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language propaganda for the anarchists. “At last,” she wrote, “I will be on the scene of revolutionary action” (Wexler, Emma Goldman in Exile, 201). “I have come to you as to my own,” she told the thousands of comrades who welcomed her at a mass meeting, “for your ideal has been my ideal for forty-five years and it will remain to my last breath” (Drinnon 302). To understand the Spanish social revolution and report on its progress, she toured factory and countryside, pleased that worker control was succeeding without the apparatus of state bureaucracy and police that she believed had destroyed the fledgling Russian revolt. She traveled to the front in Aragon, within hearing of fascist gunfire in the trenches of Madrid, to see for herself if a volunteer workers’ army had succumbed to hierarchy and discipline, relieved to find, as she sat in trenches with anarchist troops, that no special privileges separated officer from foot soldier. “Your revolution,” she told a meeting of FAI youth, “will destroy forever [the notion] that anarchism stands for chaos” (ibid., 303).

These moments of exhilaration were painfully short-lived. Mounting internal and external threats seemed to conspire against the young anarchist experiment. Within months of her confident public affirmations, Goldman worried privately to friends that power in anarchist strongholds was already shifting from the local revolutionary associations, whose autonomy was precious to anarchist principles, to the centralized republican government of the popular front. When leading figures in the CNT/FAI groups consented to take up offices in the popular front government, Goldman believed the “spirit” and “tradition” of their anarchism was succumbing to “pitfalls.” Of one woman anarchist leader whom she distrusted, she wrote privately to a friend that she was a “Lenin in skirts” (Wexler, Emma Goldman in Exile, 207).

While schisms within the Spanish republic widened and deepened, the European democracies and the international labor movement itself were ominously passive, while the fascist governments of Italy and Germany readied sophisticated military arms to meet the untrained militias of the republic. Back in England, where Goldman traveled in 1937 to rally financial support for Spain, the Tory government’s Non-Intervention Pact claimed neutrality while actually sabotaging republican military capacity by closing the ports of Tangier and Gibraltar to their forces and imposing strict laws prohibiting the sale of arms to the republicans. England’s extensive mining interests in Spain encouraged its keeping a wary eye on a social revolution that threatened its own economic interests. Other countries, including France and the isolationist United States, joined the Non-Intervention Pact. Meanwhile Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy passed arms into Franco’s arsenals without restraint.

Only the Soviet Union came to the support of the republic with arms for its fight against fascism, although the support came with a heavy price tag. Stalin, a shrewd political strategist, embarked on a program of dismantling the social revolution in Spain, telling comrades that the time was not right for such change. In fact, Stalin was determined to preserve an antifascist alliance with England and France as long as possible, well aware that while these governments might tolerate a Spanish bourgeois democracy, they would no more tolerate social revolution in southern Europe than they had been willing to see the Bolsheviks prevail in eastern Europe.

It was no surprise that Emma Goldman would recoil at the new influence of Stalin’s foot soldiers in Spain. With her memory firmly fixed on Bolshevik prisons, the oppression by the Cheka, the special privileges of a new Soviet elite, Goldman appealed to Barcelona youth to consider that their enemies were not only among the fascists: “All those who talk of the necessity of new governments, of new rules, are making ready to forge new chains for your enslavement. They are trying ... to lead your glorious Revolution into channels that will inevitably end