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ISRAEL VENIAMINOVICH GOLUB
Political
Ex-convict Israel Golub (1890,
Grodno – 1957, Tbilisi)
FROM A PRISONER TO A BOSS..
Israel Golub was born in the
city of Grodno to a Jewish family. No information about his formal
education exists. First Russian Revolution of 1905 drew him into the
political whirlwind, brought him to The Bund party (General Jewish Labour Bund, a secular Jewish socialist party initially
formed in the Russian Empire, and active between 1897 and 1920. Soon he
switched to
Socialist Revolutionary Party,
probably the Combat Organization of the SR party, its terrorist sub-group
(Boris Savinkov called it the “Terrorist
Brigade).
He attempted to kill a secret
agent of the Tsarist secret service at the age of 15 and got arrested. He
was an active member in the organization: he was running their print shop,
kept weapons stock, and kept archives of the group. Looks like due to the
young age and lack of evidence, Israel got released. At the end of 1907 he
was exiled to the Narym region in Siberia for
three years. Despite his age, young Israel was highly respected by the
political prisoners, was elected as a chairman of the board of the Colony
of exiles, a delegate to the congresses of exiles throughout the country.
After returning to his
homeland, he got arrested again. One of the agent provocateurs - Raiber gave detailed testimony of his past activities.
The case ended with a sentence of 8 years of hard labor, but due to youth
and illness (tuberculosis) got replaced with the imprisonment. Israel Golub
was released from the Vologda prison hospital on March 4, 1917. He decided
to stay in Vologda after his release, worked for SR newspaper “Free Voice
of the North”.
The political situation in
Vologda in 1918 sharply aggravated. A punitive and repressive apparatus was
created to fight counter-revolution, and people like Israel Veniaminovich Golub, with his experience in
party-terrorist work, came in handy there. He becomes the head of the
department for combating private trade in the Provincial Cheka
(Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counter-revolution and Sabotage—usually
known as the Cheka (based on the Russian acronym “ЧК”)).
A new appointment followed in
January 1919: the former prisoner of the Vologda Central Jail becomes its
boss! He joined Russian Bolshevik Communist Party, organized
and ran labor camp. His political career continued up to 1922 in Southern
Russia is Rostov and Stavropol, where he served as head of the
Revolutionary Tribunal.
In 1922 Israel was in
subtropical Batumi, which only recently became Soviet. New party
assignment? Probably not, since by this time Israel Golub was probably
ousted from the party. The first big purge of the Communist party began,
most likely he was among the several hundred thousand, as they said at the
time, cleaned up.
The former Bund member and
Socialist-Revolutionary, became a former Bolshevik. In those years,
expulsion from the party did not become a lifelong stigma. There were stories, that he organized steamships for Jews moving to Palestine in early 1920.
Golub changed several more
positions, but their titles became less and less formidable: he worked in a
cooperative of a special customs department, then as an authorized
representative of the trade in the area.
In 1925 he moved to Tiflis,
was working at Soyuz-Meat. In the mid-1930s, forty-five-year-old Israel Veniaminovich occupied a relatively calm position as an
inspector for the procurement, supply and
processing of livestock in the Soyuz-Meat organization in the sunny capital
of Georgia, Tbilisi.
He somehow survived Big Terror
of the 1930s and died in Tbilisi in 1957
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