“The Unwilling Reformer”
Was Krushchev forced to liberalise by the Gulag revolts?
“The Unwilling Reformer”
An excerpt from an article in Nezavisimaya Gazeta by Igor Chubais, PhD (History), director of Russian Studies Institute at the Peoples’ Friendship University, Moscow
Translated by Szarapow [Thanks!]
http://www.ng.ru/ng_politics/2009-04-21/15_hrushev.html
[...] Let’s go back mentally to the mid-1950s and ask ourselves why the [Communist] Party which unanimously supported the great leader [Stalin] for so many years has one day condemned him just as unanimously? And if the people approved of this renunciation, then why did Nikita Khrushchev made his chief report secretly, at night, and why was the text first published – that is, informed the people of what it was exactly that the people supported – more than 30 years later? Why did Nikita Sergeyevich who had a reputation of being Stalin’s right-hand man had suddenly changed his views and anathemise his teacher? As we try to look into the questions that were ignored by the Soviet and post-Soviet social pseudo-science, we find three possible answers.
Approaching it formally we may think that the new party leader felt remorse, overcame himself and decided to repent. (Something similar happened in Hungary when the people’s revolution was headed by a former apparatchik Imre Nagy.) Alas, this explanation doesn’t apply to Khrushchev, if he really did repent the country would’ve been freed from censorship, collective farms, the Communist Party, the KGB, and the Hungarian revolution wouldn’t have been crushed by the Soviet tanks…
Or maybe the First Secretary’s about-turn could be explained by powerful external pressure? Alas, after WWII the worldwide international respect for Stalin’s native land has sharply grown, people of the many capitalist countries have been tuning in to Soviet propaganda, and their authorities listened to their own people’s voice.
We only have the last option left – powerful internal pressure on the authorities of the USSR appeared. And although the school books or TV won’t mention that, it’s high time it ceases to be a mystery…
After a rising of hundreds of prisoners at the Ust-Usinsk camp in 1942 all sorts of riots and protests were happening at the GULAG regularly. But after Stalin’s departure from this world they quickly gained new amplitude and scale. On May 25, 1953 in six camps near Norilsk a riot started which lasted for 72 days. No less than 20,000 people took part in the strike. More than half of them were activists of anti-communist national liberation movement in the West Ukraine, usually referred to in Soviet and post-Soviet press as Banderovites [after the nationalist leader Stepan Bandera]. These young lads underwent military training, were in good physical shape, and they trusted each other. They organised the first protest. One of the leaders of the riot was the ex-leader of the youth partiotic organisation of the West Ukraine, Yevgeniy Gritsak, [now in his 80s.] The prisoners had made domestic, economic and political demands from the administration.
Right after Norilsk, in August 1953 in the Vorkuta area a new, even more powerful uprising started. The protest was very well-organised, so the information about it is very hard to get even now, as all the documents are kept secret. But I got lucky, I listened to and remembered the address by one of the Vorkuta leaders, Igor Dobroshtan, to the first conference of Memorial Society in Moscow in October 1989. When combined with other sources, the following picture emerges. The core of the insurgents were former Vlasovites [from the Nazi collaborator Andrey Vlasov's army] and Ukrainian anti-communist patriots. Such a union proved too hard a nut to crack for the camp administration or for the thieves in law [Soviet criminal organisation similar to the mafia]. After secretly manufacturing piercing objects, the prisoners attacked the guards, killed them and got a hold of the correctional officers’ machine guns. One by one, all brigades were set free. Vlasovites made a decision to move onto Vorkuta to capture the city’s powerful radio station and address the country. En route, the 10,000-strong prisoner army freed several more camps. NKVD detachments that were sent to intercept them couldn’t stop the 100,000-strong column. The tanks sent against the rebels got stuck in the tundra. And only the military planes managed to stop and disperse the insurgents, twenty kilometres from the city. By that time all of Vorkuta’s party and state functionaries fled or were promptly evacuated. According to Igor Dobroshtan, at the first stage of the operation, at the demand of the rebels’ staff, some of the rising’s leaders were flown to Moscow for negotiations with the highest level leadership of the Party.
Third rising, by time and importance – in Kengir – started in May 1954 and lasted for 40 days. The information about it has been better known because Kengir was described by Solzhenitsyn in ‘The Gulag Archipelago.’ Nearly half of insurgents were members of OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) and UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army), its leader was the Jewish UPA member Mikhail Keller. Former “Forest Brothers” from the Baltics [anti-communist guerrillas in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia] and Vlasovites also took part.
It’s not hard to understand that there were reasons for Khrushchev, who would be getting his information from the KGB and in some cases from the insurgent leaders, to be desperate. The machine of authority was falling apart. It was becoming evident that if there were one or two more uprisings, the regime would collapse. Guards, taiga or Kremlin walls, – nothing would save the apparatchiks. The powers-that-be were forced into stopping the repression machine promptly – new arrests stopped, some prisoner-manned construction projects were suddenly halted, the dissolution and dismantling of the GULAG has started.
It was this process that was taking place in Summer and Autumn of 1953. I stress that the importance of the uprisings that were led by Gritsak and Dobroshtan wasn’t just about dismantling two of the GULAG camps. The prisoners’ revolution forced the authorities into dismantling the entire system of terror which was being created since October 1917. And by the time that the 20th Congress of the Communist Party has opened and the apparatchiks were first asked to officially condemn Stalin’s crimes keeping Lenin’s name untouched, nearly all of the political prisoners were already free.
If we analyse the decisions that the Kremlin made after Norilsk and Vorkuta, we get another proof of the role these uprisings played.
Why in the spring of 1954 the campaign of reclamation of virgin and derelict lands started and 2 million young, active people were sent to the semi-cultivable steppes of Kazakhstan (when the country had the Black Earth Belt and even the subtropics)? The project was not about economics, it was all about politics. Reclamation of virgin lands was the launch for the mechanism of indirect repressions. Khrushchev very calmly took the fact that his original illusions – that the virgin lands would solve Soviet Union’s food problem and allow to start exporting grain – weren’t realised. The other, most important yet unannounced task was being carried out successfully: by pushing the most active part of society into very tough conditions, into distant districts under propagandists’ fanfare, the party apparatus has expertly isolated potential young rebels, prevented and transformed possible political protest into safe mass Sisyphean labour. (If the authorities really wanted to sort out the agricultural problem they would’ve privatised the land and continued Stolypin’s reforms.)
And why in the latter half of the 1950s did the USSR start mass housing construction, why Khrushchev’s five-storey houses appeared? It was because millions of people returned from the camps. It wasn’t possible to live in the already overcrowded communal flats anymore. After stopping mass repressions, in 1957 the party was forced to make a decision on starting mass residential housing construction.
Camp uprisings have significantly changed Soviet Union’s foreign policy. In 1956 the last German and Japanese POWs were allowed to go home, and in 1955 the USSR suddenly signed a treaty with an openly non-communist country, Austria, about its neutrality and returned its troops home (so they wouldn’t flee.) During the first ten post-war years Finland always feared that they’ll be forced to join the socialist camp and obliged to construct a better future. But the Kremlin ceased to give its attentive advice, and the peace-loving USSR even abandoned its navy base on Finland’s Porkkala peninsula. (The concession agreement, signed in 1947 for 50 years, was denounced in 1955.) I will finally add that the limited liberalisation and criticism of Stalinism which were taking place under Moscow’s command in the post-Stalin years in Poland and Hungary, to a lesser degree in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania (pre-Ceausescu) and Mongolia – that was also due to fear of potential and real Dobroshtans and Gritsaks.
On the other hand, it was after the 20th Congress that Moscow lost support of the fraternal Chinese Communist Party. Beijing had no reason to repent and “self-liberalise” because their version of the KGB was, alas, dealing with any rioting well enough. The People’s Republic keeps the pictures and the personality cult of Chairman Mao not due to “political wisdom” as the post-Soviet spin doctors tell us, it’s just that it hasn’t gotten hot enough yet. It was the same set of factors that led to a conflict between Moscow and Tirana in the latter half of the 1950s. The communist dictators Enver Hoxha and Haxhi Lleshi were already suspicious of the increasing influence of Yugoslavia’s liberal socialism on the Socialist People’s Republic of Albania. When the thaw was announced by the Kremlin, the small Balkan nation found itself under an even more brutal tyranny of its leaders who naturally sided with Beijing against Khrushchev.
The picture would be incomplete if a few more touches wouldn’t be added. The GULAG uprisings put a crack in the totalitarian regime but didn’t break it. The Politburo had to permanently abandon physical terror as its main strategy. For a short time the political atmosphere in the country became cleaner and freer. But the thaw, short-lived and dangerous for the authorities, was soon stopped, and a switch to a new kind of control started. Information censorship, as opposed to physical [elimination] has become the main element of oppression. The society was deprived of an opportunity to receive and create any sort of independent information, you could open your mouth but the only words permitted would be “Glory to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union!” [...]
Eisenberg the Anarchist, from the prison memoirs of Alex Weissberg
[This account is set in Kharkov prison Kholodnaya Gora, in June 1938. The Brikhalovka is the transit cell for prisoners being taken to interrogation (and hence source of information). The ‘conveyor’ consisted of threats and abuse, sleep deprivation and being forced to maintain a single position.]
–
Prisoners who came back from the Brikhalovka told us a fantastic story about an anarchist named Eisenberg. The man hadn’t carried on any counter-revolutionary or anarchist activity, of course, but he had openly clung to his old ideas. He was a Jewish tailor, and when still an apprentice he had accepted the ideas of Kropotkin and Bakunin. He upheld them now with Talmudic obstinacy. They described him to us. He was a small, wiry man with burning eyes, reminiscent of an Indian fakir. There wasn’t a scrap of fat and very little lean on his body, but he was a powerful little fellow. His muscles were small and hard, but very strong. He was fifty-five but every day he did his physical exercises with great conscientiousness.
‘So you’re an anarchist, Eisenberg?’ said the examiner at their first interview.
‘That’s right, Citizen Examiner.’
The examiner was surprised. Although they all confessed to their crimes in the end they usually made some show of protesting their innocence at first.
‘You’re very wise to confess at once without making any trouble. That means you’ll get a lighter sentence. Who recruited you?’
‘Prince Peter Kropotkin, Citizen Examiner.’
‘Don’t make jokes here, man. This is a very serious matter. Who recruited you? Who brought you into the organization?’
‘ I am an individual anarchist, Citizen Examiner.’
‘Maybe you are, but I want to know all about your counter-revolutionary organization.’
‘Citizen Examiner, you seem to be new, otherwise you’d know that individual anarchists haven’t an organization. We don’t believe in it. That’s our whole point. It’s in our programme. We form a community of like-minded individuals. No one is subordinate to anyone else.’
‘Go and … your grandmother with your community of like-minded individuals,’ said the examiner irritably. ‘If you don’t tell me all about your organization at once I’ll break every bone in your body, you counter-revolutionary son of a bitch.’
Eisenberg rose and spoke slowly and solemnly:
‘Citizen Examiner, you have insulted me. For that reason I shall answer no more of your questions.’
The Citizen Examiner shrieked and raved. He punched Eisenberg in the face. He made him put his hands above his head and stand with his face to the wall, but it was no good. Not a word could he get out of his prisoner. Finally he began to temporize.
‘Eisenberg, now you’re not going to sabotage the examination, are you? That would be an anti-Soviet demonstration, and it would end very badly for you. Now be reasonable.’
Eisenberg made no answer.
‘Eisenberg, you don’t want me to call for assistance, do you? They’d beat you up so that your own mother wouldn’t know you.’ Eisenberg turned round.
‘Citizen Examiner, you may beat me up, as you say. That’s your trade. You’re a policeman, and I’m a prisoner. I was seven years in the Katorga [hard labour] under the Tsar. They beat me up too, but they didn’t insult me. I’m a human being just as you are, and I have a soul just as you have. You have no right to humiliate my personality.’
The examiner kept him standing with his face to the wall for six hours. Then Eisenberg said quietly:
‘Citizen Examiner, I’m tired now. With your permission I’ll sit down.’
And without waiting for permission he sat down on the floor. The examiner jumped up and began to punch him.
‘What! You son of a bitch, you think you can resist the Soviet power! If you don’t get up at once we’ll beat you to a jelly.’
Eisenberg took no notice and remained sitting down. The examiner then fetched two of his men. Eisenberg still made not the slightest attempt to resist. They belaboured him for an hour and it seemed to have no effect on him at all. The other prisoners who came from the Brikhalovka told strange stories about him. They declared that he was able to make himself impervious to all feeling. Finally the G.P.U. strong-arm men noticed that his eyes were quite fixed and expressionless. This we were told by one of the secretaries of the G.P.U. who was in the room at the time and who was later himself arrested and put into our cell. Then they called a doctor, who examined the prisoner and reported that his heart was perfectly sound and functioning normally but that his general physical nature was abnormal. As he really seemed to be quite impervious to pain they gave up beating him and organized a ‘Conveyor.’
This emaciated, under-sized Jewish tailor set up an all-time record in the history of the G.P.U. He survived an almost uninterrupted ‘Conveyor’ lasting for thirty-one days and thirty-one nights. I cannot understand how that was physically possible, but since then I have been less sceptical of the stories I have heard about the performances of Indian fakirs.
With deep excitement and interest the whole Brikhalovka and the whole of Kholodnaya Gora followed the battle between the all-powerful G.P.U. and this one man. The ‘Conveyor’ was interrupted twice in the twenty-four hours and Eisenberg was sent below to a cell. There he would throw off his clothes and lie down flat on the floor whilst two of his fellow prisoners rubbed him with wet towels, massaged him and stuck a cigarette in his mouth. Then he ate his meal and slept for ten minutes. After that he was called up again.
His examiner was in despair.
‘But Eisenberg,’ he pleaded, ‘why don’t you be sensible? Look, you admit the chief thing, which is being a counter-revolutionary anarchist, so why hold out so obstinately over this question of your organization? Now tell me who your fellow conspirators were, there’s a good fellow.’
‘I am an anarchist, and I always have been, but I am not a counter-revolutionary, and I never have been. I have fought and worked for the Revolution all my life. But I am an enemy of the State. I am an enemy of all States, including your State. The State and its repressive system is the cause of all social evil. When the State disappears the people will be able to breathe freely for the first time in history.’
‘Don’t be silly, Eisenberg. You can’t get on without a State. That’s logical. What would you do with criminals, for instance?’
‘Crime will disappear with the State.’
They could do nothing with him. As I see things his outlook was wrong, but he clung to it as the most important thing in life. He was the only one amongst the 12,000 of us who fought for an idea. The rest of us were just unfortunate victims of oppression. He was the one fighter against oppression.
‘Some day truth will triumph,’ he would say again and again to his cell mates. ‘Our sufferings will not be in vain.’
It was he who won the unequal struggle. He survived the record ‘Conveyor’ without confessing. After thirty-one days and nights of it he had them beaten. They broke off the examination and sent him to Moscow-it was said to a lunatic asylum.
[Note on names]
Sometimes I have been obliged to change not only names but also accompanying circumstances in order to shield people who are still within reach of the G.P.U., though I am well aware how unreliable such precautions are. World public opinion is one of the sore points of the regime, and in this respect the G.P.U., whose arm is long, spares no efforts. For this reason I have even felt myself obliged to leave out some things altogether. But although I may have altered names and places in some instances, the essentials have remained. After all, it is of no consequence that a man I call Lebedev was really Lebedinsky, that he came from Stalingrad and not from Sverdlovsk, and that he was really only thirty and not forty.
A very great deal of space is devoted to my talks with the examiners and with my fellow prisoners. In most cases I have used the direct form of speech. It may be objected that it is impossible to reconstruct a conversation accurately after the passage of ten years. But the same is true of a conversation that took place only ten days before. Thus the form of direct speech I have chosen is a matter of convenience only and I make no claim that it conveys absolute verbal accuracy.
As far as the statements of my fellow prisoners reproduced here are concerned, I was naturally not always in a position to check their accuracy. However, the atmosphere of a prison quickly teaches a man to judge the character and credibility of a fellow prisoner. Most of the experiences were typical and they were materially confirmed by constant repetition.
When all these reservations have been made I can claim with confidence that the future will confirm the objectivity of my report and the accuracy of my interpretation of what happened.
In any case, I propose to describe what happened accurately, without exaggeration and without minimization. (page 15)
from Conspiracy of Silence by Alex Weissberg (Hamish Hamilton, 1952)
New Kate Sharpley Library website
The Kate Sharpley Library website – www.katesharpleylibrary.net – is now bigger and better.
The Kate Sharpley Library – dedicated to recording and restoring the history of Anarchism – has redesigned and expanded its website at www.katesharpleylibrary.net
The new design means you can now explore the website by author, translator or subject. Subjects include Anarchism, Lives (for biographies, autobiographies and obituaries), Reviews as well as events like the Paris Commune or Spanish Revolution and Civil War..
All back issues of the KSL bulletin are available in HTML and PDF format.
We are now able to take paypal payments for orders or donations.
The many new texts on the website include:
Libertad Ródenas by R. Montsant del Priorat
Octavio Alberola interviewed about Cuba (2004)
Antonino Dominguez (from Against all tyranny! Essays on anarchism in Brazil) by Edgar Rodrigues
The first guerrillas In Cantabria by Antonio Téllez Solà
Freie Arbeter Shtime by Shelby Shapiro
A voice from Texas [on the Haymarket martyrs] by Ross Winn (1895)
And lots of reviews
We welcome ideas for what else you’d like to see or feedback on what’s already there.
the Kate Sharpley Library collective
www.katesharpleylibrary.net
Russian Anarchist letters in Amsterdam
[Some information on Russian anarchists whose letters are preserved in the Senya Fleshin (Fléchine) archive at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam.]
Introduction
If you want to know more about Bolshevik persecution of the Russian anarchist movement or anarchist solidarity with it, you should read the Bulletin of the Joint Committee for the defense of revolutionists imprisoned in Russia (1923-26) and the Bulletin of the relief fund of the International Working Men’s Association for anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists imprisoned or exiled in Russia (1926-31). They published contemporary eyewitness accounts of the repression, which makes them a vital source of information. Inevitably they’re a partial source: they couldn’t publish everything. Also, they chose to protect the identities of their comrades inside Russia. Correspondents and other prisoners and exiles are often just referred to by a single initial, which makes identifying them a challenge.
The International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam hold the Fléchine (Fleshin), Yelensky and Maksimov (Maximoff) archives. These archives are full of documents which would help reconstruct both the Bolshevik crushing of the anarchist movement, and the anarchist response. Many of these files are given a quick and basic listing: “Illegal letters from Russia. 1922-1925″ (Fléchine papers, folder 80); “file of letters from Russian exiles 1923-1927″ (Boris Yelensky papers). But in the Fléchine papers the letters dated 1926-32 written to Senya Fléchine and Jacques Doubinsky in connection with the Relief Fund of the International Working Men’s Association have been listed by name and date. They fill 31 folders. Presumably the bulk of these letters are in Russian, but some might be in Yiddish or even English. What follows is a listing of who these people are, a cross section of the Russian anarchist movement [nb, of course, it's possible that some of the unidentified people are 'non=party', SRs, etc.]. That’s one reason to produce this list. But it’s also a signpost to further research. Translating these letters would fill some of the gaps in what we know from the Bulletins of the Joint Committee and IWMA Relief Fund. Beyond that, what else might we learn? What will we hear from anarchist voices that have been silenced for seventy years?
The International Institute of Social History website is at: http://www.iisg.nl/
Memorial website (in Russian) is at: http://socialist.memo.ru/
NB names are transliterated from Russian twice: ISO (which the IISG/IISH use) and Library of Congress-style.
See the list of names at http://katesharpleylibrary.pbwiki.com/Russian+Anarchist+letters+in+Amsterdam
The Anarchists in Russia [Anarchist prisoners in Russia, circa-1972]
Recently the Union of Former Zionist Prisoners (a Russian Jewish organisation in Israel) met in Habimah (Tel Aviv) for its annual convention. It was adressed by Absorbption Minister Natan Peled, who called for economic attacks upon the USSR (something which does not move their policies: he obviously does not understand the State Socialism of Russia has, after all, dispensed internally with many capitalist myths, even though replacing them with new ones). Secretary of the Union, Mr Yehiel Perelovitch, called for a ‘permanent petition’ of free peoples – a typical liberal gesture.
From the floor, however, Mrs Tevye Weinberger made an attack on such policies and called for direct action inside Russia, which was denounced from the platform as provocative. Mrs Weinberger said that “the anarchist prisoners in Russia stick together and fight for what they think. They will never get what they want but we are only asking to get out … we can succeed.”
Asked later by a reporter whether in fact there were any dissidents in Russia, Mrs Weinberger said, “Trotskyists, socialists, anarchists, you find them all in the prison camps. I mentioned the anarchists because I was witha group of anarchist women. There are students, there are grandmothers … they have been there since before Stalin.”
It is not clear if Mrs Weinberger meant to say that there are some individual prisoners still in prison from before Stalin, which is possible though it hardly seem credible (nearly fifty years) or if she just meant, what is a fact, that anarchists were in Russian jails under the Tsar and under Lenin. It is interesting to note, however, that the Russian Anarchists, long cut off from contact with the outside world, still survive and fight (“there are students…”) and that Mrs Weinberger approved of their direct actionist methods, though exactly what they were did not come over in the report in the Israel papers, understandable in the present climate of opinion there.
“Black Flag” vol. 2, no.14, October 1972, p.16
Presumably written by Albert Meltzer
A Grand Cause: The hunger strike and the deportation of Anarchists from Soviet Russia (Review)
Anybody who still has any lingering doubts that communism and anarchism are one and the same thing, needs to read this excellent Kate Sharpley Library pamphlet. “The Russian anarchist movement did not disappear in a puff of logic once the Bolshevik dictatorship over the proletariat arrived.” The Russian revolution, a largely libertarian revolt from below which created autonomous free Soviets, soon ended in the formation of a party dictatorship controlled by the Bolsheviks. The anarchists rapidly became the disposable elements of this failed libertarian revolution. They were rounded up, imprisoned, shot and sent into exile into the newly created gulags. The Bolsheviks understood that their dictatorship would not last if libertarian socialist revolutionaries got the upper hand.
This pamphlet catalogues one tiny portion of that titanic struggle between libertarian socialism and an inherently authoritarian group like the Bolsheviks who used the rhetoric of communism to impose their will on the Russian people. This pamphlet brings to life people who have been forgotten for over ninety years. It is a meticulously researched pamphlet. The footnotes give a detailed account of what happened to many activists who have been written out of the pages of Russian history. A Grand Cause is the beginning of a much more ambitious project to bring the Russian anarchists’ sacrifices back into the public arena.
You can obtain a copy of this fascinating pamphlet from Kate Sharpley Library
BM HURRICANE, London WC1 N 3XX, UNITED KINGDOM www.katesharpleylibrary.net
If you want further information about the Anarchists in the Gulag, Prison and Exile Project, try http://gulaganarchists.wordpress.com or the Memorial Society of Moscow http://socialist.memo.ru A good contact at this web site is Anatoly Dubovik from the anarchist section.
A Grand Cause: The hunger strike and the deportation of Anarchists from Soviet Russia
G. P. Maximoff with a biographical essay by Anatoly Dubovik, translated by Szarapow.
Kate Sharpley Library – Anarchists in the Gulag Prison and Exile Project 2008
ISBN 9781873605745 Anarchist Library No. 20
- Text from The Anarchist Age Weekly Review, number 810, 27th October to 2nd November 2008.
ALEXEI BOROVOI: A Biography by Anatoly Dubovik
Alexei Alexeyevich Borovoi was born on October 30, 1875 in Moscow in a general’s family. However, he wasn’t attracted to a military career, and after graduating from Moscow University he stayed on to teach at the Faculty of Law. Borovoi’s sphere of interests was pretty wide, even in his student years and included history, philosophy, political economy, pedagogy, music, and literature. He had an interest in Marxism which he greatly respected throughout his life.
In the Autumn of 1904 Borovoi was visiting Paris on a professional business trip. A comprehensively educated person, he was intellectually ready to accept anarchist teachings, however, he came to it quite on his own, and quite unexpectedly even for himself: “No one taught anarchism to me, didn’t persuade me, didn’t infect me,” – Borovoi remembered much later – “Suddenly, out of some unknown depths a great, well-formed, enlightening, united thought was born in me. With unusual clarity, with victorious cogency a feeling of an attitude that was new to me was born in me… I stood up from the bench in the Luxembourg Garden as an enlightened, passionate, uncompromising anarchist, and I still remain one.”
As an anarchist, Borovoi belonged for most of his life to the individualist current, however, he never shared the extremities of individualism such as the philosophical systems of Max Stirner and Friedrich Nietzsche and always remained outside any strict confines of movements and currents. But it is doubtless that in his person anarchism has gained, to quote later researchers, “an adherent who was original, romantic and devoid of any dogmatism,“ a brilliant writer whose “magnificent figurativeness, daring fabulousness of style and speech betray a poet, an artist of the word, rather than what is commonly known as a theorist.”
In the Autumn of 1905, when the revolution that had started a few month before was at its peak, Borovoi returned to Russia and resumed work at Moscow University. In April 1906 he read Russia’s first legal, open lecture on anarchism which was a big success with the intelligentsia – “Social ideals of modern humanity.”
The early Borovoi is characterized by an original synthesis of Marxist views on sociology and history with an individualist philosophy that was close to Stirnean views. He regarded the history of civilization as a succession of social systems that replace one another and are notable for the ever increasing degree of personal freedom. Feudal absolutism is replaced by the bourgeois regime with democratic freedoms and development of machinery and science. It will inevitably be replaced by state socialism which will in a revolutionary manner destroy the exploiters, the propertied classes, establish state control over all economic and social life, and deal with social problems such as poverty and unemployment. However, at the same time it will retain the spiritual enslavement of humanity by the “all-embracing authority of socialist chauvinism.” The development of humanity will be crowned by the society of unlimited individual freedom naturally replacing socialism, – Anarchy. Young Borovoi considered individualism to be the only consistent anarchist system and saw in Kropotkin’s anarchist communism, first of all, an internal contradiction between the individual and society, the collective, as well as a denial of absolute personal freedom. Sometimes he even proclaimed that communism and anarchism are mutually exclusive concepts. Borovoi referred to the search for the way to combine the individual’s absolute freedom with the interests of the entire society as the “scientific theory of anarchism” and viewed it as his chief task as a theorist. He saw the most promising ways to achieve that in the maximum development of science and machinery which was supposed to cause complete abundance of material welfare.
Starting from 1906, Borovoi lectured on anarchism in different Russian cities and took part in the activities of the Logos publishing house which printed anarchist literature without preliminary [government] permission. He also wrote several articles for an “Individualist” collection. The lectures often took the form of anti-government propaganda, and Borovoi was even sentenced to a month in gaol for one.
But Borovoi himself remained unconnected with the immediate revolutionary struggle and anarchist organisations of any sort, so the numerous Russian anarcho-communists and syndicalists viewed him as a faux anarchist who was in fact advocating parliamentary democracy in a social-democratic spirit. Borovoi was particularly scathingly attacked at the Amsterdam International anarchist congress in the Summer of 1907. One of Russia’s leading anarchists Vladimir Zabrezhnev in his report “Advocates of individualist anarchism in Russia” referred to his anti-communist and individualist theories as “Nitzschean phrase-mongering.”
In late 1910 Borovoi faced the threat of a court case related to the anti-state direction of the Logos publishing house. Such a crime was punishable by up to a year in gaol, so he preferred to escape abroad. After settling in France, Borovoi got a job teaching political economy and history at the Russian Popular University and at the Free College of Social Sciences, the latter of which was founded by French anarchists. His personal acquaintance with them got Borovoi interested in the theories and practices of the French proletarian syndicalist movement and caused him to fundamentally revise his own individualist attitude. In his lectures Borovoi has now claimed support for revolutionary syndicalism which denied parliamentarism and aimed for the reconstruction of the society via social revolution. He still remained quite sceptical of classic anarchist communism though.
In 1913 the Czarist government proclaimed an amnesty for political criminals to coincide with the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty. Upon his return to Russia Borovoi worked as a social and political journalist for St. Petersburg and Moscow magazines. He was also preparing a new work dedicated to the syndicalist movement. The result of this work, the book Revolutionary Creativity and Parliament, was published in 1917.
The second Russian revolution which started in February 1917 was greeted not just by a philosopher who dreamt of abstract ideals of anarchy. Borovoi was then an active propagandist who took part in the practical work of organisations and groups of like-minded people. As early as April 1917 Borovoi co-organised the syndicalist Federation of Unions of Workers of Intellectual Labour which united teachers, doctors etc. He also edited their paper Klich (The call). Unfortunately, the Federation didn’t gain much support from the Russian intelligentsia and broke up in late 1917. In the spring of 1918 Borovoi initiated the creation of the Union of Ideological Propaganda of Anarchism and its printed organ, daily newspaper Zhizn (Life). Borovoi’s comrades in the Union were veterans of the revolutionary anarchist movement: Pyotr Arshinov, Iuda Grossman-Roschin, and our old pal Vladimir Zabrezhnev who criticised Borovoi so passionately just ten years ago.
As we’d already mentioned, individualism was inherent in Borovoi’s ideas throughout his life, and his 1917 and 1918 articles, as well as his new book Anarchism bear a remarkable imprint of these views. Denying any authority and coercion, the writer never fails to emphasise that “for anarchism never, under no circumstances, will harmony between the personal and social principles be achieved. Their antinomy is inevitable. But it is the stimulus for continuous development and perfection of the individual, for denial of any ultimate ideals.” Thus for Borovoi the chief importance is given not to Anarchism as the aim but to Anarchy as the continuous quest for the aim: “No social ideal, from the point of view of anarchism, could be referred to as absolute in a sense that supposes it’s the crown of human wisdom, the end of social and ethical quest of man.”
Zhizn newspaper was closed by the Soviet authorities in the Summer of 1918 along with other organs of anarchist propaganda. A year later his comrades in the Union of Ideological Propaganda left the organisation. Some joined the Bolsheviks, and some, like Arshinov, joined the mass anarchist movement of the Ukraine, the Makhnovschina. Borovoi remained the Union’s sole leader but he didn’t stop working for it. As late as 1922 he organised lectures on the history and theory of anarchism, and participated in publishing classic anarchist literature. Borovoi actually propagated anarchism among the students of Moscow University and other institutes of higher education. He lectured on the history of socialism, the workers’ movement, the newest trends of capitalism etc. It has to be mentioned that his high standing as a scientist was confirmed by the granting of the status of professor by the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Moscow State University in 1919.
Borovoi’s views kept changing over time. By the early 1920s they have shed the remainder of individualism and gotten closer to classic anarchism. Borovoi himself referred to his views as “anarcho-humanism.” Now he accepted a possibility of conciliation between social and personal interests on the basis of socialist collectivism. Borovoi’s views of the time were set out in his most thought-through and deep book, 1921’s Individual and Society in the Anarchist Worldview.
In late 1921, using the attempt of the students of the Communist University to organise an open debate “Anarchism vs. Marxism” (the two contrary ideologies were to be defended by Borovoi and the member of the Bolshevik Central Committee Nikolai Bukharin) as a pretext, the authorities ousted Borovoi from the Moscow State University – he was accused of being anti-Soviet. In Autumn 1922 he was stripped of his status as a professor and banned from teaching. After that Alexei Alexeyevich had to master the profession of an economist. But even in the 1920s, when legal anarchism was being put under increasing pressure, he continued to play an active role in the anarchist and social movement. He worked as an editor at the anarcho-syndicalist publishing house Golos Truda (Voice of Labour), was a member of several historical societies and the Scientific section of All-Russian Public Committee (VOK) for the immortalization of Peter Kropotkin. His participation in VOK was particularly significant as it permitted him to lecture at the Kropotkin Museum which until 1929 remained the only legal refuge of anarchism in the land of Soviets. Borovoi was the secretary of the Scientific section, and in 1925 he was elected as the deputy chairman of the Committee.
In the Summer of 1927 a group of veteran Moscow anarchists (including Borovoi) attempted to organise a campaign to support fellow anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti who were sentenced to death in the USA. They expected that the campaign, aside from its immediate purpose, would permit them to openly propagate anarchist ideas as well as to raise their voice in support of exiled and gaoled anarchists in the USSR. The anarchists repeatedly applied for a permission for a solidarity meeting from the Moscow city Soviet but in the end it was denied.
However, the short existence of the Bureau for the Defense of Sacco and Vanzetti played an important role in consolidating the Moscow anarchists. Around veterans such as Vladimir Barmash, Alexei Borovoi, Nikolai Rogdayev, and Vladimir Khudolei some of the “old guard” who didn’t abandon their views as well as youths who were just discovering anarchism started to gather.
They formed an underground group which established connections with the staff of the Paris-based anarchist magazine Delo Truda (Cause of Labour) which was published by Arshinov and Nestor Makhno. After studying the famous Platform they took it as the foundation of their views. Borovoi’s practical participation in the activities of the Barmash-Khudolei group included compiling the collection of articles Ten Years of the October [Revolution] which gave a political and economic analysis of the first decade of Bolshevik rule. The text of the collection was illegally transferred abroad and published as a pamphlet in Paris. Borovoi also organised the struggle against “anarcho-mystics” – “an ugly outgrowth on the body of anarchism,” as he characterized this “esoteric” teaching which attempted to replace the scientific atheism and class approach of Kropotkin and his followers with vague “Templar” legends about angels and demons and reactionary arguments about the uselessness of revolutionary struggle and any attempts to violently transform society.
In early 1929 Delo Truda published a collective letter by the Moscow anarchists who greeted the activity of the magazine and the group that published it as the only thing that can lead revolutionary anarchism out of crisis. The letter was co-signed by Borovoi, and such an appraisal of the activities of the Platformists – who were in favour of a single centralised organisation of anarchist communists, of comradely discipline and responsibility; all of which were things ten years ago unthinkable for Borovoi – signified the final break with individualist anarchism.
In May 1929 Borovoi was arrested by the OGPU, along with other Moscow comrades. They were accused of “active work to create illegal anarchist groups in Moscow, distribution of anti-Soviet literature, connections with anarchist emigration.” On July 12 the Special Conference of the OGPU sentenced him to three years’ exile to Vyatka.
Liberation from this exile didn’t bring any serious easing of the conditions of life for the old anarchist. The security organs forbade Borovoi from living in the large cities and limited his choice of jobs. He spent the last years of his life in Vladimir working as an accountant, in isolation and poverty.
Alexei Alexeyevich died on November 21, 1935.
The Russian State Archive of Literature and Art still holds Borovoi’s sizeable personal archives. It includes a manuscript of his book about Fyodor Dostoevsky, correspondence with Andrei Bely, Alexander Blok, Valery Bryusov, Boris Pasternak, Alexander Chayanov and many other artists and scientists, plus unfinished memoirs. One day Borovoi’s unpublished works on philosophy, history, anarchism will be extracted from the archives…
Anatoly Dubovik, 2008. Translated by Szarapow.
From KSL: Bulletin of the Kate Sharpley Library #55. PDF at www.katesharpleylibrary.net
One of the ‘Bandits’ (In Memory of Comrade Khodounov)
During the wrecking of the Moscow Anarchist Federation [April 1918], the Bolshevik authorities executed one of the Federation’s most active workers, Comrade Khodounov.
He was known as an honest and sincere comrade not only among Anarchists but wherever he had an opportunity to work.
He was one of the workers of the Telephone shops and as such he enjoyed high confidence among his fellow employees. He organized an Anarchist group at the factory. The workers elected him as their representative to the Soviet of one of the Moscow boroughs.
During the October days comrade Khodounov organized a fighting unit consisting of Anarchist workers living in various districts of Moscow. He spent several sleepless night at the sessions of the Soviet which at that time were held day and night. And he was one of the first to announce to the Federation the joyful news of the final victory of the workers.
Due to his energy the Telephone shops passed into the hands of the workers. As one of the organizers of this enterprise, comrade Khodounov threw himself into his work, spending days and nights at his task, neglecting even the most necessary rest.
When the food crisis came, the workers of the Telephone shops designated comrade Khodounov as the delegate of their purchasing committee which went south to obtain bread. Khodounov came back to Moscow after a six week absence. That was just on the eve of the break-up of the Federation by the Bolshevik authorities.
Among the victims of this savage, unwarranted assault upon the revolutionary organization of Moscow Anarchists was also comrade Khodounov. He was arrested as “a bandit”, dragged to the Criminal Department of the Police and booked as an underworld character. This was done in spite of the fact that even the Bolsheviks paid homage to him as a member of the Borough Soviet and as an active worker of the Central Soviet.
On the way to the prison this “bandit” was shot. And then the Bolsheviks keep on affirming that they are combating only the casual criminal element among the Anarchist and not Anarchism as an honest, ideological movement.
(“Uralsky Nabat”, No. 2, 1919).
The Guillotine at Work p.388-9
From KSL: Bulletin of the Kate Sharpley Library #55. PDF at www.katesharpleylibrary.net
A Letter from Yarchuk
Dear Comrades:
In one of the recent numbers of the “Freie Arbeiter Stimme” I learned that the American Anarchist Red Cross has resumed its activities.
I heartily congratulate the comrades who again have undertaken this most important work.
In the days when Tzarism reigned in Russia, the American Anarchist Red Cross was famous for its energetic work in helping the Russian comrades persecuted at that time.
Hundreds of Anarchists who were tortured in the Tzaristic prisons and fortresses, all those revolutionists who have gone through the great inquisition in their fight for freedom, found great help and relief in the devoted work of their comrades of the American Anarchist Red Cross.
The revolution came. The doors of the prisons opened, the tortures of the exiled were at an end.
A great number of revolutionists left the cold, solitary, miserable Siberia, and returned to revolutionary Russia, where they at once became a part of the great movement.
With body and soul, and full of energy, they spread all over Russia, to propagate their ideal, and call the peasants and workers to organize for the final conflict, to destroy the old society completely, and organize life on a new ideal basis, devoid of God, Tzar and masters.
The American Anarchist Red Cross, in that great moment of enthusiasm realizing that the time when the triumph of the persecuted proletariat over their masters was approaching, gave up their activities.
The American Anarchist Red Cross could then feel, see and realize that their work was not in vain. By the great solidarity of its work the Anarchist Red Cross not only saved the lives of the comrades, but still more helped to keep up the spirit and love for the great struggle for freedom.
Great uncontrollable hopes! Several years elapsed. Enthusiasm! Joy! Hope passed with the storm in the struggle for the great unattainable ideal for complete freedom…
The Russian Revolution is destroyed!
What did happen during those few years? In the height of the world’s imperialism, in February, 1917 the proletariat of Russia raised the banner of revolt, a revolt which brought thousands of victims for the great cause, and destroyed the vast capitals which for years have been saved with the sweat and blood of the Russian proletariat.
Their desperate struggle was final; with their enthusiasm they were ready to infect the proletarians of the world. Their slogan became. “Long live the solidarity of the world proletariat.”
In October came the final challenge to the arch enemies of the workers – power and capital. This was too much for the world’s capitalists and governments. In their great fright that the proletariat of the world would follow the Russian brothers, they determined to crush the Russian revolution. The memorable blockade followed, troops from all sides surrounded Russia. Their only purpose was to choke the great enthusiasm of the Russian revolution.
The heroic struggle of October brought to the foreground the best sons of Russia who perished in the final battle for freedom.
They died, but they helped to bring to life the dictatorship of “Sovnarkom” (Soviet of Workers’ and Peasants’ Comm’s). The workers of Russia fought for Social Revolution; instead winning they suffered the most terrible losses. They are shattered; their battling organizations, the immediate Soviets in the factories and shops, destroyed Everything for which they paid with the blood of their comrades and abominable sufferings was seized by the Bolshevik governmental machine. The revolutionists who propagated the free communism, those fighters who gave their life and energy for the final and complete overthrow of the government, dictators and power, those have undergone the most terrible persecutions under the new power, “Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” In the prisons, where epidemics of all kinds and miseries prevailed, these were the only places where Anarchists were found.
Our imprisoned comrades, tormented by hunger, tzinga [scurvy], tuberculosis and all other famous prison tortures, are constantly struggling with the administration and Cheka for some kind of human treatment, for at least a bit of freedom within the prison walls. At times, however, the torment of hunger was so great that everything else, as books, the right to see friends, fresh air, etc. was forgotten; the comrades were so weak and sick that they hardly found strength to move from their places.
In 1920, however, when demands for better treatment of prisoners began to penetrate from Europe and America, the conditions were somewhat improved.
But in Russia itself help for prisoners is not tolerated. The organizations, which our comrades outside tried to organize in order to help the imprisoned, were persecuted and destroyed by the Cheka, which gave “plots” as its reasons.
Another method of Nicholas the Second was revived by the Bolsheviks – to exile the revolutionists to Siberia and other desolated places, where the comrades met with great disaster.
At such a time you, my American comrades, again took up the work of the Anarchist Red Cross, which discontinued in 1917, never dreaming that the time would come again when our comrades would be dispersed in exile and your work in the Anarchist Red Cross become of great necessity again.
Those who have lived through the persecution of the Czaristic regime, in far Siberia and the fortresses, have then gone through all the struggles of the revolution and are at present again in the same miseries of being exiled, and tormented.
However, those heroic spirits who were able to withstand all this, and who again have the comradely aid and encouragement of their comrades on the other side of the ocean, are still full of hope and energy, and are ready again to struggle for the attainment of our ideal – the Social Revolution and Free Communism.
With comradely greetings and best wishes for success,
Your comrade
E. Yarchuk
Behind the Bars, 1, January 1924.
From KSL: Bulletin of the Kate Sharpley Library #55. PDF at www.katesharpleylibrary.net
FRANCESCO GHEZZI – ITALIAN ANARCHIST IN VORKUTA
Victor Serge remembered the Milan worker, Francesco Ghezzi (who ended his days in a soviet gulag in 1942) as “thin and lanky”. Thanks to the recent publication of the records of the trial held after he was arrested in 1937, we now how some detail about how he ended his days. Born in Milan on 4 October 1893 into a working class family, Ghezzi started work at the age of seven and was an anarchist by the age of sixteen. Between 1914 and 1921 he was linked to the USI and active in political protests and anti-imperialist campaigning. He was often forced into exile in Paris or Switzerland to avoid police harassment. In 1919 he was arrested and jailed for his part in the orchestration of an uprising in Zurich but was freed after a campaign by public opinion, only to be expelled from Switzerland right after that for his opposition to a patriotic demonstration. In the wake of the Diana theatre bombing in Milan in 1921, in order to get him out of the way of the anti-anarchist crackdown, the USI sent him as its anarcho-syndicalist delegate to the Profintern. Relations between anarcho-syndicalists and the leaders of the Party were very strained by that point. The Profintern refused to acknowledge trade union autonomy and arrests were becoming more and more frequent. Few denounced the violence behind the crackdown; following on-the-spot protests from Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, a few anarchists and anarcho-syndicalist prisoners were freed and some of these took part in the foundation congress of the IWA in Berlin in 1922. Attending that congress illegally and speaking on behalf of the USI, Ghezzi was then arrested by the German police who meant to hand him over to the Italian state. According to his wife Olga, Ghezzi had been tried in absentia and sentenced to death by the Italian fascist government, should he return to Italy. The leftwing press launched a campaign for his release. Lawyer Michel Fraenkel secured a document certifying that Ghezzi was a soviet citizen; and thanks to support from the soviet foreign minister Narkomindel, Ghezzi made it back to the Soviet Union. From 1923 to 1926 Ghezzi lived and worked on a farming commune in Yalta and strove to reestablish contacts with foreign anarchists. In 1926 he found a job as a workman in Moscow. He helped establish liaison between the Russian anarchists who were operating semi-underground by this time and their counterparts abroad. With the philosopher Borovoy (a pamphlet from whom Ghezzi managed to smuggle out of the country) and others, he joined the Kropotkin Museum team, leaving it in 1928: conflict erupted within the Museum between the ‘ideoogical’ anarchists and the ‘anarcho-mystics’ led by Alexey Solonovich. The anarchists who dropped out of the Museum set up a new Black Cross in competition with the Black Cross of the ‘anarcho-mystics’ and Ghezzi looked after donations coming in from abroad. In 1929 and 1930 he was caught up in a further wave of arrests, charged with engaging in counter-revolutionary activity: on 31 May 1929 he was sentenced to three years in a labour camp and shipped off to political isolation in Suzdal, 250 kms. northeast of Moscow. A massive campaign to secure his release was launched abroad. The French novelist Romain Rolland sent a letter to the soviet writer Maxim Gorky to get him to intercede with Stalin, with whom he was friendly: Gorky was hesitant but finally raised the matter with Stalin and with OGPU leader Genrikh Yagoda, but to no avail. But thanks to the urgent lobbying, Ghezzi was freed after he had been dispatched to exile in Kazakhstan in 1931, but was required to remain in the Soviet Union. He then made his way back to Moscow where he became a workman again, graduated from the Technical Institute and took as his second wife Olga Gaake, by whom he had a daughter. From the evidence gathered it appears that Ghezzi still clung to his own anarchist and anti-bolshevik opinions. In Moscow he carried on liaising with the outside world and offered to harbour activists fleeing from exile. In 1933, through the Red Cross, he lobbied for the release of the Trotskyist Gurevitch and helped Victor Serge’s exiled wife, Lyubov Rusakova-Kibaltchitch. In 1936 Ghezzi made repeated requests to be sent to Spain as a volunteer, but permission was denied. On 5 November 1937 Ghezzi was rearrested: the charge was engaging in counter-revolutionary activity in his workplace and being a Nazi supporter. Inquiries took a month. Ghezzi repudiated all the charges, including the charge of being pro-Trotskyist. Up until he was convicted he was held in the Lubyanka, the NKVD’s internal prison, before being dispatched to a labour camp inside the Arctic Circle, even though prison doctors had diagnosed him with TB. On 3 April 1939 the NKVD Special Commission sentenced him to eight years’ hard labour and a fortnight later he was moved to the Vorkutlag (the Vorkuta camp). In 1943, a further NKVD decree sentenced him to be shot, but sentence was not carried out because Ghezzi had died on 3 August 1942. In 1956, following an application by Olga Ghezzi, Khruschev agreed to reopen the Ghezzi file and to rehabilitate him. Some of the witnesses whose depositions had been used in his arrest in 1937 retracted these, insisting that the statements had been extracted from them through violence. On 21 May 1956 the Moscow court declared that “the evidence against him was insufficient” and the NKVD verdict was overturned.
From Bollettino Archivio G. Pinelli (Milan) No 27, July 2006
[Translation of 'Un anarchico italiano a Vorkuta' by Mikhail Tsovma, translated (and edited?) by Barbara Ielasi]
From KSL: Bulletin of the Kate Sharpley Library #55. PDF at www.katesharpleylibrary.net
