David Petrovsky (Lipetz) (also known as Max Goldfarb, Bennett, Humboldt, Brown, September 24, 1886, Berdychiv, Russian Empire — September 10, 1937, Moscow, Soviet Union) was a Jewish revolutionary politician, economist, journalist, general of the Red Army, and Soviet statesman. He was an active member of the Jewish Bund in the Russian Empire and the Jewish Socialist Federation in the USA. In 1912 he received a Ph.D. in economics from the Free University of Brussels where he studied under Emile Vandervelde. He moved to New York in 1913 where served as the editor of the Jewish Daily Forward newspaper in New York until 1917. In 1917 Petrovsky ran the Russian Constituent Assembly and returned to Ukraine. He was elected a member of the Central Council of Ukraine, its Central Executive Committee (Mala Rada), where he voted for the separation of Ukraine from Russia. He also served as a mayor of Berdichev, a city with the largest Jewish population in the Russian Empire and Ukraine. As a mayor, he managed to prevent planned large Jewish pogroms in the city between 1917-1919. Petrovsky joined the Red Army in 1919 and eventually became a General of the Red Army where he was responsible for all military education in the Soviet Union. General Petrovsky led the Directorate of Military Education in the Red Army from 1919 to 1924 and co-founded the Governmental Committee for the Fight against Antisemitism in Russia and the Soviet Union. Petrovsky was a member of the Presidium of the Executive Committee of the Communist International from 1924 to 1929 where he was responsible for the formation of communist parties in Great Britain and France. From 1929 to 1937 Petrovsky served as a member of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the National Economy in the Soviet Union. From 1929 to 1937 he headed the General Directorate of Higher and Secondary Technical Education in the Soviet Union where he was responsible for the creation of several hundred universities and technical schools across the Soviet Union that prepared engineers and technical personnel in the accelerated push for the industrialization of the Soviet Union. Petrovsky was arrested and executed during Stalin’s Great Purge in 1937 in Moscow. He was posthumously rehabilitated in the Soviet Union in 1958 as a victim of political repression.
Throughout his life, Petrovsky (Lipetz) used the following names: Goldfarb, Bennett, Humboldt, and Brown. Each of these names corresponds to a specific period of his life and work.
Biography
Early life
David Lipetz was born in 1886 in Berdychiv in a family of a wealthy textile merchant Efraim Lipetz. He studied in a Jewish school and at home with private tutors where he finished the Russian classical gymnasium course. He was the chairman of the literary and theatrical society of Berdychiv. He soon became interested in revolutionary activities, and in 1902 he joined the General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland and Russia (Bund). In 1903 he moved to Paris and enrolled in the Russian Higher School of Social Sciences, where he became acquainted with many of the famous revolutionaries: Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Anatoly Lunacharsky.
In the beginning of the 1905 Russian revolution he returned to Russia. He worked among workers of Dvinsk, Bialystok, Gomel, was one of the leaders of the strike at Libava-Romny railroad. At the 7-th Congress of the Bund, where he first used the pseudonym Max Goldfarb, he was elected a candidate for the Central Committee. At the end of 1906 he was arrested by police and spent three months in prison. After that he left Russia - first to England where he participated at the London 5th Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, and then to Brussels, where in 1912 he graduated from the Free University of Brussels with a Ph.D. in Economic Sciences (his supervisor was Emile Vandervelde - the future Minister of State of Belgium).
Along with his studies he lectured (as a member of the Bund) in the cities of Belgium and France. Back in Russia he was actively engaged in party work. At the end of 1912, he was arrested in Odessa and sentenced to exile to Siberia which was then replaced by exile from Russia.
Work in the US
By agreement between the Central Committee of the Bund and the Jewish Socialist Federation (JSF) of the Socialist Party of America, in 1913 David Lipetz came to New York City to conduct work among the Jewish workers and to raise funds for the Bund. In America Lipetz worked and published as Max Goldfarb, and under this name he was elected to the Central Committee of the JSF.