Emma Goldman’s disillusionment with the Soviet Union
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!
By the time Emma Goldman wrote these lines, she was profoundly disillusioned with the Soviet Union. But she wanted, as she wrote her autobiography later in life, to convey to her readers something of the enthusiasm that she had felt, on heading for the Soviet Union in 1919.
It was not that “Red Emma” was ever a Communist. As an anarchist, she held different views about government from those of the Communist party. But Goldman had long hoped to see her native Russia liberated from the czar, and at the time she chose to accompany her longtime comrage Alexander (“Sasha”) Berkman in his deportation, she hoped that the revolution had led to a better, freer Russia. All the more so because she left behind an America in the grip of a Red scare, imprisoning and deporting anarchists – not the land of liberty that she had once hoped America to be.
She had scarcely arrived in Russia when she got the first indications of trouble:
It had been considered unwise to allow him to give us his first impressions of Russie, in order not to prejudice us. “It! It!” both Sasha and I exclaimed. “Who is this 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?”
Still, Goldman and Berkman would spend a long time struggling with their contradictory impressions, before they finally concluded that the revolution in Russia had failed to bring the liberty they hoped for. They wanted to believe in the Soviet Union, they had friends urging them to overlook its failings, and it was, after all, surrounded by enemies – to which everyone pointed as the cause of current problems. And, too, there was a lot of unevenness in the government of the Soviet Union at this time. Goldman and Berkman would hear from anarchists in Petrograd that they were being suppressed, and find anarchists operating freely in Moscow. Well-known critics of the government would still be at large, while lesser ones were imprisoned. They would, as they later toured the country collecting documents for an archival project, find pockets of greater freedom. Goldman tried to chronicle all the contradictions she had seen honestly – from a community of Jews grateful to be freed from pogroms to shortages which could trivially have been alleviated were people not prevented from moving food on their own initiative from where it was plentiful to where it was scarce, to a special hospital for Communists, and thirty-four different grades of rations.
Now, the connection I make between Emma Goldman’s disillusionment with Communism and her attitudes toward political violence (the subject of my whole series) is this – Goldman was quite willing to approve violence of the oppressed against the state. She continued to believe in the rightness of the revolt which she saw the Communists betraying. But violence of the state against the people it governed was another matter. When people urged her to excuse or overlook such things, she resisted:
People raided, imprisoned, and shot for their ideas! The old and the young held as hostages, every protest gagged, iniquity and favoritism rampant, the best human values betrayed, the very spirit of the revolution daily crucified – were all these nothing by “grey, dull spots,” I wondered! I felt chlled to the marrow of my bones.
This is the last installment of my series on Emma Goldman. The other installments (as well as quotes from her on other topics, are in my anarchism category.