In the coalition, not the party
Isaac Steinberg
Isaac Nachman Steinberg · 1888–1957
Photograph. Wikimedia Commons.
Steinberg is the control case. A radical socialist, Jewish, inside the revolutionary government, who treated Cheka shooting as a crime rather than as class hygiene.
Origin and religion
Jewish, from Dvinsk (Daugavpils), a Left Socialist-Revolutionary, not a Bolshevik. He is in this ledger because he sat in the first Soviet cabinet as people’s commissar of justice and used the office, briefly, to fight the Cheka. Leaving him out would let the cabinet look unanimous.
Jewish family in Dvinsk. Left Socialist-Revolutionary, not a Bolshevik. Secular political Jew.
Responsibilities
- People’s commissar of justice, December 1917–March 1918
- Left SR critic of executions
- Later an exile writer
During the weeks of the Bolshevik–Left SR coalition he tried to bring executions under some legal review. Dzerzhinsky’s commissariat did not accept a justice commissar as a superior. The coalition broke by March 1918 over Brest-Litovsk and the peasant question; the Left SR rising in July 1918 finished it.
The record
His memoirs of those months are a primary source from inside the building, written by an enemy of the Bolsheviks who had been their coalition partner. Read him alongside Latsis, not instead of the archives. He emigrated, lived in Germany, then Australia and the United States, and died in 1957. He is marked throughout this archive as not a Bolshevik.
What they said
No short quotation is filed here. A line that cannot be tied to a book, a decree, or a named archive does not get invented to make the page symmetrical. The record above is the case.
Others filed as Jewish
- Leon Trotsky — Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet (1917)
- Yakov Sverdlov — Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee
- Grigory Zinoviev — Party boss of Petrograd
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