Status Updates From Maria Nikiforova: The Revol...

The attitude of anarchists can only be against all ‘revolutionary’ powers. This is exactly the difference between socialism and anarchism; for us, as long as there is power, nothing changes.

You are in power in Russia, but what has chismes? The factories and the lands are still not in the hands of the workers, but in those of the State-boss. .. because of the ‘necessity to endure everything’ for a brighter future, and with the excuse of defending ‘what has already been achieved’, an enormous bureaucratic apparatus has been created, the right to strike has been abolished...

On the other hand, active support for the Bolsheviks or simply a benevolent neutrality could permit them to seller in power permanently, to the point that it would become impossible to remove them.

This altercation was part of a difficult choice that troubled many anarchists: should there be an alliance with the Bolsheviks in the struggle against the Whites? On the one hand, certain comrades condemned the Red gov’t’s repressive policies, but a victory by the Whites seemed like an even more atrocious possibility.

"In reality, the Bolsheviks made it looks like they were accepting the will of the people and of the Revolution only to better bury it later, marking the beginning of a policy which did the exact opposite of what it declared."

As observed by S.S., an anarchist active in Ukraine at this time, the Bolsheviks did nothing but impose a bureaucratic framework on a revolutionary process..: "When all the owners of land had been chased away from the villages, when the land had been shared within villages' communes, only much later did a decree from Lenin formalize what had been spontaneous, what had been conquered by the masses themselves."

In this text, we will not dress Maria Nikiforova up as a saint or heroin, as sometimes the anarchist movement remembers its dead. Already enough nightstand books exist..placing one more figure to the pantheon of anarchists or great woman before falling asleep. Because if not to nourish the reflections & the struggles of the present, why is it necessary to immerse ourselves in the lives of comrades that preceded us?