Arkadi Kremer

Arkadi Kremer was born in Švenčionys in Vilna Governorate, Russian Empire (in present-day Lithuania), into a religious maskilic family.

He aimed to expand the Jewish worker's influence in mass politics to end their struggle under capitalism led by the bourgeoisie.

He worked closely with Shmul Gozhansky, another revolutionary leader to change the Vilna Jewish workers circles tactics from propaganda to mass agitation.

In the course of this struggle, they would develop a class consciousness and an understanding of the contradictions of capitalism, leading eventually to their political organization and to the overthrow of the capitalist system.

Kremer argued for this tactic in the influential pamphlet On Agitation (Ob Agitatsii), produced in 1893, together with the future Menshevik leader Julius Martov.

Kremer initially rejected this idea, believing that a political party would be the organic outcome of the workers' own economic struggle.

He placed less emphasis on Jewish cultural nationalism and autonomy than subsequent younger Bundist leaders like Mikhail Liber.

Kremer attended the RSDRP's founding congress in Minsk and was elected to its first, short-lived Central Committee (which also comprised three members).

While in prison, Kremer put his technological and mathematical studies to use by developing a system of cryptography and a coding machine that came to be widely used in the Russian revolutionary movement.

In 1903, the Bund's position, most forcefully argued by Liber, was rejected by both Lenin and Martov, shortly to emerge as the leaders of the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions.

In the bitter controversies which divided the European socialist movement with the outbreak of World War I, Kremer played a minor role, though he seems to have sided with the supporters of the Entente.

During his Vilna years, Kremer met and married Pati Matle Srednitskaia (or Srednicki) (1867–1943), a revolutionary activist in her own right.