader and critic of the new trends in Yiddish literature, and would continue to be much more interested in Yiddish literary culture than most Jewish socialist leaders. Olgin immigrated to New York City at the outbreak of World War I, where, while continuing Yiddish work, he also mastered English, took a doctorate from Columbia University in 1918, and was much in demand in both Yiddish- and English-language radical circles as someone who could explain what was going on in revolutionary Russia (e.g., “Who Is Trotsky?”). In the course of the revolution, Olgin became a supporter of the Bolshevik regime and a Communist. In the interwar years, he became the dominant figure in the Yiddish-speaking Jewish Communist section of the Communist Party in America and its newspaper Morgn frayhayt. In this period, his Stalinism was unquestioning, as evidenced by his 1935 Trotskyism: Counter-Revolution in Disguise, a Stalinist denunciation of the very Trotsky he formerly praised.