This short book, written in 1922, is remarkable in its unflinching takedown of the Bolshevik regime at a time when its was still being applauded by leftists and radicals throughout the world. Emma Goldman was born in Russia but had been a U.S. Citizen for 32 years when she was deported in 1919 because of her antiwar activities. As an anarchist, she had never accepted Marxism but like many non-Marxist radicals, she believed that the Russian revolution was the true people's uprising she had long foretold. Very soon, however, she saw that the Communist Party had choked the life out of the original February 1917 revolt and established a police state that, in most respects, did not change until its collapse in 1989. The secret police, then called the Cheka, routinely and ruthlessly imprisoned and executed thousands under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky, and the attempt by the Kronstadt sailors to restore democracy to the revolution was crushed amid mass murder in 1921. Too often, western Marxists blamed Stalin for what the USSR became but Goldman makes it clear that the criminal nature of that state was created by Lenin and the original Bolsheviks. She details the role of Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev and other early Bolsheviks who ironically received from Stalin the same fate they so easily meted out to countless innocents.
Goldman witnessed the privileged lives of party members, the deliberate starvation and deprivation of workers and peasants, and the complete suffocation of political and cultural life within the first two years of the Bolshevik seizure of power. As an anarchist, she was shocked at the arrest and murder of thousands who merely shared her beliefs, and the betrayal of the anarchist armed forces led in the Ukraine by Nestor Makhno. She also commented on the pogroms against her fellow Jews and their treatment as second class citizens by the Bolsheviks, and predicted the genocide that was to come. Finally, after two years she and her companion Alexander Birkman left Russia in despair and she expressed her disillusionment in this book. Its publication caused her to be reviled and isolated by the radicals and socialists of the West who were misled by their own naïveté and by Bolshevik propaganda into thinking that the new Russian regime was anything other than the most horrendous of all police states - one which established the totalitarian model copied by the Fascists and Nazis.
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