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of about 100,000 people. Over the heads of the crowd, among the red
flags, one could see the black banners of the anarchist groups inscribed
in letters of fire: "Where there is authority there is no freedom."
According to Kropotkin's biographers, this was "the last great
demonstration against Bolshevik tyranny, and many took part more to
demand freedom than to praise the great anarchist."
Hundreds of anarchists were arrested after Kronstadt, and only a few
months later, the libertarian Fanny Baron and eight of her comrades were
shot in the cellars of the Cheka prison in Moscow. Militant anarchism
had received a fatal blow. But outside Russia, the anarchists who had
lived through the Russian Revolution undertook an enormous labor of
criticism and doctrinal revision which reinvigorated libertarian thought
and made it more concrete. As early as September 1920, the congress of
the Confederation of Anarchist Organizations of the Ukraine, Nabat, had
categorically rejected the expression "dictatorship of the proletariat,"
seeing that it led inevitably to dictatorship over the masses by that
fraction of the proletariat entrenched in the Party, by officials, and a
handful of leaders. Just before he died Kropotkin had issued a "Message
to the Workers of the West" in which he sorrowfully denounced the rise
of a "formidable bureaucracy": "It seems to me that this attempt to build
a communist republic on the basis of a strongly centralized state, under
the iron law of the dictatorship of one party, has ended in a terrible
fiasco. Russia teaches us how not to impose communism."
A pathetic appeal from the Russian anarcho-syndicalists to the world
proletariat was published in the January 7-14, 1921, issue of the French
journal Le Libertaire: "Comrades, put an end to the domination of your
bourgeoisie just as we have done here. But do not repeat our errors; do
not let state communism establish itself in your countries!" In 1920 the
German anarchist, Rudolf Rocker, who later lived and died in the United
States, wrote Die Bankrotte des Russischen Stautskommunismus (The
Bankruptcy of State Communism), which appeared in 1921. This was the
first analysis to be made of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution.
In his view the famous "dictatorship of the proletariat" was not the
expression of the will of a single class, but the dictatorship of a party
pretending to speak in the name of a class and kept in power by force of
bayonets. "Under the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia a new class
has developed, the 'commissarocracy,' which oppresses the broad masses
just as much as the old regime used to do." By systematically
subordinating all the factors in social life to an all-powerful government
endowed with every prerogative, "one could not fail to end up with the
hierarchy of officials which proved fatal to the development of the
Russian Revolution." "Not only did the Bolsheviks borrow the state
apparatus from the previous society, but they have given it an all-
embracing power which no other government arrogates to itself."
In June 1922 the group of Russian anarchists exiled in Germany
published a revealing little book under the names of A. Gorielik, A.
Komoff, and Voline: Repression de l'Anarchisme en Russie
Sovietique(The Repression of Anarchism in Soviet Russia). Voline made
a French translation which appeared at the beginning of 1923. It
contained an alphabetical list of the martyrs of Russian anarchism. In
1921-1922, Alexander Berkman, and in 1922-1923, Emma Goldman
published a succession of pamphlets on the dramatic events which they
had witnessed in Russia.
In their turn, Peter Archinoff and Nestor Makhno himself, escaped
Makhnovites who had taken refuge in the West, published their
evidence.
The two great libertarian classics on the Russian Revolution, The
Guillotine at Work: Twenty Years of Terror in Russia by G. P. Maximoff
and The Unkown Revolution by Voline, came much later, during the
Second World War, and were written with the maturity of thought made
possible by the passage of the years.
For Maximoff, whose account appeared in America, the lessons of the
past brought to him a sure expectation of a better future. The new ruling
class in the U.S.S.R. cannot and will not be permanent, and it will be
succeeded by libertarian socialism. Objective conditions are driving this
development forward: "Is it conceivable . . . that the workers might
desire the return of the capitalists to their enterprises? Never! for they are
rebelling specifically against exploitation by the State and its
bureaucrats." What the workers desire is to replace this authoritarian
management of production with their own factory councils, and to unite
these councils into one vast national federation. What they desire is
workers' self-management. In the same way, the peasants have
understood that there can be no question of returning to an individualist
economy. Collective agriculture is the only solution, together with the
collaboration of the rural collectives with the factory councils and trade
unions: in short, the further development of the program of the October
Revolution in complete freedom.
Voline strongly asserted that any experiment on the Russian model could
only lead to "state capitalism based on an odious exploitation of the
masses," the "worst form of capitalism and one which has absolutely
nothing to do with the progress of humanity toward a socialist society."
It could do nothing but promote "the dictatorship of a single party which
leads unavoidably to the repression of all freedom of speech, press,
organization, and action, even for revolutionary tendencies, with the sole
exception of the party in power," and to a "social inquisition" which
suffocates "the very breath of the Revolution." Voline went on to
maintain that Stalin "did not fall from the moon." Stalin and Stalinism
are, in his view, the logical consequence of the authoritarian system
founded and established between 1918 and 1921. "This is the lesson the
world must learn from the tremendous and decisive Bolshevik
experiment: a lesson which gives powerful support to the libertarian
thesis and which events will soon make clear to the understanding of all
those who grieve, suffer, think, and struggle."
Anarchism in the Italian Factory Councils
The Italian anarchists followed the example of events in Russia, and
went along with the partisans of soviet power in the period immediately
after the Great War. The Russian Revolution had been received with
deep sympathy by the Italian workers, especially by their vanguard, the
metal workers of the northern part of the country. On February 20, 1919,
the Italian Federation of Metal Workers (FIOM) won a contract
providing for the election of "internal commissions" in the factories.
They subsequently tried to transform these organs of workers'
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