My Disillusionment in Russia

Name: My Disillusionment in Russia
Rating: 3.833 (6 reviews)
ISBN: Y9wEfVsA5b

By Emma Goldman

Publisher Description

In 1919, at the height of the anti-leftist Palmer Raids conducted by the Wilson administration, the anarchist activist and writer Emma Goldman was deported to the nascent Soviet Union. Despite initial plans to fight the deportation order in court, Goldman eventually acquiesced in order to take part in the new revolutionary Russia herself. While initially supportive of the Bolsheviks, with some reservations, Goldman’s firsthand experiences with Bolshevik oppression and corruption prompted her titular disillusionment and eventual emigration to Germany.

In My Disillusionment in Russia, Goldman records her travels throughout Russia as part of a revolutionary museum commission, and her interactions with a variety of political and literary figures like Vladimir Lenin, Maxim Gorky, John Reed, and Peter Kropotkin. Goldman concludes her account with a critique of the Bolshevik ideology in which she asserts that revolutionary change in institutions cannot take place without corresponding changes in values.

My Disillusionment in Russia had a troubled publication history, since the first American printing in 1923 omitted the last twelve chapters of what was supposed to be a thirty-three chapter book. (Somehow, the last chapters failed to reach the publisher, who did not suspect the book to be incomplete.) The situation was remedied with the publication of the remaining chapters in 1924 as part of a volume titled My Further Disillusionment in Russia. This Standard Ebooks production compiles both volumes into a single volume, like the original manuscript.

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My Disillusionment in Russia Reviews

3.5

Nahiyan

Created about 2 months ago

veja

Created over 2 years ago

smellincoffee

Created over 5 years ago

““Is there any change in the world? Or is it all an eternal recurrence of man’s inhumanity to man?” – Emma Goldman, 1921 In 1919, then-notorious anarchist Emma Goldman was exiled to still-revolutionary Russia, along with several other anarchists who had endorsed targeted assassins of those deemed political enemies — a tactic they called “Propaganda of the Deed”, but which today we’d understand more concisely as terrorism. Goldman later realized that such violence generally backfired (see Red Emma Speaks), but in 1919, she looked to the promise of revolution. As the title indicates, however, she found in Russia not a hopeful future but a thing whose new terrors were rivaled only by the return of familiar elements from the Tsars. My Disillusionment in Russia records her first year or so in Russia, traveling between different cities and meeting luminaries of the age – including Peter Kropotkin, Bertrand Russell, and Lenin. Having spent time in Russia as a girl – emigrating to America when she was thirteen – she still retained a workable use of the language, and was able to speak with men and women at all strata of society. Goldman eagerly sought out American emigres who had ventured to Russia to fight for their dream of the future, but she found many of them either crushed and disappointed, or – more foreboding – in prison. At every turn she encountered starving wretches much abused by the State, while a new aristocracy had ensconced itself. Those with “pull” did well for themselves – -getting choice appointments, free meal tickets without work, etc. Those without pull, or those who were ideological enemies of the State, could expect starvation, prison, exile, or execution. Some horrors came from intent, others from sheer incompetence: even a couple of years into the experiment, bureaucracy had grown so rapidly that getting anything done was virtually impossible. At first, as Goldman talked to people and took in the sights before her, she excused it as being a consequence of the western blockade, or the war, or perhaps even the violent birth inevitable in a revolution. Even seven months into her stay she was still holding on to some meager way to justify what was happening. By the time a year had passed, however, and she’d seen the vigorous persecution of anarchists and the absolute hostility towards actual democracy, let alone free speech – Goldman could no longer view the Bolsheviks as anything other than the same enemy she’d railed against in America. Most damning was their conviction that the ends justified all means. In the end, she could only wonder: is there anything to history, or is it merely a continual loop of man’s inhumanity to man? Goldman makes for an especially fascinating critic of the Soviet state because she shares much of their contempt for say, religion and capitalism, while at the same time holding the State itself in condemnation. For the future reader, it’s astonishing to see that so many of the inevitable failures of the soviet system ere present from the start: their inability to effectively manage an economy without market prices, the stagnation owing from so little incentive to work (aside from the minimum as not to get shot), the mere shifting of privilege from those with royal sanction to those with ideological sanction, etc. The horrors, too – the gulags, the executions – were present from the beginning, vouched for here Goldman just as they were by Solzhenitsyn’s research a few decades later, and documented in The Gulag Archipelago.”

Alan Rodriguez Tiburcio

Created almost 6 years ago

Daniel Ashton

Created about 6 years ago

About Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman (June 27 [O.S. June 15], 1869 – May 14, 1940) was an anarchist political activist and writer. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the 20th century.

Born in Kaunas, Russian Empire (now Lithuania), to a Jewish family, Goldman emigrated to the United States in 1885. Attracted to anarchism after the Chicago Haymarket affair, Goldman became a writer and a renowned lecturer on anarchist philosophy, women's rights, and social issues, attracting crowds of thousands. She and anarchist writer Alexander Berkman, her lover and lifelong friend, planned to assassinate industrialist and financier Henry Clay Frick as an act of propaganda of the deed. Frick survived the attempt on his life in 1892, and Berkman was sentenced to 22 years in prison. Goldman was imprisoned several times in the years that followed, for "inciting to riot" and illegally distributing information about birth control. In 1906, Goldman founded the anarchist journal Mother Earth.