Living My Life - Emma Goldman [18]
In fact, the book with its preface and afterword serves as a concise and informative anarchist response to the events of the Russian revolution. Her witness to the historic experiment taking place in Russia is prescient in its unforgiving repudiation of political repression. Of her earlier support for Bolshevism, Goldman wrote, “For 30 years I fought the Marxian theory as a cold, mechanistic, enslaving formula.... But the Allied attack upon them made them the symbol of the Russian Revolution, and brought me to their defence” (Disillusionment in Russia, x). She accused the Bolsheviks of betraying the Russian revolution, replacing one state power with another.
Goldman offers Kropotkin’s distinction between the Russian revolution, which she wrote was inspired by “libertarian principles,” and the Bolshevik ascendancy, which ruled by “coercion” (ibid., 157). “The actual Russian Revolution,” she wrote, “took place in the summer months of 1917. During that period the peasants possessed themselves of the land, the workers of the factories, thus demonstrating that they knew well the meaning of social revolution” (ibid., ix). Indeed, these workers “were virtually in control of the economic life of Russia” (ibid., xvii). “But after the high tide of revolutionary enthusiasm had carried them into power, the Bolsheviki discarded their false plumes” (ibid., ix), broke up the “shop committees” that had formed under direct worker control in the factories, and crushed them “under the iron yoke of the Bolshevik state” (ibid., xvii).
She had not, she wrote, expected to see individual liberty immediately extended. “I should have been content if the Russian workers and peasants as a whole had derived social betterment as a result of the Bolshevik regime” (ibid., xvi). Instead, fuel lay untapped sixty-five miles from St. Petersburg while the city workers froze; farm implements lay stacked in warehouses of Kharkov, waiting for orders from Moscow for their distribution, while peasants in the Ukraine were unable to cultivate their land (My Further Disillusionment, 162). All this mismanagement, she believed, might have been rectified if independent units of workers had been free to establish networks of mutual aid. “The industrial power of the masses,” she wrote, “expressed through their libertarian associations—Anarcho—syndicalism—is alone able to organize successfully the economic life” (ibid., 163). Meanwhile, claiming the need to defend itself, the Bolshevik state strengthened its police arm and violently suppressed dissent.
The Russian revolution, the true libertarian revolution, failed, she wrote, because the Russian people, so long repressed by the czar, were inexperienced “in the political game and [had] a naïve faith in the miraculous power of the party that talked the loudest and made the most promises” (ibid., 159). Russian anarchists who might have led the masses to a consciousness of their own political and economic power had been themselves victims of suppression and were “too few,” and too engaged in “limited group activities of individualistic endeavour” (ibid., 159).
The field had been left to Lenin, whom Goldman met personally in Russia and whom she assessed: “he was a shrewd politician who knew exactly what he was about and ... would stop at nothing to achieve his ends” (ibid., 151). There were, she wrote, “an all-powerful, centralized Government with State Capitalism as its economic expression,” with the transfer of wealth from workers to the new Soviet bureaucracy, an elite that maintained itself with privileges never imagined in “true communism” (ibid., 153).
Finally Goldman unequivocally repudiated the justification