Anarchist writer who served 14 years for the Frick assassination attempt, then broke with the Soviet state
At his farewell banquet in Chicago, told of Frick's death, Berkman remarked: 'Frick had been deported by God.'
Russian-born anarchist revolutionary and writer who emigrated to the United States in 1888. Outraged by the repression of striking Homestead steelworkers, he attempted to assassinate industrialist Henry Clay Frick in 1892, served 14 years in prison, and chronicled the experience in Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (1912). After his release he became editor of Emma Goldman's Mother Earth and a central figure in the American anarchist movement; in 1919 he was deported to Soviet Russia for anti-war activism. Initially enthusiastic about the Bolshevik Revolution, he became disillusioned after witnessing the Kronstadt rebellion's suppression and documented the early Soviet state's authoritarianism in The Bolshevik Myth (1925); in French exile he wrote the anarcho-communist primer Now and After (1929).
Career Timeline
- 1888Immigrates to US, joins anarchist movement as typesetter for Johann Most's Freiheit
- 1892Attempts to assassinate Henry Clay Frick during Homestead strike; serves 14 of 22 years
- 1907–1915Editor of Mother Earth, builds it into the leading US anarchist journal
- 1916Launches his own journal The Blast in San Francisco
- 1917Imprisoned for anti-draft organizing; deported to Soviet Russia in 1919
- 1921Witnesses Kronstadt suppression, breaks with Bolsheviks, leaves Russia
- 1925Publishes The Bolshevik Myth, a diary-based critique of early Soviet rule
- 1929Publishes Now and After, classic introduction to anarcho-communism