Emma Goldman, A Century Later

[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]

In Warren Beatty’s 1981 epic Reds she was played by Maureen Stapleton, the veteran character actress who had a native warmth and charm with which she infused her part in the film, as she did almost all of her roles, whether on screen or on stage. In real life, Emma Goldman was, to put it mildly, no Maureen Stapleton: on the contrary, she was, throughout her adult life, a tough piece of work and a passionate advocate of revolutionary violence. Born in 1869 in Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, she moved as a child to Köningsberg (now Kaliningrad) in the German Empire, then to Saint Petersburg, and finally, in her teens, to Rochester, New York, where she became a factory worker.

By this time she had been deeply influenced by anarchist thought. Moving to New York City, she met fellow radicals and soon began giving ardent speeches in favor of revolution. After workers at a Carnegie steel plant in Homestead, Pennsylvania, went on strike, Goldman and her lover, Alexander Berkman, decided it would be a good idea to assassinate the plant’s manager, Henry Clay Frick. The plan failed, but while Berkman ended up behind bars, Goldman evaded prison and stepped up her work as a public speaker and fierce advocate of anarchism, not just in the U.S. but in Europe.

It was World War I that changed her life: imprisoned and then deported from America for opposing Wilson’s entry into the war, she ended up in Russia. “All my life,” she wrote in her illuminating 1923 book My Disillusionment in Russia, “Russia’s heroic struggle for freedom was as a beacon to me. The revolutionary zeal of her martyred men and women…was my inspiration in the darkest hours.” She cheered the February 1917 revolution. But although as an anarchist (she claimed) she had always resisted Marxism, she accepted, and defended as a “miracle,” the Bolshevik takeover in October, in no small part because of the Western Allies’ opposition to it.

But doubt soon began to gnaw at her. At a secret meeting of fellow anarchists in Russia, she heard factory workers tell of their “enslavement” and sailors charge that “the people they had helped to power…had become their masters.” She learned of the “Red Terror,” the ubiquitous censorship, “the over-filled prisons,” “the violence practised on the workers and peasants.” She listened, but argued herself out of believing any of it. “It sounded impossible; it could not be. Someone was surely at fault, but probably it was they, my comrades, I thought. They were unreasonable, impatient for immediate results. Was not violence inevitable in a revolution…?” No, she concluded, “I could not credit their stories.”

Even when a leading Bolshevik told her that freedom of speech, in which she believed, was “a bourgeois superstition,” she “felt that I had no right to judge. I was a newcomer.” When she met the famous writer Maxim Gorky, she asked him whether the Bolsheviks’ “persecution and terror” were “inevitable” or the product of “some fault in Bolshevism itself”; he replied that the Bolsheviks “were making mistakes, but they were doing the best they knew how.” Asking anti-Marxists about the prospect of elections, she was told that the Bolsheviks enjoyed the support of such a small minority of Russians that they would never hold a real and fair election, because they knew they would have no chance of winning it.

Still she couldn’t abandon her devotion to the cause. Meeting Lenin, she offered to lead an effort to export Bolshevik propaganda to the U.S. – a proposal he accepted with enthusiasm. When she encountered the legendary anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin, he said that to publicly criticize the Leninist regime, about which he had strong misgivings, would be to give comfort to the imperialist enemy. Besides, Kropotkin assured her, protest was “useless” because the government’s only concern “was to maintain itself in power”; compared to this all–encompassing goal, human lives and human rights were mere “trifles.” “We have always pointed out the effects of Marxism in action,” Kropotkin added. “Why be surprised now?”

Meanwhile Goldman continued to observe suffering, abuse, oppression. “Reason,” she writes, “urged me to look the social facts in the face.” Yet, having developed a “personal attachment” to many leading Communists, she still “refused to accept the facts,” telling herself that as long as there were such people in the party leadership, “there must be something vital in the ideas they represent. I held on tenaciously to the phantom I had myself created.”

A later meeting with Kropotkin also reassured her: despite everything, he insisted, the Russian Revolution was “even greater than the French, for it has struck deeper into the soul of Russia, into the hearts and minds of the Russian people.” The only problem was the current “governing class,” a “small political party” preoccupied with “false theories” and prone to “blunders” and “inefficiency.” What was needed, in his view, was less Marxism and more anarchism. She also met a number of American anarchists who’d been imprisoned by the Bolsheviks – but who still clung to their “faith in the Revolution,” an attitude that Goldman confesses to having found “truly sublime.” And a chemist who was a former member of the despised middle-class assured her that the “bourgeoisie” was “by no means dead” under the USSR but had “only been chloroformed for a while, so to speak, for the painful operation. But it is already recovering from the effect of the anesthetic and soon it will have recuperated entirely. It only needs a little more time.”

Nor did Goldman’s faith unravel when she saw groups of influential visitors from Western Europe arrive in St. Petersburg – which was now called Petrograd – only to see them being “entertained royally” by the regime, which treated them to “theatres, operas, ballets, and excursions,” even as the overwhelming majority of the Russian people “slaved and went hungry.” Meanwhile Goldman found herself “besieged…with appeals” from suffering Russians “to inform their relatives in America about their miserable condition….It was touching to see the people’s deep faith that their relatives in America would save them.”

It was not until 1921 that Goldman, having finally acknowledged to herself her long-suppressed disillusion, left the Soviet Union. Living in Germany, she wrote articles for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World that were collected in the books My Disillusionment in Russia and, in 1924, My Further Disillusionment in Russia. In the preface to the first volume, she writes that she had gone to Russia “possessed by the hope that I should find a new-born country, with its people wholly consecrated to the great, though very difficult, task of revolutionary reconstruction.” But what she found was, she ultimately had to confess, “grotesque,” a nation run by a “sinister machine.”

When she gave speeches to leftists in Berlin expressing her harsh criticism of the Leninist regime, her audiences were repulsed by what they saw as her unforgivable betrayal of their utopian dreams. And when she finally was permitted to return to the U.S. for a lecture tour in 1933, she was well received all over the place – except by Communists, who viewed her, of course, as a traitor to the faith. No, Goldman never came around to embracing democratic capitalism: before dying in 1940, in fact, she underwent a second disillusion when she took up the cause of Spanish anarchists during that country’s revolution only to be appalled when they allied with Stalin.

It is curious to ponder the fact that the second of Goldman’s two detailed books on life under Soviet Communism appeared exactly a century ago – but that whereas the evil empire that she so thoroughly exposed finally collapsed in ignominy in 1991, the ideology that governed it is alive and well now in the West, especially among the sons and daughters of the upper middle classes – who, if the revolution they agitate for were ever to take place, would surely be the first to be marched to the gallows. But then again, the chief lesson of Goldman’s fascinating memoirs is the enduring stubbornness of radical ideological faith – the remarkable ability with which a soul shaped by revolutionary dreams can refuse to accept the testimony of her own eyes and, if only out of a sheer desire for self-preservation, to shake off those dreams and face reality.