THE RUSSIAN ANARCHISTS STUDIES OF THE RUSSIAN INSTITUTE

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY THE RUSSIAN ANARCHISTS

BY PAUL AVRICH

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS Copyright © 1967 by Princeton University Press ALL RIGHTS RESERVED L.C. Card: 66-25418 ISBN 0-691-00766-7 (paperback edn.) ISBN 0-691-05151-8 (hardcover edn.)

The Russian Institute of Columbia University sponsors the Studies of the Russian Institute in the belief that their publication contributes to scholarly research and public understanding. In this way the Institute, while not neces­ sarily endorsing their conclusions, is pleased to make available the results of some of the research conducted under its auspices. A list of the Studies of the Russian Institute appears at the back of the book.

First Princeton Paperback Edition, 1971

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade, be lent, resold, hired out, or other­ wise disposed of without the publisher's consent, in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published. Printed in the United States of America by Princeton University Press ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to express my sincere gratitude to Geroid Tanquary Robinson, Seth Low Professor Emeritus of History, Columbia University, who guided and encouraged my study of modern Russian history. I am also indebted to James Joll, Sub-Warden of St. Anthony's College, Oxford, and Professor Alexander Erlich of the Russian Institute, Columbia University, who read this work in manuscript form and offered constructive criticisms and suggestions. In addition, Max Nomad read most of the manuscript and kindly allowed me to see documents and rare publications in his possession. My thanks are due also to Princess Alexandra Kropotkin, Boris Yelensky, and the editors of the Freie Arbeiter Stimme in New York City, Isidore Wisotsky, Morris Shutz, and the late Leibush Frumkin, who gave me the benefit of their personal recollections of the men and events dis­ cussed herein; and to Judith Maltz, the late , Senya Fleshin, John Cherney, and Irving Abrams, who were good enough to answer my inquiries and to place at my disposal lit­ erature and photographs that could not be obtained elsewhere. Needless to say, however, the sole responsibility for this volume remains my own. For their expert assistance in finding pertinent materials, I am indebted to Lev Magerovsky of Columbia University's Archive of Russian and East European History and Culture; Hillel Kem- pinski and Lola Szafran of the Bund Archives of the Jewish Labor Movement; Edward Weber and Marjorie Putnam of the ; Rudolf de Jong and L. J. van Rossum of the International Institute of Social History; and the staffs of the Hoover, Columbia, and Harvard Libraries, the New York Pub­ lic Library, the Library of Congress, the Yivo Institute of Jewish Research, the Tamiment Library, the British Museum, and the Lenin and Saltykov-Shchedrin Libraries in the Soviet Union. Finally, I am deeply grateful to the American Philosophical Society, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, the Ford Foundation, and the City University of New York for making my visits to these archives and libraries possible. υ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS NOTE: In the spelling of Russian names, I have adhered, by and large, to the transliteration system of the Library of Congress, without the soft sign and diacritical marks. Exceptions have been made (a) when other spellings have become more or less conventional (, , Alexander Herzen, Angelica Balabanoff, Trotsky, and Gorky), (b) in two cases where the persons involved spent most of their careers in the West and themselves used a different spelling in the Latin script (Alexander Schapiro and Boris Yelensky), and (c) in a few diminutive names (Fanya, Senya, Sanya). CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS V

INTRODUCTION 3

PART I: 1905

1. THE STORMY PETREL 9

2. THE TERRORISTS 35

3. THE SYNDICALISTS 72

4. AND ANTI- INTELLECTUALISM 91

PART II: 1917

5. THE SECOND STORM 123

6. THE OCTOBER INSURRECTION 152

7. THE ANARCHISTS AND THE BOLSHEVIK REGIME 171

8. THE DOWNFALL OF RUSSIAN ANARCHISM 204

EPILOGUE 234

CHRONOLOGY 255

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY 259

INDEX 291

ILLUSTRATIONS Following page 214

1. (International Institute of Social His­ tory) 2. Peter Kropotkin (Bund Archives) 3. "For Land and Liberty," St. Petersburg, 1905 (Columbia Special Collections) 4. "The Preparation of Bombs," 1905 (Columbia Russian Archive) 5. A Chernoe Znamia Meeting, Minsk, 1906 (Bund Archives) 6. Appeal for Imprisoned Anarchists, 1913 (New York Public Library) 7. Bakunin Centenary, Paris, 1914 (Columbia Russian Archive) 8. "The Bourgeois Order," Petrograd, 1917 (New York Public Library) 9. in Guliai-Pole (New York Public Library) 10. The Funeral of Kropotkin, February 1921 (New York Public Library) 11. Nikolai Rogdaev ( Aid Fund) 12. Lev Chernyi (Courtesy of Senya Fleshin) 13. AronBaroninSiberianExile, 1925 (LabadieCollection) 14. in Paris (Courtesy of Senya Fleshin) 15. Alexander Schapiro (International Institute of Social History) 16. Grigorii Maksimov in the United States (Courtesy of John Cherney)

THE RUSSIAN ANARCHISTS

INTRODUCTION

Although the idea of a can be traced back to ancient times, anarchism as an organized movement of social protest is a comparatively recent phenomenon. Emerging in Europe during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was, like liberalism and , primarily a response to the quickening pace of political and economic centralization brought on by the industrial . The anarchists shared with the liberals a common hostility to centralized government, and with the socialists they shared a deep hatred of the capitalist system. But they held no brief for the "reformism, parliamentarism, and unrelieved doctrinairism" of their competitors; nothing less than a clean sweep of "bourgeois civilization," with its growing regimentation and callous indifference to human suffering, could satisfy their "thirst for the absolute."1 Focusing their attack on the state and on capitalism as the chief institutions of domina­ tion and exploitation, the anarchists called for a social revolu­ tion that would abolish all political and economic authority and usher in a decentralized society based on the voluntary co­ operation of free individuals. In Russia at the turn of the century, as in Western Europe several decades earlier, it was the arrival of the industrial rev­ olution and the social dislocation it produced that called a mili­ tant anarchist movement into being. It is not surprising, then, that the Russian anarchists should have found themselves de­ bating many of the same questions that had long been pre­ occupying their comrades in the West, notably the relationship between the anarchist movement and the newly emergent work­ ing class and the place of terrorism in the impending revolution. Yet however much Russian anarchism owed its predecessors in Western Europe, it was deeply rooted in a long tradition of native radicalism stretching back to the peasant revolts of Stenka Razin and Emelian Pugachev, a tradition which was shortly to reach a climax in the of 1905 and 1917. The social creed propagated by the Russian anarchists was itself a curious

1Victor Serge, Mimoires d'un revolutionnaire (Paris, 1951), pp. 18-19. INTRODUCTION blend of western and indigenous elements; originating in the West with Godwin, Stirner, and Proudhon, it subsequently filtered through the prisms of Bakuninism, Kropotkinism, and native Populism, thus acquiring a distinctive Russian hue. The character of Russian anarchism, moreover, was shaped by the repressive political environment into which it had been born. Tsar Nicholas II, by thwarting all efforts by enlightened mem­ bers of Russian society to reform the autocracy and alleviate social and economic distress, drove his opponents to seek re­ dress in a frenzy of terrorism and violence. flourished and waned with the fortunes of the revolutionary movement as a whole. When rebellion erupted in 1905, the anarchists jubilantly hailed it as the spon­ taneous mass upheaval forecast by Bakunin a generation before, and ,they threw themselves into the fray with bombs and pistols in hand. However, failing to build up a coherent organization or to penetrate the expanding labor movement on any significant scale, they remained a loose collection of obstreperous little groups whose activities had a relatively minor impact on the course of the uprising. The episodic character of the opening sec­ tion of this book is, in part at least, a reflection of the disarray within the anarchist movement during its formative years. After the 1905 revolt was suppressed, the movement fell dormant until the First World War set the stage for a new uprising. Then, in 1917, the sudden collapse of the monarchy and the breakdown of political and economic authority which followed convinced the anarchists that the millennium had indeed arrived, and they applied themselves to the task of sweeping away what remained of the state and transferring the land and factories to the com­ mon people. The Russian anarchists have long been ignored by those who regard all history through the eyes of the victors. Political suc­ cess, however, is by no means the sole measure of the worth of a movement; the belief that triumphant causes alone should in­ terest the historian leads, as James Joll recently observed, to the neglect of much in the past that is valuable and curious, and narrows our view of the world.2 Thus if one is to appreciate the true range and complexity of the Revolution of 1917 and the

sJames Joll, The Anarchists (London, 1964), p. 11.