The Bauman Affair

Comrades in a socialist organization get romantically involved. Things go sour. One of the parties is abusive, with painful consequences for the other. The survivor of the abuse writes to the organization’s leadership for help.

Afraid of retaliation, the survivor asks a comrade to read the letter for them at a leadership committee meeting. Some in the room are outraged and call for investigations and reprimands. They think the integrity of the movement is at stake. 

Others are slower to react. They know the fragility of the movement at this particular moment. They say the abuser in question is a good organizer, and they don’t know the facts of the situation. 

With leadership divided, comrades draw lines. To one side are those incredulous about claims of abuse, moving slowly to react in the name of organizational stability. On the other side, in solidarity with the survivor, comrades become enraged at their supposed brothers-in-arms who they see as abandoning their revolutionary values of equality and their basic decency. 

Veteran organizers quit in frustration. Active newcomers feel deflated, confused, and embittered. Previous political and strategic differences get thrown into the mix and the differences become deeper. Factional politics emerge in and around the dispute. 

Sound familiar? It should. This summary covers the basics of the Bauman Affair, a scandal that rocked the fledgling Russian Social Democratic Party in 1902. This case of abuse in a socialist organization trying to become a legitimate political party was the precursor to the rifts that would eventually separate Menshevik from Bolshevik and shape the Russian Revolution. 

Given the steady rhythm of abuse scandals in DSA, history can be a helpful guide when thinking about them.

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The context then was starkly different than our own, but eerily similar in some ways. Russian revolutionaries in the generation after Tsar Alexander II’s assassination fought for radical social change using parliamentary organizing. They wanted to defeat the monarchy. To do so, they planned to build a political party that could defeat Tsarism and put workers in charge of society. The government frequently arrested and exiled them to prevent their work. 

One tactic the revolutionary exiles used was media. Newspaper production was particularly effective. A group of notable organizers and intellectuals started a paper called Iskra (or Spark). They wrote socialist articles under pseudonyms while in exile and distributed copies of the paper to other exiles and expats throughout the continent. 

Vladimir Lenin, Vera Zasulich, Jules Martov, George Plekhanov, Alexander Potresov, among others (Trotsky was present but not yet in a leadership role), were on the editorial board of Iskra. It was fifteen years before the 1917 revolution. 

At one of their meetings, Martov read a letter he’d been asked to present to the board. The letter was from a comrade in Ukraine. 

The letter’s author wrote that she’d had an ‘affair’ with an organizer named Nikolay Bauman. She was married to someone else. She got pregnant. Bauman was cruel about it, sending around satirical cartoons of her holding a baby that looked like him to taunt her and her husband. 

Both the survivor and Bauman were revolutionaries, distributing Iskra and organizing reading groups and meetings with exiles in the region. 

She wrote to the leadership of Iskra, asking them to intervene in the situation. It was unbearable for her. She asked them to expel Bauman from the party. She said doing so would ensure the organization was “the party of the struggle for freedom.”

Martov, Potresov, and Zasulich took her side. They wouldn’t stand for this kind of behavior in their party.

Lenin took another view. Bauman, Lenin said, was a good organizer. That’s what was important, not whether he was abusive in his personal life. At the meeting, Lenin used parliamentary procedure to call the matter out of order and insisted on dismissing it. (For a good account with sources, see Israel Getzler, Martov: A Political Biography of a Russian Social Democrat, p. 66-67).

As depicted in the BBC series Fall of Eagles, Martov was bewildered that his friend and comrade Lenin would be so callous. They’d shared rooms together in exile, thought and fought together for a better society. Zasulich, a veteran organizer from the previous generation, protested mightily and left the room in frustration. Trotsky stayed silent. 

The committee didn’t reprimand Bauman. 

The rifts caused by the scandal, particularly between Martov and Lenin, reshaped alliances on Iskra. These new alliances set the stage for factional differences over party policies, which ended up Martov would go on to start the Mensheviks and Lenin the Bolsheviks. Zasulich and Potresov refused to go with Lenin. The rest is history. (And a content warning must be issued for what became of the comrade that filed the complaint.*)

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Looking back at the Bauman affair, at the very least, we can ask some questions to think through its lessons. Who was right and wrong in this situation, and how could it have been avoided? Where should the lines between personal and political get drawn when trying to build a socialist party, specifically when it comes to gendered sexual abuse? How best can we build solidarity with survivors?

These questions are much bigger than one little piece about the Russian Social Democratic Party can handle. At the very least I can suggest some readings and resources to think about them. AK Press’s The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Partner Abuse in Activist Communities has a series of essays from activists and scholars on the issue. And Sarah M. Hanks’s fascinating dissertation Restoring Solidarity: ‘Accountability’ Leftist Subcultures, completed last year, takes a historical and interview-based approach to the question of transformative justice in left spaces. 

After reviewing several approaches to creating accountability in movements, Banks reflects on her historical work on the question. She concludes by saying “there is a real worry that social movements will fail to learn from previous movements’ mistakes. There are significant problems in radical leftist social movements around sexual assault and gendered interpersonal dynamics.” She goes on to say that this practice--reflecting on lessons learned from past movement experiences--may be even more important than instituting accountability practices themselves.

*She committed suicide.