Emma Goldman: Biographical Sketch

by Charles Allan Madison

She and Berkman organized the No-Conscription League for the purpose of encouraging conscientious objectors to resist induction into the army. Writing in behalf of the League, Emma explained: "We will resist conscription by every means in our power, and we will sustain those who, for similar reasons, refuse to be conscripted." At several mass-meetings she and Berkman expressed these sentiments, knowing that government agents were taking notes on their speeches. On June 15, 1917, both were arrested and charged with "conspiring against the draft."

The two rebels did not flinch from the ordeal awaiting them. "Tell all friends," Emma wrote shortly before their trial, "that we will not waver, that we will not compromise, and that if the worst comes, we shall go to prison in the proud consciousness that we have remained faithful to the spirit of internationalism and to the solidarity of all the people of the world." In court they conducted their own defense with a facility and frankness that gained the admiration of even their detractors. They shrewdly used the courtroom as a forum. In addressing the jury they were eloquently polemical.

It is organized violence on top [Emma asserted] which creates individual violence at the bottom. It is the accumulated indignation against organized wrong, organized crime, organized injustice, which drives the political offender to his act.... We are but the atoms in the incessant human struggle towards the light that shines in the darkness—the ideal of economic, political, and spiritual liberation of mankind!

The dramatic trial was in a sense another re-enactment of the age-old tragedy in which the rebellious idealist is condemned by the gross guardians of society. The obdurate defendants were each given the maximum penalty of two years in prison and a fine of ten thousand dollars.

Time passed in dreary monotony for Emma in Jefferson City and Berkman in Atlanta. The war was fought and won, the millions of American soldiers were back from Europe, and peace again prevailed over the earth. But to conservatives the specter of Bolshevism had replaced the ogre of Prussianism as the enemy of established society. In this country Attorney-General Mitchell Palmer, a Quaker and God-fearing man, led the manhunt against those who were suspected of sympathy with the Russian Revolution. Thousands of men and women were made the victims of an Anti-Red hysteria, and hundreds were deported as undesirable aliens. When Emma and Berkman were released, they also became subject to expulsion. Although she had long been a naturalized citizen by virtue of her marriage to a citizen, the Department of Labor ruled otherwise. On the night of December 21, 1919, the two rebels together with 247 other undesirables were hurried aboard the ancient troopship Buford for passage to Russia.

Thirty years of struggle and suffering on this side of the Atlantic had so Americanized Emma and Berkman that they could not think of themselves as belonging to another country. The ignominy of expulsion and the loss of their friends wounded them deeply. Yet they were comforted by the thought of the adventure that lay ahead. As the battered Buford plowed its billowy way to the shores of Finland they reflected on the ironic turn of events which had transformed Czarist Russia into a land of revolution and converted the free United States into a citadel of reaction. While still in jail they had approved the Bolshevik coup as a necessary safeguard of the revolution. They believed that Lenin and his fellow leaders, while Marxists and therefore advocates of a strong centralized government, were devoted to the principles of freedom and equality and therefore deserved the support of all workers and libertarians. Now, outcasts from the capitalist stronghold, they longed to join their Russian comrades in the defense of the revolution. When she reached the Soviet border, Emma later wrote, "my heart trembled with anticipation and fervent hope."

Dismay darkened their days throughout the twenty months of their sojourn in Russia. Their official welcome quickly spent itself. They began to look about for themselves, to speak privately with fellow anarchists, and to seek explanations of events and practices not to their liking. The twin demons of inefficiency and stupidity—judged by their American and anarchist standards respectively—leered at them wherever they went; the black walls of bureaucracy rose before them at every turn. Perverse cruelty on the part of the government came to their attention with distressing frequency. All their early efforts at rationalization failed to excuse the needless hunger, the mass arrests, the arbitrary executions. They discussed these events with prominent Bolshevik leaders, including Trotsky and Lenin, in the hope of persuading them to mitigate conditions injurious to the revolution. In each instance the response was either enigmatic or equivocal. Angelica Balabanova, then secretary of the Third International and later as disaffected an exile as herself, told Emma that life was "a rock on which the highest hopes are shattered. Life thwarts the best intentions and breaks the finest spirits." Alexandra Kollontay, the hard-headed diplomat, chilled her with the advice to stop "brooding over a few dull gray spots." Even Lenin impressed her and Berkman as callous and unsympathetic.

Time only deepened their perturbation. After eight months of life in Russia, Emma began to doubt the revolution itself. "Its manifestations were so completely at variance with what I had conceived and propagated as revolution that I did not know any more which was right. My old values had been shipwrecked and I myself thrown overboard to sink or swim." The climax of her quarrel with the Bolsheviki came a year later during the attack upon the mutinous Kronstadt sailors. That hundreds of true sons of the revolution should be shot down for sympathizing with striking workers seemed to her a crime worse than any committed by the Czarist regime. Neither she nor Berkman could any longer stomach such ruthless authoritarianism and both left the country as soon as they were able to obtain visas.

Once past the Soviet border, the hapless pair became true Ishmaelites, without either home or country. No government offered them asylum, and few were willing to provide them with even temporary visas. Devoted friends had great difficulty in getting Swedish officials to permit the two refugees a long-enough stay in Stockholm to procure visas for a sojourn in Germany.

Their one great mission now became the unmasking of the Bolsheviki, and their attacks were more virulent and hysterical than those of the most extreme reactionaries. Berkman's The Bolshevik Myth and Emma's My Disillusionment in Russia and My Further Disillusionment in Russia (the book was published in two separate volumes as a result of an inadvertent misunderstanding) are charged with fanatic hatred. Both insisted that Lenin and his monstrous crew were perverting the Russian Revolution to their own sinister purposes and must be destroyed at all costs. They made no effort to view the situation objectively.