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Aron Baron

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Aron Baron
אהרן באראן
Photograph of Aron Baron in 1911
Aron Baron (1911)
Born
Aron Davydovych Baron

(1891-07-01)July 1, 1891
Hnylets [uk], Kyiv, Russian Empire
DiedAugust 12, 1937(1937-08-12) (aged 46)
Tobolsk, Tyumen, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
Cause of deathExecution by firing squad
NationalityUkrainian Jew
Other namesAron Polevoy
Aron Faktorovich
Aron Kantorovich
Occupations
  • Political activist
  • Baker
Years active1905-1921
OrganizationNabat
MovementMakhnovshchina
Spouses
ChildrenTheodore, Voltairine
Parents
  • David Iosifovich Baron (father)
  • Mindel Avigdorovna Baron, née Rabinovich (mother)
RelativesMikhail Baron [uk]

Aron Davydovych Baron (Ukrainian: Аро́н Дави́дович Ба́рон; 1891–1937) was a Ukrainian Jewish anarchist revolutionary. Following the suppression of the 1905 Revolution, he fled to the United States, where he met his wife Fanya Baron and participated in the local workers movement. With the outbreak of the 1917 Revolution, he returned to Ukraine, where he became a leading figure in the Nabat and in the Makhnovshchina. He was imprisoned by the Cheka for his anarchist activities and was executed during the Great Purge.

Biography

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Aron Davydovych Baron was born into a Ukrainian Jewish family.[1]

From Kyiv to Chicago

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As a teenager, Baron became an anarchist and participated in the 1905 Russian Revolution and the strike of the Kyiv Union of Bakers, for which he was banished to Siberia as punishment. He fled to the United States, where he lived in Chicago.

Aron Baron in exile with wife and daughter

There he met and married Fanya Grefenson, also an anarchist revolutionary, and together they were arrested for starting a demonstration against unemployment.[2] He was a member of the Industrial Workers of the World and, together with Lucy Parsons, edited the newspaper The Alarm. During a hunger march of the unemployed in early 1915, Baron and his wife were in the forefront of the demonstrators and took direct part in the clashes with the police, during which he was severely beaten. During his stay in the USA, he was briefly imprisoned several times.

From Chicago to Kyiv

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Following the February Revolution, Baron returned to Ukraine,[3] where his lectures and writings grew in popularity and the Kyiv bakers' union elected him to represent them at the local Soviet.

After leaving Ukraine under pressure from the German and Austrian occupation troops, Baron and the rest of the anarchists found themselves in Rostov-on-Don in May 1918. There they rioted, robbed local businessmen and banks, and released prisoners from Soviet penal institutions. Soon, the anarchists, side by side with the Morozov and Donetsk detachments, stood in defense of Tsaritsyn, holding the defense near the Zhutovo station. But quarrels with the Soviet authorities led to Baron's detachment, like all anarchist detachments, being disarmed in early June. In September, in the Neutral Zone, together with Vitaly Primakov, he joined in the creation of the Ukrainian insurgent division, in which his brother headed the Tarashchansky regiment.

Anarchist Agitation in Ukraine

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In the wake of the October Revolution, Baron moved to Kharkiv with Fanya, where they participated in the establishment of the Nabat, a confederation of anarchist organizations in Ukraine. He joined the confederation's secretariat and acted as co-editor of its journal, along with Volin.[2] Wherever he could, he created Nabat cells, which eventually led to his arrest. The Yekaterinoslav Cheka imprisoned Baron on February 8, 1919, for several days for his lecture "Anarchism and Soviet Power".

After his release, Baron participated in the second district congress of the Soviets of the Hulyaipilsky district (December 12-16, 1919), at which he called for the creation of non-party Soviets as an instrument of local government. After the congress, he left for Kyiv, where in early April he was again arrested by the Cheka. At the first congress of Nabat's Confederation of Anarchists of Ukraine, held in Elisavetgrad from April 2 to 7, 1919, he was elected in absentia to the Secretariat.

From April 1919, he was in Odesa, where he published the Russian-language newspaper Odesskiy Nabat. The last issue of the newspaper was No. 7 dated June 16, 1919. The Baron's activities in Odessa were put to an end by the Soviet authorities.

By the summer of 1919, Nabat had been forcibly dispersed by the Bolshevik government, which led Baron and Volin to join the ranks of the Makhnovshchina, serving on its Cultural-Educational Commission[4] and on the Military Revolutionary Council.[5] At a Regional Congress, Baron spoke out against the Bolsheviks and declared the necessity to build a regime of free soviets, outside of party control.[6]

Before long, however, Baron had started to clash with Nestor Makhno and Dmitry Popov over the leadership of the movement, with the latter even threatening to have him killed.[7] In September 1920, during an illegal conference of the Nabat in Kharkiv, Baron issued a resolution that was highly critical of the Makhnovshchina, declaring it "better to vanish into a Soviet prison than vegetate in that terrible atmosphere".[8]

Under Soviet rule

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In early October, the Baron was again imprisoned - this time on suspicion of involvement in the explosion of the building of the Moscow Committee of the RCP(b) in Leontievsky Lane. In prison, he became one of the organizers of the investigative commission, created from arrested legal anarchists, which tried to trace the circumstances of the explosion. In November 1919, he was released from prison thanks to a military-political agreement between the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine (RPAU) and the Soviet authorities. He returned to cooperation with the RPAU: from November 1 he worked in the newspaper "Voice of the Makhnovist", spoke in Kharkov at factories and plants, laid the foundations of anarcho-syndicalist trade unions, with the aim of organizing an all-Ukrainian anarchist congress.

Years in prison, internal exile, execution and rehabilitation

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In November 1920, the leaders of the Nabat were arrested by the Cheka in Kharkiv, as part of Bolshevik operation against the Makhnovshchina.[9] The entire editorial staff of "Voice of the Makhnovist" was arrested and the vast majority of them were shot by the Chekists. The arrest turned into long months of imprisonment for Baron.

Aron and Fanya Baron in Russia

Aron and Fanya Baron were subsequently transferred to a prison in Moscow.[10] In February 1921, Aron was briefly freed from prison in order to attend the funeral of Peter Kropotkin.[11]

In September 1921, Fanya was executed by the Cheka.[12] Aron Baron spent the following 17 years in either prison or exile, before he was arrested and executed during the Great Purge.[13]

In November 1922, he was sent back to the Kharkiv prison. Although Baron was soon released, on December 18, 1922, he was sent to the Solovki prison camp to serve a two-year sentence. Protesting the camp rules introduced by the administration, in June 1923 he tried to settle accounts with his life by self-immolation. In December 1924, he was released and returned to Moscow.

In January 1925, by a resolution of the Special Meeting of the Board of the OGPU, Baron was exiled to Novonikolayevsk (now Novosibirsk) for four years. After the end of the exile, he was given a new punishment: exile to Tashkent for five years. When Baron returned from Central Asia to the European part of the USSR in 1933, he was forbidden to live in large cities, so he got a job in Voronezh as an economist at a local energy trust. But on January 27, 1934, he was arrested again: this time, according to a sentence of May 14, 1934, he was sentenced to three years in prison.

After serving his sentence, Baron remained as a political exile in Tobolsk, where he worked as a planner at a local trading house. The last arrest in his life took place there on March 20, 1937. Six months later, on August 5, 1937, by the verdict of the Troika of the Omsk Department of the NKVD, Baron was sentenced to death and on August 12, 1937, he was shot in Tobolsk.

He was rehabilitated on February 8, 1957.

References

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  1. ^ Avrich 1971, pp. 215–216; Malet 1982, p. 172; Peters 1970, p. 94; Skirda 2004, p. 339.
  2. ^ a b Avrich 1971, p. 205.
  3. ^ Avrich 1971, p. 205; Skirda 2004, pp. 323–324.
  4. ^ Avrich 1971, pp. 215–216.
  5. ^ Peters 1970, pp. 104–105.
  6. ^ Skirda 2004, pp. 365–366.
  7. ^ Malet 1982, p. 162.
  8. ^ Malet 1982, pp. 162–163.
  9. ^ Avrich 1971, pp. 222–223; Skirda 2004, pp. 238–239.
  10. ^ Avrich 1971, pp. 222–223.
  11. ^ Avrich 1971, pp. 227–228.
  12. ^ Avrich 1971, pp. 232–233.
  13. ^ Avrich 1971, p. 245.

Bibliography

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  • Avrich, Paul (1971) [1967]. The Russian Anarchists. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-00766-7. OCLC 1154930946.
  • Darch, Colin (2020). Nestor Makhno and Rural Anarchism in Ukraine, 1917-1921. London: Pluto Press. ISBN 9781786805263. OCLC 1225942343.
  • Malet, Michael (1982). Nestor Makhno in the Russian Civil War. London: Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-333-25969-6. OCLC 8514426.
  • Patterson, Sean (2020). Makhno and Memory: Anarchist and Mennonite Narratives of Ukraine's Civil War, 1917–1921. Manitoba: University of Manitoba Press. ISBN 978-0-88755-578-7. OCLC 1134608930.
  • Peters, Victor (1970). Nestor Makhno: The Life of an Anarchist. Winnipeg: Echo Books. OCLC 7925080.
  • Skirda, Alexandre (2004). Nestor Makhno–Anarchy's Cossack: The Struggle for Free Soviets in the Ukraine 1917–1921. Translated by Sharkey, Paul. Oakland, CA: AK Press. ISBN 1-902593-68-5. OCLC 60602979.

Further reading

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