Living My Life - Emma Goldman [304]
In reply, Doubleday, Page and Company cabled that they had bought from the McClure Syndicate the world rights to the twenty-four chapters in the belief that they comprised my complete story. They had also been authorized to use their own title. They had known nothing about the existence of the other chapters.
Energetic Harry Weinberger would not give up. He succeeded in inducing Doubleday, Page and Company to publish the missing chapters in a separate volume, the cost of printing to be guaranteed by us. [...]
The reviews of My Disillusionment in Russia showed as much discernment as the representative of Doubleday, Page and Company who had bought three-quarters of a manuscript as a complete work. Among the scores of reviewers only one guessed that the book was an abortion. It was a Buffalo librarian, who pointed out in the Journal that Emma Goldman’s narrative ended with Kiev, 1920, while in her Preface she stated that she had left Russia in December 1921. Had nothing happened in all the intervening time to impress the author? The man’s perspicacity strikingly reflected on the dullness of the “critics” who presume to pass literary judgment in the United States.
The Communist response to my volume on Russia could have been foreseen, of course. William Z. Foster’s “review” was to the effect that everybody in Moscow was aware that Emma Goldman was receiving support from the American Secret Service Department. Mr. Foster knew that I should not have lasted a day in Russia if the Cheka had believed such a thing. Other Communists, who wrote as kindly as Mr. Foster, also knew that I had not been bought. There was only one who had the courage to say so: René Marchand, of the French group in Moscow, who stated in his review that, though he regretted my misguided judgment, he could not believe that my stand against Soviet Russia was motivated by material reasons. I appreciated his giving me credit for my revolutionary integrity, and I wished he were brave enough to admit that he was unable to reconcile himself to some of the methods the Bolsheviki practised in the name of the Revolution. Commandeered to work in the Cheka, René Marchand had seen enough to plead for his removal, as otherwise he would be compelled to leave the Communist Party. Like many other sincere Communists he did not understand the Revolution in terms of the Cheka.
Not so Bill Haywood. As Sasha had foreseen, he easily took the Bolshevik bait. Three weeks after his arrival in Russia he wrote to America that the workers were in full control and that prostitution and drunkenness had been abolished. Lending himself to such obvious falsehoods, why should Bill not also credit me with motives he knew were absurd? “Emma Goldman did not get the soft jobs she was looking for; that was why she wrote against the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” Poor Bill! He began rolling down the precipice when he ran away to save himself from the burning house of the I.W.W. He could not stop himself in his fall.
My Communist accusers were not the only ones to cry “Crucify!” There were also some anarchist voices in the chorus. They were the very people who had fought me on Ellis Island, on the Buford, and the first year in Russia because I had refused to condemn the Bolsheviki before I had a chance to test their scheme.
Daily the news from Russia about the continued political persecution strengthened every fact I had described in my articles and in my book. It was