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EMMA GOLDMAN IN EXILE: From the Russian Revolution to the Spanish
Civil War. By Alice Wexler. Beacon Press. 301 pp. $24.95
Reviewed by Dorothy Gallagher
[excerpts]
The last twenty years of Emma Goldman's life were bracketed by
the two great revolutions of Alice Wexler's subtitle; the outcome of
each was exactly calibrated by the terrible god of irony to break her
heart and spirit. In this, her sequel to *Emma Goldman in America*,
Wexler examine in reach detail the years of Goldman's exile -
wandering, tumultuous, yearning decades. She also pays that most
argumentative, idealistic, obstinate, demanding, sometimes irritating
and always brave woman the compliment of arguing with her.
Emma Goldman was deported from the country she considered her
home during the Red Scare of 1919. With her went Alexander Berkman,
her Sasha, the dearest friend of her life, and the 240 other alien
radicals. Out they went from liberty's shores one dark, freezing
January morning, to arrive a month later in *Matushka Rossiya*, land
of the people's revolution. The two years Goldman and Berkman spent
there would obsess Goldman for the remainder of her life.
Like almost all anarchist, Emma Goldman was wary of the
Bolsheviks when the first euphoria oat the news of October had passed.
In 1918 she wrote, "As an anarchist I am opposed to the rigid
centralization the Boyl. proclaim and as much opposed to the
Dictatorship of the Proletariat as to that of the Bourgeoisie." She
added, "But the very fact that they are so attacked and maligned
compels me to stand up for them and with them." She also believed
that anyone with a "revolutionary spark" would put aside difference in
the face of the "attempt to crush the Soviet. Now is not the time,
that's all there is to it."
She was writing in response to the institution in Soviet
Russia of War Communism, the Bolshevik reaction to the crisis of civil
war and foreign intervention. War Communism "halted," Wexler writes,
"the democratic, egalitarian thrust of the early stages of the
revolution, moving instead toward increasingly centralized control of
industry, compulsory labor for all.... a policy of terror against
counter-revolutionists, a flexible category easily stretched t include
hungry workers selling goods on the black market, and members of other
left-wing parties."
The Russian anarchists, almost all of whom had sided with the
Bolsheviks in the early months of the October Revolution, viewed the
new direction as a betrayal of their hopes. Had not Lenin once
asserted, "So long as the state exists there is no freedom"? But by
1921, shortly before his death, the venerated anarchist Peter
Kropotkin would write of the Revolution: "It is perpetrating horrors.
It is ruing the whole country. In its mad fury it is annihilating
human lives." Despite her recognition that some things in Russia had
changed for the better - education, suppression of anti-Semitism in the
Ukraine, a flourishing of the arts - Goldman arrived at Kropotkin's
view that Bolshevism was a conspiracy against the Revolution. Thus
Emma Goldman, the revolutionary, was in a country where the Revolution
had been made, and yet she was alienated from it, "utterly unable to
give," she wrote, a "stranger in a strange land." She suffered,
Wexler believes, from a deep and almost incapacitating depression.
The fateful year was 1921. Hungry, freezing workers in
Petrograd went on strike and were repressed by military force. The
sailors at the Kronstadt naval base, heroes of the Revolution, issued
a list of demands in solidarity with the Petrograd strikers. Here was
the actual tragedy of Kronstadt which, in later years, would become a
metaphor for disillusion with the Bolsheviks. Under government orders
the military moved against the Kronstadt sailors, killing hundreds,
wounding thousands, imprisoning more. Until Kronstadt, Berkman,
unlike Emma, had extended to the Bolsheviks the benefit of every
doubt. But on March 7 he wrote in his diary, "It is 6 PM. Kronstadt
has been attacked.... My heart is numb with despair; something has
died within me." Goldman and Berkman had offered to mediate the
conflict, but to no avail. Both now agreed that they had no place in
Russia, though nine more months would pass before they got out.
In the summer of 1921, in Moscow, American delegates arrived
for the first Congress of the Red Trade Union International-old
friends, including BIll Haywood, Mary Heaton Vorse, Ella Reeves Bloor;
but after the initial greetings the visitors held themselves aloof
from the two anarchists, having gotten word that they were out of
favor with the regime. In September the Checka shot ten political
dissenters, including the anarchist poet Lev Cherny and Fanya Baron,
whom Emma had known in the United States. IN late November, through
the intervention of Angelica Balabanoff - the Comintern's first
Secretary, who was still close to Lenin and would shortly, in despair,
leave the country herself - Goldman and Berkman received exit visas.
For the remainder of her life and throughout her wanderings in Sweden,
Germany, England, France and Canada, Goldman's energies were largely
spent in bearing witness to the failure of the Bolshevik Revolution.
Had she wished to increase the loneliness and isolation of her exile
she could not have chosen her position better; as she feared, few of
her radical friends who were not anarchists would join her in an
outright condemnation of Soviet Russia.
[The review goes on to describe G and B' wanderings and ostracism by
other leftists. Her failed attempt to warn the loyalists of Spain of
the dangers of Stalinism.]
In the spring of 1940 she died [in Canada] of a stroke; in its mercy
the United States government allowed her body to be brought across the
border so long closed to her. She was buried at Waldheim Cemetery in
Chicago, next to the Haymarket martyrs whose tragedy had brought her
to anarchism.
...Wexler argues, in essence, that Emma Goldman's anti-Bolshevism was
less than rational; that the Soviet Russia she witnessed in the early
1920s did not necessarily contain the seeds of the Soviet Union Stalin
would create in the 1930s. She thinks, as do some other scholars,
that the potential exited for the country to develop in a more
democratic direction, and that by inveighing against the Bolshevism of
Lenin's era, Goldman "contributed to the emergence of an
anti-Communist consensus of which the anarchists-and she herself-would
become tragic victims." And Wexler argues further that "Goldman
helped lay the foundations for a caricature of Russian history that
served interests profoundly hostile to her own."
To this argument I would reply that Western liberalism needed
no help from Emma Goldman to formulate an anti-communist position, as
it needed none from Rosa Luxemburg or Angelica Balbanoff. That die
was case. Goldman's position was based on classic anarchist
principles, principles she had espoused all her life and which she had
seen cruelly violated in the Soviet Union. She was also entirely
conscious of her dilemma. In London, in 1924, trying to organize a
campaign to protest the imprisonment of Soviet dissidents and
generally to arouse protest against the Soviet regime, Goldman saw
those who should have been her allies turn their backs on her. "My
situation is really a desperate one," she wrote to Berkman. The
tories have taken a stand against the communists, in France they are
being hounded, the Pope comes out against them. And here I am doing
the same. It is no wonder that everybody refuses to join me. It
really means working hand in glove with the reactionaries. [But] I
know I must go ahead and that our position is of a different nature."
If the exiled Emma Goldman struck out harder at the Bolsheviks
than she did at the democracy that expelled her, as Alice Wexler
points out, it may be that she saw no moral parallel between the
bourgeois state and the revolutionary one. The comrade who betrays is
always judged by a harsher standard than the known enemy, for it is he
who poisons the body of the movement. Anarchist, as well as member of
all other indigenous radical movements, experienced the Russian
Revolution, with its rhetoric of liberation, as a cloud spreading
itself over their ideals, blotting out the sun.
But although I think Wexler is mistaken in her quarrel with
Goldman, it is clear that she has deepened our understanding of her
subject. She has shown us Emma Goldman as she suffered, aged,
despaired and yet held on to the ideas that were her core. From now
on, any discussion about Goldman will have to take Wexler's portrait
into account.