Moisei Rafes

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Moisei Rafes
משה רפס
General Controller
In office
13 July 1917 – 14 August 1917
PresidentMykhailo Hrushevsky
(speaker of the Central Rada)
Preceded byPosition created
Succeeded byAleksandr Zarubin
Personal details
Born3 November 1883
Vilnius, Russian Empire
(now Lithuania)
Died1942 (aged 58–59)
Komi ASSR, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
(now Russia)
Political partyKombund (from 1919)
Other political
affiliations
RSDLP (1907–1919)
Jewish Labour Bund (1910–1919)

Moisei Rafes

Bolshevik Party until the rise of Joseph Stalin, when he was imprisoned.[1]

Rafes was a member of the 1917

Central Council of Ukraine, the Petrograd Soviet, headed Jewish Bund in Kiev. In Kiev Rafes became a member of the Regional Committee in Protection of Revolution in Ukraine and served as the General Controller of the General Secretariat of Ukraine.[3] He was succeeded at this post by another Bundist, Aleksandr Zolotarev
.

When tensions within the Bund heightened, due to the pro-Bolshevik leaning of a part of the leadership, Moisei Rafes was the leader of the centrist wing of the Bund, while Mikhail Liber and Benjamin Kheifetz led the rightists.[4]

However, Rafes led the scissionist

Komfarband. These moves were apparently motivated by the large-scale pogroms committed by all the armies present in Ukraine at the time, except the Red Army. After the refusal of the Soviet authorities to authorize the formation of a distinct Jewish Communist Party, Rafes, like other former Bundists Esther Frumkin, Alexander Chemerinsky and Rakhmiel Veinshtain, finally joined the upper echelons of the Yevsektsiya, the Jewish section of the Soviet Communist party (CPSU).[5]

Moisei Rafes was at the head of the artistic section of

Sovkino and a member of the Sovkino board in the late 1920s and through 1930.[6]

Notes

Sources