Kossovsky Vladimir (1867-1941)

Kossovsky Vladimir (real name Mendel Yakovlevich Levinson (Nahum Mendl) (1867, Dinaburg – 1941, New York) – political figure, one of the founders and first ideologists of the Bund organisation.

Vladimir Kossovsky grew up in an assimilated family, studied at the Kovno Gymnasium, joined a revolutionary circle in the 7th grade, became involved in agitation, dropped out of school, and went into hiding from the police. In 1894 (1895?) in Vilnius, he joined a Jewish social democratic circle, taught political economy to groups of workers and intellectuals, and wrote articles on political topics. In 1896, he became a member of the Vilnius Social Democratic Committee. He edited the social democratic magazine Yiddisher Arbeiter. In September 1897, at the founding congress of the Bund, he was elected to its central committee, collaborated with the party newspaper Arbeiter Stimme, and in 1898 published an illegal pamphlet on the struggle of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) against the Bund. From 1898 to 1900, he was imprisoned in Moscow, deported to Vilnius pending sentencing, and fled abroad. In 1900, as a member of the Bund delegation, he participated in the International Socialist Congress (Paris). From October 1900, he was a member of the Bund's foreign committee and spoke out in its press against the activities of the Jewish Independent Workers' Party, the terrorist acts of the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), the assimilationist attitudes of the Iskra editorial board, and against territorialism and Zionism. In his pamphlet On the Question of National Autonomy and the Transformation of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (1902), he substantiated

In his pamphlet ‘On the Question of National Autonomy and the Transformation of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party’ (1902), he substantiated the Bund's main theses on Jewish national and cultural autonomy and the need to reorganise the Russian Social Democratic Party on a federal basis. Kossovsky's articles helped M. Lieber introduce into the Bund's programme a clause on the struggle for the national (and not just civil) rights of the Jewish population of the Russian Empire.

In 1905, he returned to Russia and became editor-in-chief of the legal Bund’s newspapers Weker and Volkszeitung, among others. In the summer of 1907, he emigrated again. During World War I, he wrote extensively about the situation of Jews in the war zone and on topics related to the socialist movement. After the war, he contributed to the Bund publications in Poland. From 1930, he lived in Warsaw and was a regular contributor to Volkszeitung. He managed to leave Warsaw in 1939 and arrived in New York in 1941.