#WORLD #WORLDWIDE #FRANCE #ANARCHISM #News #Journal #Update - (en) France, UCL AL #322 - Story, 920-1921: Emma Goldman, witness of the Bolshevik masquerade (ca, de, it, fr, pt)[machine translation]

 In December 1919, Emma Goldman was stripped of her US nationality and expelled

from the United States to Russia. The militant anarchist, in her own words, then
cherishes the hope of finding a new country there. The revolution of 1917 was in
her eyes "a real miracle" and she therefore defended the work of the Bolsheviks.
Two years later, she was forced to flee. His unvarnished account of the
dictatorship of the Bolshevik Party is a precious document, it is also the
occasion for a deep reflection on the political use of violence. ---- On December
21, 1919, Emma Goldman, Alexandre Berkman and 248 other political prisoners were
stripped of their nationality and expelled from the United States[1]. She is a
known and recognized libertarian activist. The US authorities, then in the midst
of a war against "anarchist agitation", increased arrests and trials. The entry
into the war in 1917 alongside the Allies only reinforced the fight against the
militants of the socialist camp. Emma Goldman is the enemy to be brought down:
"America's most dangerous woman" according to John Edgar Hoover[2]. When she
learned of her expulsion from the territory on December 5, 1919, Emma decided not
to challenge this unfair decision. If she says she leaves with regret her
American sisters and brothers, it is, she says with a touch of lyricism, to find
her liberated Matushka Rossiya , the land of her political masters, Bakunin and
Kropotkin.

Emma welcomed the Revolution of 1917 with enthusiasm. And if she does not convert
to Marxism, she takes advantage of her release on bail, from November 1917 to
February 1918, to travel the United States and defend the Russian Revolution and
the work of the Bolsheviks. She even wrote a pamphlet, The Truth About the
Bolsheviks (1918) published before her return to prison. For Emma Goldman,
theoretical disagreements with the Bolsheviks should not prevent us from
remaining absolutely united in the defense of the Revolution.

Twenty-eight days of crossing the Atlantic in a floating prison and crossing
Finland in armored cars do not dampen the enthusiasm of the militant anarchist
who is only waiting to put herself at the service of the Revolution. Here is what
she wrote of her arrival in Russia: "It was a cold day, the earth covered with a
white film, but spring was in our hearts" . The welcome given to these expelled,
political refugees, treated as criminals in the United States and welcomed here
as heroes, reinforces Emma in her good mood towards the new power.

But this first impression is almost immediately thwarted by reality. The
Petrograd that she knew in her youth is no more than a shadow of herself, hunger
lurks everywhere, the city is depopulated. And yet Emma wants to believe it. From
the first days, however, the clues are there, in front of his eyes. His comrades,
these heroes of the socialist camp, they are treated as potential spies and are
placed in military custody, an error we explain to him then. A first lesson on
Bolshevik methods, indeed.

Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman convicted of conspiring against a bill and
sentenced in the United States to two years in prison and fined $ 10,000 each,
July 9, 1917.
First lessons in Bolshevism
Supervised by supporters of the Bolshevik regime, it was only after several weeks
that Emma Goldman could finally come into contact with anarchists. Unpleasant
impression: the speech does not fit with the official narrative that is then
served to him. But all in her desire to believe in this revolution, Emma Goldman
refuses to admit the obvious. In front of her, however, workers, sailors from
Kronstadt and those condemned to death spoke to her about censorship, repression
and terror. Disappointed in the face of her "unreasonable and impatient" comrades
, she recites the official arguments like mantras - violence is inevitable,
imposed on the Bolsheviks by the imperialists. His judgment is final: "How
childish and insignificant it all seemed to me, in the face of the world event
that was taking place in Russia!"

Yet she sees these starving women prostituting themselves to soldiers, Red
Guards, heroes of the Revolution, for bread or soap ... And when she attends her
first meeting of the Petrograd Soviet and witnesses the impossibility made to
non-Bolshevik delegates to express themselves, because "freedom of expression is
a bourgeois superstition" , Emma the anarchist cannot subscribe to these
procedures, but she refrains from judging: after all, she does not is just a
newcomer.

Her arrival in Moscow puts her in direct contact with the Bolshevik power and its
omnipresent political police: the Cheka. She receives a lot at her hotel,
opponents and opponents (anarchists, revolutionary left-wing socialists) and
other emigrants who have returned from the United States to "play their role in
the Revolution" . Yet it is always the same story, the same despondency, the same
observation: the story of an unexpected revolution rich in promises of the future
for the peasants and proletarians of Russia, raising high the hopes of the
working classes, and the observation of 'a revolution betrayed by a party, once
its power is assured.

Bolsheviks carried by "the mad obsession with the dictatorship, which is not even
the dictatorship of the proletariat, but the dictatorship of a small group over
the proletariat". Intervention and the blockade playing only at the margins,
persecutions and shootings, the implacable repression of peasant uprisings and
strikes paint the unvarnished portrait of Bolshevik power. And yet Emma Goldman
writes: "I was holding on to my faith."

Intervention and blockade playing only on the margins, persecutions and
shootings, the implacable repression of peasant insurgencies and strikes are the
reverse of Bolshevik power. Here, Lenin and Trotsky in 1918.
In the Russia of Lenin ... and Kropotkin
In March 1920 she went to the libertarian congress in Moscow, where her comrades
taught her the role of the anarchists in the overthrow of tsarist power, their
incessant fights on all fronts. But also how they and they were the first victims
of the Bolsheviks. She hears the criticisms about "the lack of unity and
cooperation" of the anarchists during the revolutionary period and agrees with
Berkman to sign a resolution asking the government for the release of imprisoned
anarchists and the legalization of libertarian propaganda. She even brought this
claim to Lenin, whom she met a few days later. The man is cold, devoid of
nuances, convinced that only his policy is the right one: "but was its policy the
Revolution"she wonders? Agreeing to cooperate with the Bolshevik government, but
it refuses to put under the control of the III th International.

Her meeting with Kropotkin soon after also disappoints her. His story of the
Revolution is identical to all the others: from the beginnings to extraordinary
energy, then the subordination of the interests of the Revolution to those of the
Party. But Kropotkin is worn out and does not want to attack the revolution, and
cannot speak out against the Bolshevik government. Defeatist, he chose to fall
back: "we have always denounced the effects of Marxism in action. Why be
surprised now? » Of which act. Emma refuses to give up. She came back to Russia
to help make a revolution a success, not to witness the swan song.

Emma Goldman is during the following months witness to the real nature of the
regime: increased bureaucratization, militarization of society as a whole in the
name of the fight against enemies, both external and internal, in defense of a
Revolution which appears to her more and more. more like the only defense of the
Party. The few sincere Communists she rubbed shoulders with, Zorine, her host in
Petrograd, or even Angelica Balabanova had allowed her until then to hope for
better days. But the accounts of the Cheka's tortures, the direct testimonies of
anarchist militants on the real situation in Ukraine - she had a rather negative
image of Makhno at the time because of the official lies - make Emma begin to
dare to criticize certain brutalities of the regime. The answer is: "You should
be ashamed of yourself. You, an old revolutionary and yet so sentimental."

This is enough, she knows from now on that she cannot put herself at the service
of this "communist machine". From then on Emma Goldman scrupulously chronicles
the regime which, in the name of the Revolution, promoted a new privileged class
and imposed a servile obedience to the proletariat. [3]

In January 1921, in Russia for thirteen months, Emma Goldman was alerted to
Kropotkin's declining state of health. She cannot see him again before his death.
Kropotkin's family and friends did not give in to the government and organized
his funeral, the last show of force for a dying anarchist movement [4].

Then comes the Kronstadt episode to which it is unnecessary to return. The
protests of Goldman and Berkman to the "Bolshevik comrades" did nothing, Trotsky
ordered the bombing of Kronstadt two days later, and on March 17 the insurrection
was crushed, the Party was saved. At the same time at the 10th Congress of the
Communist Party of Russia, Lenin castigates the Workers' Opposition, accused
pell-mell of being counter-revolutionary, too revolutionary and
anarcho-syndicalist ... and at the same time promulgating the liberalization of
the economy . And Emma Goldman concludes that "Kronstadt broke the last thread
which had held me back from the Bolsheviks".

During the uprising in Kronstadt, the protests of Goldman and Berkman to the
"Bolshevik comrades" did nothing. on March 17, Kronstadt was crushed, the Party
was saved.
Lucidity regained, and flight
Fleeing Russia, Emma hastily writes an unvarnished testimony of what she has seen
and experienced. She draws precious lessons from it on the one hand on the causes
of the deviation of the Revolution of 1917 by the Bolsheviks, and on the
political use of violence, she who had never ceased to support those of her
comrades who had used it. It also paints a tasty portrait of Lenin, "the most
flexible politician in history".

For Goldman, the fact is indisputable, if the Revolution had been made Bakunin
instead of Marx, the result would have been totally different. The Bolsheviks, by
replacing the proletariat, "by usurping the revolutionary functions of the
people", showed "how a revolution should not be made".The Russian social
revolution generated a creative energy that did not fit into the program of the
Bolsheviks who domesticated the workers' organizations and cooperatives with
which Russia was covered. The Bolshevik Party was the vanguard of the proletariat
and power had to remain in its hands, even at the cost of crushing this same
proletariat. The forces liberated by the Revolution were for Emma Goldman
eminently libertarian and in this sense diametrically opposed to those of the
centralizing and state party in power. To end a revolution, you have to put an
end to the state.

On the question of violence, finally, Emma Goldman is uncompromising, the end
cannot justify the means: "No revolution can ever succeed as a factor of
liberation, unless the means employed are identical in spirit and tendency with
the goals to be achieved." The revolution is useless if it is not inspired by its
ultimate goal. It implies a profound change in social relations, not the simple
substitution of one domination for another. A Revolution which deprives itself of
its moral values makes the bed of injustice, the October Revolution is the best
proof of this.

David (UCL Grand-Paris sud)

To validate

[1] Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and some 4,000 anarchist activists are
victims of the Immigration Act of 1918, which hardens the Anarchist Exclusion Act
of 1903. It specifically targets Russian and Italian anarchists, and
revolutionary trade unionists. IWW.

[2] John Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI from 1924 until his death in 1972, began
his career in 1917 in the Alien Enemy Bureau of the Department of Justice before
heading the Radical Division ( Radical Division) in 1919. He had made the
expulsion of Berkman and Goldman his main objective.

[3] Emma Goldman, The Agony of the Revolution. My two years in Russia (1920-1921)
, Les Nuits Rouges, 2017. The quotes in quotation marks are taken from this work.

[4] "1921: Kropotkin's funeral, Russian libertarian twilight" , Alternative
libertaire , April 2021.

https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?1920-1921-Emma-Goldman-temoin-de-la-mascarade-bolchevik
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