Osip Vasilyevich Aptekman () (March 18(30), 1849,

Pavlohrad Pavlohrad (, ; , ) is a city and municipality in central east Ukraine, located within the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. It serves as the administrative center of Pavlohrad Raion. Its population is approximately . The rivers of Vovcha (runs through t ...

– July 8, 1926) was a Russian revolutionary, member of the Land and Liberty, and one of the founders of the Black Repartition.

Biography

Born in Ukraine to an upper class Jewish family, Osip Aptekman studied medicine in Kharkov from 1870. In 1873, as the start of the 'to the people' movement, when idealistic students travelled to the countryside hoping to radicalise the peasants, he and two other students from Kharkov,

Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea (born Solomon Katz; 1855, village of Slavyanka near Yekaterinoslav (modern Dnipro), then in Imperial Russia – 1920, Bucharest) was a Romanian Marxist theorist, politician, sociologist, literary critic, and j ...

and S.N.Kulasko set up a blacksmith shop in Gherea's home village, Slavyanka. They had to abandon the project to avoid arrest. He returned to Kharkov to complete his studies. In 1874, a few months after qualifying as a surgeon, he again 'went to the people' in the Volga region, and was one of the organisers of Land and Liberty (''Земля и Воля'' - Zemlya i Volya). When Zemlya i Volya split in August 1879, with one faction - impatient with the failure to politicise the peasantry - breaking off the form the

People's Will Narodnaya Volya ( rus, Наро́дная во́ля, p=nɐˈrodnəjə ˈvolʲə, t=People's Will) was a late 19th-century revolutionary political organization in the Russian Empire which conducted assassinations of government officials in an att ...

and plan the assassination of the Tsar, Aptekman joined the future founder of Russian Marxism, Georgi Plekhanov and in organising Black Partition (''Черный Передел'' -Cherny Peredel) grouping which insisted that the continued use of propaganda was the best means of achieving

social change Social change is the alteration of the social order of a society which may include changes in social institutions, social behaviours or social relations. Definition Social change may not refer to the notion of social progress or socio ...

. He edited the group's journal. In 1880, he was arrested and sentenced to five years exile in

Yakutsk Yakutsk (russian: Якутск, p=jɪˈkutsk; sah, Дьокуускай, translit=Djokuuskay, ) is the capital city of the Sakha Republic, Russia, located about south of the Arctic Circle. Fueled by the mining industry, Yakutsk has become one ...

, in Siberia. When his term of exile ended, he emigrated to Munich, to resume his study of medicine. He returned to Russia in 1889, to practise as a country doctor in Nizhny Novgorod region. In 1893 and 1894 Aptekman was one of the primary leaders of the People's Rights Party ''(Partiia Narodnogo Prava),'' an illegal

constitutionalist Constitutionalism is "a compound of ideas, attitudes, and patterns of behavior elaborating the principle that the authority of government derives from and is limited by a body of fundamental law". Political organizations are constitutional ...

populist organization.Shmuel Galai, ''The Liberation Movement in Russia, 1900-1905.'' Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1973; pg. 60. But later in the same decade, when Marxist ideas began to spread among the young, he broke with the

Narodniks The Narodniks (russian: народники, ) were a politically conscious movement of the Russian intelligentsia in the 1860s and 1870s, some of whom became involved in revolutionary agitation against tsarism. Their ideology, known as Narodism, ...

and joined what became the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. When the RSDLP split, in 1903, he sided with the

Mensheviks The Mensheviks (russian: меньшевики́, from меньшинство 'minority') were one of the three dominant factions in the Russian socialist movement, the others being the Bolsheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. The factions em ...

. During the

1905 revolution The Russian Revolution of 1905,. also known as the First Russian Revolution,. occurred on 22 January 1905, and was a wave of mass political and social unrest that spread through vast areas of the Russian Empire. The mass unrest was directed again ...

, he travelled from district to district, organising armed groups of revolutionaries, until he was arrested and imprisoned. Released in May 1906, he emigrated to Switzerland. After the outbreak of war in 1914. he sided with the

Menshevik-Internationalists The Menshevik-Internationalists were a faction inside the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Mensheviks). The faction, representing the left-wing inside the party, emerged in May 1917. It was joined by a number of political leaders returning fr ...

, led by Yuri Martov Having returned to Russia after the February Revolution, in 1919, aged 70, he announced that he accepted the legitimacy of the communist government. In his final years, he worked for the Historical and Revolutionary Archives, in St Petersburg.

Footnotes

1849 births 1926 deaths People from Pavlohrad People from Pavlogradsky Uyezd Ukrainian Jews Jewish socialists Narodniks Mensheviks {{Ukraine-bio-stub