My Two Years in Russia: An American Anarchist's Disillusionment and the Betrayal of the Russian Revolution by Lenin's Soviet Union

by Emma Goldman

A scathing look at the Russian Revolution in the aftermath of the Bolshevik takeover. Prominent anarchist Emma Goldman describes the repression practiced by the Leninists against politicla dissidents and their own workers, in order to maintain their system of centralized party-dominated state capitalism.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1925

About the author

Emma Goldman was a feminist anarchist known for her political activism, writing and speeches. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the twentieth century.

Born in Kovno in the Russian Empire (present-day Kaunas, Lithuania), Goldman emigrated to the US in 1885 and lived in New York City, where she joined the burgeoning anarchist movement.Attracted to anarchism after the Haymarket affair, Goldman became a writer and a renowned lecturer on anarchist philosophy, women's rights, and social issues, attracting crowds of thousands.

She and anarchist writer Alexander Berkman, her lover and lifelong friend, planned to assassinate Henry Clay Frick as an act of propaganda of the deed. Although Frick survived the attempt on his life, Berkman was sentenced to twenty-two years in prison. Goldman was imprisoned several times in the years that followed, for "inciting to riot" and illegally distributing information about birth control. In 1906, Goldman founded the anarchist journal Mother Earth.

In 1917, Goldman and Berkman were sentenced to two years in jail for conspiring to "induce persons not to register" for the newly instated draft. After their release from prison, they were arrested—along with hundreds of others—and deported to Russia.

Initially supportive of that country's Bolshevik revolution, Goldman quickly voiced her opposition to the Soviet use of violence and the repression of independent voices. In 1923, she wrote a book about her experiences, My Disillusionment in Russia. While living in England, Canada, and France, she wrote an autobiography called Living My Life. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, she traveled to Spain to support the anarchist revolution there. She died in Toronto on May 14, 1940, aged 70.

During her life, Goldman was lionized as a free-thinking "rebel woman" by admirers, and derided by critics as an advocate of politically motivated murder and violent revolution.Her writing and lectures spanned a wide variety of issues, including prisons, atheism, freedom of speech, militarism, capitalism, marriage, free love, and homosexuality. Although she distanced herself from first-wave feminism and its efforts toward women's suffrage, she developed new ways of incorporating gender politics into anarchism. After decades of obscurity, Goldman's iconic status was revived in the 1970s, when feminist and anarchist scholars rekindled popular interest in her life.

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This short book, written in 1922, is remarkable in its unflinching takedown of the Bolshevik regime at a time when its was still being applauded by leftists and radicals throughout the world. Emma Goldman was born in Russia but had been a U.S. Citizen for 32 years when she was deported in 1919 because of her antiwar activities. As an anarchist, she had never accepted Marxism but like many non-Marxist radicals, she believed that the Russian revolution was the true people's uprising she had long foretold. Very soon, however, she saw that the Communist Party had choked the life out of the original February 1917 revolt and established a police state that, in most respects, did not change until its collapse in 1989. The secret police, then called the Cheka, routinely and ruthlessly imprisoned and executed thousands under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky, and the attempt by the Kronstadt sailors to restore democracy to the revolution was crushed amid mass murder in 1921. Too often, western Marxists blamed Stalin for what the USSR became but Goldman makes it clear that the criminal nature of that state was created by Lenin and the original Bolsheviks. She details the role of Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev and other early Bolsheviks who ironically received from Stalin the same fate they so easily meted out to countless innocents.

Goldman witnessed the privileged lives of party members, the deliberate starvation and deprivation of workers and peasants, and the complete suffocation of political and cultural life within the first two years of the Bolshevik seizure of power. As an anarchist, she was shocked at the arrest and murder of thousands who merely shared her beliefs, and the betrayal of the anarchist armed forces led in the Ukraine by Nestor Makhno. She also commented on the pogroms against her fellow Jews and their treatment as second class citizens by the Bolsheviks, and predicted the genocide that was to come. Finally, after two years she and her companion Alexander Birkman left Russia in despair and she expressed her disillusionment in this book. Its publication caused her to be reviled and isolated by the radicals and socialsts of the West who were misled by their own naïveté and by Bolshevik propaganda into thinking that the new Russian regime was anything other than the most horrendous of all police states - one which established the totalitarian model copied by the Fascists and Nazis.

[Marina the Reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

Right on. It was not Stalin who destroyed the communist ideals, it was Lenin.

[Nicholas Jensen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't know. This one was weird. I've been a fervent, even fannatical follower (?, or fan?) of Goldman for most of my adult life. Honestly I think Goldman is/was an intregral part of the revolutionary/radical traditions on this continent (North America), but many things were inchoate and underdeveloped even, about this work. Okay first I think I need to address how highly, highly bifuricated (myriad-furicated, even, ha) and contentious this time period in russia and soviet union was/is. There is so much information on the soviet union, and tragically, most of it received in the United States especially, are half-truths or just unblemished lies. So with that said... Goldman in the autobiography (SPOILERS) often repeats about how (newly formed) Soviet Union was actively targeted by United States and literally quite a host of others (looong list of countries) to be strangled from the outside (and inside) to death. And also, Goldman often times repeats that this was a nation that underwent the Blights of WWI, a civil war, and then another foreign invasion (by the White Armies), as well as innumerable other conflicts and wars in other areas, But then Goldman scrutinizes 'Revolutionary Russia' as a military state, unorganized, poor, corrupt, etcetera. Very odd. Goldman's other works are brilliant and her advocacy and activism during her years was heroic however.

[Luís Garcia · Rating 5 out of 5]

leitura obrigatória!

(lido em Chengdu, China)