Leibel Bergman

Leibel Bergman (1915–1988) was an American communist activist. A member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) from the 1930s to the 1950s, he was later involved in the founding of the Maoist Bay Area Revolutionary Union and its successor organization, the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). Between 1965 and 1967 he lived in China, where he met and married fellow activist Vicki Garvin. After Mao's death in 1976 he left the RCP, co-founding the Revolutionary Workers Headquarters. Bergman represented a link between the prewar CPUSA and the New Communist movement of the 1970s. He was a target of FBI surveillance for decades.

Bergman was born in Grand Forks, North Dakota in 1915, into a religiously observant Jewish family. He earned a degree in mathematics at the University of North Dakota, graduating at the age of 19. After college he took a job as a statistician at the North Dakota State Planning Board.

Bergman joined the CPUSA in 1937, according to his FBI file. In the late 1930s he traveled the Midwest and East Coast as a Party activist. With the outbreak of World War II he joined the US Army (consistent with the anti-fascist position of the CPUSA at the time), serving as an Army-Air Force navigator in the Pacific theater. During the war he married his first wife, Anne, a fellow communist. The couple had three children together. After the war they settled in San Francisco, where Bergman worked in a drop forge factory. Continuing his activism with the CPUSA, he participated in union organizing and published a newsletter, The Scriber.

An anti-revisionist, Bergman left the CPUSA after Kruschev's speech criticizing Stalin in 1956.

In 1960 he was called to testify before HUAC, where he refused to provide any information, telling the committee "I am here against my will." He was briefly a member of the Progressive Labor Party but disagreed with its strategic direction.

Bergman's wife Anne died of cancer in 1963, at the age of 47.

Inspired by the Chinese Communist Revolution, in July 1965 Bergman and his sons left the US for China, where he taught English. In China he met Vicki Garvin, who he married in 1966. He returned to the US in 1967, with Garvin following a few years later.

With a group of mostly younger activists (including Bob Avakian, H. Bruce Franklin and Steve Hamilton) Bergman founded the Maoist Bay Area Revolutionary Union (BARU) in Spring 1968. At the time, an FBI informant inside the organization described Bergman as its "dominating factor." Bergman continued to help lead the BARU as it grew into a national organization and changed its name, first to the Revolutionary Union and then (in 1975) to the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA (RCP).