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Course note · Lecture 1 slides (file not included in this release)
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Verbatim transcript supplied by Anthony for Lesson 1, “Revolution and Disillusion,” on 2026-09-22. It has not been checked against the video. Transcription errors and unsupported historical assertions may be present; see the linked course note for selected source checks.
Transcript
The year was 1875, and in the air in America, there was this call to revolution. It would be the end of the trilogy that began with the Revolutionary War, which overthrew the forces of aristocracy, the Civil War, which put an end to slavery forever, and now the forces of labor were going to overthrow capitalism and install a society more equitable, based on the workers and their needs. There was a group in Chicago, specifically, that called themselves the Educational and Defense Society. They had the guns, they had the will, and they practiced their militia in order to overthrow the government and to install this prophesied revolution.
The Illinois legislature passed a law in 1879 banning private militias. This went all the way up to the Supreme Court. And in the 1886 Presser v. Illinois decision, it was determined that states do have the rights to organize and license militias, and that the Second Amendment only applied to Congress, not to state legislatures. Some of the very earliest restrictions on gun rights were used by the right against the left. But if they could not have militias, they could have other mechanisms.
There was a scientist named Christian Schönbein, and he had discovered that by mixing nitric acid and sulfuric acid, he could come upon a new compound, something called nitroglycerin. It was highly explosive. It took the work of Alfred Nobel to create a fulminating blasting cap and mixing that nitroglycerin with diatomaceous earth to create a new substance, dynamite. Nobel’s vision was that dynamite would help miners. Instead of having to spend hours doing back-breaking work in the mines, they could explode the rocks and extract the minerals so much more easily. But other people had other ideas. If dynamite could be so effective against rocks deep in the Earth, imagine what it could do to human beings.
It was the German-born anarchist Johann Most, who published a pamphlet called The Science of Revolutionary Warfare. In what was an enormously questionable first speech concern, this pamphlet taught people how to make explosives from the safety of their own home. Mass violence had now become democratized. This dynamite held a clarion call to young radicals who now felt empowered to impose or implement their vision of a more just and equitable world.
As one anarchist writer later put it, “When free speech is suppressed, when men are jailed for asking for food, clubbed for assembling to discuss their grievances, and stoned for expressing their opinions, there is but one recourse, violence. The ruling class has guns, bullets, bayonets, police, jails, militias, armies, and navies. To oppose all this, the worker has only dynamite.” Incidentally, the author of this piece later became a biology professor at NYU, although it is highly questionable what the faculty knew of his youthful, let’s just say, indiscretions.
As Johann Most put it, “Once we are in error when things are really happening, it would be stupid to consider amateur dynamite production. Dynamite factories and explosive warehouses can be seized just like anything else.” The momentum was in the air. Laws were passed, mandating eight-hour days, but they were overthrown or poorly implemented. The Industrial Revolution plowed on, and many people got very, very rich, while many others stayed very, very poor, unable to feed their own families. It seemed to be a gross injustice that so few should have so much while so many should have so little.
On May 1st, 1886, the first May Day, a national strike was organized and around 350,000 workers demanded shorter hours. On May 4th, three days after that, a rally was held in Chicago’s Haymarket Square. Estimates for how many people attended varied from several hundred to several thousand. What is in dispute is that the rally was a peaceful one. No one from the stage called for violence or started babbling about dynamite. They were advocating for workers’ rights, for organizing, for working together as unions, to try to get better conditions for themselves and their families. The mayor personally came. He saw the situation, so everything was fine, and then he left.
At around 10:30 PM, in complete violation of the First Amendment, the police inspector ordered the crowd to disperse in the name of the law. That is when somebody threw a bomb. To this day, we don’t know who threw that bomb or why, but what we do know is that many people were killed, including several police officers. That meant that somebody had to pay. These comments in the air about dynamite and violence had now gone from being theoretical to being practical and resulting in mass death. Eight men were arrested as a result of these events, several of whom had not even been in attendance. They were being put on trial simply because they had espoused anarchist views, some of whom had never espoused violence, but all would be judged as a group.
They were all found guilty, one of whom was given a 15-year sentence, while the others were sentenced to hang. It was a decision largely without precedent, certainly in American soil. They appealed to the Supreme Court, they appealed to the governor, but no one was interested in letting them off. The one who would have the greatest impact historically was the young man by the name of Louis Lingg. It’s crazy to look at this picture and realize this is someone from the 1800s because he looks like he stepped out of an Abercrombie ad. In fact, the police chief who arrested him talked about how visitors came to the jail just to look upon. Let me see the exact words.
“Many callers came to sympathize with Linng, as well as to admire his handsome physique.” This is from the police captain who arrested him. And Lingg was brought before the judge, as were the others. Like a caged animal, he snarled before the judge and told the court, explicitly, “I tell you frankly and openly, I am for force. I am the enemy of the order of today, and as long as breath remains in me, I shall combat it. I declare again, frankly and openly, that I’m in favor of using force. Perhaps you think, you’ll throw no more bombs, but let me assure you, I die happy on the gallows. So confident am I that the hundreds and thousands to whom I’ve spoken will remember my words, and when you shall have hanged us, then, mark my words, they shall do the bomb-throwing. In this hope, do I say to you, I despise you, I despise your order, your laws, your force-propped authority. Hang me for it.”
But they would never have the opportunity to hang Louis Linng. Somehow or other, historically it remains unclear, someone had managed to smuggle a blasting cap into the prison, and from his jail cell, he managed to blow off half his face. His jaw, what was left of it was left hanging, his tongue sticking out, his teeth were gone. In his death throes, he managed to write on the wall of his cell with his own blood, “Hoch die Anarchie!” Hooray for anarchy. The other men, two of them, asked for clemency. They were granted it, but four of the others refused to bend the knee, and they were brought to the gallows.
Adolph Fischer, George Engel, August Spies, and Albert Parsons. “This is the happiest moment of my life,” Adolph Fischer said, right before the hangman pulled the lever and sent him to his grave. There are several versions of August Spies’ last words, but the one that is enshrined on the monument that was built to these men several years after their death in Chicago reads, “The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today.” They were posthumously pardoned, but of course, that did them little good. You can still see that monument, by the way, today in the cemetery in which they’re buried.
Two of the people that were inspired by these men, one of them was a young woman by the name of Emma Goldman, who was born in the Russian Empire. She emigrated to the United States. As she put in her own words, “I devoured every line in anarchism I could get. Every word about the men, their lives, their work. I read about the heroic stand while on trial, their marvelous defense. I saw a new world opening before me.” In a way, Louis Linng was what Che Guevara is meant to be and supposed to be, this young revolutionary who inspired so many in the call of revolutionary violence.
The first day she was in New York, she met a young man named Alexander Berkman, and the two of them became partners in crime for the rest of their lives, both literally and figuratively. It seemed that this worker’s revolution, which had been so prophesied by Marx and others, was just moments away from starting. What would be the spark that would set it off? Well, the young Berkman and Goldman decided that they would be the ones to do it, and history gave them an engraved invitation.
In 1892, there was a strike at the Homestead Steelworks, which were eight miles to the east of Pittsburgh, run by Andrew Carnegie, and his right-hand man, Henry Clay Frick. The workers were on strike, negotiating not even for a raise, not even for the same pay, but they were fighting a pay cut, even as Carnegie was making bundles upon bundles of profits. Henry Clay Frick, who was the chairman of Carnegie Steel, had a new and innovative idea. He simply fired them all and shut down the factory. They were no longer workers, so they were not in a position to negotiate at all. He said he would be happy to negotiate with them on an individual basis.
He brought in replacement workers. You couldn’t even call them scabs because, technically, the union was no longer working at the works. He began to fortify the works, making it into even more of a warlike atmosphere. Then he hired a bunch of private security, including the notorious Pinkertons. A barge full of Frick’s men came up the river to attend to the workers who were camped outside. And history doesn’t record who shot first. But if you read history books, it’ll always say something like, “inevitably, shots were fired.” Well, perhaps it is inevitable, but it’s really important to know who shot first, and that is something we don’t know. What we do know is that many people were killed, one young boy was injured, and things were escalating at a rapid rate, and no one knew what to do about it.
The militia was called on July 18th. The town was put under martial law. Politicians reached out to Frick, trying to get him to compromise, but he dug in his heels. With the loss of men’s lives, Carnegie, who was hardly some sort of crazy anti-union capitalist, dug in his heels as well. He telegrammed Frick with his decision, and as he put it, “Never employ one of these riders. Let grass grow over the works. I’d rather lose this factory than deal with any of these men.”
This enormously inspired Goldman and Berkman. This was their opportunity. This was the clearest example of capitalist oppression of the workers. If they took out Frick, they would be the heroes that would set off the revolution. Everyone would clap, and they would be, in a sense, these messiahs who would bring in this new wave and set off this new class warfare. They tried to build a bomb, but even with Johann Most’s book, it’s a lot harder to build a bomb at home than you might think. I do not encourage anyone listening to this to do so. They’re like, “All right, we could do it old school.” Berkman got a gun, he got a knife, and he made his way down to Frick’s office.
Berkman broke into the office. He shot Frick. The first bullet hit Frick in the ear. He fired again, hitting Frick in the neck. Frick and the vice-chairman of Carnegie Steel, who was both in the office, began to wrestle Berkman. It was a loud office. People charged in. They tried to wrestle him down. Berkman pulled out his knife and began to stab Frick, and then he was tackled and subdued. Frick never lost consciousness. He refused anesthesia, and he would not bend the knee. Before he even left for the hospital, Frick left basically a press release. “This incident will not change the attitude of the Carnegie Steel Company towards the Amalgamated Association,” meaning the workers. “I do not think I shall die. But whether I do or not, the company will pursue the same policy and it will win.”
And he was absolutely correct. The assassination completely failed. Frick regained his health entirely. If anything happened as a result of this, people only had sympathy for Frick. Instead of killing Frick, Berkman humanized him and made a martyr out of him without him even having to die. Even the members of the union shook their heads, knowing that this made them look bad because their whole argument was, “We’re just trying to get more food for our families. We’re not violent thugs like the capitalists are.” Even Johann Most condemned Alexander Berkman, perhaps out of jealousy. As he put it, “Berkman is my enemy. He is no good. I hate him as much as I hate Frick, and Frick is the Tsar of America.”
Berkman was 21 years old and was sentenced to 21 years in jail. His life effectively was already almost over, and he had nothing to show for it. The Homestead strike was a complete disaster for the workers. They voted to return to work on Frick’s terms. The union went from 24,000 members in four years, down to 8,000 members, a drop of two-thirds. Frick went on to live a long and happy life. To this day, you can visit the museum of his art collection in New York City, where it is known as the Frick.
Goldman was left alone, trying to agitate the workers. She would give speeches. She would have jobs under assumed names, often as a nurse. When she would tell the workers, “Go to the capitalists and ask for work. If they don’t give you work, ask for bread. If they don’t give you bread, take bread. You do not have a responsibility to starve when so many people have so much and you’re just trying to feed your family.” Of all the people who heard Emma Goldman speak, there was one who goes down history for perhaps not so positive reasons, a young man with the unpronounceable name of Leon Czolgosz. In 1901, he went up to Buffalo, New York, at the Pan-American Exhibition, where President William McKinley was shaking hands with patriotic Americans. He pulled out his rifle and shot the President at point-blank range.
When he was arrested, Czolgosz said, “What started the craze to kill was a lecture I heard some little time ago by Emma Goldman. Her doctrine that all rulers should be exterminated was what set me to thinking, so that my head nearly split with the pain. Miss Goldman’s words went right through me, and when I left the lecture, I had made up my mind that I would have to do something heroic for the cause I loved.” It took McKinley a week to die, and Emma Goldman was on the lam. In fact, she had met Czolgosz before, but he was such a weirdo that most of the anarchists who met him wondered if he was a fed because he was acting crazy, crazy by anarchist standards, mind you. So she was right to be suspicious, but now, think about this.
The President’s on his deathbed. The assassin, or would-be assassin, blames you. You’re Emma Goldman. You’re on the run. What do you do? Eventually, she was arrested by someone named Captain Hermann Schlueter, the very same man who had earlier arrested Louis Linng. When asked her thoughts, she said that, of Czolgosz, “I felt the man is one of those unfortunates who have been driven by despair and misery to commit the deed. I feel deeply with him as an individual, as I would feel with anybody who suffers.”
Here are some of her other quotes. “I’m not in a position to say who ought to be killed.” She said, “What I don’t see is why they would make more fuss about a president than anybody else. All men are born equal.” She said, if she had the means, she would help Czolgosz as much as she could. She would see that he had counsel, that justice was done him. And of McKinley, she said, “Other presidents have had heart or something, but this poor fellow, God forgive him, since he knows nothing, is a tool in the hands of the wealthy.” As for the police, she said, “They’re making more anarchists than the most prominent people connected with the anarchist cause could make in 10 years. If they would only continue, I should be very grateful. They’ll save me lots of work.”
Imagine this. You’ve just been arrested because the president’s would -be assassin said it was your idea. And Emma Goldman’s response is, “I’d help the assassin. Mckinley is a fool. P.S. Fuck the police.” To say that she was the most hated woman in America is something that is a bit of an understatement. But there was nothing the police could do. They felt that there was this idea that, if someone is in a position to kill the President, because McKinley did succumb to his wounds, there surely had to be some kind of big organization behind it, but there wasn’t.
As a result of this, McKinley’s successor, Teddy Roosevelt, launched a full-scale assault on anarchism in as much as he could, as President of the United States, saying that “the anarchist is more dangerous than any other criminal because he represents the same depravity in a greater degree.” And he prophesied that, “if anarchy is triumphant, its triumph will last for one but red moment, to be succeeded for ages by the gloomy night of despotism.” And he said that anarchism is worse than piracy and the slave trade. “It is a far blacker infamy than either.”
In 1903, President Roosevelt signed the Anarchist Exclusion Act, banning people from immigrating to the United States if they were beggers, epileptics, or anarchists. “They and those like them should be kept out of this country, and if found here, they should be promptly deported to the country whence they came.” This makes me a little nervous, but come and find me.
Let’s go back to Alexander Berkman. By 1906, 14 years after prison, he was released and now a free man. Goldman had been publishing a journal called Mother Earth, promoting anarchism and associated causes. And by 1916, Woodrow Wilson was running for re-election. His slogan as the Great War was tormenting Europe was, “He kept us out of war.” And he barely beat his opponent, Charles Evans Hughes, New York governor, and became the first sitting Democrat to be re-elected President since the Civil War. In March 1917, Woodrow Wilson was sworn in. On April 2nd, 1917, he asked for and received a Declaration of War from Congress and officially entered the US into World War I. He kept us out of war for one month into his second term.
Now, during the Great War, Germany had two fronts. She had to deal with her Western front, from Western Europe, and the Eastern front from the Tsar and the forces of Russia. General Ludendorff of Germany was a very smart and very crafty man, and he knew that warfare could be managed by several different means. And that gave him an idea. There was someone by the name of Vladimir Lenin. At the time, Lenin was regarded as a complete lunatic and a kook. His vision of this Bolshevik Communist dictatorship was something regarded as both utopian and ridiculous and impossible. But he would have made a great troublemaker.
In 1905, Lenin had taken part in an attempt to overthrow the Tsar, and as a result, had been exiled from Russia. Ludendorff had the idea, let’s take Lenin out of exile, send him back where he came from, to Russia, and have him cause trouble there. The more trouble the Tsar has to deal with, the less of a problem the Tsar is going to be on German’s Eastern front. Very famously, Lénin was put in a sealed train car with his associates from Zurich, Switzerland, and he made his way all the way around, taking a ferry to Sweden, then to Finland, and then back to the Russian Empire after eight days.
Two months later, on June 15th, 1917, Woodrow Wilson signed the Espionage Act of 1917, which made it a felony to interfere with the draft. In 1916, keeping us out of war was a winning slogan. In 1917, working to keep us out of war was a felony. The very same day that the Espionage Act was put into law, Goldman and Berkman were arrested, their office seized, and the authorities found a list with the contact info of every anarchist and anarchist sympathizer. Bail was set for each at $25,000, an insane amount of money back in 1917.
Further, the government retroactively repealed the citizenship of Goldman’s teenage husband, which had granted her citizenship. And since he was no longer a citizen, therefore she was no longer a citizen as well. And the pair were sentenced to two years in jail. They were not alone. Very famously, Eugene V. Debs, who had been the socialist presidential candidate, was also in jail for opposing the Great War.
And then the impossible happened. Lenin and his right-hand Man, Trotsky, had done great work convincing many in the military to buy into his ideology. They persuade enough the population that they controlled a majority of the Petrograd Soviet, which was one of the workers’ councils that was trying to transition Russia into a working democracy. And on October 24th, 1917, things came to a head. Lenin and Trotsky’s forces seized control of Petrograd, and they declared themselves the new government.
As journalist John Reid called it, “It was 10 days that shook the world.” As Berkman wrote, “Without exaggeration, I may say that the happiest day of my existence was passed in a prison cell, the day when the first news of the October Revolution and the victory of the Bolshevik reached me in the Atlanta federal penitentiary.” The Russian Civil War had begun. What’s important to understand is this Bolshevik vision, this Communist vision, was supposed to be scientific socialism. This was a new society based on the idea that the experts would plan everything centrally, that what had happened before was accidents of history. Now that we had science and we had technology, we could run a society based on scientific principles, as opposed to these vague principles of the market and having some greengrocer make decisions for the rest of us.
In fact, everything was on the table. By 1918, the Bolshevik’s code on marriage, the family, and guardianship envisioned a withering away of the family itself, because preferring your own children to other children was inequality. Since it was unfair that some parents would be better than others—this is something that few people dispute —why not have professional educators educate all the children collectively so no one unfairly has a better head start than anyone else? In fact, anything that was old-school or bourgeois, which was their slur of the moment, was regarded with suspicion. Marriage, very bourgeois idea.
In fact, it got down to the point when the communists began to question biology itself, when they spoke of creating a new Soviet man, they meant so literally. In fact, one writer mused that, “We don’t know whether during communism, emotions will disappear, whether a human being will change to such an extent that he will become a luminous globe consisting of a head and brain only, or whether new and transformed emotions will come into being.” They would change everything, including having a new calendar, because again, everything was on the table in this new era of science. As one writer later put it, “I had been to the future, and it worked.”
Just weeks after seizing power on December 19th, 1917, Lenin issued a decree to form what he called an extraordinary commission for combating counterrevolution and sabotage, popularly known as the Cheka, the secret police. Their job was to persecute and to break up all acts of counterrevolution and sabotage all over Russia. And since the revolution was regarded as the Bolshevik government itself, opposition to it could therefore claim to be in itself sabotage. As the head of the Cheka publicly stated, “We stand for organized terror. This should be frankly admitted. The Cheka is obligated to defend the revolution and conquer the enemy, even if its sword does by chance sometimes fall upon the heads of the innocent.” This was an organization external to and superior to the law.
Now, in order to consolidate his power and to make sure that the revolution wasn’t going anywhere, Lenin wanted to get out of the Great War as quickly as possible, something that General Ludendorff never hoped for, perhaps, in his wildest dreams. It wasn’t just the Bolsheviks who were in power, there were the Mensheviks. Now, in Russia, “bolshe” means greater or more, “menshiy” means lesser. The Mensheviks wanted things to be implemented slowly. The Bolsheviks wanted quick revolution as fast as possible. There were other groups like the Social Revolutionists, the left SRs, who are an agrarian party. They’re more democratic socialists. Then there were the anarchists, who believed in these local workers’ councils, the Soviets. When people speak of the Soviet Union, they’re referring to the workers’ councils which supposedly ran everything, but in practice, ran nothing.
In December 1917, Lenin sent his right-hand man, Trotsky, to meet with the Germans. Lenin told him, “String out the talks until there’s a revolution in Germany, or as long as possible.” Because the idea was, and has been prophesied, once the revolution takes place in one country, the workers throughout the world are going to overthrow their chains, and this is going to be a worldwide phenomenon. If you just wait it out, things are going to resolve themselves. This was the German counter-offer. You can get out of the war, but we keep whatever we’re currently in occupation of, meaning Poland, Lithuania, and most of western Ukraine. Lenin didn’t know what to do. He’s barely in office. If he goes back to his people and says, “Listen, we can cut a deal where we’re losing an enormous amount of territory,” it’s going to look very badly for us.
Then General Hoffmann offered an ultimatum. The Russians had one day to sign this treaty or else Germany would invade. This was Trotsky’s response. He said, “Russia is going to leave the war, but we’re not signing a treaty.” Bye. The Germans didn’t know what to do. This is not how things are done. The Russians just tried to run out the clock. The Germans threatened again. Russians dawdled. In late February, they invaded and captured more territory in three days than they had in the previous three years combined. Soon, capturing Petrograd itself was on the table. If that happened, it really would be the end of the Russian Revolution, if not Russia herself.
Finally, Lenin convinced his comrades that they needed to sign the treaty, and they also had to give up the Baltic states, Finland, nearly all of Ukraine, several ports. In short, about a third of their best agricultural land, half their industry, and 89% of their coal mines, in addition to an indemnity of 120 million gold rubles. It was a huge humiliation. And one of his comrades said to him, “If we had 500 courageous men in Petrograd, we should put you in prison.” He said that to Lenin. Lenin said, “Some people may indeed go to prison after this, but if you calculate the probabilities, you’ll see it is much more likely that I’ll send you than that you will send me.” And indeed, this did firmly establish Lenin as the head of Russia.
On August 30th, 1918, Lenin was the victim of an assassination attempt. A young woman managed to shoot him three times, giving him injuries from which he would never recover. And this gave him the cover to unleash what was known as the Red Terror. As one newspaper at the time put it, “We will turn our hearts into steel, which we will temper in the fire of suffering and the blood of fighters for freedom. We will make our hearts cruel, hard, immovable, so that no mercy will enter them, so that they will not quiver at the sight of a sea of enemy blood. Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands. Let them drown themselves in their own blood.”
Terror and class warfare became official state policy. The Weekly Cheka, the newspaper, opined, “Enough of this long, sterile, and vain talk about Red Terror. It is time, while it is not late yet, to carry out, by deed and not in word, a ruthless and strictly organized mass terror.” In fact, concepts like individualism were old-school. This was the new scientific society so that, in case guilty people are not turned over to the authorities, one person out of 10 will be shot irrespective of whether he’s guilty or not.
Meanwhile, the United States, as the US further entered the Great War, the Socialist Party in Philadelphia printed and mailed out flyers to young people under the heading of “Long live the Constitution of the United States.” They pointed out that the 13th Amendment made involuntary servitude illegal in the United States, and that when you conscript and compel a man to go abroad, to fight against his will, you violate the most secret right of personal liberty, meaning the draft was a form of slavery and grossly unconstitutional.
This was a mild example of free speech, of political speech, and of course, it resulted in arrests. The case went all the way up to the Supreme Court, and unanimously, the Court, Republicans and Democrats alike, upheld the Espionage Act, and Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes said words that resonate to this day. “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.”
It’s the type of legal gymnastics that only a brilliant jurist could come up with with a straight face. To begin with, you can’t yell anything in a theater at any time. It is private property. Number two, if you’re releasing a flyer that says, “Don’t go to war, this is against the Constitution,” this is advocating against violence, not for it. We’re all told to this day that the First Amendment protects anything. It protects the right of free political speech. Yet that was exactly what was made a felony at this time. If you hear ever people talk about you can’t yell fire in a crowded movie theater, this is where they’re getting it from. An idea that you can’t argue against the draft during in a time of war, without even telling people to defy the draft. Just telling people that the draft in and of itself is unconstitutional.
Radicals began to be deported from the United States in line with the laws that Teddy Roosevelt had passed. Then, as earlier prophesied, the workers had dynamite. In April 1919, 30 letter bombs were mailed out to various powerful people in the United States. The others were intercepted, and one detonated, blowing up the hands of a sender’s housekeeper and his wife’s teeth. On June 2nd, nine bombs were detonated across eight cities. Most concernedly was the one meant for the attorney general, Mitchell Palmer. It detonated prematurely in front of his townhouse in Washington, DC. The explosive took out the young anarchist carrier. Then across the street, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, FDR, and his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, witnessed the aftermath, including a piece of the bomber’s body landing on their doorstep. This would not be the only time in his life that FDR would know what it’s like to look at a useless leg.
The attorney general took this matter very seriously, understandably so, and he put a young Justice Department lawyer named J. Edgar Hoover in charge of a series of Palmer Raids to investigate these radicals that infiltrated the United States. Berkman and Goldman were arrested, along with many others, and then they were deported. On what was called the Red Ark, on December 21st, 1919, 250 radicals were deported to Russia. Get your commie ass back where it came from. Now, the two of them were very optimistic. Berkman said that landing in Russia was “the most sublime day of my life. Thus, my pious old forefathers must have felt first entering the Holy of Holies.” He felt a strong desire to kneel down and kiss the ground.
They would try to make the best of what they had. This was their opportunity to take part in the workers’ revolution and bring it forth to its conclusion. A nation of equity, peace, free speech, and food for everyone. Berkman met with Lenin, and Lenin told him that “Liberty is a luxury not to be permitted at the present stage of development.” When the revolution is out of danger, external and domestic, then free speech might be indulged in. He admitted that the government is often compelled to resort to unpleasant means, but that is the imperative of the situation from which there can be no shrinking. He told Goldman that free speech is a bourgeois notion. There can be no free speech in a revolutionary period, and that after the revolution is won, then you could have all the free speech you want. But not now.
Goldman saw firsthand the depravity of the Cheka. She told the story of a young man who was arrested. His rich relatives were told that he had been arrested and that he could be liberated by paying a very large fine. They got the money, handed over the fine, and then they were arrested for attempted bribery, and the prisoner and the relatives were shot. As she herself witnessed, early in the morning, mounted Chekas with DShKs shooting in the air, which was a warning that closed all the windows. Then came motor trucks loaded with the doomed, faces down, hands tied behind them. Soldiers were over them with rifles, and that blood dripped from the wagons, leaving a crimson streak on the pavement all the way up to the Cheka headquarters.
Karl Radek, who had been in the sealed train car with Lenin, came to Berkman with a proposition. He wanted Berkman to translate one of Lenin’s essays into English. The essay was called The Infantile Thickness of Leftism, and it was a clear attack on anarchism directly. At that very moment, there were a group of political prisoners, anarchists, who were being held in prison. They were undergoing a hunger strike to demand better conditions. They were who Berkman thought of in this moment. He said, “I saw their burning eyes peering accusingly at me through the iron bars. ‘Have you forsaken us?’ he could hear them whisper.” He wanted to write a preface to the essay, saying that he couldn’t in good conscience translate an attack on his views without allowing some defense. Of course, this is something Lenin would not allow. After that, Berkman was persona non grata.
For 18 months, the two of them had held out hope that the Russian Revolution could be redeemed, and day by day, their hopes were dashed. As he put it, “I saw the ideals of yesterday betrayed, the meaning of the revolution perverted, its essence caricatured into reaction. I saw the workers subdued, the whole country silenced by the party dictatorship and its organized brutality. I saw entire villages laid waste by Bolshevik artillery.” And then came Kronstadt.
Kronstadt is a naval base just outside St. Petersburg. During 1919, a detachment of sailors there were crucial to defending the city against the White Forces, the counterrevolutionaries. By 1920, the impossible became reality. The White Forces were defeated, and war communism would finally be on its way out. The Bolsheviks had won against the only forces internally who offered them a threat. Now the soldiers of Kronstadt asked that Lenin and the Bolsheviks deliver what had been promised, specifically, new elections by secret ballot, freedom of speech and of the press, freedom of assembly for labor unions, to liberate political prisoners, to review cases of those held in prisons, and to equalize the rations of those who work, and to permit free individual production on a small scale.
Lenin and Trotsky were not exactly amenable to these demands. Trotsky personally approved the plan to gas them if they continued their uppity behavior. To put it mildly, Lenin and Berkman were beside themselves. These men who had been crucial in winning the revolution were now being threatened simply for asking for what the revolution had promised from the very beginning. They wrote to the Petrograd Soviet of labor and defense. They offered their services as intermediaries, saying, “We want no bloodshed.” And then Berkman himself heard the decision of the Bolsheviks. He heard the sounds of the cannons and the weapons as Kronstadt was laid under attack.
It was a complete bloodbath, and the Kronstadt men fell and were defeated utterly by the forces of the Bolsheviks. Two thousand were taken prisoner, many executed on the spot. The rest were sent to prisons, others to labor camps. As Lenin put it, “The time has come to put an end to opposition, to put a lid on it. We’ve had enough opposition.” Nine days after Kronstadt fell, Lenin declared war on anyone whose views were different from his own. The Mensheviks, who had been his allies throughout this whole thing, now Lenin said, “An open proof of one’s Menshevism should be sufficient ground for our revolutionary courts to confer the highest punishment.” That is, shooting. Over 1,000 Mensheviks were arrested in Ukraine alone.
As historian Paul Abrich puts it, “By the end of the year, the active remnants of political opposition had been silenced or driven underground, and the consolidation of one party rule was all but complete.” Emma Goldman left the Soviet Union in 1921 with complete and utter loathing. She published a memoir in what became two books, given titles of My Disillusionment in Russia and My Further Disillusionment in Russia. His was called The Bolshevik Myth. His came out in 1925 during the Coolidge administration. So as early as 1923, 24, and 25, people could learn for themselves, if they were interested, the reality of what was going on behind what would become the Soviet Union, from the pens of people who were hardly on the right.
As Goldman put it, “Those familiar with the real situation in Russia, and who are not in the mesmeric influence of the Bolshevik superstition, will bear me out that I have given a true picture. The rest of the world will learn in time.” This was 100 years ago. But the rest of the world didn’t want to learn it. They didn’t want to hear it. Books began to be burned. Descartes, Plato, Schopenhauer, virtually every philosopher. Bakunin, who was Marx’s rival, was an early anarchist. And Kropotkin, forbidden. Tolstoy’s novels escaped censures, but his non-fiction works, as he was an anarchist, were banned. Kant could be found in academic libraries, but could only be given out under the strictest responsibility of the chief librarians.
This was a new society, and anything from before could be regarded as obsolete and outdated, and therefore counterrevolutionary. In 1924, Goldman gave a dinner talk in London. Red Emma, the revolutionary. This is the woman who prophesied what would happen, who fought for the workers all her life. Wild applause, standing ovation. By the time she was done, you could hear a pin drop because she told these lefties in London that this is not what they were fighting for. This is not what they had hoped for. This was something more barbaric than the Tsar could ever have imagined in his wildest dreams.
As she put it, “To call the present Soviet government a workers’ experiment is the most preposterous lie ever told. The time has come when silence on the Russian situation makes you a party of the crimes which are being committed there.” They called her a Tory, Emma Goldman. Until the day she died, she never stopped advocating for the workers of Russia and for the workers all around the world. In 1933, she wrote, “The fact is that the communists are the forebears of fascism. Neither Mussolini nor Hitler have made a single original step. All they had to do was to follow and copy faithfully the steps taken by Lenin and Stalin.” At the time, this was regarded as complete absurdity. Lenin and Stalin are on the left, Hitler is on the right. What could the two possibly have in common?
Even though Lenin was indisputably an ideologue and a fanatic, he was more pragmatic than many people in the popular consciousness realize. So after Kronstadt, basically, he did what many in the rebellion were asking for. He introduced what he called the New Economic Policy. So realizing that, first of all, this worldwide revolution was not imminently happening, and trying to ground the Russian Revolution in something more solid, he pulled back a bit on this dictatorship of the proletariat, meaning, instead of grain being requisitioned, producers would pay a tax. Instead of public services being free, they would cost money. Attempts were made to encourage foreign investment. While big business and banking remained under government control, small businesses were allowed to develop. So he brought some air into the market.
And as a result of this, a new class of people were formed, New Economic Policy, NEP. They were called NEP men. And by having this little space for these, what before had been a huge taboo, these bourgeois, now these people got very wealthy very quick by offering their services. And it’s quite easy to become very wealthy when everyone else is so desperately poor, if only by comparing your assets to theirs. Sounded a lot like a return to capitalism, and it kind of was. Lenin called it state capitalism.
This was regarded not only as a huge betrayal, but also for people of the Menshevik persuasion. “And I told you so. We said you were going too fast, and now you’re proving us right.” And then it became a felony to point out this hypocrisy. As Lenin put it, “When certain people who may even be guided by the best possible motives begin to so panic just at the time when we’re carrying out a retreat, beset with vast difficulties, at a time when it’s vitally important to retain good order in retreating, it is necessary to punish severely, ruthlessly, the slightly violation of discipline.”
When Lenin was a kid, he saw firsthand many people starving to death, food having been a problem for a long time in Russia. And now food became a problem again in the years of 1920 and ‘21. At first, Lenin made it illegal to use the words famine and starvation in the media, but banning discussion of hunger did not make people more fed. The problem increased. Russians went to train stations in hopes of getting food or going to somewhere where food was, and these gatherings turned into scenes of complete inhumanity.
One aid worker in Lenin’s hometown saw things like a mother being driven mad by hunger, rocking her baby. And then suddenly, as it starts to cry, smacking in the face, beating the child furiously, her face distorted with rage. She rains blows with her fist on its little face, on its head, and at last, she throws it upon the floor and kicks it with her foot. The mother’s eyes are fixed but apparently sightless as she loses her mind due to hunger. In 1921, Lenin’s position was far stronger than it had been in 1919, and he was persuaded to accept help from abroad. The man who was in charge of this was Herbert Hoover. Hoover made his name by feeding the people of Europe during the Great War, civilians. Now, the man who was known as the Great Engineer set his sights on feeding the people of Russia.
This was humiliating for Lenin, and he said that, “One must punish Hoover. One must publicly slap his face so the whole world sees.” I think it’s funny, just historically, to have Lenin denouncing Herbert Hoover in 1921 because that’s quite a Venn diagram in terms of what we envision of American history and worldwide history. Eventually, Hoover and his compatriots would pull out because what they saw was happening was the Bolsheviks were simply taking the grain and selling it for export, leaving the citizens hungry. At least 1 million people starved, probably far more. But this was just a practice run for what was to come a decade later.
On the morning of May 26, 1922, Lenin got out of bed in a very bad state. He had trouble walking. He had trouble moving his arm. He couldn’t write. He couldn’t even do basic multiplication. He had had a stroke. He remembered what Karl Marx’s son-in-law had done with his wife in 1911, and he asked his wife to give him cyanide. The couple couldn’t go through with it, so they called in a man who they knew could, Joseph Stalin.