Living My Life, Vol. 2

Emma Goldman

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780486157948
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

"You damn bitch of an anarchist, I wish I could get at you. I would tear your heart out and feed it to my dog." This was one of the less obscene messages received by Emma Goldman (1869-1940), while in jail on suspicion of complicity in the assassination of McKinley. The most notorious woman of her day, she was bitterly hated by millions and equally revered by millions.
The strong feelings she aroused are understandable. She was an alien, a practicing anarchist, a labor agitator, a pacifist in World War 1, an advocate of political violence, a feminist, a proponent of free love and birth control, a communist, a street-fighter for justice — all of which she did with strong intellect and boundless passion. Today, of course, many of the issues that she fought over are just as vital as they were then.
Emma Goldman came from Russia at the age of 17. After an encounter with the sweatshop and an unfortunate marriage, she plunged into the bewildering intellectual and activist chaos that attended American social evolution around the turn of the twentieth century. She knew practically everyone of importance in radical circles. She dominated many areas of the radical movement, lecturing, writing, haranguing, and publishing to awaken the world to her ideas. After World War I she was deported to Russia, where she soon discovered that anarchists were no better liked than in America, despite Lenin's first gesture of welcome. She escaped with her life but never was allowed to return to the United States.
Emma Goldman was a devastatingly honest woman, who spared herself as little as she spared anyone else. From her account the reader can gain insight into a curious personality type of recurrent interest: a woman who devoted her life to eliminating suffering, yet could make a bomb or assist in staging an assassination. Equally interesting are her comments on other radicals of the period, such as Kropotkin, Berkman, Mooney, Lenin, Trotsky, Haywood, Most, the Haymarket martyrs, and many others. Her autobiography, written with vigor, ranks among the finest in the English language.

CHAPTER LII

SOVIET RUSSIA! SACRED GROUND, MAGIC PEOPLE! YOU HAVE COME to symbolize humanity’s hope, you alone are destined to redeem mankind. I have come to serve you, beloved matushka. Take me to your bosom, let me pour myself into you, mingle my blood with yours, find my place in your heroic struggle, and give to the uttermost to your needs!

At the border, on our way to Petrograd, and at the station there, we were received like dear comrades. We who had been driven out of America as felons were welcomed on Soviet soil as brothers by her sons and daughters who had helped to set her free. Workers, soldiers, and peasants surrounded us, took us by the hand, and made us feel akin to them. Pale-faced and hollow-cheeked they were, a light burning in their sunken eyes, and determination breathing from their ragged bodies. Danger and suffering had steeled their wills and made them stern. But underneath beat the old childlike, generous Russian heart, and it went out to us without stint.

Music and song greeted us everywhere and wondrous tales of valour and never-failing fortitude in the face of hunger, cold, and devastating disease. Tears of gratitude burned in my eyes and I felt great humility before those simple folk risen to greatness in the fire of the revolutionary struggle.

In Petrograd, after a third reception, Tovarishtch Zorin, in whose company we had made the trip, invited Sasha and me to come with him to a waiting automobile. Darkness covered the big city, fantastic shadows over the glistening snow on the ground. The streets were entirely deserted, the grave-like silence disturbed only by the rattling of our car. We sped on, several times halted by human forms suddenly emerging from the blackness of the night. Soldiers they were, heavily armed, their flashlights searchingly on us. “Propusk, tovarishtch! (Pass-card, comrade!),” was their curt demand. “Military precautions,” our escort explained; “Petrograd has only recently escaped the menace of Yudenich. Too many counter-revolutionists are still lurking about for us to take any chances.” We continued on our way, and as the automobile turned a corner and passed a brightly lighted building, Zorin remarked: “The Cheka and our jail — generally empty, though.” Presently we halted before a large house, lights streaming from its many windows. “ The Astoria, a fashionable hotel in tsarist times,” Zorin informed us, “now the First House of the Petro-Soviet.” We were to room there, he added, while the rest of the deportees would be housed in the Smolny, formerly the most exclusive boarding-school for the daughters of the aristocracy. “ And the girls ? ” I inquired. “ Ethel Bernstein and Dora Lipkin — I could not bear to be separated from them.” Zorin promised to secure a room for them in the Astoria, although only party members were quartered in that Soviet house, mostly high officials, as well as special guests. He led us to his apartment, while places for us were being prepared.

Liza, Zorin’s wife, bade us a hearty welcome, her greeting as kindly as Zorin’s attitude had been throughout the day. She felt sure we were hungry. She had not much to offer us, but we should partake of everything she had, which proved to be herring, kasha, and tea. The Zorins looked none too well fed themselves, and I promised myself to replenish their scanty larder when our trunks were unpacked. Our American friends had provided us with a huge trunkful of supplies and we had also rescued some of the rations given us on leaving the Buford. I chuckled inwardly at the thought of the United States Government unwittingly feeding the Russian Bolsheviks.

The Zorins had lived in America, though we had never met them there. But they knew us, and Liza said that she had attended some of my lectures in New York. Both spoke English with a strong foreign accent, but more fluently than we did Russian. Thirty-five years in the States with almost no practice in our native tongue had paralysed our ability to use it. Besides, the Zorins had much to relate to us and they could do it in English. They told us of the Revolution, its achievements and hopes, and many other things we wanted to learn about. Their story of the events leading up to October and the developments since, though more detailed, was somewhat repetitious of what we had already heard at our receptions. It concerned the blockade and its fearful toll; the iron ring that surrounded Russia and the devastating sabotage of the interventionists; the armed attacks by Denikin, Kolchak, and Yudenich; the havoc wrought by them and the revolutionary spirit that kept at its height against terrible odds, fighting on numerous fronts and routing its enemies. Fighting also on the industrial front, building the new Russia out of the ruins of the old. Already much constructive work had been achieved, they informed us; we should have the opportunity to see it with our own eyes. Schools, workers’ colleges, social protection of mother and child, care of the aged and the sick, and much more were made possible by the dictatorship of the proletariat. Of course, Russia was very far yet from perfection, with every hand raised against her. The blockade, the intervention, the counter-revolutionary plotters — foremost amongst them the Russian intelligentsia — they were the greatest menace. It was they who were responsible for the fearful obstacles the Revolution encountered and for the ills the country was suffering.

The herculean tasks facing Russia now made our past struggles in America appear pitifully insignificant; our real test by fire was yet before us! I trembled at the thought of my possible failure, my inability to scale the heights already attained by the obscure and dumb millions. In their earnestness and obvious consecration the Zorins symbolized this greatness and I felt proud to have them as friends. It was past midnight before we could tear ourselves away from them.

In the hotel corridor we ran into a young woman who told us that she was on her way to the Zorins’ to call us. A friend from America was waiting, eager to see us. We followed her to an apartment on the fourth floor, and when the door was opened, I found myself in the embrace of our old comrade Bill Shatoff. “Bill, you here!” I cried in surprise; “why, Zorin told me you had left for Siberia!”

“Why were you not at the border to meet us? Didn’t you receive our radio? ” Sasha chimed in.

“ None of your American speed,” Bill laughed: “let me hug you first, dear Sasha, and let’s have a glass to your safe arrival in revolutionary Russia. Then we’ll talk.” He led us to a divan, placing himself between us. The others present greeted us warmly: Anna (Bill’s wife), her sister Rose, and the latter’s husband. I had met the girls in New York, but I had not recognized Rose in the dim light of the corridor.

Bill had put on considerable weight since the farewell send-off we had given him in New York. His military uniform accentuated his bulging lines and made his face look rather hard. But he was the same old Bill, impulsive, affectionate, and jovial. He pelted us with a volley of questions about America, the San Francisco labour cases, our imprisonment and deportation. “Never mind all that for the present,” we parried; “better tell us first about yourself. How do you happen still to be in Petrograd? And why were you not on the reception committee for the American deportees?” Bill looked somewhat embarrassed and sought to dodge our questions, but we were insistent. I could not bear the uncertainty about Zorin and I was not willing to suspect him of deliberate deception. “I see you have not changed,” Bill teased; “you are the same old persistent pest.” He tried to explain that in the strenuous life of Russia people had no time for mere sociability. He and Zorin, having different duties, rarely met. That might explain Zorin’s impression that he had departed. His Siberian journey had been settled upon weeks previously, but, owing to the difficulty of procuring the necessary equipment for his trip, had been delayed. Even now much was to be attended to before he would be ready to leave. It might keep him in the city for another fortnight, but he did not mind it now that we were with him — it would give us time to talk things over, about America and Russia. He had received our radio and he had asked to be on the committee, but he was refused. It had been considered unwise to allow him to give us our first impressions of Russia, in order not to prejudice us. “It! It!” both Sasha and I exclaimed. “ Who is that dictatorial ‘ it’ that orders your Siberian trip and that refuses you the right to meet your old comrades and friends? And why could you not have come on your own account?” “The dictatorship of the proletariat,” Bill replied, patting me on the back indulgently; “but of that some other time. Now I just want to tell you,” he continued earnestly, “that the Communist State in action is exactly what we anarchists have always claimed it would be — a tightly centralized power, still more strengthened by the dangers to the Revolution. Under such conditions one cannot do as one wills. One does not just hop on a train and go, or even ride the bumpers, as I used to in the United States. One needs permission. But don’t get the idea that I miss my American ‘ blessings.’ Me for Russia, the Revolution, and its glorious future!”

Bill was certain we would come to feel just as he did about things in Russia. No need to worry about trifles like propusks during our first hours together. “Propusks! I have a whole trunkful of them, and so will you soon,” he concluded, a mischievous twinkle in his eye. I caught his mood and dismissed my questions. I was dazed by the impressions that had crowded the day. Was it really only one day, I wondered. I seemed to have lived years since our arrival.

Bill Shatoff did not leave for another fortnight, and we spent together most of our time, often into the wee hours of the morning. The revolutionary canvas he unrolled before us was of far larger scope than had been painted before by anyone else. It was no longer a few individual figures thrown on the picture, their role and importance accentuated by the vast background. Great and small, high and low, stood out in bold relief, imbued with a collective will to hasten the complete triumph of the Revolution. Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, with their small band of inspired comrades, had a tremendous part to play, Bill declared with enthusiastic conviction; but the real power behind them was the awakened revolutionary consciousness of the masses. The peasants had expropriated the masters’ land all through the summer of 1917 . . . workers had taken possession of the factories and shops . . . the soldiers had flocked back by the hundred thousands from the warring fronts . . . the Kronstadt sailors had translated their anarchist motto of direct action into the everyday life of the Revolution . . . the Left Socialist Revolutionists, as also the anarchists, had encouraged the peasantry in socializing the land. . . . All these forces had helped to energize the storm that broke over Russia, finding full expression and release in the terrific sweep of October.

Such was the epic of dazzling beauty and overwhelming power, infused with palpitating life by the ardour and eloquence of our friend. Presently Bill himself broke the spell. He had shown us the transformation in the soul of Russia, he continued; he would have to let us see her ills of the body as well. “Not to prejudice you,” he emphasized, “as has been feared by people whose criterion of revolutionary integrity is a membership card.” Before long we would ourselves meet the appalling afflictions that were sapping the country’s strength, he said. His object was merely to prepare us — to help us diagnose the source of the disease, to point out the danger of its spreading and enable us to see that only the most drastic measures could effect a cure. The Russian experience had taught him that we anarchists had been the romanticists of revolution, forgetful of the cost it would entail, the frightful price the enemies of the Revolution would exact, the fiendish methods they would resort to in order to destroy its gains. One cannot fight fire and sword with only the logic and justice of one’s ideal. The counter-revolutionists had combined to isolate and starve Russia, and the blockade was taking frightful toll of human life. The intervention and the destruction in its wake, the numerous White attacks, costing oceans of blood, the hordes of Denikin, Kolchak, and Yudenich; their pogroms, bestial revenge, and the general havoc wrought had imposed on the Revolution a warfare that its most far-sighted exponents had never dreamed about. A warfare not always in keeping without romantic ideas of revolutionary ethics, indispensable none the less to drive off the hungry wolves ready to tear the Revolution limb from limb. He had not ceased to be an anarchist, Bill assured us; he had not become indifferent to the menace of a Marxian State machine. That danger was no longer a subject for theoretic discussion, but an actual reality because of the existing bureaucracy, inefficiency, and corruption. He loathed the dictatorship and its handmaiden, the Cheka, with their ruthless suppression of thought, speech, and initiative. But it was an unavoidable evil. The anarchists had been the first to respond to Lenin’s essentially anarchistic call to revolution. They had the right to demand an accounting. “And we will! Never doubt that,” Bill fairly shouted, “we will! But not now, not now! Not while every nerve must be strained to save Russia from the reactionary elements which are desperately fighting to come back to power.” He had not joined the Communist Party, and never would, Bill assured us. But he was with the Bolsheviki and he would continue until every front had been liquidated and the last enemy driven to cover, like Yudenich, Denikin, and the rest of the tsarist gang. “And so will you, dear Emma and Sasha,” Bill concluded; “I am certain of it.”

Our comrade was the enthusiastic bard of old, his song the saga of the Revolution, the most stupendous event of our time. Its miracles were many, its horrors and woe the martyrdom of a people nailed to the cross.

Bill was entirely right, we thought. Nothing was of moment compared with the supreme need of giving one’s all to safeguard the Revolution and its gains. The faith and fervour of our comrade swept me along to ecstatic heights. Yet I could not entirely free myself from an undercurrent of uneasiness one often feels when left alone in the dark. Resolutely I strove to drive it back, moving like a sleep-walker through enchanted space. Sometimes I would stumble back to earth only half-aroused by a harsh voice or an ugly sight. The gagging of free speech at the session of the Petro-Soviet that we had attended, the discovery that better and more plentiful food was served Party members at the Smolny dining-room and many similar injustices and evils had attracted my attention. Model schools where the children were stuffed with sweets and candies, and side by side with them schools dismal, poorly equipped, unheated, and filthy, where the little ones, hungry all the time, were herded together like cattle. A special hospital for Communists, with every modern comfort, while other institutions lacked the barest medical and surgical necessities. Thirty-four different grades of rations — under alleged Communism! — while some markets and privileged stores were doing a lively business in butter, eggs, cheese, and meat. The workers and their womenfolk standing long hours in endless queues for their ration of frozen potatoes, wormy cereals, and decayed fish. Groups of women, their faces bloated and blue, accompanied by Red soldiers and bargaining with them for their pitiful wares.

I talked to Zorin about these things, to the young anarchist Kibalchich, living in the Astoria, to Zinoviev and others, pointing out these contradictions. How were they to be justified or explained? All of them repeated the same refrain: “What will you, with the blockade around us, the sabotage of the intelligentsia, the attacks of Denikin, Kolchak, and Yudenich!” They alone were to blame, they reiterated. Old evils could not be eradicated until the fronts were liquidated. “ Come and work with us,” they said, “you and Berkman. You can have any position you choose and you can help us a great deal.”

I was profoundly moved to see these people reaching eagerly out for willing hands. We would join them; we would work with them with our best energy and strength as soon as we found our bearings, knew where we belonged and where we could be of greatest use.

Zinoviev did not look the formidable leader his reputation would have led one to assume. He impressed me as flabby and weak. His voice was adolescent, high-pitched and lacking in appeal. But he had faithfully helped the Revolution to its birth and he was indefatigably working for its further development, we had been told. He certainly deserved confidence and respect. “The blockade,” he reiterated, “Kolchak, Denikin, Yudenich, the counter-revolutionist Savinkov, as well as the Menshevik traitors and the Socialist Revolutionists of the Right, are a constant menace. They are eternally plotting vengeance and the death of the Revolution.” Zinoviev’s plaint added tragic momentum to the general chorus. I joined in with the rest.

Soon, however, other voices rose from the depths, harsh, accusing voices that greatly disturbed me. I had been asked to attend a conference of anarchists in Petrograd, and I was amazed to find that my comrades were compelled to gather in secret in an obscure hiding-place. Bill Shatoff had spoken with great pride of the courage shown by our comrades in the Revolution and on the military fronts, and he had extolled the heroic part they had played. Why should people with such a record, I wondered, be driven under cover.

Presently came the answer — from workers in the Putilov Ironworks, from factories and mills, from the Kronstadt sailors, from Red Army men, and from an old comrade who had escaped while under sentence of death. The very brawn of the revolutionary struggle was crying out in anguish and bitterness against the people they had helped place in power. They spoke of the Bolshevik betrayal of the Revolution, of the slavery forced upon the toilers, the emasculation of the soviets, the suppression of speech and thought, the filling of prisons with recalcitrant peasants, workers, soldiers, sailors, and rebels of every kind. They told of the raid with machine-guns upon the Moscow headquarters of the anarchists by the order of Trotsky; of the Cheka and the wholesale executions without hearing or trial. These charges and denunciations beat upon me like hammers and left me stunned. I listened tense in every nerve, hardly able clearly to understand what I heard, and failing to grasp its full meaning. It couldn’t be true — this monster indictment! Had not Zorin pointed the jail out to us and assured us that it was almost empty? Capital punishment, he had said, had been abolished. And had not Bill Shatoff paid glowing tribute to Lenin and his co-workers, glorifying their vision and valour? Bill had not covered up the dark spots on the Soviet horizon; he had explained the reason for them and the methods they had forced upon the Bolsheviki, and indeed upon all rebels serving the Revolution.

The men in that dismal hall must be mad, I thought, to tell such impossible and preposterous stories, wicked to condemn the Communists for the crimes they must know were due to the counter-revolutionary gang, to the blockade and the White generals attacking the Revolution. I proclaimed my conviction to the gathering, but my voice was drowned in the laughter of derision and jeers. I was roundly denounced for my wilful blindness. “That’s the gag they have given you!” my comrades shouted at me. “You and Berkman have fallen for it and swallowed it whole. And Zorin, the bigot who hates anarchists and would shoot them all in cold blood! Bill Shatoff, too, the renegade!” they shouted; “you believe them and not us. Wait, wait until you have seen things with your own eyes. You will sing another song then.”

When the indignant uproar had subsided, the fugitive from the death-sentence demanded the floor. His pale face was deeply furrowed, suffering spoke from his large, hunted eyes, and he talked in a voice trembling with suppressed excitement. He dwelt at length on the recent events and the difficulties in the way of the Revolution. The anarchists did not close their eyes to the counter-revolutionary menace, he said. They were fighting it tooth and nail, as proved by the numerous comrades on the fronts and the great numbers that had laid down their lives in the battles against the enemy. In fact, it was Nestor Makhno, an anarchist, who with his peasant rebel army of povstantsy had helped to rout Denikin and thus saved Moscow and the Revolution at the most critical period. Anarchists in every part of Russia were at the very moment on the firing line, driving back the enemies of the Revolution. But they were also fighting the plague that had brought in the counter-revolutionary pest: the Brest-Litovsk peace, which had disintegrated the revolutionary spirit of the masses and had been the first wedge to break the proletarian forces and their unity. The anarchists and the Left Social Revolutionists had opposed it from the very first as a perilous step and a breach of faith on the part of the Bolsheviki. The policy of the razverstka, introduced by the Bolsheviki, the forcible gathering of products by irresponsible military detachments, had added fuel to the fires of popular bitterness. It had aroused hatred among the peasants and workers and had made them fertile soil for counter-revolutionary plots. “Shatoff knows all this,” the man cried; “ why did he hide these facts from you? But Bill Shatoff has become a ‘Sovietsky’ anarchist and he is serving the men in the Kremlin. That is why Lenin has saved him from the Cheka and has exiled him to Siberia instead. Workers and peasants, soldiers and sailors had been shot for lesser offences than the shady manipulations with his bourgeois cronies that Shatoff engaged in as virtual governor of Petrograd. The Bolsheviki are grateful masters. Shatoff had ruled Petrograd with an iron hand. He had himself rushed after ...