Grusenberg Oskar (Israel) Osipovich (Iosifovich) (b. 1866, Yekaterinoslav – d. 1940, Nice, France) — lawyer, public figure.
Oskar Grusenberg was the brother of the writer and social activist Samuil Grusenberg. He graduated from the Faculty of Law at Kyiv University in 1889 but declined an offer to remain at the university and prepare for a professorship due to a requirement to convert to Christianity.
He settled in St. Petersburg and soon became one of the city’s most prominent lawyers. However, as a Jew, he was long denied the title of barrister (prisyazhny poverenny), which he obtained only in 1905. Alongside criminal cases, he frequently defended prominent writers and public figures (including Maxim Gorky, Korney Chukovsky, Pavel Milyukov, Vladimir Korolenko, and others) as well as political defendants — such as those involved in the St. Petersburg Workers’ Soviet and the signatories of the “Vyborg Manifesto” issued by deputies of the First State Duma.
Grusenberg’s courtroom defences during military trials of participants in the 1905–07 Russian Revolution often saved defendants from execution. He gained particular fame for his role in trials involving Jewish defendants. In the trial of David Blondes (1900–02), accused of ritual murder, Grusenberg succeeded in overturning the initial conviction and securing his acquittal.
His speeches in the highly publicised trials related to the pogroms in Kishinev and Minsk and in the case of P. Dashevsky (accused of attempting to assassinate the Black Hundreds journalist P. Krushevan, 1903) earned him nationwide recognition. The pinnacle of his legal career was his role as lead counsel in the Menahem Mendel Beilis trial.
From autumn 1905, Grusenberg was a member of the Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets). He ran for election to the Second State Duma in 1907 representing Vilna Governorate but was not elected. That same year, he provided legal support to a group of Jewish deputies in the Third Duma. From 1912, he was a member of the political bureau supporting Jewish deputies in the Fourth Duma.
In 1917, he grew closer to the Zionist movement and was elected to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly on a united Jewish list. During the Civil War (1918–19), he led the Jewish Self-Defence Council and the Relief Committee for Pogrom Victims.
In 1920, Oskar Grusenberg emigrated. He lived in Berlin (1921–23) and in Riga (1926–32). From 1929, he served as a representative of Latvian Jews in the Jewish Agency and was elected to its Council. He was instrumental in founding the Russian Legal Society in Latvia and its journal Zakon i Sud (“Law and Court”), published until 1938 — the only legal periodical in the Russian émigré community.
Grusenberg spent his final years in France, working on his memoirs. In 1950, in accordance with his will, his remains were reinterred in Israel.
Works:
Vchera [Yesterday]. Paris, 1938
Ocherki i rechi [Essays and Speeches]. New York, 1944