Maxim Vinaver

Maxim Vinaver

Maxim Moisseyevitsch Vinaver (Russian: Макси́м Моисе́евич Вина́вер; 30 November [O.S. 18 November] 1863, Warsaw – 10 October 1926, Menthon-Saint-Bernard) was a Russian lawyer, politician and patron.

Early life

Maxim’s father Moishe-Leib Abramovych Vynaver (1831–1905) was a Jewish shopkeeper.

After graduating from the 3rd Warsaw Gymnasium, Vinaver studied law from 1881 to 1886 at the University of Warsaw.

Career

Vinaver lived in Saint Petersburg and worked as an assistant to a lawyer on the de facto prohibition of admitting lawyers of Jewish faith. During this time he became known as a legal scholar by publishing articles in legal journals. Later, he began to develop the defense in criminal cases, resulting from the Anti-Semitism. So he organized in 1900, the successful defense in the Vilna trial of David Blondes, who was charged with ritual murder. He resigned in 1904 in Gomel with a civil suit called the Jewish Victims, accusing the judge of being biased and leaving the trial as the leader of a group of lawyers. It was only in July 1904 that he was sworn in as a lawyer.

Vinaver lectured on social science at the New University of Brussels and at the Paris School of Social Sciences. He became a member of the Legal Society of the University of St. Petersburg and from 1904-1906 headed the civil law department of the editorial office of the newspaper Rechtskurier der Gesellschaft. In 1909 he participated in the editing of the work of the St. Petersburg Legal Society. In 1913-1917 he issued the civil law courier.

Vinawer participated in the work of the Society for Education of Russian Jews and became chairman of the Historical and Ethnographic Commission. During the revolution of 1905 he was one of the founders of the Union for Full Rights of the Jewish People in Russia in March 1905, and in 1907 he founded the Jewish Folk Group. He collected paintings and worked as a patron. In particular, he supported Marc Chagall with a small scholarship so that he could travel to Paris in September 1910.

In 1905 he was also one of the founders, leaders and theorists of the Constitutional Democratic Party, which was called the party of the Cadets. He became a member of its Central Committee, and he became a deputy in the First State Duma. After the dissolution of the Duma in 1906 he was among the signatories of the Vyborg Manifesto. Because of this he was condemned to three months of imprisonment.

In 1907 Maxim Vinaver helped Marc Chagall to start his painting career. He helped him financially and found housing for him in the editorial office of Voskhod magazine. Later Chagall wrote that Vinaver made him an artist.

After the February Revolution, Vinaver joined the Working Group on drafting laws for the election of a Constituent Assembly, and the Provisional Government appointed him Senator of the Civil Division of the Senate Court of Cassation. He was a member of the new Central Duma. During this time he tended to the left wing of the Cadet Party, and he was Deputy Group Chairman in the Provisional Soviet of the Russian Republic. In 1917 he was elected to the Constituent Assembly of Petrograd (Saint Petersburg). From March 1917 he was the Head of the Commission for Agitation and Publication of the Cadets Party together with the historian Alexander Alexandrovich Kornilov. He was also one of the editors of the newspaper Kurier of the People's Liberty Party.

Even before the October Revolution and after an illegal stay in Moscow, Vinaver fled to Crimea and took part in the conference of the Cadets on 1 October 1918 in Gaspra. In the spring of 1919 he became Foreign Minister of the Regional Crimean Government, which turned against the Bolsheviks to the Entente Powers.

In 1919, Vinaver emigrated to France and settled in Paris, where he called on the allies of Russia to continue to support the White movement. He was a friend of the Chairman of the Committee of the Paris Group of Cadets and joined the unification of all democratic forces of the emigrants. He was chairman of the Russian Publishing Society in Paris, one of the founders of the Russian newspaper Recent News and initiator of the construction of a Russian university at the Sorbonne, where he gave a lecture on Russian civil law. He participated in the publication of the newspaper Jewish Tribune that fought against anti-Semitism. He played a large part in the trial of Sholem Schwarzbard, who had shot in 1926 in Paris the former Ukrainian President Symon Petliura, and was scheduled as a witness of the defense.

Grave of Maxim Vinaver

Family

Vinaver was married and had three children, the radiologist Valentina Maximovna Vinaver Kremer (1895-1983), the literary historian and founder of the International Arthurian Society Eugène Vinaver (1899-1979) and the lawyer Sofia Maximovna Vinaver Grinberg (1904-1964), married to Leo Adolfowich Grinberg (1900-1981).

Death

Maxim Vinaver was buried as Maxime Vinaver at the Paris cemetery Père Lachaise.

External links

Media related to Maxime Vinaver at Wikimedia Commons