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).
Activities and affiliations
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
Related historical events
The Kronstadt Rebellion and an Attempt at Mediation
In February 1921, amid shortages of food and fuel in Petrograd, workers at the Trubotchny mill went on strike. They complained that Communists had received preferential treatment over non-party members in the distribution of winter clothing; the authorities refused to consider their grievances until they returned to work. Workers demanded the release of arrested Socialists and non-party laborers, the lifting of martial law, freedom of speech and assembly for working people, and free elections to factory committees and Soviets. Berkman’s diary combines contemporary observations with his own judgments about the events and political factions.
On March 1, a meeting in Kronstadt attended by about 16,000 sailors, Red Army soldiers, and workers from the First and Second Squadrons of the Baltic Fleet expressed support for the Soviet system while criticizing Bolshevik bureaucracy. Its resolutions called for new Soviet elections by secret ballot, freedom of speech for workers, peasants, Anarchists and Left Socialist parties, the release of political prisoners, and equal rations. Berkman recorded that the resolutions were passed by an overwhelming majority. The party leadership described them as evidence of a White Guard conspiracy, and Trotsky demanded the rebels disarm and warned that the uprising would be suppressed by force.
Berkman and Emma Goldman sought to prevent armed conflict. In a proposal sent to Grigory Zinoviev on March 5, Berkman urged that the workers’ and sailors’ grievances be addressed through discussion and agreement, and proposed a five-person mediation commission that included two Anarchists to travel to Kronstadt. He acknowledged the possibility that White forces might exploit the discontent, while arguing that the government’s use of force against workers and sailors would damage the revolutionary movement. The proposal was not accepted. Berkman wrote that he heard artillery fire on March 7 and recorded Kronstadt’s fall on March 17, followed by the deaths of sailors and workers and summary executions of prisoners and hostages. His diary is not an eyewitness account of the fighting in Kronstadt; it records the perspective of an observer in Petrograd who followed events through contemporary reports and information reaching the city.