by Lawrence Bush on January 30, 2012
A mathematician and avid communist in the Soviet Union, Sofya Yanovskaya was born in Bessarabia on this date in 1896. She became a Bolshevik during the Russian revolution and served as an officer in the Communist Party until 1924. Most of her career was spent at the Moscow State University as a scholar of the history, philosophy, and logic of mathematics. Yanovskaya participated for years in Party-run efforts to bring mathematics to “heel” alongside dialectical materialism and other aspects of Marxist-Leninist ideology. Yet she ultimately became a defender of the scientific integrity of mathematics as an independent discipline. Her thirty-year task of editing Karl Marx’s mathematical writings enabled mathematicians in communist lands, especially in China during the Cultural Revolution, to defend their discipline as legitimate and in the interests of the working class. Yanovskaya was awarded the Order of Lenin in 1951, and in 1959 became the first chairperson of the newly created department of mathematical logic at Moscow State University.
“Marx’s Mathematical Manuscripts must be seen as an outstanding model of dialectical practice, and read from the standpoint from which it was written — the struggle for dialectical theory as a guide to revolutionary social practice.” —Andy Blunden
by Lawrence Bush on December 19, 2011
Cheka, the first incarnation of the Soviet secret police (NKVD), was established on this date in 1917. Many Jews played leading roles in the secret police, and even more fell victim to it. “About 40 percent of high-ranking NKVD officers had Jewish nationality recorded in their identity documents,” writes Yale University professor Timothy Snyder in Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, “as did more than half of the NKVD generals. . . . The Great Terror could be, and by many would be, blamed on the Jews.”
“At the time when the NKVD was killing members of national minorities, most of its leading officers were themselves members of national minorities…. In carrying out these ethnic massacres, which of course they had to if they wished to preserve their positions and their lives, they comprised an ethic of internationalism, which must have been important to some of them. Then they were killed anyway . . . and usually replaced by Russians.” —Timothy Snyder
by Lawrence Bush on November 2, 2011
Dr. Paul Bermanzohn, the son of Holocaust survivors, was among 15 members of the Communist Workers Party who were wounded or killed on this date in 1979 in an attack by the Ku Klux Klan in Greensboro, North Carolina. Dr. Michael Nathan, the chief of pediatrics at the Lincoln Community Health Center in Durham, a clinic that served low-income people, was among five killed in that assault, and a civil suit in 1985 found several of the Klansmen, as well as some Greensboro police officers, liable for his wrongful death. The CWP members had been organizing mostly black industrial workers in the area and were leading a “Death to the Klan” march in a Black housing development when an armed caravan of Klansmen descended upon them and opened fire. Two criminal trials resulted in acquittals of 14 defendants by all-white juries. In 2005, a Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission (for Bermanzohn’s testimony, click here) determined that both the police and the FBI had been alerted by informants to the likelihood of violence but had taken no actions to prevent it.
“Over the years I discovered that my roots as the child of a Holocaust survivors gave me special credibility among Black people who had suffered from the severe oppression of the racist system in the US. As we developed our work in the communities around NC, this bond was strengthened repeatedly as I became an organizer in the Black community.” —Paul Bermanzohn
by Lou Charloff on September 12, 2011
In the 1930’s, the big political struggle in New York was not between the left and the right – it was between the left and the left.
My Aunt Bess was a fiercely dedicated Communist. She strove all her life for a world in which government, which of course meant the people, would own all means of production and everybody earned a decent wage. With no poverty, we would eliminate almost all crime, do away with many illnesses and could even look forward to the end of wars. Or so she believed.
She was a very bright woman who, when angry, had a mouth that could strike like a slashing saber and bring you to your knees. And she directed that anger against a cold, harsh, bitter world that she fought to replace with an ideal utopia. [click to continue…]
A mathematician and avid communist in the Soviet Union, Sofya Yanovskaya was born in Bessarabia on this date in 1896. She became a Bolshevik during the Russian revolution and served as an officer in the Communist Party until 1924. Most of her career was spent at the Moscow State University as a scholar of the history, philosophy, and logic of mathematics. Yanovskaya participated for years in Party-run efforts to bring mathematics to “heel” alongside dialectical materialism and other aspects of Marxist-Leninist ideology. Yet she ultimately became a defender of the scientific integrity of mathematics as an independent discipline. Her thirty-year task of editing Karl Marx’s mathematical writings enabled mathematicians in communist lands, especially in China during the Cultural Revolution, to defend their discipline as legitimate and in the interests of the working class. Yanovskaya was awarded the Order of Lenin in 1951, and in 1959 became the first chairperson of the newly created department of mathematical logic at Moscow State University.
