MOYSHE POTASH

MOYSHE POTASH (b. 1892)

           He was a Soviet journalist and historian, born in Dvinsk (Dinaburg, Daugavpils), Latvia. He was a member of the Bund from 1914, and in 1920 he joined the Communist Party. In the first half of the 1920s he lived in Vitebsk, he wrote for Der royter shtern (The red star) there (1920-1923). In 1930 he graduated from the Institute of Red Professors in Moscow. Over the years 1931-1936, he was deputy to the director of the Institute of Party History of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Byelorussia. He was arrested in December 1937 and charged with Trotskyism. Freed in 1945, he worked (1946-1948) for the Institute of History at the Byelorussian Academy of Sciences. He was arrested again in 1948, rehabilitated in 1955. He authored: In der royter armey (In the Red Army) (Vitebsk, 1924), 15 pp.; and the pamphlet entitled Der bolshevizm un di kleynbirgerlekhe parteyen in der revolutsye fun 1905 yor in vaysrusland (Bolshevism and the petit bourgeois parties in the Revolution of 1905 in Byelorussia) (Minsk: Central Publishers, USSR, Byelorussian division, 1931), 48 pp. 

Source: Chone Shmeruk, comp., Pirsumim yehudiim babrit-hamoatsot, 1917-1961 (Jewish publications in the Soviet Union, 1917-1961) (Jerusalem, 1961).

Yankev Kahan

[Additional information from: Chaim Beider, Leksikon fun yidishe shrayber in ratn-farband (Biographical dictionary of Yiddish writers in the Soviet Union), ed. Boris Sandler and Gennady Estraikh (New York: Congress for Jewish Culture, Inc., 2011), p. 276.]