A Letter From Francesco Ghezzi
Dear Friends,
The June 2008 Bulletin mentions a “Russian (and other) anarchists in the Gulag” research project. Among the “others” was : Francesco Ghezzi. Whoever has read Victor Serge’s Memories of a Revolutionary already knows how Ghezzi, who was one of his closest friends in USSR, had courage enough to go with him to the train station, in 1936, when eventually Serge was allowed to leave the country. Ghezzi, who was again arrested in 1937, died at Vorkuta in 1942.
What makes me to write you, is more precise.
It is already known that after he had been arrested in 1937 and when he faced the GPU, saying he was still an anarchist, and proud to be an anarchist, he recalled having sent a letter to protest to the GPU when the Bolsheviki had arrested Nicolas Lazarevitch, in Moscow, on Oct. 8th, 1924. Now working on the Lazarevitch papers, thanks to the fine inventory of Alexander Goriounov, I came across the rough copy of this letter, written at the risk of his life (or at least, of his freedom) : written in Italian, it is sent to Agranov – one of the GPU’s most terrible elements.
Though I don’t know if it might be of any use I send you its text, anyway, since it gives an idea of the courage of such men.
Sincerely
Luc Nemeth, Paris
Yalta, 31-12-1924
Il compagno Nicola Lazarevic si trova detenuto da tre mesi presso la G.P.U. di Mosca per ragioni politiche.
Noi abbiamo conosciuto Lazarevic in Italia nel 1920 durante i movimenti rivoluzionari e abbiamo imparato ad amarlo per la sua fede rivoluzionaria, per averlo sempre visto in prima fila nelle lotte, devoto alla cause operaia. Come noi egli dovette fuggire e rifugiarsi in Russia perchè perseguitato e noi siamo molto addolorati nel saperlo perseguitato anche da questo governo. Noi ci domandiamo costernati, come se lo domandano varii altri rifugiati politici in Russia e operai rivoluzionari all’estero che conobbero in Lazarevic un campione della classe operaia, come mai si possa arrestare un operaio consimile anche ammettendo che avesse fatto della propaganda rivoluzionaria e comunista con concetti che contrastano colle direttive ufficiali del governo russo, mentre si lasciano in libertà tanti borghesi sabotatori i quali non attendono che il momento per impiccare tutti gli operai.
Ciononostante pero noi vogliamo credere che presto mettiate Lazarevic in libertà e che possa venire qui in Yalta a lavorare con noi la terra nelle nostra colonia agricola.
Saluti rivoluzionari
Francesco Ghezzi
Ghezzi’s letter to Agranov (courtesy of Luc Nemeth):
Yalta, 31-12-1924
Comrade Nicola Lazarevic [Nicholas Lazarevitch] has been three months in the custody of the Moscow GPU for political reasons. We made Lazarevitch’s acquaintance in Italy in 1920 during the revolutionary disturbances there – and learnt to love him for his revolutionary faith and because we had always seen him in the front ranks of struggles, committed to the workers’ cause. Like us, he was forced to flee and sought refuge in Russia because he was persecuted and we are greatly saddened to discover that he has been persecuted by this government as well. Dismayed, we wonder, as a number of other political refugees in Russia and revolutionary workers abroad do, how on earth a worker of his calibre could have been arrested, even assuming that in his revolutionary communist propaganda he has employed ideas at odds with the official directions of the Russian government, whilst so many bourgeois saboteurs just itching for the chance to string up all the workers are left at liberty.
Notwithstanding which we would like to believe that you will shortly set Lazarevitch free and that he may come here to Yalta to join us in working the soil of our agricultural settlement.
Revolutionary greetings,
Francisco Ghezzi.”
Source: Lazarevitch papers: BDIC (Bibliothèque de documentation internationale contemporaine)
6, Allée de l’Université F-92001 Nanterre Cedex
http://www.bdic.fr/index.php
From KSL: Bulletin of the Kate Sharpley Library #55. PDF at www.katesharpleylibrary.net
OTELLO GAGGI, AN EXEMPLARY CASE
Summer 1944. The Italian communist Togliatti, minister without portfolio in the new Bonomi government (which has recently taken over from Marshal Badoglio) receives an expected and lengthy missive from Mexico City. The signature at the foot of the letter cannot but have startled the one-time conspirator known as ‘Ercoli’, now comfortably ensconced in a ministerial chair in Rome. Victor Serge, one-time leading Bolshevik, leader of the international Trotskyist Opposition, a writer and historian of world repute, had decided to write to the Italian communist leader with a query that, given the times and the war then raging in Europe, must have struck the letter’s recipient , busy as he was, as absurd and bizarre. What had become of anarchist working man Otello Gaggi from San Giorgio Valdarno (in the province of Arezzo) who had fled to the USSR as a political refugee? Here are a few extracts from Serge’s letter:
“TO MINISTER PALMIRO TOGLIATTI, MINISTER OF THE ANTIFASCIST GOVERNMENT IN ROME
Minister,
Since 1926 you have been the Communist Party of Italy’s representative in Moscow. A member of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, secretary of that executive for the Latin countries, charged with confidential missions in Spain, you enjoyed the complete trust of the Russian government. As required you collaborated with the Commissariat of the Interior, to wit, that government’s political police. It was to you that Italian refugees harassed by the GPU would address their appeals from prison, without any effect (…) Whatever became of the Italian antifascists who fled to the USSR at a time when the Russian revolution was generously offering a haven to the persecuted the world over? (…) What has become of the Tuscan syndicalist Otello Gaggi, sentenced to a thirty year prison term by the Arezzo Court in 1921 for having defended his village against the fascist gangsters; arriving in the USSR in 1923, he was arrested on grounds unknown in 1935 and the following year applied in vain to be allowed to go to Spain to fight? Joaquin Ascaso, delegate of the Caspe militias, Emilienne Morin, the Durruti Column delegate and Alfonso De Miguel, press delegate of the CNT, telegraphed Stalin in support of Gaggi’s application. The Italian antifascists never received any answer and Gaggi has disappeared.
What has become of Luigi Calligaris ?… What has become of Francesco Ghezzi (…)?
They have vanished without trial. And were not defended. Have they been executed? When? Why? (…)
Victor Serge
Gaggi was one of the many. He was born on 6 May 1896, the son of a steelworker. He was not a leader and not an intellectual around whom public opinion might be mobilised. He was an ordinary working man, a real social fighter. His native Valdarno is generous territory with solid libertarian roots, a land of miners and workers and peasants who, since the end of the 19th century, had begun to chip away at the old stereotype that depicted the subjects of the grand-dukes as long suffering. From an early age, as was only to be expected, he belonged to the anarchist movement there and was deeply involved in the epic events of, first, the social struggle, and then of the post-Great War years. An anti-militarist, he participated in anti-war activities mounted by local anarchists and the Socialist Youth Federation, targeting the disciplinary battalions and then opposing the Libyan expedition in 1911. After Italy entered the Great War in 1915, he was called up but deserted time and again, was captured, shipped to the front lines and sentenced to a prison term before being released under the amnesty of February 1919. He was active in the USI (Italian Syndicalist Union) which in the Vadarno area was led by Attilio Sassi. That organisation, a leftwing revolutionary syndicalist breakaway from the reformist GCdL (General Labour Confederation), had seen its ranks swell in the area during the war years as 5,000 miners who quit the CGdL flooded into it. In the Valdarno in Arezzo, Malatesta was on home turf: as late as the 1970s you could hear elderly militants talking of the crowds that showed up for his rallies in the “Gioco del pallone” square in San Giovanni, about the clashes between the miners and the forces of law and order and of the first acts of thuggery by the fascists.
After the fascist attacks against individual militants and the premises of various labour and popular associations and institutions got properly under way at the end of the so-called “Red Biennium”, on 23 March 1921 there were serious clashes in San Giovanni Valdarno with the fascist expeditionaries from Florence and this triggered rioting throughout the nearby mining district of Castelnuovo. Premises were seized and barricades thrown up and a bomb was tossed into the mine administration office. A group of workers, Gaggi among them, was later charged with premeditated armed conspiracy. Gaggi went on the run. Gaggi, who was a premature partisan, found himself aligned with those who held that they had to defend themselves by force of arms from the rising tide of fascist violence and he joined the Arditi del Popolo (People’s Commandos). These units welcomed volunteers of every persuasion, inspired by an antifascist libertarian outlook, but were afforded official backing only by the anarchist movement. With the police on his trail and forced to go underground in San Marino, Gaggi was given a 30 year prison sentence by the courts in Arezzo and like other Valdarno workers was forced into exile.
But where was he to go? Among the various options open to him (although he didn’t have a long time to mull it over), the possibility of going to the USSR, to the ‘socialist homeland’ looked most inviting. There was already an existing escape line headed by the new-born Communist Party of Italy which offered help indiscriminately to any antifascist in need of its services. Even though since the early 1920s there had been no shortage of awful hints about anti-anarchist reprisals mounted by the Russia of Lenin and Trotsky, and despite the disappointing audience that Armando Borghi (the USI’s general secretary) had in Moscow with Lenin himself in 1920, in spite of the appeals for the release of anarchist prisoners that had been presented to Soviet Foreign Minister Chicherin in Italy, in spite of all this, we can still see how many thought at the time that this might be just some sort of a passing crisis, a misunderstanding due to the straits in which the revolution found itself and that everything would be sorted out later.
From the outset, enthusiasm for the victorious Russian revolution had spread through the entire worldwide workers’ movement. Moreover, the Communists could scarcely be regarded as anything other than brothers since they filled Mussolini’s prisons, in equal and even greater numbers than any other antifascist faction.
Gaggi, a childhood friend of some of those who were then supporters of the new-born Communist Party of Italy, would probably have reasoned along these lines. He boarded a Soviet vessel that dropped him off in Odessa. Reaching Moscow in 1923 after a long and roundabout trip, he received a warm welcome from the substantial (200-300 strong) Italian antifascist colony there already. But, as was the case with every new arrival, along with Gaggi there arrived a dossier noting his political history as compiled by a number of his countrymen, Party officials and completed by the Soviet police.
He found work as a doorman with a large firm in Petrovka Street in central Moscow. He picked up and took classes in Russian (he who could barely read and write in Italian) so that later he was able to carry out sterling work as a translator and interpreter. He continued to show an interest in developments in Italy and in the USSR, whilst holding on to his anarchist beliefs. His wife was a Russian citizen employed by the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs. Gaggi lived with her for ten years and they had a son together. So his life in Moscow, his new home, was made up of small pleasures, a longing for the Valdarno and Arezzo and Florence and larger worries that loomed as Stalin came to power. His enthusiasm for politics was still evident in discussions within the Italian exile community with which he remained in touch, and with many others he met in his day to day work. In 1929, the libertarian syndicalist refugee from Milan, Francesco Ghezzi, was arrested and deported to Suzdal [NE of Moscow]. This signalled the start of a crackdown on leftist dissidents among the Italian colony. In 1930 Gaggi approached the Italian embassy to sound his chances of returning to Italy, his lawyer having suggested in a letter from Italy that the case against him and his sentence might be reviewed. In June 1933 a gathering of Italian exiles from Moscow, Kiev and Odessa, heard a proposal from Giuseppe Sensi that they all adopt Soviet nationality. Gaggi was reluctant to do so as he still hoped somehow to get back to Italy. The Italians split into “orthodoxes” and “dissidents”. Gaggi was one of the latter.
In December 1934, the USSR had entered one of the darkest periods in the history of the international communist movement. With the murder in Leningrad of the Soviet leader Kirov as a pretext, the Stalinist purges got properly under way. This tremendous purge even hit the Bolsheviks of the old guard before spreading through the Comintern parties. Suspicion, slander and denunciation ate into the motley community of Italian antifascist refugees. In December 1934, Otello Gaggi was inexplicably arrested by the GPU. And since the building where he worked as doorman housed the Argentine embassy, one of the charges levelled at him was that he was a spy for that South American nation. A nonsensical charge. He was accused of belonging to a Trotskyist counter-revolutionary organisation headed by another Italian exile, Luigi Calligaris, a follower of Amadeo Bordiga. The interrogation records show that under questioning in the Lubyanka, Gaggi denied the charges of counter-revolution and Trotskyism but agreed that he shared Calligaris’s view that there was no freedom in the USSR and that workers’ lives were wretched there. He conceded that he had been corresponding with a group of Italian anarchists in Paris, among them Umberto Tommasini.
The courts in Moscow sentenced him to three years’ hard labour in Siberia under Article 58, Paragraph 10 of the Soviet Penal Code! In an attempt at sarcasm, the Russian Bolshevik judges had thereby shown that they were ten times more “clement” than their Italian fascist counterparts who had sentenced this anarchist trade unionist from the Valdarno to thirty years. Gaggi was banished to the province of Arkhangelsk in northern Russia, 1,000 kilometers from Moscow. Two years after that, he was deported to Kazakhstan in Central Asia, after which his trail goes cold.
By who knows what freakish means, he managed from a camp in Siberia to communicate to comrades in Paris his desire to come and fight the fascists in Spain, as well as the plea he had made to that effect to the Soviet authorities.
After some inevitable mishaps, the Tuscan exile got through and dozens of telegrams were sent off to Stalin, signed by CNT and militia leaders, calling for Gaggi to be set free and for him to be allowed to come to Spain!
No reply was ever received and nothing was heard of Gaggi again. And so it stands.
Giorgio Sacchetti
[adapted from a paper read to the Libertarian Festival in Reggio Emilia, Italy (1990) later published in Umanità Nova of 30 September 1990, and from a review of his book Otello Gaggi, vittima del fascismo e dello stalinismo (Pisa 1992)]
From KSL: Bulletin of the Kate Sharpley Library #55. PDF at www.katesharpleylibrary.net
Trouble in Moscow: From the life of the “Liesma” ["Flame"] Group
[This account covers the Latvian anarchists’ activities in Moscow, up to the Cheka raids of April 1918, when the Bolsheviks attacked anarchists in the city in the name of “Law and Order”]
The group was founded in August 1917 and from the beginning worked in the syndicalist direction.
Before its foundation comrades worked independently, as well as together with existing Russian groups. Later, in view of much greater efficiency if comrades could communicate in Latvian, working with Latvian workers, comrades decided to unite in a permanent group and found quarters which could be open at any time to interested workers, where existing anarchist literature would be available for their use, where on certain days comrades would be able to come together, read lectures, organise “question and answer” evenings for comrades and the broader public. But because such quarters were difficult to find, members gathered once a week in a tiny private apartment, where they were only able, packed like sardines, to review and discuss the most important issues for the group.
When the October revolution started all comrades subscribed either to the Red Guard or to the anarchist fighting organisation, and took the most active part in the October battles, extending their solidarity (hand in hand) with the formerly oppressed but now empowered and oppressing Bolshevik-Communists.
Other comrades, who at the time of the fighting were at the printing house “Moskovski Listok” (The Moscow Sheet), fought a fierce battle against the Junkers and only because of the cowardice of soldiers who had been called to the assistance of the anarchists after two days of fierce fighting were they disarmed and subjected to the Junker’s violence. Together with coats and hats, also the whole capital of the group – several hundred roubles – was looted. (One of the comrades happened to have the money on him). Thus the group again remained without any means, and we had to postpone our plans to open permanent quarters for an indefinite time.
But time went on. Comrade Bolsheviks, who seized the Government’s money, started to fall behind the growing revolution and, unable to forget their God Marx’s holy words that social revolution is only possible with the concentration of capital and that a lot of time was needed to reach it, it was necessary to step upon the tail of the revolution, so that it wouldn’t derail from its prescribed path and topple the theory laid out in the thick volumes of Marx’s Capital.
All this made comrades think that there was no time to wait until capital would “concentrate” in their cash box in order to rent quarters; quarters had to be acquired now, in the nearest future, irrespective of how and by what means. As social expropriations were already happening in other cities, where private houses, shops, factories and other private property were being nationalised, our comrades considered this a justified and important step in continuing the revolution, and decided to look out for an appropriate building where we could start our club.
In the end such a house was found in Presnensk Pereulok number 3. It was a small house without furniture and needed repairs in order to make living in it possible, but the group still occupied it and after a couple of weeks the Latvian Anarchists’ Club of the “Liesma” group opened there.
In that time, as best we could, we bought in books and literature for our reading table and every Sunday public lectures were held which often attracted an audience of over a hundred people. On Wednesday evenings we organised theoretical reading circles for our comrades themselves, where various political issues were discussed. Special focus was upon the spreading of anarchist ideas, which in the end set the group on a distinct communist [anarchist-communist, not Bolshevik] platform.
With the growth of the group, many and various new needs appeared, one of the most important of which was the need to find a way to publish literature, because it was impossible to gather large masses of people in the tiny building – we had to give the masses something to read. We had to organise communes, show the masses an example and instil in them faith in the future free order (system). In order to realise all this we needed a larger building and financial means, money.
In January the group occupied a house in Malaja (Little) Dimitrovka, but because the house was inhabited, we had to share it with the earlier inhabitants (the owner of the house), and the group took only half of the house. The other half of the house with all the belongings (except for some furniture and the library) was given to the owner with the right to rent it.
The Club is now moving to the new quarters, while the former house is being renovated for a commune (communal flat).
The group started publishing literature. Because of lack of resources, at present only three pamphlets are being published and the other texts will be printed gradually, at the end of each job when the main work has been finished.
Apart from the ideological work, the group has also founded a Fighting Unit with acting members. So that the Fighting Unit could be self-reliant (independent), full ammunition and food parcels for all members were received from the main Red Headquarters. Their task was to defend the revolution, together with the Moscow workers, against the counter-revolutionary element that only waited to raise its head again.
With the arrival of the Latvian group from Kharkov on the order of the Revolutionary Committee, Group “Liesma”, together with the Russian group “Kommuna” occupied a manor house in Vedenski Pereulok (side street), with two “fleugels” (out buildings), where only three people lived. One of these “fleugels” was occupied by “Kommuna”, which had only just been organised and still didn’t have their own quarters. The other “fleugel” was occupied by “Liesma” for the comrades from Kharkov, who had to come to Moscow at the beginning of April.
But because there were exceptionally many historical things in the newly occupied house – precious porcelain, old silver, famous masters’ paintings, extensive libraries and an enormous collection of various ancient icons, the value of which was enormous (indescribable), after an evaluation by some artists both groups decided that, considering that [no] one person was able to use such treasures, which were not in the possession even of many a museum, and which were absolutely out of the reach for a wider public, they consider it their duty to see to it that all these historical treasures should be accessible to the broadest masses of people.
The group established contact with the members of the City Art Committee who took it upon themselves to organise and open a museum, which was also done in the first days of April.
Also, the group “Liesma” established contacts with the actors of the Moscow Latvian Theatre in order to open a Latvian Anarchist Theatre, which promises good results and has met a sympathetic response from the actors. A common united meeting of representatives of both theatres was planned on 12 April, at which the foundation of the Latvian Workers’ Theatre would be laid. “But man supposes and God disposes”… In the night of 11/12 April we were woken up by a terrible noise, amid shooting and noise we could hear people screaming. In the first moments we couldn’t ask anybody either. All rooms were overfilled with soldiers, who were on a horrible looting spree – they just went mad like beasts who broke out of cages – who were ready to tear you to pieces with their teeth for every word you dared to say.
Later we found out that the unexpected guests were a unit of the Soviet government army, the Latvian Riflemen and others, and that on orders of the government we were arrested for some dark deeds, and like in October from the side of the Junkers, now on the orders of the Bolsheviks we were to be destroyed. After several days of torture in the cellars of the Kremlin and behind the walls of Butyrka Prison, we were recognised as “ideological revolutionaries” and were released with the following words from the high authorities: “we fight against bandits, but we leave ideological workers in peace”.
We were recognised as “ideological” workers, but only after our ideological work had been completely destroyed, the literature which had cost us so much efforts and selfless work was burned, the printing press confiscated, all the capital looted. Rendered harmless, we were let off to go where we wanted.
But it is possible to suppress a man, not an idea, and the “Liesma” group, having been robbed twice, did not stop its activities but renewed its work again with twice as much dedication and energy.
Pooling our last strength and means together, we started replacing our literature and started publishing our magazine to spread our ideas even more energetically.
“R”
The author of this article, “R”, was Janis Birze (Remus), a Latvian anarchist who had taken part in the 1905 Revolution in the Baltic, first as a member of the Latvian Social Democratic Workers Party (LSDSP) then as a member of the Anarchist-Communist group “Liesma” and the leader of an anarchist fighting group that carried out numerous expropriations and attempted assassinations in Riga. Arrested in 1907, he was sentenced to 6 years hard labour on 2 April 1908, which he served in Riga and Pleskav (Pskov) prisons, afterwards being exiled to Jenisejas district (Siberia), in the region of Kansk, Vidrina pagasts. Freed by the revolution in March 1917, Birze re-formed “Liesma” in Moscow as this article describes. Of his subsequent life all that is known is that he worked in the Soviet Union in the trade sphere during the 1920s and 30s. His last known place of work was Novosibirsk, where “his life was ended” (according to a Soviet account written in 1962) at the end of the 1930s.
“From the life of the ‘Liesma’ group” Published in “Liesma” (Flame) No. 1, Moscow July 1918, by the Moscow Latvian Anarchist Group “Liesma”
Thanks to Phil Ruff for providing this text.
Bolshevik repression of Anarchists: two new publications from the Kate Sharpley Library
The Kate Sharpley Library are pleased to announce two new publications dealing with Bolshevik repression of Anarchists: An eyewitness account of the 1921 hunger strike in Moscow; and a special double issue of “KSL: Bulletin of the Kate Sharpley Library”, dealing with Anarchists in the Gulag, prison and exile under the Bolsheviks.
1, New pamphlet:
A Grand Cause: The Hunger Strike and the Deportation of Anarchists From Soviet Russia
by Grigorii Petrovich Maksimov (G. P. Maximoff)
with a biographical essay by Anatoly Dubovik, translated by Szarapow.
Grigorii Petrovich Maksimov (better known to western readers as G. P. Maximoff) was Secretary of Russia’s Anarcho-Syndicalist Confederation and editor of Golos Truda (The Voice of Labour). He experienced at first hand the Bolshevik repression which crushed other revolutionaries and subordinated popular revolt to party dictatorship. This is his story of the 1921 hunger strike in which some of the leading lights of Russian anarchism staked their lives in a desperate gamble to expose Bolshevik repression – and win their freedom.
This text comes from his indictment of the Bolshevik regime The Guillotine at Work: Twenty Years of Terror in Russia (1940). It has been footnoted by the Kate Sharpley Library to throw the light on the stories of other Russian anarchists as part of our Anarchists in the Gulag, Prison and Exile Project.
Contents:
Introduction
Gregory Petrovich Maximoff (1893-1950) by Anatoly Dubovik, translated by Szarapow
The Hunger Strike and the Deportation of Anarchists From Soviet Russia
I The sickness and death of P. A. Kropotkin
II Kronstadt events, arrests
III The Taganskaya Prison
IV The confinement was to be long
V All decide to declare a hunger strike
VI Cell no. 4 on hunger strike
VII We are released
VIII We are deported
IX We start out
X Stettin Prison. We are no more Czechs
Appendices
- Trotzky’s reply
- An agreement between the committee of the foreign delegates and the Bolshevik government
- A ray of light from Moscow
- To the workers of the world
ISBN 9781873605745 Anarchist Library #20
£3 (£2 to Kate Sharpley Library subscribers)
Some review copies are available.
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2, Special double issue of “KSL: Bulletin of the Kate Sharpley Library”
This issue of the KSL Bulletin includes a Latvian anarchist’s view of Moscow in 1918, a tribute to Khodounov, one of the anarchist activists killed by the Cheka in the raids there in April 1918, texts on two Italian anarchist victims of the Bolshevik regime, a letter from Efim Yarchuk, (author of “Kronstadt in the Russian Revolution”) and a new biographical essay on Alexei Borovoi, one of the most important anarchists who stayed, and died, in Russia. Leaving the Soviet Union, we finish off with a review of the memoirs of Polish anarchist and 1944 Warsaw Rising survivor, Pawel Lew Marek.
Contents:
Trouble in Moscow: From the life of the “Liesma” ["Flame"] Group by “R”, [Janis Birze (Remus)] (courtesy of Philip Ruff)
Otello Gaggi: Victim of Fascism and Stalinism by Giorgio Sacchetti (translated by Paul Sharkey)
A Letter From Francesco Ghezzi (courtesy of Luc Nemeth from the Lazarevitch papers)
Francesco Ghezzi: Italian Anarchist in Vorkuta, From “Bollettino Archivio G. Pinelli” (Milan) (translated and adapted by Paul Sharkey)
Efim Yarchuk on the Anarchist Red Cross (1924) from “Behind the Bars”, published by the Anarchist Red Cross
New pamphlet : “A Grand Cause : The Hunger Strike and the Deportation of Anarchists From Soviet Russia”
One of the Bandits (In Memory of Comrade Khodounov) from “Uralsky Nabat”, reprinted from “The Guillotine at Work”
Alexei Borovoi (from individualism to the Platform) by Anatoly Dubovik, translated by Szarapow.
Letter from Memorial
“On the edge of life: Memories of an anarchist 1943-44″ by Pawel Lew Marek [Review] by Admiral, from “Inny Swiat”, trans S.
Subscriptions to “KSL: Bulletin of the Kate Sharpley Library” for one year (4 issues) are UK:£3, Europe:10euro, USA: $5, Institutions: £20. Friend rate (bulletin and all other publications): £25/ $40
Back issues can be read at: www.katesharpleylibrary.net
–
Kate Sharpley Library, BM Hurricane, London, WC1N 3XX
Kate Sharpley Library, PMB 820, 2425 Channing Way, Berkeley CA 94704, USA
www.katesharpleylibrary.net
http://gulaganarchists.wordpress.com/
Yelensky, The struggle for equality
The Struggle for Equality:
The History of the Anarchist Red Cross
By Boris Yelensky
Edited with Introduction by Matthew Hart
http://www.abcf.net/la/pdfs/layelensky.pdf
An important resource.
Memorial: “Opposition and resistance of Russia’s socialists and anarchists”
Just had a message from the people at Memorial (K. Morozov to be precise). The good news is they are producing ‘an encyclopaedic dictionary “Opposition and resistance of Russia’s socialists and anarchists to the Bolshevik regime (October 1917 – mid-20th century)’.
Also he mentions ‘Anarchists in the GULAG’ is not strictly accurate… His message follows:
As a group of authors (including A. Dubovik who is the curator of anarchist section) we are working on
compiling an encyclopaedic dictionary “Opposition and resistance of Russia’s socialists and anarchists to the Bolshevik regime (October 1917 – mid-20th century)” (supervised by K. N. Morozov, Doctor of History) -
http://socialist.memo.ru/forum/index.php?showtopic=901
The project will extensively cover the problems of prison resistance and generally fates of anarchists and socialists in political isolators and concentration camps. I have to mention that we try not to refer to this as “Anarchists in the GULAG” or “Socialists in the GULAG” because their prison epic has started in 1918, long before the very GULAG system was created. And the majority of them, paradoxically enough, didn’t spend any time in the GULAG camps, moving from concentration camps to political isolators and exile. In early to mid-thirties they got into political isolators from exile, and then were sentenced to death. At least such a picture is visible as regards the socialist-revolutionaries. We are interested in co-operation with everyone who has professional interest in these problems, and are open to co-operation.
(Thanks to Szarapow for translation.)
The memorial website is at http://socialist.memo.ru/
On leaving Russia by Mollie Steimer
[1923 letter by Mollie 'Alexander Berkman in skirts' Steimer: "No, I am NOT happy to be out of Russia. I would rather be there helping the workers combat the tyrannical deeds of the hypocritical Communists."]
The name of Mollie Steimer, we trust will be recalled, if only very dimly, by some of the workers into whose hands this article may fall.
Mollie Steimer came as a child to the United States from Russia. When she was quite a young girl her rebellious spirit brought her into the real class struggle just at the time when the revolution in Russia broke out; and as a consequence of her activity with a number of other young workers who dared to denounce the action of the United States government in sending American soldiers to Siberia, she was brought before a United States court. Defiantly she stood up for her ideas. For this she had to spend two years in an American prison, after which she was deported to Russia.
But almost as soon as she stepped foot on her native soil, where a self-styled government of the workers ruled supreme, she found herself again in difficulty. She found the prisons of Bolshevik Russia filled just like those she had left behind. No, not with Grand Dukes and Czarist generals, but with working-men and women. They had dared to do in Russia what she had done in the United States – they had criticised the government – or were at least suspected of dissatisfaction.
For protesting against this, and for endeavouring to alleviate a little bit the suffering of these prisoners and of their families, she was thrown again into prison and finally deported from the land of her birth.
The capitalist government of the United States and the Communist government of Russia proved alike – that there is no real difference between one government and another no matter upon what pretensions it is founded. The Anarchists have all along contended that in the event of a Socialist state materialising it would prove not one iota less despotic than a capitalist one – nay, that by the nature of its position and its programme it was bound to prove even more ruthless in its suppression of all who dared to be dissatisfied or to demand real freedom from economic or political slavery. The “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” in Russia has only borne out that prediction.
How far the working masses of Russia are from that real freedom can be judged from Mollie Steimer’s letter, following:
Among other things it has been stated in the American press that I was very happy to leave Russia, and that I preferred exile in Germany to freedom in Russia. This statement attributed to me, is a deliberate lie!
It is true that the hypocrisy, intolerance, and the treachery of the Bolsheviks arouse in me a, feeling of indignation and revolt, but, as an Anarchist, I have no admiration nor defence for any government of any land, and the statement that I prefer exile in Germany rather than freedom in Russia is ridiculous and false.
I made it very clear to the press correspondent with whom I spoke that in spite of all the difficulties with which I had to put up with in Russia, I was deeply grieved when I was forced to leave that country. This was not true when I left America. Although I have my entire family, good comrades and many dear friends in the U.S.A. Yet, when I was deported from there by the capitalist government, my heart was light. It was not so in the case of Russia. Never have I felt so depressed as since I have been sentenced to exile from Russia. My love for Russia and its people is too deep for me to rejoice that I am an exile, especially at a time when they are undergoing extreme suffering and most severe persecution. On the contrary, I would prefer to be there, and together with the workers and peasants, search for a way to loosen the chains of Bolshevik tyranny.
I regard the Bolshevik government as the worst foe of Russia. Its system of espionage is perhaps worse than anywhere else in the world. Espionage overshadows all thought, all creative effort and action. Despite tales to the contrary told by foreign observers who have spent a few weeks or months on Russian soil under Bolshevik guides, and despite the statements of those who receive money from the Bolsheviks for their services, there is NO freedom of opinion in Russia. No one is permitted to express an opinion unless it be in favour of the ruling class. Should a worker dare say anything at a meeting of his factory or Union which is not favourable to the Communists, he is sure to land in prison or be booked by the agents of the G.P.U. (the new name for the Tcheka) as a counter-revolutionist. Thousands of workers, students, men and women of high intellectual attainments, as well as undeveloped but intelligent peasants, are languishing today in Soviet prisons. The world is told they are counter-revolutionists and bandits. Though they are the most idealistic and revolutionary flower of Russia, they are charged with all sorts of false charges before the world, while their persecutors, the “Communists” who exploit and terrorise the people, call themselves revolutionaries and the saviours of the oppressed. Behind revolutionary phraseology they hide deeds which no capitalist government on earth would be allowed to commit without a protest arising from the whole world.
Let me give a few examples of how the proletariat is treated by the co-called revolutionists:
On March 5, 1923, the Central Government Clothing Factory in Petrograd reduced the wages of its employees 30 per cent, without giving notice or making any explanation to any of them. When the salaries were handed out, each of the workers was under the impression that it was a clerical mistake, and went for an explanation to the office, with the result that 1,200 employees went simultaneously to ask why so much of their Pay was missing. To this the factory director replied that the people ought to be satisfied with what they get and ought to thank them (the directors and the government) for supplying them with work at all. Amazed at such an answer and boiling with indignation, they decided not to resume work until they got a satisfactory explanation. Union representatives were thereupon called, but those officials refused to come until the workers went back to their machines. The factory manager told them also that if they dared to strike, all of them would be considered counter-revolutionists and dealt with accordingly. Immediately the workers called a meeting. While they were discussing their grievances, the union representatives entered. But instead of sympathising with the workers, one of these “defenders of labour” pounded on the table with his fist and called in a thundering voice: “I order you back to work.”
Naturally, such behaviour only aroused all present to the highest pitch of excitement. The order was bitterly resented and the meeting continued. An old workingman got up and related the conditions under which he and his family were forced to live, and asked how on earth he could keep from starvation with the miserable wages he received. The description of his own life being the very mirror of the life they all led, resulted in the most pitiful scene. Everybody suddenly burst into tears. Young and old, men and women, all were crying, and several in the audience fainted.
A few hours after this came several chiefs representing the G.P.U., the Union and together with the head director of the Petrograd Clothing factories, announced that the wages would be reduced only 18 per cent instead of 30 per cent. The workers, thereupon decided to resume work and quietude prevailed in the factory. But at the end of the next week 120 workers, who were considered to be more outspoken and determined than the others, were discharged from the factory, thrown out of the Union, and put on the blacklist; that is, on their passports were written: “Citizen … discharged from the Central Government Clothing Factory for mutiny against the Workers and Peasants Government, with the purpose of taking over the factory.”
Thus, because these proletarians of the “Communist” state protested against a reduction in their wages, they were thrown out of the Union, and consequently they can no longer obtain work. What is still worse, they are registered by the G.P.U., as counter-revolutionists!
Now, let us take the case of Skorokhad factory. In June, 1923, the Leather Makers Union and the Communist Committee of the Skorokhad factory decided, without consulting the workers, that a club house of the district should be repaired at the expense of the Skorokhad workers (about 3,000 in number). Each of the various departments were told that it must work eight hours overtime to cover the expense of the club, and that “the other departments have already agreed to do so.” All departments without knowing about each other, indignantly refused on the following grounds; 1. That the club is not a workers’, but a Communist club, only Communist lectures are delivered there, and no other are permitted. 2. That even if they would agree in principle to working on behalf of the club, they resented the action of the Union officials and the “Communist” Committee, in having decided for them, as if they were so many cattle to do the work.
The workers demanded a meeting of the entire factory. This the Union and shop committee (which usually consists of Communists or Communist sympathisers) refused to grant. On that day no one remained working overtime. The next day, when this refusal was repeated, the doors of the factory were locked, and the customary passes that permit the workers to leave the factory were not given out. About half the workers then returned to work – the other half stood waiting until the two hours were up and the gates opened. Each evening of that week the same thing was repeated. The doors were locked and the passed not issued. Yet it was only under the threat of being discharged that the rest of the workers submitted. As usual, a week later, those workers of the various departments who did not act like cattle, but who showed character and spirit were discharged.
In the same month – June, 1923, – the workers of the Putilov factory and shipyard went out on strike, demanding an increase in their salaries and the discontinuance of the practice of deducting high taxation from their weekly pay. Out of the small wages that the workers receive in Russia, the Government orders – without consulting the workers, of course, – a certain amount be deducted for various purposes, such as the Red Army invalids, the Red Army and the Red Aeroplane Fleet, “Cultural” work, union dues and other countless things; because of these deductions, the workers, at times, get no more than half of their wages.
After a three days’ strike of the Putilov workers, the wages were increased. But their second demand was declined, and the employees nevertheless returned to work. However, as a result of this strike, about 400 workers were discharged and 100 arrested. The most tragic part of all this is that the Union and Shop Committees, of course under the Communist management, participated in these discharges and arrests, in co-operation with the factory administration and the Government Political Department, for there is a law in Soviet Russia that no workers can be discharged without the consent of the Union and Shop Committee. But the Government solves this problem by placing their own agents as officials in the Unions and Shop Committees.
It happened that I was kept in the same prison where those 100 Putilov workingmen were detained. When asked why they were imprisoned, I received the answer: “They charge us with counter-revolution. God knows what they meant by it.”
The above mentioned facts concern only Petrograd; but there are thousands of similar cases all over present day Russia, and yet the Bolsheviks are continually publishing stories about the glorious conditions and the free – living in the shadow of the G.P.U., cannot tell the truth to the world. Should he try it, or should he even try defending his own rights within Russia, he will find himself listed as a counter-revolutionist or a bandit, liable to arrest at any moment.
No, I am NOT happy to be out of Russia.
I would rather be there helping the workers combat the tyrannical deeds of the hypocritical Communists.
Mollie Steimer
Berlin, November 1923.
Freedom, January 1924.
Reprinted in Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review, #4 (1978.)
The tragedy of Karaganda (Wayne Foster)
The Libcom library has posted a newly written article (by Wayne Foster) on “The tragedy of Karaganda : Members of the CNT and other Spanish anti-fascists in the Soviet Union, 1938-1956.”
Abstract [from libcom]: In March 1939, Republican soldiers who had been training as aviation pilots were stranded in the USSR along with the sailors of several vessels from the Spanish merchant navy. They were prevented from leaving and in 1941 were arrested and sent to Novosibirsk Transit Prison. Also detained were several civilians who had been working with children evacuated from the Civil War. In 1942 the three groups were brought together in an agricultural labour camp in Kazakhstan, where eight Spaniards fathered children with Austrian prisoners. They remained there until 1948 when, partly due to a vigorous solidarity campaign fought by exiled Spanish anarchists on their behalf, they were transferred to a camp near Odessa. 18 prisoners signed documents accepting Soviet citizenship and were released to work in the region around the Black Sea. The rest remained in the Gulag system until 1954 or 1956. Towards the end of their imprisonment they were held with Spanish fascists who had been captured during WWII while fighting in the Blue Division. In addition to those Spanish anti-fascists who went missing or died in the first years of detention, out of 66 anti-fascists known to have been in Kazakhstan on the 1st January 1943, 11 died in Soviet camps. That the majority survived can be attributed in part to the togetherness and solidarity they maintained in captivity, evident in their work stoppages and hunger strikes.
Full article at http://www.libcom.org/library/the-tragedy-karaganda
Who, what, why?
Anarchists in the GULAG project
We are researching Bolshevik repression of anarchists after 1917 (anarchists covers anarchist-communists, anarcho-syndicalists, individualists, universalists and Makhnovists, but not Tolstoyans). Repression includes executions and open combat like the raids on the Black Guards, but we’re most interested in anarchists in prison and exile (we’re also interested in foreign – Italian, Spanish, Polish – anarchists). We’re interested in biographies of imprisoned anarchists. These can cover their anarchist activities before, during and after 1917, not just their prison years. We would expect this project to also shed some light on solidarity work for the imprisoned anarchists, both from within the Soviet Union and from abroad. This foreign solidarity work has given us important material like “Letters from Russian Prisons”, “The Guillotine at Work” and the Bulletins of the Joint Committee for the defense of revolutionists imprisoned in Russia and Relief fund of the International Working Men’s Association for anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists imprisoned or exiled in Russia.
Publication
Short articles can be published in the Kate Sharpley Library Bulletin (quarterly, six pages). Longer texts could be posted on the Kate Sharpley Library website: www.katesharpleylibrary.net. Alternatively, we could
create a blog for the project and post texts there. Ultimately we hope to publish a pamphlet (biographies of executed, imprisoned and exiled anarchists). Please contact us if you’re interested in assisting with the
Anarchists in the GULAG project.
(Russian-languague announcement: http://community.livejournal.com/anarchia_ru/279625.html ]
