INTRODUCTION

THE election to the fourth Russian State Duma, in the autumn of 1912, represented a critical break in the history of Polish-Jewish relations in Warsaw. For the first time the Jewish voters had a potential majority; more importantly, they managed, for the most part, to remain united. By contrast, the Polish voters split between two nationalist lists, one headed by the National Democratic leader Roman Dmowski, the other by a member of the National Democratic ‘Secession',· Jan Kucharzewski, who was supported by many anti-Dmowski Poles.

Socialist groups in the city, on the other hand, were weak and badly split; the major ones were the Jewish Bund, Polsko Partia Socjalistyczna-Lewica (PPSLewica: Polish Socialist Party Left), and the Socjaldemokracja Królestwa Polskiego i Litwy (SDKPiL: Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania). Yet, when the time came to choose a Duma delegate in November, the Jewish electors turned to the Socialists as the only Polish elements active in the campaign which accepted, in their platforms, the idea of equal rights for Jews. The Jewish electors (mostly businessmen) resolved to cast their votes for a Polish Socialist in spite of their own misgivings and in the face of threats from practically all Polish nationalist and liberal elements; this turned out to be Eugeniusz Jagiello, a metal-turner and political nonentity from the PPS Left, whom the party had put forward because none of its leaders met the legal requirements. The main result of this was a furious anti-Jewish boycott supported by many parts of Polish society, under the slogan Swój do swego po swoje, which roughly means, ‘Stick to your own'.

This was the only occasion on which a Polish Socialist of any sort ever got into the Russian State Duma, but the Socialist parties do not seem to have been very pleased with their success. The Social Democrats claimed that Socialist parties should not be accepting bourgeois votes in such a fashion, and the PPS Left seems to have been at least embarrassed by the outcome.

Here are translated recollections and comments on these events from the memoirs of a Polish Jewish journalist, Bernard Singer, who witnessed the events as a young resident of Warsaw, and from contemporary Russian police reports describing Jewish political meetings and summarizing the scanty facts available on the city's new Socialist delegate to the State Duma.