An Anarchist Revolution? Emma Goldman as an Intellectual Revolutionary
- An Anarchist Revolution?Emma Goldman as an Intellectual Revolutionary
When the Russian Revolution changed Russia in February 1917, turning it from an autocratic monarchy into a supposedly democratic republic, the well-known Russo-American anarchist Emma Goldman was cheering—not only because the revolution had ended a political system that was repressive and undemocratic, but also and especially because the masses of people that had taken their fate into their own hands.1 Regardless of her joy, Goldman, who in December 1919 was deported from the United States to Soviet Russia—with other radicals, due to the Palmer Raids—had hoped for a revolution on American soil rather than to be a revolutionary in exile.2 It was her work as a leading figure of the anti-militarist No-Conscription League that had brought her to trial, together with her friend and former lover Alexander Berkman, and once both had served a prison sentence until late 1919, they were deported as foreign radicals who had opposed the government and the U.S. war effort by conspiring with others, as the accusation and sentence would claim respectively.
Goldman had also supported the Russian Revolution since early 1917, as well as Lenin and the Bolsheviki, whom she considered to be fulfilling the revolutionary ideals that had been expressed by the Russian masses during the protests that led to the end of the Czarist regime.3 For Goldman, a revolution, in accordance with her anarchist ideals and theoretical considerations, needed [End Page 29] to secure freedom for all people and had to be based on equal decisions. In general, she therefore supported the council system, in a way, as a form of grassroots democracy, and Lenin's claim of "All power for the Soviets" made her consider the Bolsheviki to be acting in the name of the ideals of the February Revolution. Yet in Soviet Russia, Goldman would have to reconsider her ideas and find a way to not lose faith in a successful revolution that was supposed to bring the anarchist revolutionary ideas back to life.
Goldman's life and works have been discussed in a number of biographies that basically follow her story from Czarist Russia to the United States, and eventually to exile.4 Recent works have begun to look at different aspects of Goldman's life and thought in more detail, including her struggle against the U.S. state during the First World War,5 her views on the Russian Revolution,6 and her identity as an early or kind of proto-feminist,7 as well as an anti-Fascist in the interwar period.8 All these works analyzed a specific aspect of her life and impact and are in their sum important to critically question the role Goldman had played as a public intellectual in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The following analysis continues to this growing body of specialized Goldman literature, by considering and putting a special focus on her identity as an anarchist revolutionary who, although she did not develop a concrete theory of revolution of her own, through her experiences and writings established an anarchist understanding of revolutionary processes and expressed a demand for its democratic nature, that is, a grassroot democracy, in the future.
This article analyzes Goldman's theoretical reflections in relation to her deportation from the United States, her early exile in postrevolutionary Russia, and her later attempts to enlighten people about the corruption of the Russian Revolution by Lenin and the Bolsheviki. It thus offers a case study of an anarchist intellectual revolutionary and her thoughts about revolutions in a decisive time period of the 20th century when future perceptions of revolutionary processes and a very often negative view of revolutions as such had been generated by the Russian events. After a first section that looks at the revolutionary Goldman on American soil, the second section takes a look at her inner struggles with the Russian Revolution while in exile in Soviet Russia. The final part then emphasizes which ideas in relation to revolutionary processes Goldman had tried to advertise in other countries while continuing her life as a radical exile. [End Page 30]
