Living My Life - Emma Goldman [17]
In the summer of 1919, a bomb exploded in Washington outside the home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, an act which fueled a new aggressive stage in government reprisal. Palmer began his notorious series of “raids” on immigrants who were not American citizens, enabled by a new federal law that permitted the deportation of foreign-born dissidents described as aliens. On December 21, 1919, Palmer’s men arrested Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, only recently released from a two-year prison sentence for their antiwar work. Goldman and Berkman were summarily deported along with 249 other “aliens,” crowded onto the ship the Buford for transport ultimately to the new Soviet Union, where the Bolsheviki were in the early days of making a proletarian revolution.
6. DISILLUSIONMENT IN RUSSIA
Goldman gives a riveting account of her residence in Russia, a story of a passage from hopeful expectation to profound disillusionment. In her two years’ residency, amply and dramatically narrated in Living My Life, Goldman traveled widely in Soviet cities and the countryside. She met defenders and critics of the Bolshevik revolution among government officials, revolutionists, artists, and writers, while touring factories, health facilities, schools, and prisons. Two years after their arrival, Goldman and Berkman left Russia, traveling without visas to an anarchist conference in Germany, resolved to tell the world they had found only misery and repression, not the social and economic revolution they had anticipated.
Goldman may have felt a special imperative to make her disclosure. Her 1917 pamphlet published by Mother Earth supporting the young Bolshevik revolution and urging anarchists to do likewise may have encouraged many anarchists to travel to join the revolution, a decision some paid for with arrest and execution. From prison in America, she had written an impassioned letter to her beloved “Babushka,” the Russian anarchist Catherine Breshkovskaya, asking her to recant her recent repudiation of the Bolsheviks. “They are flesh of our flesh, blood of our blood,” Goldman wrote (Wexler, Emma Goldman in Exile, 260). Although in the early days after the October Revolution, Lenin had welcomed the participation of anarchists, some even joining the government, the anarchists became the target of repression by the Cheka, the state police, as they criticized the growing state power of the Bolsheviks.
In Berlin in July 1922, needing money, and eager to share her story with the mainstream American liberals whom she had so long cultivated, Goldman told her story first to the New York World, which published her reflections on her two-year residency as a series of seven articles from late March to early April. Goldman’s chronicle of corruption, special privileges, widespread mismanagement, hunger, and police terror provoked outcries of disbelief from some on the left in America. Rose Pastor Stokes, with whom Goldman had worked in the birth control movement, suggested she be hanged “at least in effigy” (Morton 121).
In response to a suggestion from an American publisher that she turn the articles into a book, Goldman accepted an advance from Doubleday and Page, who, to her dismay, published her manuscript “My Two Years in Russia” with the altered and more sensational title My Disillusionment in Russia. Goldman felt the new title was misleading, as her disillusion had been with the Bolsheviks, not with the Russian revolution.