Throttled! The Detection of the German and Anarchist Bomb Plotters

by Thomas J. Tunney

Shatoff and Wolin waited until their flock had been herded out of the country, and then vanished themselves. No one knew their route, but they were heard from in Seattle. Altogether some 600 anarchists made the pilgrimage. Some never reached Russia. Others who did get back found that conditions offered slim picking, and the Chinese and Manchurian ports are sprinkled with them to-day—men without a country, who cannot live in Russia, and who may not return to the United States.

Those who did get through to the capital of Russia straightway joined the organization. Trotzky had found Lenine there with plans already well advanced. The Provisional Government superficially was adequate to handle the situation, and during June it gave some slight promise of being able to prosecute its share of the war, but a breach was coming. A Council of Workmen and Soldiers had sprung up to oppose the Duma and the government when the Duma voted for an immediate offensive in Galicia, the Council voted for a separate peace. Kerensky swung himself back into balance for a month, and led a military offensive. It turned into a retreat, the retreat into a rout. Korniloff took command of the army on August 2, and the following day the military governor of Petrograd was assassinated. The deposed Czar was taken to Siberia. On September 2 Kerensky tried the expedient of arrest against his rising enemies in Moscow. On September 16 he proclaimed a new republic, but political structures could not keep out the terrifying German military advance that already was threatening Petrograd nor the German propaganda which was already there. Mid-October saw the government in flight to Moscow. On the 21st of October Leon Trotzky, at the head of the Bolsheviki in the Council, declared his party for an immediate democratic peace, and left the hall at their head, cheering. Municipal elections on November 1 rejected the Bolsheviki, but they would not be rejected, and on November 7 the Maximalists deposed Kerensky and took possession of the Government. Lenine became premier, Trotzky minister of foreign affairs.

The New York delegation won influential positions under the new régime. A United States senator has described the current Russian government as nothing but “Lenine and a gang of anarchists from New York, Philadelphia and Chicago.” Wolin took charge of a branch of the press—a sort of commissioner of public misinformation. Shatoff, in America a humble syndicalist and I. W. W., rose to the eminence of chairman of the “Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle Against Speculators and the Counter Revolution” in Petrograd, a commission whose activities are perhaps better described by its common title in the capital. It is called the “Blood and Murder” or the “To the Wall” committee. He has filled in his spare time as Commissioner of Railroads, and has been commonly credited in Petrograd with the murder of the Czar and his family. Ouritzky, Shatoff’s predecessor at the head of the Committee, had amassed a fortune of some four million roubles during his tenure of office. He died a violent death. Shatoff, in October of 1918, had not followed suit. The same John Reed who contributed to the support of the Blast appeared in Petrograd as a sympathetic correspondent, and was made consul to New York—a portfolio which he was unable to use when he returned to New York because of his indictment, along with Max Eastman and several other editors of a paper known as The Masses, for attempting to obstruct the draft. The balance of the New York anarchists who made up the expeditionary force of 1917 found their way, such of them as escaped the rigors of Petrograd life, into positions of influence in the government of one hundred or more millions of Russian people. To be sure, their hold is not too secure, but they are enjoying for the moment a sense of power which is intoxicating. Nothing seems to please a Bolshevik of the New York City group more than power—the same thing he tried to overthrow. I suppose it makes a difference whose power it happens to be.

Neither Goldman nor Berkman returned to Russia. Their publishing and bookselling business kept them here, and both were always in demand as lecturers. Both had pictured themselves for many years as the champions of anarchy in the United States, and it is conceivable that they did not wish to pass over their sceptres to any less well qualified successors. Unlike the ringleaders of the I. W. W., these anarchists did not dodge real work. Both had active minds, and were happiest when they were busy. Berkman’s writing at times shows a certain cheerful tenderness underneath its bombast, and Emma Goldman had a rather good-natured sarcasm at times as a speaker.

The two cast their lot in with the pacifists, the anti-conscriptionists, and the factions whose chief aim was to interfere with America’s going to war. Emma began to lecture on the subject. On the night of May 18 she spoke to a meeting in the Harlem River Casino. After a preamble advising the audience that government agents were present and that violence would be out of order, she drew what she probably considered a logical conclusion from this advice and shouted:

“And so, friends, we don’t care what people will say about us. We only care for one thing, and that is to demonstrate to-night, and to demonstrate as long as we can be able to speak, that when America went to war ostensibly to fight for democracy, it was a dastardly lie. It never went to war for democracy!... It is not a war of economic independence, it is a war for conquest. It is a war for military power. It is a war for money. It is a war for the purpose of trampling underfoot every vestige of liberty that you people have worked for, for the last forty or thirty or twenty-five years, and therefore we refuse to support such a war....

“We believe in violence and we will use violence.... How many people are going to refuse to conscript? I say there are enough. I could count fifty thousand, and there will be more.... They will not register! What are you going to do if there are 500,000? It will not be such an easy job, and it will compel the government to sit up and take notice, and therefore we are going to support, with all the money and publicity at our hands, all the men who will refuse to register and who will refuse to fight.

“I hope this meeting is not going to be the last. As a matter of fact we are planning something else.... We will have a demonstration of all the people who will not be conscripted, and who will not register. We are going to have the largest demonstration this city has ever seen, and no power on earth will stop us.... If there is any man in this hall that despairs, let him look across at Russia ... and see the wonderful thing that revolution has done....

“What is your answer? Your answer to war must be a general strike, and then the governing class will have something on its hands....”

She wound up her speech with an appeal for funds, and said that her paper, Mother Earth, was going to support the rebellion against the draft law which had been signed by the president that very day. Mother Earth spoke, in her next issue, which appeared shortly before registration day, June 5, and spoke in fairly disapproving terms toward conscription. But the sun went down into New Jersey on registration day without having witnessed the greatest demonstration New York City ever saw, or any demonstration whatever save the quiet, cheerful enrollment of what later became a heroic national army.