Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (95 page)

He concluded that the 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.
¹⁵

Just before he died Kropoktin also wrote that the Russian Revolution

When Kropotkin died in February 1921, it was the last time that the anarchists’ black flag was carried amongst the red ones through the streets of Moscow in an immense funeral convoy of a hundred thousand people.

The last glimmer of hope for the anarcho-syndicalists and anarchists in Russia was in the uprising of the Petrograd sailors and workers in March 1921 at the Kronstadt fortress two weeks after Kropotkin’s death. The sailors had played a heroic role in October 1917 – Trotsky had called them the ‘pride and glory of the Russian Revolution’ – and although their ranks had been swelled by peasants they were still considered the revolutionary vanguard of the Navy. The mutiny was primarily an attempt to renew the revolution and restore the original Soviet idea in face of the Bolshevik dictatorship and the centralization of ‘War Communism’.

Sixteen thousand sailors, workers and soldiers attended a meeting held on 1 March 1921. The rebels condemned the usurpation of power by the Bolshevik government. They called for new elections for the Soviets by secret ballot, liberty for the trade unions, and the release of political prisoners. Their programme also included the call for ‘Freedom of speech and press to workers and peasants, to anarchists and left socialist parties’ (though
not for Mensheviks).
¹⁷
Some anarchists called the Kronstadt rebellion the ‘Third Revolution’.

Although the Kronstadt rebels insisted that they wanted to work within the framework of the Revolution, the Bolshevik government refused to negotiate. Following the great Leningrad strikes of January and February, they were in no mood for compromise. At the Tenth Congress of the Bolshevik Party in March 1921 the New Economic Policy was adopted which met most of the rebels’ economic demands, but the Party refused to make terms with the Workers’ Opposition. Soon afterwards an ultimatum to the rebels in Kronstadt appeared on billboards over the signature of Lenin and Trotsky: ‘Surrender or Be Shot Like Rabbits!’ The mutiny was labelled an anarchist conspiracy, and the sailors treated as White Guards. The rebels were ruthlessly suppressed by the Red Army and the Chekà under Trotsky’s orders. Trotsky boasted soon after: ‘At last the Soviet government, with an iron broom, has rid Russia of anarchism.’
¹⁸

By the end of 1921, Goldman and Berkman had decided to leave Russia. The latter wrote in his diary: ‘The revolution is dead; its spirit cries in the wilderness’.
¹⁹
It became clear to anarchists inside and outside Russia that the Bolsheviks had become the chief adversary of the social revolution in the country. Gaston Leval who went with the Spanish delegation to the Third Congress of the Communist International held in Moscow in the summer of 1921 returned to France to argue that the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ had become a dictatorship
over
the proletariat.
²⁰
The result, anticipated so forcefully by Bakunin, was that the Bolshevik revolution made in the name of Marxism had degenerated into a form of State capitalism which operated in the interests of a new bureaucratic and managerial class. Rocker later observed that the dictatorship of the proletariat had become a new Russian ‘commissar-ocracy’.
²¹

After 1925 no anarchist activity was allowed in the Soviet Union. Russian exiles in Paris launched the controversial ‘Organizational Platform’ which called for a general union of anarchists with a central executive committee to co-ordinate policy and action, but although it was supported by Arshinov and Makhno, Volin and others argued that its central committee was not in keeping with the anarchist stress on local initiative. It failed to get off the ground. As for Kropotkin, his revolutionary and scientific reputation was stressed in his homeland but his political works were banned; in 1938 the Kropotkin Museum was symbolically closed. Anarchists were dismissed in official publications as bandits or irresponsible hotheads. The only good anarchist was one who had been saved miraculously by the Communist Party. During Stalin’s purges, Solzhenitsyn came across several young anarchists in the Gulag Archipelago. In the forties and fifties a few
Tolstoyans were known to be in the camps, and Khrushchev had to deal with some Ukrainian Makhnovists.
²²

In the late seventies, clandestine groups distributed
samizdat
texts by Bakunin, Kropotkin, Tolstoy and Cohn-Bendit. Since the rise to power of Gorbachev and the era of
glasnost
, there has been a sudden revival of libertarian ideas and goals. On the Left, the cry for ‘All Power to the Soviets!’ has gone up.

In 1987 the anarcho-syndicalist monthly
Obshchina
began to appear in Moscow, and in 1989 the Confederation of Anarcho-Syndicalists (KAS) was founded, chiefly by young students and teachers. In 1990 it claimed some five hundred members and three thousand supporters. Those members see anarchy as the maximum realization of human freedom, and place themselves in the non-violent tradition pioneered by Tolstoy and Gandhi. Its membership mainly centres on Russia and the Ukraine, and, to a lesser extent, Siberia. As yet, it has not attracted much support in the smaller republics whose immediate goal is national autonomy. A much smaller anarchist-communist revolutionary union — AKRU – has also emerged, calling for the violent overthrow of the State.

The issues of the dominant part played by the State in steering the economy and the leading role of the Communist Party in society are clearly on the political agenda once again. Anarchist plans for decentralization and federalism are now proposed as a dam to stem the rising nationalism in the peripheral republics. Following the revolutions of 1989–90 in what was the Eastern bloc of the Soviet empire, communist imperialism is collapsing; the centre cannot hold. The Soviet Union itself has now followed suit.

The main call has been for social democracy in a multi-party State, but for some the centralized State is the principal obstacle to progress. The Soviet Union may well end up as a loose federation of autonomous republics, a model of organization for that region once imagined by Bakunin over a century ago. During the May Day Parade in Moscow in 1990, a large group — with placards declaring ‘Let the Communist Party Live at Chernobyl’ and ‘Down with the Empire and Red Fascism’ – eventually forced the leadership to leave the platform. After the failed coup of August 1991, the Communist Party itself committed hara-kiri. Anarchism, apparently destroyed by the Bolsheviks in the early twenties, is now re-emerging from the ashes of the Stalinist system.

D
ESPITE
THE
MYTH
THAT
the German character is intrinsically authoritarian and given to State worship, Germany has produced some remarkable libertarian thinkers and its own lively anarchist movement. The forerunners of the movement may be traced to Wilhelm von Humboldt who drew narrowly at the time of the French Revolution the
Limits of State Action
(1792). In the 1840s Max Stirner opposed the prevailing barrel organ of Hegelianism and attacked all absolute abstractions, including the society and the State, in the name of the unique individual. Nietzsche too in the second half of the century mounted a devastating philosophical assault against the German State and culture and celebrated the creativity of the fully developed individual.

Although Stirner had virtually no influence on the labour movement other social thinkers in the 1840s were moving towards a libertarian form of socialism. The first anarchist journal published in German,
Berliner Monatsschrift
, appeared in Mannheim in 1844, with Stirner and Edgar Bauer among the contributors.

Wilhelm Weitling, influenced by Fourier and Saint-Simon, advocated in
Guarantees of Harmony and Freedom
(1842) a ‘harmonious’ communist society without property and the wage system, although like Fourier’s utopia it remained somewhat regimented. When Weitling left for the United States in 1849, he moved closer to Proudhon’s mutualism and became primarily concerned with setting up a Bank of Exchange. Weitling had an important influence on Bakunin; the latter quoted to Arnold Ruge his declaration that ‘the perfect society has no government, but only an administration, no laws but only obligations, no punishments, but means of correction’.
¹
Arnold Ruge himself was a Left-Hegelian who favoured federalism in Germany.

Another German Proudhonist was Karl Grün, who kept the French thinker informed of developments in Germany. He wrote the first work
The Social Movement in France and Belgium
(1844) which spread Proudhon’s ideas in Germany. He translated Proudhon’s
Philosophy of Poverty
, although
he went beyond his mentor to denounce the wage system and to argue that production and distribution should result from the free choice of the individual. Not surprisingly, Marx dismissed Grün as a ‘literary hack’.

Moses Hess called Proudhon’s system ‘anarchy’ in
The Philosophy of the Deed
and in
Socialism and Communism
(both 1843). Like Proudhon and Bakunin (whom he knew), Hess rejected organized religion and the State. Yet while stressing the importance of individual inclinations, he called in an unanarchist way for national workshops and universal suffrage.

Wagner joined Bakunin on the barricades in the Dresden uprising in April 1849. He shared Bakunin’s apocalyptic vision and in
Volksblatter
declared that ‘the old world is in ruins from which a new world will arise’. He considered revolution to be ‘ever-rejuvenating ever-creating life’ which will destroy ‘the domination of one over many … the power of the Almighty, of law, of property’.
²
He called for an ideal community made up of natural alliances or associations brought about for the sole purpose of satisfying common need. At this stage, Wagner seemed explicitly anarchist and Johann Most later quoted approvingly his view that:

After the failure of the 1848–9 revolutions in several German States, there followed the dissolution of the German Confederation and the unification of the German State under Bismarck. During this period anarchism in its Stirnerite or Proudhonian form had virtually no impact. The German delegates during the early years of the First International supported Lassalle and Marx, not the anti-authoritarian groups inspired by Proudhon and Bakunin. In 1876–7 the journal
Die Arbeiter-Zeitung
, which numbered Kropotkin among its editors, was published in Bern and had some influence, especially in southern Germany. In the 1880s anarchism began to make further ground in the German socialist movement, especially within the German Social Democratic Party.

Johann Most played a significant role. A former member of the Reichstag, Most became a social revolutionary and was eventually forced into political exile. He began publishing
Freiheit
from London in 1879, but moved to New York, taking the journal with him, in 1882. Most soon became an anarchist and exported his message back to his homeland.

Anarchism at this time failed to inspire a mass movement in Germany and won over only a few small groups in Berlin and Hamburg. There was however one abortive attempt to blow up the Kaiser and his princes when
they opened the National Monument at Rudesheim on the Rhine in 1883. A young compositor called August Reinsdorf was condemned to death for the attempt; on going to his execution, he declared: ‘Down with barbarism! Long live Anarchy!’
⁴
Shortly before he was executed, a police officer called Rumpff was murdered and a young German anarchist, Julius Lieske, arrested and decapitated. Lieske was one of a team of three who had prepared the assassination, although the Bohemian anarchist August Peschmann committed the deed itself.