Professor Miron Wolffson, of Moscow University, has been expelled from the Communist Party and dismissed from his Chair at the University on the charge that he has been introducing Menshevik heresy in his books and in his lectures. He has also been dismissed from his positions as head of the Soviet State Publishing House, believed to be the largest publishing concern in the world, and as Director of the Bibliographic Institute.
Professor Wolffson, who is descended from a long line of Rabbis and Jewish scholars, was at one time a Yeshivah student. At the age of 15 he started publishing in the Hebrew “Hamelitz”, the editor, Zederbaum, being deceived by his mature style into thinking him an old and experienced journalist. When he was 20 he plunged into the midst of the revolutionary movement, was several times arrested, and exiled to Siberia, but he escaped and continued to carry on underground revolutionary activity. After the amnesty of 1905 he returned to public life, but led a double life, Legally and openly he was one of the founders and the editor of the famous radical publishing house “Prosveszenie”, the first Russian publishing enterprise to issue #arxist literature in a legalised manner, while at the same time he was writing, setting, printing and distributing through underground methods illegal
revolutionary literature. While engaged in this double life he yet managed to obtain his degrees at the University in medicine, law and mathematics.
Some of his works, like “Essays on Social Science”, have run to 12 and 15 editions, and hundreds of thousands of copies. Others of his books, such as “A Course in Political Economy”, and “The Soviet Union and the Capitalist Countries” have also run to many editions.
He was the editor of the official Soviet Encyclopaedia, to which he himself has made more than 200 contributions on various subjects. Most of his books have been translated into a number of European languages, and into all the languages of the national minorities in the Soviet Union, many of the latter running to 15 editions.
About a year ago, on his 50th. birthday, when he celebrated simultaneously the 30th. anniversary of his revolutionary activity, the Soviet Government conferred on him the high distinction of “Merited Worker for Science”.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
