Maatstaf. Jaargang 24

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George Woodcock Anarchists who returned: Kropotkin, Goldman and Berkman in Russia, 1917-1921

With the notable exceptions of Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, the Russian anarchists between 1917 and 1921 fell into two increasingly distinct groups, and endured the fates consequent on their varying attitudes and modes of action. First, there were those, generally known as the ‘Sovietsky’ anarchists, who decided that the October Revolution was a genuine one and that they must accept the period of Leninist dictatorship - even the horrors of the Cheka terror - in the hope that in this way they might be able to change the direction of the Revolution in a libertarian direction.

The most dramatic example of the ‘Sovietsky’ was perhaps Bill Shatov, an anarchist who had lived many years in the United States, where he was an iww organizer and one of the leading figures in the anarchist-oriented Union of Russian Workers. Shatov returned to Russia in 1917, in time to take part in the preparations for the October Revolution, in which many anarchists, as well as the Left Social Revolutionaries under Maria Spiridonova, collaborated with the Bolsheviks. Shatov was in fact one of the four anarchist members of the Military-Revolutionary Committee which directed the revolution, and continued his support of Lenin even after the Left Social Revolutionaries had severed their allegiance with the Bolsheviks over what they regarded as the betrayal of the treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Central Powers. In 1919 Shatov served as a Red Army officer in the defence of Petrograd, and later occupied a ministerial position organizing transport in Siberia (the Far Eastern Republic). On one occasion Shatov admitted to Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman that ‘the Communist state in action is exactly what we anarchists have always claimed it would be - a centralized power still more strengthened by the dangers of the Revolution,’ but he believed the future was still ‘glorious’, and he argued that: ‘We anarchists should remain true to our ideals, but we should not criticize at this time. We must work and help to build.’ (Emma Golman: Living my Life.)

The attitude exemplified by Shatov and others like him was similar to that of the Spanish anarchist leaders who in 1936 entered the Republican government because they believed this would protect the future of the revolution in Spain. And, like the Spaniards, they were to be disillusioned, some soon, like Alexander Shapiro who left Russia before the end of 1921, and others much later, after years of humiliating acquiescence, when in 1929 Stalin ordered the arrest of even the ‘Sovietsky’ anarchists in a prelude to the great purges of the 1930s.

It is hard to tell what proportion of the 10.000 anarchist activists in revolutionary Russia (the estimate is Paul Avrich's from The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution, 1973) may have collaborated in the same way as Bill Shatov, since few of the ‘Sovietskys’ were elevated into prominent positions, and most merged into the grey and mediocre mass of Soviet bureaucratic confirmity. But it is

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likely that at least half of the activists were involved in growing opposition to the Bolshevik regime, as anarchist-communists, anarcho-syndicalists or members of the quite numerous groups of individualist anarchists, not counting many times their number of intermittently active sympathizers, and also not counting the thousands of peasants who followed Nestor Makhno in the Ukraine and formed the backbone of his Insurrectionary Army which fought against both the Red Army and the various White expeditionary forces in southern Russia.

With few exceptions, the anarchists who opposed the regime with any degree of activity, and even many who were not active, were killed or imprisoned in the persecutions which began as early as the first Cheka raids on the anarchists in April 1918 and which reached their peak in late 1920 and 1921, after the destruction of the Nabat Federation in Kharkov, the most powerful of all the anarchist organizations, on the 26th November 1920, the day when the Red Army launched its final and ultimately destructive campaign against the Makhnovist forces in rural Ukraine. Only a tiny minority of the anarchists in opposition to the regime escaped to western Europe. In the long run the fate of the ‘Sovietsky’ anarchists was not much different from that of the oppositionists, but the latter at least escaped the humiliation of having willingly served a regime even more distant from anarchist social ideals than the Tsarist regime which had preceded it.

Kropotkin, Goldman and Berkman did not collaborate with any regime and yet they escaped anything more than minor persecution. They were certainly in part protected, as were other independent and critical figures within Russia like the old Narodnik Vera Figner, by their international reputations, in the same way as Tolstoy had been protected under the Tsars and Solzhenitsyn was to be in our own generation. But they were also shielded by the fact that none of them became part of the actual anarchist movement in Russia in the sense of joining a group of militants or becoming involved in disseminating anti-Bolshevik propaganda. Above all, they were careful - unlike the poet Volin who suffered imprisonment and risked death for his enterprise - not to establish any direct link with Makhno, the one anarchist leader whom the Bolsheviks regarded as a powerful threat to the estability of their dictatorial regime.

In each case the links might have been established, for Makhno was willing. When Goldman and Berkman were travelling in the Ukraine they were approached by Makhno's wife, Gallina, with an invitation from her husband to submit to a faked kidnapping so that they could visit Gulyai Polye and the Insurrectionary Army without being openly compromised, but they decided not to accept. Kropotkin was visited in Moscow by Makhno himself. Makhno arrived in the spring of 1918, before the creation of the Insurrectionary Army. He asked the advice of ‘our dear starik’ on whether he should initiate guerilla activities in the Ukraine, but Kropotkin refused to commit himself to an answer, remarking that is was a matter of great risk on which only a personal decision was possible. It seems that Kropotkin did not take to Makhno, and certainly he never spoke with any approval in later years of the guerilla leader's activities, though the news of the Insurrectionary Army's victorious progresses must have reached him even in rural Dmitrov to which he retreated the day after Makhno's visit.

Yet, though Kropotkin and the two celebrated anarchists from the United States neither collaborated directly with Bolshevik government nor became involved in organized opposition to it, they were by no means detached from the situation; at the same time they preserved a degree of physical and mental freedom which makes all the more striking the criticisms they felt themselves obliged to make even though none of them wished to be

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identified with the enemies of the Revolution itself, which they supported in so far as it had been a spontaneous uprising of the Russian people, but which they believed had been aborted by the Marxist authoritarians. If what they wrote during or relating to the period between 1917 and 1921 is perhaps no more important intrinsically than the inevitably partisan accounts of activist anarchists who escaped, like Volin and G.P. Maximov, it has a special value because it expresses the viewpoint of people who had no deep personal grievances and who in fact came very reluctantly - this was especially so in the case of Berkman and Goldman - to the conclusion that the revolution had been irrevocably betrayed.

When Peter and Sophie Kropotkin arrived at the Finland Station in June, 1917, the bands played the ‘Marseillaise’ and the men of the Semenovski Guard were lined up in honour of the great anarchist. Alexander Kerensky was there, as head of the Provisional Government, and so were sixty thousand other people, including representatives of socialist parties and popular organizations, as well as old friends from the Russia Kropotkin had left more than forty years before. But there were very few anarchists, for three years earlier Kropotkin had violated libertarian tradition by supporting one of the sides in the Great War, and ever since 1914 he had lived in the shadow of his pro-Allied stance. A few famous anarchists like Jean Grave and Christian Cornelissen and James Guillaume had supported Kropotkin, but the greater part of the international anarchist movement had followed the lead of Errico Malatesta in denouncing this departure from customary anarchist neutrality in the conflicts between governments; Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman had both signed the manifesto denouncing Peter Kropotkin, and so had Alexander Shapiro, representing Russian anarchists both in exile and at home.

Less than four years later, when Kropotkin took his departure from Russia by the route of death, his farewell was even more impressive than his welcome, and significantly different, for while he had been received with honour by the ruling power of mid-1917, he was seen on his way in 1921 by those who protested against the tyranny which the revolution had become since October 1917, and at his funeral on the 13th February the vast majority of the hundred thousand men and women and children who formed a five-mile procession out of Moscow to the Novo-Devichi cemetery were people come to take part in the last great demonstration against the Bolshevik power. The chorus of the Moscow Opera marched among them, chanting the requiem ‘Eternal Memory’, the Tolstoyan band played Chopin's ‘Funeral March’, and among the forests of black flags, paraded for the last time through the streets of Moscow, were banners bearing in flaming letters such messages as ‘Where there is authority there is no freedom’ and ‘Anarchists demand liberation from the prison of socialism’. At the graveside Emma Goldman was among those who spoke in honour of Kropotkin, and so were the prisoners released for one day only from the cellars of the Cheka, notable among them the fearless Aaron Baron. ‘Emaciated, bearded, wearing gold spectacles,’ as Victor Serge remembered him, ‘he stood erect and cried out in defiant protest against the new despotism, against the butchers at work in the dungeons, against the dishonour that had been brought upon socialism, against the violence by which the government was trampling the revolution under foot.’

It was a last flare of defiance that flickered and died out almost immediately, for the anarchist organizations in Russia were already broken up, most of the militants were in prison or in hiding, Makhno and a few followers were fighting a last guerrilla campaign that would peter out before 1921 came to an end, and barely a month after

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Kropotkin's burial the only remaining opposition movement of any significance, that of the libertarian sailors of Kronstadt, would be crushed out with the full power of the Soviet state. Those who marched through the bitter February streets behind Kropotkin's coffin were using the occasion less to express their grief over the loss of a devoted leader than to declare their dissent, and it would be carrying assumptions too far to suggest that there had been any deep reconciliation between Kropotkin and the mass of Russian anarchists.

Nevertheless, circumstances had brought Kropotkin steadily closer to the anarchist opposition during the last years of his life, and especially from 1918 onwards. There is no doubt that, in his English isolation (for he spent the early years of the great war in retirement at Brighton and was detached even from the English anarchists, most of whom repudiated his pro-war stand), Kropotkin had entirely miscalculated the mood in Russia after February 1917. When - following on his arrival in Russia - he devoted himself to public exhortations to continue and even step up the war effort, so that Prussian militarism might once and for all be destroyed, he was followed by only a tiny middle-class minority of the anarchists, led by Dr. Alexander Atabekian, with whom he had associated twenty years before in a short-lived Geneva publishing venture, The Anarchist Library. Not only most of the anarchists, but the more active Social Revolutionaries - heirs of the Narodniks and much influenced theoretically by Bakunin and by Kropotkin's own early writings - turned away from him, and he found himself politically isolated, since he maintained consistency in at least one major direction by refusing Kerensky's persistent urgings to join the Provisional Government. At the same time, events were bringing to the surface issues on which Kropotkin had argued with almost prophetic cogency a decade before, during the 1905 Revolution and shortly afterwards. At that time a series of informal meetings were held by expatriate anarchists in London and Paris to discuss the lessons to be drawn from the experiences of that pioneer insurrection, and the results were published in a pamphlet called The Russian Revolution and Anarchism, in which Kropotkin argued strongly for the land being taken over and worked by the peasants themselves and the factories by the workers, organized in free unions and without governmental supervision. Such, indeed, became the great slogans of 1917, first initiated by the anarchists, but adroitly adopted by Lenin and used, through the Bolshevik domination of the workers' and soldiers' soviets, to consolidate the hold of the Communist state over the Russian economy. Kropotkin had anticipated such a possibility as early as the autumn of 1905 when, discussing the workers' and peasants' councils which first appeared during that year, he remarked: ‘One may enter the Soviets, but certainly only as far as the Soviets are organs of struggle against the bourgeoisie and the State, and not organs of authority.’ He added: ‘I, however, would personally prefer to remain among the working masses.’

Now one can only speculate on whether the course of events might have been changed if Kropotkin had not discredited himself with his pro-war propaganda and his advocacy in August, 1917 of the interim establishment of a republic on the lines of the United States. What might have happened if, speaking with the authority of consistently-maintained anti-militarist beliefs, he had been able to dissuade the anarchists and the Left Social Revolutionaries from giving their crucial support to the Bolsheviks during the October Revolution? In fact, such was his isolation at the time of the coup that one can find little about his activities for at least two months before and after October 1917, though it is certain that he deplored from the beginning the triumph of the Bolsheviks and failed to understand that the October Revolution

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was also the expression of real popular forces which the Bolsheviks had been adroit enough to harness but which, with proper leadership among the anarchists, might have been diverted in another direction.

But Kropotkin was not merely, in 1917, discredited; he was old and sick, and his retreat to Dmitrov, forty miles out of Moscow, in June 1918, was more than an attempt to find a convenient refuge from the problems of life in cities where apartments were constantly being requisitioned. It was also a retreat from a situation which Kropotkin knew he would not be able to influence decisively in the short lease of life that remained to him.

At the time of the October coup, Kropotkin is said to have remarked to Atebekian: ‘This buries the Revolution.’ It was a remark in which grief and resignation were combined, but, knowing Kropotkin's essentially optimistic temperament, one cannot interpret it as a pessimistic statement, and Kropotkin's acts, during his last years were not those of a man who had lost hope. It is true that he no longer attempted to work through the anarchist movement, largely, no doubt, because he had no desire to intrude himself upon groups who had so clearly rejected his urgings in connection with the war. But he did not remain entirely isolated, for until mid-1918 the anarchist publishing house ‘Golos Truda’ was publishing his books and his early pamphlets, while activists like Volin, Maximov and Shapiro, as well as some of the younger anarchists in Moscow came to see him in Dmitrov, though their visits became less frequent after the autumn of 1918, when the activists began to drift to Kharkov, where the Nabat Federation still operated in comparative freedom, and even farther south to Makhno's headquarters at Gulyai Polye.

In Moscow, before he left for Dmitrov, Kropotkin had been involved in an organization called the Federalist League; it was not exclusively anarchist, and it consisted mainly of scholars - professional and amateur - who were anxious to establish on a more or less scientific basis the arguments against centralization, particularly in a country as large, populous and culturally varied as Russia. Kropotkin gave at least one lecture under the auspices of the Federalist League, and he was appointed editor-in-chief of a series of four volumes of essays on the various aspects of federalism. But the venture came to nothing, for in the spring of 1918 the Bolsheviks decided to suppress the League, while in other directions Kropotkin's voice was being silenced by the lack of opportunities to publish whatever he might choose to write. In May, 1918, he complained that it was six months since he had written for any newspaper, and from this time to the end of his life nothing from his pen appeared in print in his own country. Kropotkin, who had always been an acute observer of the libertarian elements already existing in an unfree world, now turned his attention to his own locality. He rejected the overtures of the Dmitrov Soviet, because it was Bolshevik-dominated, and established connections with the local Co-operative Union, because it seemed to him the nearest thing, in late-1918 Russia, to a freely organized mutual aid institution. He visited the co-operative, encouraged its members to practice handcrafts, helped in organizing a museum, lectured, and finally, on 14th November 1920, wrote the co-operators a letter in which he showed how their work helped in the process of transition from the private ownership of the means of production to a decentralized and voluntary communism. He skirted near to danger when he remarked that the Russian government had turned to centralized state communism and made use of the co-operatives to that end, which was alien to their true function. But, as the Tsarist government had done with Tolstoy, the Bolsheviks did not attack Kropotkin directly. Instead, within a week of receiving his letter, the leaders of the co-operative were arrested, and another channel of influence was cut off.

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There remained two directions of protest. First there was the essentially illusory one, which even anarchists are prone to in moments of desperation, of believing that in men who exercise total power the heart of a human being still beats, and if one can only touch that heart miracles may happen. Proudhon had, for a short time, that illusion about Muraviev-Amurski, Governor-General of Siberia. Kropotkin appears to have had it about Lenin, and Lenin to have encouraged it. Twice, and possibly three times, Kropotkin travelled from Dmitrov to meet Lenin in the Kremlin, and he wrote at least two letters to the Bolshevik leader which did not in any perceptible way deflect the course of Communist policy, but which did vouch for Kropotkin's personal fearlessness and integrity and emphasized beliefs so essential and so self-evident that one might reasonably call them anarchist truths. The first letter, typical of Kropotkin's urgent sense of the rights of the humblest individual - concerns the misfortunes of a few postal workers in Dmitrov, doomed to semi-starvation because they are paid in worthless currency. Kropotkin puts the case concretely, evoking the image of ill-nourished people ‘scurrying from office to office to secure permission to buy a cheap kerosene lamp’, and then moves on to the telling conclusion: ‘One thing is certain. Even if a party dictatorship were the proper means to strike a blow at the capitalist system (which I strongly doubt), it is positively harmful for the building of a new socialist system. What is needed is local construction by local forces. Yet this is absent. It exists nowhere. Instead, wherever one turns there are people who have never known anything of real life committing the most flagrant errors, errors paid for in thousands of lives and in the devastation of whole regions.’ Lenin did not answer, nor did he answer Kropotkin's more celebrated letter of the 21st December, 1920, written barely six weeks before his death, and protesting at the taking of

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hostages, a letter that defines a whole area of revolutionary morality and condemns in anticipation the Nechaevist pseudo-revolutionaries of the late twentieth century who imagine that by the most inhuman form of blackmail one can achieve a moral society or that by depriving others of liberty one can paradoxically ensure one's own.

The kind of protest exemplified in Kropotkin's letters to Lenin proclaims a moral stance that relates closely to the other line of his activity during his final years - the attempt to complete, under extraordinarily difficult circumstances, without adequate research materials or secretarial help, the book which he hoped would complete his life's work. Ethics was never in fact completed, and only the first half appeared, edited by Nicholas Lebedev; the notes for the second volume were never used, though Kropotkin hoped that some successor would utilize them to round out what he regarded as his master work. Ethics had not in fact been conceived in Russia. Part of it was based on articles, ‘The Ethical Need of the Present Day’ and ‘Morality in Nature’, which appeared in the English magazine, Nineteenth Century, in 1904-5, and Kropotkin saw it as the completion of the task he undertook when he wrote Mutual Aid; justice in human society, he felt, was something more than the mutual aid of animal societies, and even beyond it a factor of self-abnegation was needed to complete a non-religious ethical system.

Yet, though Ethics was not originally conceived in the kind of situation that faced Kropotkin in Dmitrov between 1918 and 1920, there seems little doubt that working on the book acquired a special significance in the circumstances that faced him then, and that this affected his vision. There is not space to discuss the book at any length, but it is appropriate to remark how - in that time of darkness and apparent hopelessness - Ethics seems a book filled with light. Kropotkin is declaring his faith in human reason; he is exorcising the horrors he hears of by arguing, in spite of them and of all the other terrible periods of human history, that there is that in man and in human society which will enable him to emerge from his troubles and conquer them for ever. To the modern reader, Ethics may seem to echo too insistently the nineteenth century faith in progress and perfectibility, yet if its tone strikes us as excessively complacent, let us remember the circumstances in spite of which its confidence was sustained.

Kropotkin in his last years of life was almost literally a voice crying in the wilderness.

His only statement to reach the outside world while he still lived was the ‘Message to the Workers of the West’, entrusted in 1920 to the British labour representative, Margaret Bondfield, and duly published in the foreign press. It talked frankly about the difficulties in Russia, but pleaded for people outside not to interfere, since that would merely seem to justify the dictators. It was left for Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman to complete Kropotkin's task, and to tell the world, from the anarchist viewpoint and largely on the basis of events after Kropotkin's death, how the revolution had been betrayed.

Unlike Kropotkin, neither Goldman nor Berkman went willingly to Russia. They welcomed the Revolution, but both believed that their own political roles lay in the United States, and only their deportation in 1919 as undesirable radicals brought them to Russian soil. Unlike Kropotkin's, their welcome was perfunctory, for it was more than two years after the February uprising that they appeared, and their departure in 1921 was equally uncelebrated, since they went as disillusioned malcontents.

Knowing little of what had happened since October 1917, they were at first full of enthusiasm for the Revolution and of willingness to work for its future. They were inclined in the early days to accept the

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assurances of the Bolsheviks and the ‘Sovietsky’ anarchists, and to discount the stories of repression told them by the anarchist opposition. They wished to be active in the reconstruction of Russia, provided only they need not assume official posts, but in the end all they could find was employment on a museum commission gathering documents on the period of the Revolution and the Civil War.

Scanty as the assignment seemed, it gave them a unique opportunity to travel across Russia and see for themselves the real conditions under which the people lived. At the same time, in Moscow and Petrograd, they were in close touch with the anarchists and other dissidents, some of them already in hiding, and thus they acquired a much more complete knowledge than Kropotkin in Dmitrov of the terror that was being established by the Cheka to eliminate all opposition. Gradually their position became untenable. They could not keep silent, but the only way they could transmit their knowledge abroad was through western correspondents working for capitalist papers which in those days distorted news without scruple to suit their editorial policies. It was in the final months of 1921 that they decided to depart. Kropotkin's death, with the struggle to obtain the release of anarchist prisoners to attend his funeral, had emphasized the Cheka's duplicity. The bloody suppression of the Kronstadt sailor's revolt a month later, in March 1921, was a time of agony, with its revelation of the cold inhumanity of Trotsky and the other Bolshevik leaders. There followed the final and complete suppression of the anarchist groups, the hunting down of Makhno's followers in the Ukraine, and then, in September 1921, the brutal execution in the Cheka cellars of the libertarian poet, Lev Chorny, and of Fanya Baron, who had worked years before with Emma in New York. This was the final blow which made it obvious that there was no promise in any foreseeable future of Russia becoming a country where freedom might grow again. Not without difficulty, Goldman and Berkman made their way out to Latvia and then to Sweden in December 1921, to live out the wandering exile of the stateless. In their books, in Emma's My Disillusionment with Russia (1923) and Alexander's The Bolshevik Myth (1925), they wrote the first full-scale exposures of the Bolshevik dictatorship from a left-wing viewpoint. Had Kropotkin been younger, and had he lived to witness the Kronstadt incident, to hear of the killings in the Cheka cellars, and to escape, he would without doubt have written with as much agony and anger, to reveal the dark side of that revolutionary moon whose brightness had once filled his mind.