Living My Life - Emma Goldman [300]
Comrades in half a dozen lands were working hard to secure asylum for us. [ ... ] The situation was rather desperate, made more so by several other circumstances. The cost of living in a Stockholm hotel had bankrupted us within a month. The hospitable Jensens invited me to share their two-room apartment, which I accepted in the belief that it would be only for a short time. Sasha had found a room with a Swedish family whose place was too small even for themselves. He regretted that we had not followed his original plan of going by the Minsk route. It had been stupid to ask Moscow for passports. At any rate, he would not apply for a visa any more and he was determined to leave without giving notice and to enter without permission. I could do as I pleased, he declared.
There was something else that had come between us—the question whether I should or should not permit the New York World to publish my series of articles on Soviet Russia. Stella had cabled me that the World was eager for the story of my Russian experience. [...] I wrote her that I preferred to have my say in the liberal and labour press in the United States, and that I should be willing to have them publish my articles without any pay rather than have them appear in the New York World or similar publications.
Stella tried the Freeman with an article on the martyrdom of Maria Spiridonovna.2 It was declined. The other American liberal papers showed equal illiberality. I realized that in addition to being stamped an Ishmaelite I should also be gagged on the question of the Bolsheviki. I had kept silent long enough. [...] Now that I knew the truth, was I to be forced to slay it and keep silent? No, I must protest. I must cry out against the gigantic deception posing as truth and justice.
This I told Sasha and Schapiro. They also were determined to speak out, and, indeed, Sasha had already written a series of articles dealing with various phases of the Bolshevik regime, and they were being published in the anarchist press. [...] But Sasha knew that the bulk of workers, particularly in the United States, read nothing but the capitalist papers. It was they whom he wanted to enlighten on the difference between the Revolution and Bolshevism. His attitude hurt me very much and we argued for days. [...] He was my lifelong comrade in arms, my friend and fellow fighter in a hundred battles that had scorched our beings and tested our souls. We had gone our separate ways while in Russia regarding the question of “revolutionary necessity.” There had been no break between us, however, because I also had been uncertain for a long time in my stand. Kronstadt had cleared our minds and had brought us closer again. It was harrowing now to have to take a position so divergent from my friend’s attitude. Days and weeks went into the conflict, the hardest life had allotted me. All through the spiritual torture it beat against my brain: I must, I would be heard, even if it should be for the last time. Finally I cabled to Stella to turn over the articles, seven in all, to the New York World. [ ... ]
I was too far away to witness the fury my articles aroused in the Communist ranks or to be affected by their poisonous venom. But from the descriptions sent me about Communist meetings against me and from their press I could see the similarity between their blood-lust and that of Southern whites at Negro lynchings. [ ... J
The stereotyped accusation that I had forsworn my revolutionary past, by people who had no past to forswear, was also nothing to worry about. What did trouble me was that the New York World had not rated my literary value as highly as did my Communist admirers. It had paid me a paltry three hundred dollars for each article, or twenty-one hundred dollars for the series of seven. And it was being heralded by the Communist chorus that thirty thousand dollars had been paid to the traitor E.G. I was wishing it were true! I might have saved at least some portion of it for the Russian political victims who were suffering cold,