PART II • 1917

5 THE SECOND STORM

In the last week of February 1917, strikes and bread riots broke out in Petrograd. Mobs surged through the streets of the capital in angry demonstrations against the government. Troops were summoned to restore order, but they disregarded the commands of their officers to fire on the unruly crowds and fraternized with them instead. The forces of law and order quickly melted away. In the midst of the turbulence, Soviets of workers' deputies, modeled on the prototypes of 1905, appeared throughout the city. On 2 March, a committee of the recently prorogued Fourth Duma organized a predominantly liberal Provisional Government. That same day, Nicholas II was persuaded to abdicate, bringing to an end more than three centuries of Romanov rule.

What was most striking about the February Revolution was its elemental character. It was, as the former director of the Tsar's police observed, "a purely spontaneous phenomenon, and not at all the fruit of party agitation."¹ No revolutionary vanguard led the workers and housewives into the streets of Petrograd; political ideologies and radical groups were momentarily lost in the chaotic outbreak of a hungry people protesting the lack of bread and the unremitting sufferings of the war. To the ill-starred Aleksandr Kerenskii, future premier of the Provisional Government, it appeared as if the whole population had been carried away by "a sense of unlimited freedom, a liberation from the most elementary restraints essential to every human society."²

The dreams of the Russian anarchists seemed at last to be coming true. A dozen years after the 1905 "prologue," a second storm had broken, bearing all the earmarks of the long-awaited "social" revolution. Russian radicalism, at a low ebb [123] since the repressions of Stolypin, quickly revived. When news of the revolt reached the anarchist emigres, their excitement knew no bounds. "The sun has arisen," wrote Iuda Roshchin in Geneva, "and has dispersed the black clouds. The Russian people have awakened! Greetings to revolutionary Russia! Greetings to the fighters for the happiness of the people!"³ The Provisional Government, on assuming the reins of authority, declared a general amnesty for all political offenders. Roshchin and his comrades in exile made plans to return to their homeland as soon as possible. Meanwhile, inside the defunct empire, Daniil Novomirskii, Olga Taratuta, and hundreds of other anarchists were released from forced labor camps and from the prisons in which they had been languishing for a decade or more.

It was not long before vigorous groups of anarchists emerged anew in the cities of Russia. In Petrograd, a few Anarchist-Communist circles composed of workers and intellectuals had already been revived during the past five years and, on the eve of the revolution, could boast a total membership of about 100;⁴ anarchist cells in three large munitions plants -- the Metal Factory in the Vyborg district, the Pipe Factory on Vasilii Island, and the huge Putilov Metal Works in the southwestern corner of the city -- participated in the February demonstrations that brought the old regime to dust, their members carrying black banners embroidered with the slogan, "Down with authority and capitalism!"⁵ Within a few weeks after the collapse of tsarism, anarchist groups dotted the working-class sectors of the capital and its suburbs. The heaviest concentrations occurred in the Vyborg district, situated in the northern part of the city, and at the port and naval base of Kronstadt in the Gulf of Finland, where anarchist workmen were joined by a considerable number of sailors of the Baltic Fleet.

As in Petrograd, the anarchist groups which sprang up in other large cities attracted their membership largely from the [124] working class. In Moscow, for example, anarchist units were formed among the bakers and the workers in the food industry,⁶ augmenting the groups which had appeared before the revolution among the leather workers, printers, and railroad hands. During March, a Moscow Federation of Anarchist Groups was created which claimed about 70 members.⁷ In the south, anarchist circles were organized in the factories of Kiev, Kharkov, Odessa, and Ekaterinoslav, and by mid-year the miners of the Donets Basin had adopted as their platform the preamble to the constitution of the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World: "The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world, organized as a class, take possession of the earth and the machinery of production, and abolish the wage system."⁸ As the year advanced, however, the composition of the movement changed somewhat, for each new month brought a growing number of intellectuals back from prison and exile.

Throughout 1917 -- in contrast to 1905, when anarchism was strongest in the border regions -- the movement centered in Petrograd, no longer the headquarters of a despotic government, but the very eye of the revolutionary storm. Until the summer months, when the syndicalists arrived in force from their American and West European sanctuaries, most of the anarchist organizations of "Red Peter" adhered to the Anarchist-Communist persuasion. The local Anarchist-Communist groups in the capital and its environs soon joined together to form a loose-knit Petrograd Federation of Anarchists. By May, the Federation had launched its first newspaper, Kommuna (The Commune), to be succeeded in the fall by Svobodnaia Kommuna (The Free Commune) and Burevestnik (The Stormy Petrel). The goal of the Petrograd Federation, [125] as the names of its newspapers suggest, was to transform the city into an egalitarian commune, patterned after an idealized image of the Paris Commune of 1871. In place of the indiscriminate killings and holdups perpetrated by the Anarchist-Communist terrorists of the previous decade, the Federation called for systematic "expropriations" carried out on a far broader scale, embracing houses and food, factories and farms, mines and railroads. "Through a social revolution to the anarchist commune," was its motto -- a revolution designed to remove government and property, prisons and barracks, money and profits, and usher in a stateless society with a "natural economy."⁹ The anarchists of Kronstadt, who published a few numbers of their own local journal, Vol'nyi Kronshtadt (Free Kronstadt), issued a dramatic appeal to the oppressed masses the world over to extend the social revolution begun in Russia to their own countries and to emancipate themselves from their masters: "Awaken! Awaken humanity! Disperse the nightmare that surrounds you. . . . Put an end to the foolish craving for earthly and heavenly deities. Say, 'Enough! I have arisen!' And you will be free."¹⁰ In words that echoed the diatribes of their Beznachalie forebears, the Kronstadt Anarchist-Communists exhorted the downtrodden multitudes around the globe to take revenge on their oppressors. "Hail anarchy! Make the parasites, rulers, and priests -- deceivers all -- tremble!"¹¹

Much to the dismay of the anarchists, the February Revolution fell short of the principal objective of the social revolution, for although it overthrew the monarchy, it failed to eliminate the state. In their disappointment, some anarchists likened the February rising to a game of musical chairs, in which one ruler took the seat of another. What happened in February? asked an Anarchist-Communist journal in Rostov-on-Don. "Nothing special. In place of Nicholas the Bloody, Kerenskii the Bloody has mounted the throne."¹² [126]

Determined to remove the double yoke of the Provisional Government and private property, the anarchists found themselves making common cause with their ideological adversaries, the Bolsheviks, the only other radical group in Russia pressing for the immediate destruction of the "bourgeois" state. The intense hostility the anarchists had felt for years towards Lenin dissipated rapidly as 1917 moved forward. Impressed by a series of ultra-radical statements Lenin had been making since his return to Russia, many (but by no means all) of them came to believe that the Bolshevik leader had shed the strait-jacket of Marxism for a new theory of revolution quite similar to their own.

On 3 April, the day he arrived in Petrograd, Lenin proclaimed to his welcomers that a new era was dawning in Russia, an era which would soon witness the replacement of the new "bourgeois" government by a republic of workers' Soviets and the substitution of a popular militia for the army and police. Here was the kernel of a program that few anarchists would have disavowed. Moreover, the anarchists must have noted with approval Lenin's pointed omission of any reference to a Constituent Assembly and his failure to invoke Marxist doctrine in support of his proposals.¹³

In the "April Theses," which Lenin read the following day to a gathering of Social Democrats in the Tauride Palace, he pursued the same unorthodox tack, exempting Russia from an entire phase of history -- the prolonged period of "bourgeois democracy" which, according to Marx, necessarily preceded the proletarian revolution. "The peculiarity of the present situation in Russia," Lenin said, "is that it represents a transition from the first stage of the revolution, which, owing to the insufficient consciousness and organization of the proletariat, gave power to the bourgeoisie, to its second stage, which will place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest strata of the peasantry."¹⁴

This pronouncement, not materially different from Leon Trotsky's theory of "permanent revolution," a theory Lenin had rejected in 1905, left the moderate Social Democrats [127] thunderstruck. By repudiating the period of capitalism which, in Marx's system, must precede the socialist revolution, was Lenin, they wondered, abandoning his master's laws of history outright? Did he intend to make a mockery of Marxist philosophy by leaping over whole epochs of social and economic change? To the more orthodox socialists, Lenin's remarks constituted a heretical departure from established doctrine; apparently, they thought, he had taken leave of his senses during his long and trying exile or, even worse, had become an anarchist. I. P. Goldenberg, a veteran Russian Marxist, was moved to declare: "Lenin has now made himself a candidate for one European throne that has been vacant for thirty years -- the throne of Bakunin! Lenin's new words echo something old -- the superannuated truths of primitive anarchism."¹⁵ Nevertheless, Lenin's newly found "anarchism" had a galvanizing effect on his Bolshevik cohorts, who had been floundering during the weeks prior to his return; as Sukhanov, the left-wing Menshevik chronicler of the revolution, noted, Lenin "shook the dust of Marxism off their feet."¹⁶

If Lenin's impatience with rigid historical stages, his "maximalist" zeal to push history forward, dismayed many of his fellow Marxists, the anarchists, by and large, reacted affirmatively. The April Theses included an array of iconoclastic propositions that anarchist thinkers had long cherished. Lenin called for the transformation of the "predatory imperialist" war into a revolutionary struggle against the capitalist order. He renounced the idea of a Russian parliament in favor of a regime of Soviets modeled after the Paris Commune. He demanded the abolition of the police, the army, and the bureaucracy, and proposed that the salaries of officeholders (all of whom were to be elected and subject to recall at any time) not exceed those of skilled workers.¹⁷ Although Lenin's preoccupation with the seizure of political power gave pause to some anarchists, more than a few found his views sufficiently harmonious with their own to serve as a basis for cooperation. Whatever suspicions they still harbored were for the moment [128] put aside. Indeed, one Anarcho-Syndicalist leader who returned to Petrograd during the summer of 1917 was convinced that Lenin intended to inaugurate anarchism by "withering aWay the state" the moment he got hold of it.¹⁸

Lenin reaffirmed the anarchistic views of the April Theses in August-September 1917, when he drafted his famous pamphlet, The State and Revolution. Once again he traced the lineage of the Soviets back to the Paris Commune, an event consecrated in anarchist as well as socialist legend, and called upon the proletariat and poor peasantry to "organize themselves freely into communes," then sweep away the capitalist system and transfer the railroads, factories, and land to the "whole society." Though he mercilessly derided the anarchist "dream" of dissolving the state "overnight," he did say that the state would eventually become "entirely unnecessary," quoting with approval a well-known passage from Friedrich Engels' Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State: "The society that will organize production on the basis of free and equal associations of producers will put the whole state machine where it will then belong: into the Museum of Antiquities, by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze axe."¹⁹ Lenin declared, "So long as there is a state, there is no freedom; when there is freedom, there will be no state." Nor did he fail to acknowledge "the similarity between Marxism and anarchism (both of Proudhon and Bakunin) ... on this point."²⁰

Thus it happened that, during the eight months that separated the two revolutions of 1917, both the anarchists and the Bolsheviks were bending their efforts toward the same goal, the destruction of the Provisional Government. Though a degree of wariness persisted on both sides, a prominent anarchist noted that on most vital questions there existed "a perfect parallelism" between the two groups.²¹ Their slogans Were often identical, and there even developed a certain camaraderie between the long-time antagonists, a camaraderie [129] engendered by their common purpose. In October, they were to work hand in hand to divert the locomotive of history onto a new set of rails. When a Marxist lecturer told an audience of factory workers in Petrograd that the anarchists were disrupting the solidarity of Russian labor, an irate listener shouted, "That's enough! The anarchists are our friends!" A second voice, however, was heard to mutter, "God save us from such friends!"²²

In the turmoil and confusion which followed the February Revolution, groups of militant Anarchist-Communists "expropriated" a number of private residences in Petrograd, Moscow, and other cities. The most important case involved the villa of P. P. Durnovo, which the anarchists considered a particularly suitable target, since Durnovo had been the Governor-General of Moscow during the Revolution of 1905. Durnovo's dacha was located in the radical Vyborg district, Petrograd's "Faubourg St. Antoine," as John Reed dubbed it,²³ lying on the north side of the Neva, just beyond the Finland Station. It was here that the anarchists had their staunchest following among the workers of the capital. Anarchists and other left-wing workmen seized the Durnovo villa and converted it into a "house of rest," with rooms for reading, discussion, and recreation; the garden served as a playground for their children. The new occupants included a bakers' union and a unit of people's militia.²⁴

The expropriators were left undisturbed until 5 June, when a band of anarchists quartered in the dacha attempted to "requisition" the printing plant of a "bourgeois" newspaper, Russkaia Volia (Russian Liberty). After occupying the premises for a few hours, the attackers were dislodged by troops sent by the Provisional Government.²⁵ The First Congress of Soviets, then in session, denounced the raiders as criminals "who [130] call themselves anarchists."²⁶ On 7 June, P. N. Pereverzev, the Minister of Justice, gave the anarchists 24 hours to evacuate Durnovo's house. The following day, 50 sailors came from Kronstadt to defend the dacha,²⁷ and workers in the Vyborg district left their factories and staged demonstrations against the eviction order. The Congress of Soviets responded with a proclamation calling on the workers to return to their jobs. Condemning the seizure of private dwellings "without the agreement of their owners," the proclamation demanded the liberation of Durnovo's dacha and suggested that the workers content themselves with the free use of the garden.²⁸

During the crisis, the dacha was draped in red and black flags, and armed workers came and went. Numerous meetings were held in the garden. Anarchist speakers urged that all orders and decrees, whether from the Provisional Government or the Soviet, be ignored. A typical argument in the street outside the dacha was recorded by a reporter for the Soviet's organ, Izvestiia:

"We seized the palace because it was the property of a servant of tsarism."
"And what about Russkaia Volia?"
"That's a bourgeois organization. We're against all organizations."
"Against workers' organizations too?"
"In principle, yes. But right now...."
"Comrade, under the socialist order will you fight with the workers' organizations and press?"
"Certainly."
"Even with Pravda? You will seize it too?"
"Yes . . . even with Pravda. We'll seize it if we find it necessary."²⁹

The demonstration spurred by the affair of Durnovo's dacha reflected the mounting discontent of the Petrograd working class with the Provisional Government. After three months in power, the new regime had done little more than its tsarist predecessor to end the war or to cope with the shortages of food and housing. The mood of the workers was growing increasingly radical. Trotsky observed that the response of the masses to the anarchists and their slogans served the Bolsheviks as "a gauge of the steam pressure of the revolution."³³ [132] By the last week of June, workingmen, soldiers, and sailors in and around the capital were on the point of erupting into open violence. A report to the Minister of Justice noted that the Oranienbaum garrison, an important military establishment situated on the mainland directly south of Kronstadt, was "already cleaning the machine guns" in preparation for a move against the government.³⁴

In the latter part of June, Kerenskii ordered an assault on the Galician front, a last-ditch effort to turn the tide of the war in Russia's favor and forestall a popular mutiny at the same time. After some initial gains, German reserves moved up and halted the offensive, forcing the Russians into a disorderly retreat. Shortly before the southwestern front collapsed, shattering what little remained of Russian morale, an abortive insurrection broke out in Petrograd known as the "July Days" (3-5 July).

On 3 July, in Anchor Square, Kronstadt's revolutionary forum, two prominent anarchists addressed the crowd of workers, sailors, and soldiers who had gathered there in anticipation of radical action against the government. The first speaker, Kh. Z. ("Efim") Iarchuk, was a veteran of the movement, one of the founders of the Chernoe Znamia group in Bialystok before the Revolution of 1905. In 1913, after a five-year term in Siberian exile, he emigrated to the United States, where he joined the Union of Russian Workers and the staff of its organ, Golos Truda. Returning to Russia in the spring of 1917, he came to Kronstadt and was elected to the local soviet, becoming the leader of its influential anarchist faction.³⁵ The Kronstadt Soviet, a maverick body, pressed for an immediate rising against the Provisional Government, in spite of opposition from the Petrograd Soviet. The Petrograd Committee of the Bolshevik party also considered any rebellion at this time to be premature, the majority of its members fearing that an undisciplined outburst by anarchists and rank-and-file Bolsheviks would be easily crushed by the center and right, causing grave damage to their party. [133]

Iarchuk's comrade was an outspoken member of the Petrograd Federation of Anarchists named I. S. Bleikhman. A tinsmith by trade, Bleikhman had spent many years as a political exile abroad and in Siberia. Released from forced labor after the February Revolution, he came to Petrograd and at once became a leading member of the Anarchist-Communist Federation, delivering speeches to factory workers and writing numerous articles for Kommuna and Burevestnik under the pen name of N. Solntsev. By July, he had been elected as a delegate to the Petrograid Soviet. Iraklii Tsereteli, a leading Menshevik in the Soviet, remembers Bleikhman as a "comical figure," small in stature, with a thin, clean-shaven face and greying hair, uttering in ungrammatical Russian the superficial ideas he had gleaned from anarchist pamphlets.38

In Anchor Square, Bleikhman, with his shirt open at the neck and his curly hair flying out on all sides, exhorted a delegation from the First Machine-Gun Regiment to overthrow the bungling Provisional Government, just as the tsarist regime had been overturned in February.³⁷ He assured the soldiers that they needed no assistance from political organizations to fulfill their revolutionary mission, for "the February Revolution also took place without the leadership of a party."³⁸ He admonished his listeners to ignore the directives of the Petrograd Soviet, most of whose members, he said, were on the side of the "bourgeoisie," and he called on the masses to requisition all available supplies, to seize the factories and mines, and to destroy the government and the capitalist system -- at once.³⁹ Bleikhman denounced the Provisional Government for persecuting the anarchists of the Durnovo dacha. "Comrades," he told the machine-gunners, "your brothers' blood is now perhaps already flowing. Will you refuse to support your comrades? Will you refuse to come out in defense of the Revolution?"⁴⁰

Later that day, the First Machine-Gun Regiment raised the standard of rebellion in the capital. Crowds of soldiers, Kronstadt sailorss, and workmen erupted into armed demonstrations, demanding that the Petrograd Soviet assume power, though the anarchists among them were more interested in destroying the government than in transferring the reins of authority to tthe Soviets. The following day, 4 July, an angry mob demamded revenge on Pereverzev for ordering the raid on die dacha. A group of Kronstadt sailors even tried to kidnap Viktor Chernov, the SR leader and Minister of Agriculture, but Tirotsky came to the rescue and managed to free the unfortunate minister before any harm befell him.⁴¹

To call tthe July Days "an anarchist creation," as did one speaker at a conference of the Petrograd Federation of Anarchists in 11918,⁴² would be a gross exaggeration; nor can the Durnovo dacha incident be regarded as more than a single link in die chaim of events connecting the June Demonstrations in the capital with the abortive July insurrection. Nevertheless, the role of the anarchists should not be minimized. Together widi rank-and-file Bolsheviks and unaffiliated radicals, the anarchists actted as gadflies, goading the soldiers, sailors, and workers into the disorganized rising. But the Petrograd Soviet refused to endorse die prerhature rebellion, and the government was able to suppress the rioters without much difficulty. The leaders of the Bolshevik party were arrested or forced into hiding,, while die remaining anarchists were evicted from Durnovo's Ihouse, some of them ending up behind bars. The radical tide momentarily ebbed, affording the Provisional Government a very brief respite.

The Anarcho-Syndicalists returning to Russia during die summer of 1917 were sharply critical of the armed seizure of houses andl printing presses carried out by their Anarchist-Communist: cousins. They deplored what seemed to be an atavistic revival of the terrorism and "ex's" of 1905. Although diey emphatically agreed mat the war had to be terminated and the revolution carried forward until the state had been abolished, ithey rejected random expropriation as a retrogressive [135] step. The immediate task, they argued, was to organize the forces of labor.

By 1917, the Anarcho-Syndicalists had been joined by the majority of Kropotkin's Khleb i Volia group, which had split apart over its leader's "defehsist" position on the war issue. Though Kropotkin was well aware of the extreme war-weariness of the Russian people, he regarded the defeat of German militarism as a necessary precondition of European progress, and, on the eve of his departure for his homeland, he reaffirmed his support of the Entente. Despite this unpopular gesture, when Kropotkin arrived at the Finland Station in June 1917 after 40 years in exile, he was greeted warmly by a crowd of 60,000, while a military band played the Marseillaise, a hymn of revolutionaries everywhere and the anthem of the great French Revolution so close to Kropotkin's heart. Kerenskii offered the venerable libertarian a cabinet post as Minister of Education as well as a state pension, both of which Kropotkin bruskly declined.48 In August, however, he accepted Keren-skii's invitation to speak before the Moscow State Conference (Plekhanov, the sage of Russian Social Democracy and also a supporter of the war effort, was to be another speaker), a body of former Duma members and representatives of the zemstva, municipal governments, business associations, trade unions, Soviets, and cooperatives, called together by the new Prime Minister in the hope of bolstering his shaky regime. The Conference welcomed Kropotkin with a standing ovation. In a brief address, he urged a renewed military offensive, summoning the whole nation to rally to Russia's defense.⁴⁴

Kropotkin's "patriotism" continued to alienate him from his former followers; he found himself virtually isolated from the renascent anarchist movement inside Russia. His faithful disciple Maria Korn, who had stood by him even on the war question, remained in the West with her ailing mother.⁴⁵ Varlaam Cherkezov, who also shared Kropotkin's "defensism," [136] returned to his native Georgia, and had little further contact with his former London associate.⁴⁶ Orgeiani, who, like Cher-kezov, went back to his Caucasian birthplace, had fallen out with his old mentor over Kropotkin's support of the Allies and had entered the Anarcho-Syndicalist camp.

The first prominent Anarcho-Syndicalist to arrive from foreign exile was Maksim Raevskii, who returned in May on the same boat as Trotsky. Born into a prosperous Jewish family in Nezhin, one of the first centers of the anarchist movement in southwestern Russia, Raevskii (his real name was Fishelev) attended gimnaziia in his home town, then went to Germany for his university diploma. Moving to Paris, he became an editor of the influential Kropotkinite periodical Burevestnik and engaged in heated polemics with the antisyndicalists and "motiveless" terrorists of the Chernoe Znamia and Beznachalie groups. At the outbreak of World War I, Raevskii was in New York City, the editor of the pro-syndicalist journal Golos Truda, the weekly organ of the Union of Russian Workers of the United States and Canada, a body with about 10,000 members.⁴⁷

Raevskii's ablest collaborators on the editorial board of Golos Truda were^ Vladimir (Bill) Shatov and Vsevolod Mikhailovich Eikhenbaum, known in the movement as "Volin." Shatov, a rotund and affable man, had worked at various jobs in America -- machinist, longshoreman, printer; in addition to his duties on the staff of Golos Truda, he took an active part in the Union of Russian Workers and the IWW.⁴⁸ Volin came from a family of doctors in Voronezh, a city in the black-earth region of central Russia. His younger brother, Boris Eikhen-baum, was to become one of Russia's most distinguished literary critics. In 1905, while a law student at St. Petersburg University, Volin joined the Socialist Revolutionary party and was banished to Siberia for his radical activities. He escaped to the West, and in 1911 was converted to anarchism by the Anarchist-Communist circle in Paris led by A. A. Karelin. When hostilities broke out in Europe, Volin joined the [137] Committee for International Action Against the War. Arrested by the French police, he managed to flee once again, reaching the United States in 1916. There he entered the Union of Russian Workers and soon won a place on the staff of Golos Truda.⁴⁹

In 1917, aided by the Anarchist Red Cross,⁵⁰ Shatov and Volin sailed to Russia by the Pacific route, arriving in Petro-grad in July. Once reunited with Raevskii, they replanted Golos Truda in the Russian capital. Joining their editorial board was Alexander ("Sanya") Schapiro, an eminent Anarcho-syndicalist who had only recently returned to his native country from London after an absence of some 25 years. Victor Serge, in his celebrated Memoirs of a Revolutionary, aptly described Schapiro as a man "of critical and moderate temper."⁵¹ Schapiro was born in Rostov-on-Don in 1882, the son of a revolutionist who himself was to become an active member of the London Anarchist Federation. Taken to Turkey as a child, Sanya attended the French school in Constantinople. He had the good fortune to be brought up with four languages (Russian, Yiddish, French, and Turkish -- he later mastered English and German as well), and by the age of eleven he was reading pamphlets by Kropotkin, filisee Reclus, and Jean Grave. At sixteen, he entered the Sorbonne in Paris to study biology in preparation for a medical career, but was soon forced to give up his studies for lack of funds. In 1900, Schapiro joined his father in London and worked for many years as a close associate of Kropotkin, Cherkezov, and Rocker in the Anarchist Federation on Jubilee Street. He was elected secretary of the International Anarchist Bureau by the Amsterdam Congress of 1907, and later succeeded Rocker as secretary of the Relief Committee of the Anarchist Red Cross.⁵² [138]

The youngest member of the Golos Truda group, Grrigorii Petrovich Maksimov, was to become a widely respected figure in the anarchist movement both in Russia and abroad. Born in 1893 in a peasant village near Smolensk, Maksimcov attended an Orthodox seminary in the medieval capital of "Vladimir. He completed his studies, but changed his mind about entering the priesthood and enrolled in the St. Petersburg Agricultural Academy. While studying there, he reaid the works of Bakunin and Kropotkin, and was won over ito the anarchist cause. Upon graduating as an agronomist in 1915, Maksimov was drafted into the anmy to serve in the? "imperialist" struggle which he bitterly opposed. He returmed to Petrograd at the beginning of 1917 and participated in the February strikes that toppled the tsiarist government. Iin August, he joined the staff of Golos Truda, becoming the journal's most prolific contributor.⁵³

The first issue of ^{Golos Truda} aippeared in August 1917, under the banner of the Union of Anarcho-Syndicalist Propaganda, which was established as the syndicalist counlterpart of the Anarchist-Communist Petrograd Federation. Duriing the summer and fall, the Union set aboiut spreading the gospel of syndicalism among the workingmen of the capital. Golos Truda published numerous articles on the French syndicatts, the bourses du travail, and the general sstrike, the editors soliciting contributions from such former Khlebovol'tsy as Orgeiiani in Georgia and Vladimir Zabrezhnev hn Moscow (both of: whom had previously contributed to the Neiw York Golos Truda from Paris⁵⁴), as well as from the erstwhile "legal Marxist" Vladimir Posse, who h,ad been propagating syndicalist doctrines (though without the "anarchist" prefix) for more than a decade. The printing establishment of Golos Truda brought out Russian editions of important Anarcho-Syndicalist works by 1917. [139] West European authors.⁵⁵ In addition, Volin, Shatov, and Maksimov, despite their heavy editorial duties, found time to deliver innumerable speeches in factories and workers' clubs and at labor rallies in the Cirque Moderne.⁵⁶

The principal goal of the Golos Truda group was a revolution "anti-statist in its methods of struggle, syndicalist in its economic content, and federalist in its political tasks," a revolution that would replace the centralized state with a free federation of "peasant unions, industrial unions, factory committees, control commissions, and the like in the localities all over the country."⁵⁷ Although the Anarcho-Syndicalists endorsed the Soviets as "the only possible form of non-party organization of the 'revolutionary democracy'," the only instruments for effecting the "decentralization and diffusion of power,"⁵⁸ they pinned their greatest hopes on the local factory committees. The factory committees, declared Golos Truda, would "deliver the decisive and mortal blow to capitalism"; they were "the very best form of workers' organization ever to appear ... the cells of the future socialist society."⁵⁹

The factory committees arose in Russia as a spontaneous product of the February Revolution -- "its flesh and blood," as one labor organizer described them in the spring of 1917.⁶⁰ In the midst of the Petrograd strikes and demonstrations, workers gathered in diningrooms and workshops, in labor exchanges and medical-fund offices, with the aim of creating local organizations to represent their vital interests. Throughout the capital, under a variety of names -- factory committees, shop committees, workers' councils, councils Of elders -- committees of workers were organized on the factory and workshop level. It was not long before they were functioning in every industrial [140] center of European Russia, arising first in the larger establishments, then, within a few months, taking hold in all but the very smallest.

From the outset, the workers' committees did not limit their demands to higher wages and shorter hours, though these were at the top of every list; what they wanted, in addition to material benefits, was a voice in management. On 4 March, for example, the workers of the Skorokhod Shoe Factory in Petrograd did, to be sure, call upon their superiors to grant them an eight-hour working day and a wage rise, including double pay for overtime labor; but they also demanded official recognition of their factory committee and its right to control the hiring and firing of labor. In the Petrograd Radiotelegraph Factory, a workers' committee was organized expressly to "work out rules and norms for the internal life of the factory," while other factory committees were elected chiefly to control the activities of the directors, engineers, and foremen.⁶¹ Overnight, incipient forms of "workers' control" over production and distribution appeared in the large enterprises of Petrograd, particularly in the state-owned metallurgical plants, devoted almost exclusively to the war effort and employing perhaps a quarter of the workers in the capital. The slogan of "workers' control" caught on at once and spread from factory to factory, provoking great consternation both, within the Provisional Government -- which now operated the huge enterprises in which the factory committees were making the greatest commotion -- and among private entrepreneurs, who caught a glimpse of the nightmare yet to come.

The slogan of "workers' control" had been invented neither by the Anarcho-Syndicalists nor by the Bolsheviks, nor indeed by any radical group. Rather, as a Menshevik witness later recalled, it was "born of the storms of the revolution,"⁶² arising [141] as spontaneously as the factory committees themselves.⁶³ Political affiliation had little to do with the elemental impulse of the workers to organize local committees or to claim a role in directing their factories and workshops. Like the revolutionary syndicalist movement in France, the factory committees of 1917 were the creation of workers belonging to a variety of leftist parties or to none at all. Before long, however, the more militant workingmen grew impatient with the moderate socialists who supported the Provisional Government and its policy of perpetuating the war and the capitalist system. The overthrow of the tsarist regime in February had stirred up hopes of an immediate cessation of hostilities and of a regeneration of society, hopes that by April or May had turned into bitter disappointment. Whereas in 1905 the Social Democrats -- Mensheviks no less than Bolsheviks -- had been sufficiently radical to satisfy nearly all elements of the working class, now only the anarchists and Bolsheviks were proclaiming what a growing segment of labor wanted to hear: "Down with the war! Down with the Provisional Government! Control of the factories to the workers!" If, as Lenin remarked, the rank and file of Russian labor stood a thousand times more to the left than the Mensheviks and SR's, and a hundred times more to the left even than the Bolsheviks,⁶⁴ then it was the Anarcho-Syndicalists who came closest to their radical spirit. But the Anarcho-Syndicalists were unable to capitalize on this temperamental kinship. They exerted an influence in the factory committees that was disproportionate to their small numbers, but because they repudiated a centralized party apparatus, they were never in a position to dominate the committees or to lead the working class on a broad scale. It was left for the Bolsheviks, equipped not only with a most effective party organization, but also with a conscious will to power that the syndicalists lacked, to capture the allegiance of the working-men, first in the factory committees and then in the Soviets and trade unions.

Although Lenin was quite aware of the syndicalist nature of [142] the factory committees and their program of workers' control, he also recognized the potential role of the committees in his party's quest for political power. Lenin was looking forward to "a break-up and a revolution a thousand times more powerful than that of February,"⁶⁵ and for this he needed the backing of the factory workers. If he was instinctively suspicious of what Bakunin and Kropotkin called "the creative spirit of the masses," Lenin appreciated full well the people's destructive capabilities. He was therefore content, for the moment, to ride the spontaneous tide of revolt that was undermining the Provisional Government, awaiting the day when the Bolsheviks would seize power, stem the syndicalist tide, and begin to construct a new socialist order. Hence Lenin and his party gave vigorous support to the factory committees and their demand for workers' control in industry. Writing in Pravda on 17 May, Lenin explicitly endorsed the slogan of "workers' control," declaring that "the workers must demand the immediate realization of control, in fact and without fail, by the workers themselves."⁶⁶ To the Anarcho-Syndicalists, this was further evidence of Lenin's retreat from Marxist dogma. "The Bolsheviks have separated themselves more and more from their original goals," asserted an Anarcho-Syndicalist journal in Kharkov, "and all the time have been moving closer to the desires of the people. Since the time of the revolution, they have decisively broken with Social Democracy, and have been endeavoring to apply Anarcho-Syndicalist methods of struggle."⁶⁷

So it was that, at labor conferences between May and October, Bolshevik and Anarcho-Syndicalist delegates voted together in support of the factory committees and workers' control. Their most formidable opponents in the labor movement were the Mensheviks. Rigidly adhering to Marx's historical framework, the Mensheviks insisted that a protracted period of "bourgeois-democratic" government -- a period in which workers' control had no place -- had to follow the February devolution. "We find ourselves in the bourgeois stage of revolution," declared M. I. Skobelev, the Menshevik Minister of Labor, to the First Conference of Petrograd Factory Committees [143] in June. "The transfer of enterprises into the hands of the people at the present time would not assist the revolution."68 Any regulation of industry, moreover, was properly the function of the government, Skobelev argued, and not of autonomous factory committees. The committees, he maintained, could best serve the workers' cause by becoming subordinate units in a statewide network of trade unions; the Russian working class, instead of taking "the path of seizing the factories," would do well to rely on the unions to improve its economic situation within the framework of capitalism.⁶⁹

The Anarcho-Syndicalists, however, had no intention of meekly standing aside while the workers' committees were absorbed by the trade unions. Disenchanted with the unions, especially with those under the thumb of the "gradualist" and "conciliatory" Mensheviks, syndicalist spokesmen began to distinguish sharply between the "bold" factory committees, heirs to the legacy of revolutionary syndicalism, and the "reformist" unions, which, according to Volin of the Golos Truda group, were filling "the role of mediator between labor and capital."⁷⁰ Thus a leading Anarcho-Syndicalist in Kharkov (Rotenberg was his name) told a gathering of factory-committee representatives at the end of May: "The trade unions are bankrupt all over the world. Don't you laugh! Different methods are needed. When the trade unions want to subjugate the revolutionary committees, we say, Hands off! We will not follow your path. We must finish the struggle with capitalism -- so that it ceases to exist."⁷¹ In the same vein, a fellow anarchist delegate, representing the Kharkov Locomotive Works, labeled the unions "the offspring of the bourgeoisie," unsuitable for the new age of the common man just over the horizon: "Right now, in fact, if we want to live, we must take over the factories; but if we want to perish -- let us go into the trade unions. But we will not do the latter. In order to improve the situation of the workers, we must take the factories into our own hands."⁷² These [144] were the passionate words of men utterly devoted to their factory committees, men captivated by the vision of a brave new world that they could win only through the local committees. They considered the trade unions vestiges of a moribund capitalist order; the factory committees, being "more alive," as they liked to put it, represented the wave of the future, which would sweep away the "bourgeois" Provisional Government and carry in a glorious new era for the workingman. The factory committee was "revolutionary, militant, bold, energetic, and powerful by virtue of its youth," wrote Grigorii Maksimov in Golos Truda, whereas the trade union was "older, cautious, inclined towards compromise, calling itself militant but in reality striving for 'class harmony.' "⁷³ While the centralized bureaucracy of the unions stifled new ideas, the factory committee was "the chef d'oeuvre of the workers' creativity."⁷⁴

The persistent efforts of the Mensheviks to subordinate the workers' committees to the trade unions were successfully resisted by the anarchists and Bolsheviks, both of whom were rapidly gaining ground in the labor movement -- particularly the Bolsheviks, with their effective organization and leadership. Without a disciplined organization, the anarchists could scarcely hope to match the Bolshevik recruitment campaign; they could only take consolation in the fact that "the Bolsheviks and not the Mensheviks are everywhere on the rise." For the Bolsheviks, so they thought, had "cast off the scholasticism of their apostle and adopted a revolutionary -- that is, anti-Marxist -- point of view."⁷⁵

The growth of syndicalism among the Petrograd workers during 1917 was a fact acknowledged even by hostile Men-shevik observers.⁷⁶ New elections to the factory committees in the summer and autumn months yielded a significant number of Anarcho-Syndicalist members. Typically, a large enterprise nught have elected a dozen Bolsheviks, two anarchists, and [145] perhaps a few Mensheviks and SR's.⁷⁷ Maksimov and Shatov of Golos Truda were among the most active members of the Central Council of Petrograd Factory Committees. (Maksimov was elected in June and Shatov in August.) But the chief beneficiaries of the leftward swing of the labor movement were the Bolsheviks, who had expediently appropriated the syndicalist labor program just as they were to appropriate the SR agrarian program in October.

The startling gains of Lenin's party provoked a feeling of uneasiness within the anarchist ranks. More and more anarchists came to believe that their movement required a greater degree of organization, lest the allegiance of the working class be lost completely to their temporary Bolshevik allies. A number of local and provincial conferences were hastily summoned in the hope of remedying the woeful disunity of the movement.⁷⁸ In Petrograd, the anarchist cells within the large industrial establishments stepped up their activity, and the local branch of the Union of Anarcho-Syndicalist Propaganda in the Vyborg district opened a workers' club with the aim of enlarging its membership.⁷⁹ The Anarcho-Syndicalists of Moscow, who already had established their influence among the bakers, printers, railwaymen, and leather workers, extended it to the postal workers and the workers in the perfume industry as well.⁸⁰ In the south, syndicalism took root among the miners [146] of the Donets Basin and the cement workers and longshoremen of Ekaterinodar and Novorossiisk on the Black Sea.⁸¹

In the very midst of these organizational efforts, however, a schism developed within the anarchist camp over the question of workers' control. In English, the word "control" implies actual domination over a given procedure, but the Russian connotation is more moderate, suggesting observation or inspection; the expression "workers' control" (rabochii kontrol') meant something much closer to supervision or surveillance (nadzor, nabliudenie) of the employers than to the seizure (zakhvat) and management (upravlenie) of the factories by the workers themselves. Yet, as one factory-committee leader remarked, there were more than a few radical workmen who confused "control" with "the seizure of the factories."⁸²

Most of the proponents of outright confiscation were Anarchist-Communists who deplored workers' control as a halfway measure, a timid compromise with the existing order. One Anarchist-Communist delegate at a factory-committee conference in the capital demanded nothing less than "the seizure of the factories and the removal of the bourgeoisie."⁸³ "Control does not satisfy us," complained another. "We must take production entirely into our own hands and confiscate -- all the factories."⁸⁴ At a congress of Petrograd shipyard workers (among whom anarchist influence was exceptionally strong), an impatient delegate called for "the transfer of the management of the factories and ports into the hands of the [workers'] committees." "The committees," he declared, "must be active, not passive, that is, must operate the factories and not merely control their activities."⁸⁵ Dissenting from this view, a second speaker contended that "the workers who are [147] striving to manage the factories seriously overestimate their strength." But his turned out to be a minority voice, for a special commission of the congress endorsed the appeal for expropriation.⁸⁶ At still another workers' conference, a per-fervid advocate of expropriation demanded "deeds, not words," then set a personal example by engineering the seizure of the enterprise in which he was employed, the Schliisselburg Gunpowder Works.⁸⁷ It is worth noting that this same workman, lustin Zhuk by name, had been sentenced in 1909 to an indefinite period of forced labor for robbing a sugar factory near Kiev and killing a watchman.⁸⁸

To the Anarcho-Syndicalists, these speeches reflected the same impetuosity that had ruled out cooperation with the Anarchist-Communists in the past. According to Maksimov, the advocates of "seizure for seizure's sake" belonged to the outmoded and discredited school of banditry and terrorism.⁸⁹ While the syndicalists agreed that the workers must ultimately take possession of the factories, they were opposed to immediate confiscation before the workers had been adequately trained for the tasks of management. Maksimov and his colleagues on the staff of Golos Truda pressed for "total" workers' control, embracing all plant operations -- "real and not fictitious" control over work rules, hiring and firing, hours and wages, and the procedures of manufacture.⁹⁰ Only thus could workers' control properly serve as a transitional phase, during which the manual laborers would learn how to be their own bosses. "The control commissions must not be mere checking commissions," an Anarcho-syndicalist from Odessa told the AU-Russian Conference of Factory Committees, which met in Petrograd on the eve of the Bolshevik insurrection, "but must be the cells of the future, which even now are preparing for the transfer of production into the hands of the workers."⁹¹

In the meantime, the factory-owners of Russia were warning [148] the Provisional Government that the spread of workers' control had placed the nation's economy in jeopardy. The manufacturers complained that the situation in the factories had already reached a point "exceedingly close to industrial anarchy."⁹² They blamed the growing economic chaos on the workers' naive conviction that Russia stood on the verge of a shining new era: "The working class [declared a conference of industrialists in southern Russia], captivated by the alluring prospects depicted by its leaders, anticipates the coming of a Golden Age, but terrible shall be its disappointment, which one cannot but foresee."⁹³ The workers were indeed becoming impatient for the arrival of their Golden Age. As the workers' committees acquired an increasing measure of power in the factories and mines, their vision of a proletarian paradise grew more distinct. Russia seemed about to realize that "visible dream," as a factory-committee chairman in Petrograd described it, in which the workingmen would "govern themselves without bowing their heads before any authority of the propertied classes."⁹⁴

By October, some form of workers' control existed in the great majority of Russian enterprises. There were even sporadic instances in which factory committees ejected their em--ployers and engineers and then endeavored to run the plants themselves, sending delegations in search of fuel, raw materials, and financial aid from workers' committees in other establishments. The committees that seized the reins of management often boasted that they were maintaining -- or even raising -- existing levels of production. The workers' committee of a copper foundry in Petrograd, for example, claimed that it had almost doubled the rate of production soon after taking over the enterprise, and a delegate to the First Conference of Petrograd Factory Committees made the fantastic estimate that under committee management his aviation plant had increased output by 200 per cent in a two-month period.⁹⁵ [149]

The owners, of course, rejected these claims. The usurpations of the factory committees, they argued, only contributed to the growing economic turmoil:

What would you say [wrote a leading commercial journal after the October Revolution] of people who would establish control over the work of a physician at the very moment that he stops the flow of blood in the act of severing the vessels, or when he is administering artificial respiration to one in a coma? What would you say of the official who assigns a controller to supervise the actions of a person who is saving a drowning man or of a ship's captain during a storm?⁹⁶

Throughout the country, tensions between capital and labor mounted swiftly. Naturally, the workers blamed the perilous condition of Russian industry on the employers, accusing therfl [150] of launching a frightful war for the sake of reaping huge profits, despite the fact that their shortsighted avarice doomed the industrial machine to eventual breakdown. Labor leaders insisted that workers' control over management was necessary to prevent shutdowns, lockouts, and large-scale dismissals. For their part, the manufacturers countered that they were forced to curtail production or even to close up shop by the reckless interference of unqualified workmen in the production process, compounded by severe shortages of fuel and raw materials. The arguments on both sides had merit, but no words could bridge the wide gulf between the contending classes. Together, World War I and the domestic class war were carrying the Russian economy and the Provisional Government to the edge of disaster.

1 General E. K. Klimovich, in Padenie tsarskogo rezhima (7 vols., Leningrad, 1924-1927), I, 98.

2 Quoted in David Shub, Lenin (New York, 1948), p. 189.

3 I. Roshchin, "Privet svobode," Put' k Svobode, No. 1, May 1917, pp. 1-2. Cf. the reaction of the anarchist emigres in the United States, described in Joseph Cohen, Di Yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung in Amerike (Philadelphia, 1945), pp. 335-336.

4 Mikhailu Bakuninu, p. 322.

5 Gorev, Anarkhizm v Rossii, pp. 103-107.

6 Ibid., p. 105.

7 Mikhailu Bakuninu, p. 321.

8 John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World (New York, 1960), p. 68. The text of the preamble is in Joyce Kornbluh, ed., Rebel Voices: An I.W.W. Anthology (Ann Arbor, 1964), pp. 12-13.

9 Svobodnaia Kommuna, No. 2, 2 October 1917, p. 1; Kommuna, No. 6, September 1917, pp. 2-3.

10 Vol'nyi Kronshtadt, No. 2, 12 October 1917, p. 2.

11 Ibid., p. 4.

12 Anarkhist (Rostov-na-Donu), No. 11, 22 October 1917, p. 3. The date on this journal is misprinted as "1907."

13 N. N. Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution, 1917 (New York, 1955), pp. 282-284.

14 Lenin, Sochineniia, xx, 78.

15 Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution, p. 287; I. G. Tsereteli, Vospominaniia o fevrcd'skoi revoliutsii (2 vols, in 1, Paris, 1963), I, 301.

16 Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution, p. 324.

17 Lenin, Sochineniia, xx, 76-83.

18 Bertram D. Wolfe, introduction to Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World, p. xxxi.

19 Lenin, Sochineniia, xxi, 378, 406, 410; Marx and Engels, Selected Works, n, 322.

20 Lenin, Sochineniia, xxi, 406, 436.

21 Voline, La Revolution inconnue (1917-1921) (Paris, 1943), p. 185.

22 V. Polonskii, "Anarkhisty i sovremennaia revoliutsiia," Novaia Zhizn', 15 November 1917, p. 1.

23 Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World, p. 5.

24 A. Miakin, "Dacha Durnovo" (manuscript, Petrograd, 1917), Columbia Russian Archive.

25 Rech', 6 June 1917, p. 5; 7 June 1917, p. 4.

26 Izvestiia Petrogradskogo Soveta Rabochikh i Soldatskikh Deputatov, 7 June 1917, p. 11; 9 June 1917, p. 10.

27 P. N. Miliukov, Istoriia vtoroi russkoi revoliutsii (1 vol. in 3 parts, ^ofia, 1921-1923), part I, 213-214.

28 Izvestiia, 9 June 1917, p. 1.

29 Ibid., p. 11.

30 Rech', 20 June 1917, p. 4; Izvestiia, 20 June 1917, p. 5; Miliukov, Istoriia vtoroi russkoi revoliutsii, part I, 226; Tsereteli, Vospominaniia, ii, 252.

31 F. Drugov, "Ubiitsa Asnina o svoem krovavom dele," Probuzhdenie, No. 30-31, January-February 1933, pp. 26-29; Rech', 20 June 1917, p. 4; 21 June 1917, p. 4; Izvestiia, 20 June 1917, p. 5; 21 June 1917, pp. 4, 9-10.

32 Izvestiia, 26 June 1917, p. 9; Golos Anarkhii (Saratov), No. 2, 21 September 1917, p. 1; Bol'shaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia (2nd edn., 51 vols., Moscow, 1950-1958), xv, 651. On the Durnovo dacha incident see also Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution, pp. 386-388; Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, i, 441-456; and W. S. Woytinsky, Stormy Passage (New York, 1961), pp. 290-293.

33 Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, I, 425.

34 Ibid. n. 10.

35 Gonenia na anarkhizm v Sovetskoi Rossii (Berlin, 1922), pp. 62-63; Velikaia Oktiabr'skaia sotsialisticheskaia revoliutsiia: dokumenty i materialy; Revol'utsionnoe dvizhenie v Rossii v iiule 1917 g. -- iiul'skii krizis (Moscow, 1959), p. 91.

36 Tsereteli, Vospominaniia, I, 166-167. Cf. Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, n, 13-14.

37 Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie v Rossii v iiule 1917 g., p. 81.

38 Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, n, 82.

39 R. P. Browder and A. F. Kerensky, eds., The Russian Provisional Government, 1917 (3 vols., Stanford, 1961), m, 1338-1339.

40 W. H. Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, 1917-1921 (2 vols., New York, 1957), I, 172.

41 Ibid., I, 174.

42 Burevestnik, 11 April 1918, p. 2.

43 Interview with Princess Alexandra Kropotkin, New York City, 10 March 1965.

44 S. P. Tiruin, "Ot'ezd P. A. Kropotkina iz Anglii v Rossiiu i ego pis'ma," Na Chuzhoi Storone (Prague), 1924, No. 4, pp. 224-231; Lebedev, P. A. Kropotkin, p. 72; P. A. Kropotkin i ego uchenie, p. 230; Woodcock and Avakumovic, The Anarchist Prince, p. 397.

45 Delo Truda, No. 75, March-April 1933, p. 9.

46 B. Nikolaevskii, "Varlaam Nikolaevich Cherkezov (1864-1925)," Katorga i Ssylka, 1926, No. 4, p. 231.

47 Delo Truda, No. 66, May-December 1931, pp. 22-23.

48 Emma Goldman, Living My Life (2 vols, in 1, New York, 1931),

49 Voline, La Revolution inconnue, pp. 7-11; Rudolf Rocker, introduction to Voline, Nineteen-Seventeen: The Russian Revolution Betrayed (New York, 1954); Delo Truda-Probuzhdenie, No. 16, January 1946, pp. 13-19; No. 17, March 1946, pp. 18-19; M. S. (Mollie Steimer), Freedom (London), 17 November 1945, p. 2.

50 Yelensky, In the Struggle for Equality, pp. 36-40.

51 Serge, Memoires d'un revolutionnaire, p. 134.

52 Rudolf Rocker to Senya and Mollie Fleshin, 12 February 1947. Rocker Archive; Eusebio C. Carbo, "Alexander Schapiro," L'Adunata dei Refrattari (New York), 22 March 1947, pp. 3-4; Rocker, The London Years, p. 244; P. A. Kropotkin i ego uchenie, pp. 335-336.

53 Rudolf Rocker, "Grigorii Petrovich Maksimov," Delo Truda-Probuzhdenie, No. 33, July-August 1950, pp. 1-6; Goneniia na anarkhizm v Sovetskoi Rossii, pp. 54-55; Rudolf Rocker, introduction to G. P. Maximoff, ed., The Political Philosophy of Bakunin (Glencoe, Illinois, 1953); George Woodcock, introduction to G. Maximov, Constructive Anarchism (Chicago, 1952).

54 Cf. G. Maksimov, "Anarkhicheskie gazety i zhurnaly," Delo Truda, No. 100, December 1937-February 1938, p. 68.

55 The most significant translations were Christian Cornelissen, Vpered k novomu obshchestvu; Georges Yvetot, Fernand Pellut'e i revoliutsionnyi sindikalizm vo Frantsii; Yvetot, Azbuka sindikalizma; and Emile Pataud and Emile Pouget, Kak my sovershim revoliutsiiu.

56 See, for example, Golos Truda, No. 3, 25 August 1917; No. 8, 29 September 1917; No. 9, 6 October 1917; No. 12, 27 October 1917 (in memory of the Chicago martyrs); and No. 19, 18 November 1917.

57 Ibid., No. 1, 11 August 1917, p. 1.

58 Ibid., p. 2.

59 Ibid., p. 4; No. 2, 18 August 1917, p. 1.

60 Pervaia rabochaia konferentsiia fabrichno-zavodskikh komitetov (Petrograd, 1917), p. 37.

61 A. I. Evzel'man, "Bol'sheviki Petrograda v bor'be za bol'shevizatsiiu Profsoiuzov i fabzavkomov v period podgotovki i provedeniia Velikoi Oktiabr'skoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii," dissertation, Moscow State University (1951), pp. 98ff.

62 Solomon Schwarz, "Betriebsrate und Produktionskontrolle in Russland'' in H. Pothoff, ed., Die sozialen Probleme des Betriebes (Berlin, 1925), p. 175. Cf. G. V. Tsyperovich, Sindikaty i tresty v Rossii (3rd edn. Petrograd, 1920), p. 143; and M. Gordon, Uchastie rabochikh v sanizatsii proizvodstva (Leningrad, 1927), p. 8.

63 "Workers' control," however, had been a slogan of the West European syndicalists and the British Guild Socialists since the turn of the century.

64 Lenin, Sochineniia, xx, 345.

65 Leninskii sbornik (35 vols., Moscow, 1924-1925), iv, 290.

66 Lenin, Sochineniia, xx, 379.

67 Robochaia Mysl', No. 8, 3 December 1917; quoted in Gorev, Anarkhizm v Rossii, p na

68 Pervaia rabochaia konferentsiia, p. 14.

68 Ibid.

70 Oktiabr'skaia revoliutsiia i fabzavkomy: materialy po istorii fabrichno-zavodskikh komitetov (3 vols., Moscow, 1927-1929), I, 233.

71 Iu. Kreizel', Iz istorii profdvizheniia g. Khar'kova v 1917 godu (Kharkov, 1921), p. 50.

72 Ibid., pp. 49, 52.

73 Golos Truda, No. 1, 11 August 1917, p. 4.

74 Ibid., No. 10, 13 October 1917, p. 3.

75 Ibid., No. 8, 29 September 1917, pp. 3-4.

76 Raphael R. Abramovitch, The Soviet Revolution, 1917-1939 (New York, 1962), p. 99. Cf. Velikaia Oktiabr'skaia sotsialisticheskaia revo-jutsiia: dokumenty i materialy; Oktiabfskoe vooruzhennoe vosstanie v Petrograde (Moscow, 1957), p. 52.

77 See the figures for the Putilov, Obukhov, and Pipe factories in Professional'noe dvizhenie v Petrograde v 1917 g., ed. A. Anskii (Leningrad, 1928), pp. 272, 276; Bol'sheviki Petrograda v 1917 godu: khronika sobytii (Leningrad, 1957), p. 612; Bol'sheviki v period podgotovki i provedeniia Velikoi Oktiabfskoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii: khronika sobytii v Petrograde, aprel'-oktiabr" 1917 g. (Leningrad, 1947), pp. 288, 356, 365; Browder and Kerensky, The Russian Provisional Government, III, 1711; Putilovets na putiakh k Oktiabriu (Moscow and Leningrad, 1933), p. 85; and M. I. Mitel'man et al., Istoriia Putilovskogo zavoda, 1789-1917 (3rd edn., Moscow and Leningrad, 1941), p. 501. Of the 167 delegates to the All-Russian Conference of Factory Committees (17-22 October), there were 96 Bolsheviks, 24 SR's, 13 anarchists, and 7 Mensheviks. Izvestiia TsIK, 24 October 1917, p. 7.

78 G. Gorelik, Anarkhisty v rossiiskoi revoliutsii (Berlin, 1922), p. 7; Golos Truda, No. 10, 13 October 1917, p. 4; Vol'nyi Kronshtadt, No. 2, 12 October 1917, p. 4.

79 Golos Truda, No. 6, 15 September 1917, p. 4; No. 9, 6 October 1917, p. 4.

80 Gorelik, Anarkhisty v rossiiskoi revoliutsii, p. 20. A respects Anarcho-Syndicalist, Nikolai Konstantinovich Lebedev, edited the journal of the Moscow Perfume Workers and, with his wife, N. Kritskaia, was the author of a widely read history of the French labor movement, Istoriia sindikal'nogo dvizheniia vo Frantsii, 1789-1907 (Moscow, 1908).

81 G. P. Maximoff, The Guillotine at Work (Chicago, 1940), p. 366; B. E. [Boris Yelensky], "Fabrichno-zavodskie komitety i ikh rol' v velikoi russkoi revoliutsii," Golos Truzhenika, No. 25-26, April-May 1927, pp. 7-9. Yelensky was a key figure among the anarchists in the Novorossiisk factory-committee movement.

82 Oktiabr'skaia revoliutsiia i fabzavkomy, I, 171.

83 Ibid., II,176.

84 Ibid. II, 123.

85 Vserossiiskii s'ezd predstavitelei rabochikh zavodov, portov i uchrezhdenii Morskogo vedomstva (Petrograd, 1917), pp. 1-3.

86 Ibid., p. 3.

87 Oktiabr'skaia revoliutsiia i fabzavkomy, II, 121, 180-181; Maximofl, The Guillotine at Work, p. 351.

88 Anarkhist, No. 4, September 1909, p. 29.

89 Vol'nyi Golos Truda, No. 4, 16 September 1918, p. 3.

90 Golos Truda, No. 10, 13 October 1917, p. 3.

91 Oktiabr'skaia revoliutsiia i fabzavkomy, II, 180.

92 Rabochee dvizhenie v 1917 godu, eds. V. L. Meller and A. M. Pankratova (Moscow and Leningrad, 1926), pp. 126-127.

93 Ibid.

94 Rabochii kontrol' i natsionalizatsiia promyshlennykh predpriiatii Petrograda v 1917-1918 gg.: sbornik dokumentov (Leningrad, 1947), P- 181.

95 Oktiabr'skaia revoliutsiia i fabzavkomy, I, 147; Pervaia rabochaia konferentsiia, p. 58.

96 Quoted in A. Lozovskii, Rabochii kontrol' (Petrograd, 1918), P- "•

97 Bol'sheviki Petrograda v 1917 godu, p. 577.

98 Lozovskii, Rabochii kontrol', pp. 33-34.

99 "Materialy k istorii rabochego kontrolia nad proizvodstvom (1917- 1918 gg.)," Krasnyi Arkhiv, 1940, No. 6, p. 110.