Exiled revolutionary who made anarchism an international political movement
After witnessing the crushing of Kronstadt, Goldman wrote: 'Kronstadt broke the last thread that held me to the Bolsheviki.' She left Soviet Russia in December 1921.
Russian-born anarchist revolutionary, writer, and orator who emigrated to the United States. Politically awakened by the Haymarket affair, she played a pivotal role in developing anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe. Known as 'Red Emma,' she drew thousands to lectures on birth control, free love, and antimilitarism, and was deported to Soviet Russia in 1919. After the Kronstadt rebellion, she became a prominent critic of Bolshevik authoritarianism, documenting her disillusionment in My Disillusionment in Russia (1923).
Career Timeline
- 1889Moves to NYC; mentored by Johann Most, enters anarchist movement
- 1892Implicated in Berkman's attempted assassination of Henry Clay Frick
- 1893First imprisonment — one year for incitement after Union Square speech
- 1906Founds the anarchist journal Mother Earth
- 1917Sentenced to two years for anti-draft organizing
- 1919Deported to Soviet Russia aboard the 'Soviet Ark' Buford
- 1923Publishes My Disillusionment in Russia, a critique of Bolshevik rule
- 1936Supports the anarchist revolution in the Spanish Civil War
Related historical events
- 1921–1928The New Economic Policy (NEP)Witness to NEP's introductionWitnessing the Kronstadt crackdown in March 1921 and having her mediation offer rejected, she left Soviet Russia and documented it in My Disillusionment in Russia (1923).
- 1936–1939The Spanish Civil WarLondon representative of the CNT-FAIDefended the anarchist revolution abroad while criticizing the CNT's entry into government
Political Thought and Writings
Goldman's anarchism synthesized Peter Kropotkin's communist anarchism, Mikhail Bakunin's revolutionary practice, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's mutualism, and Max Stirner's radical individualism into what contemporaries called "anarchism without adjectives." For Goldman, anarchism was not merely a political theory but a principle to be lived in every moment. In her major work Anarchism and Other Essays (1910), she critiqued the state, capitalism, religion, prisons, patriotism, and marriage from an anarchist perspective, viewing the state as an instrument of domination and elections as an illusion. She argued that prisons returned "an emaciated, deformed, will-less, shipwrecked crew of humanity" to the world and urged attention to the socioeconomic causes of crime, while opposing conscription as the state's most violent form of coercion.
Among Goldman's most pioneering contributions was the foundation of anarcha-feminism. Though she distanced herself from the suffrage movement, arguing it legitimized the oppressive structure of the state, she championed women's economic independence, access to contraception, the abolition of marriage, and sexual autonomy. In 1897 she wrote: "I demand the independence of woman, her right to support herself; to live for herself; to love whomever she pleases, or as many as she pleases." She also publicly defended the rights of homosexuals and gender-nonconforming people, an almost unheard-of stance even among anarchists. German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld called her "the first and only woman, indeed the first and only American, to take up the defense of homosexual love before the general public."
Goldman's experience in Bolshevik Russia marked a decisive turning point in her political thought. After witnessing the crushing of the Kronstadt rebellion, she revised her earlier belief that revolutionary ends could justify violent means. In My Disillusionment in Russia (1923), she argued that "the means employed become, through individual habit and social practice, part and parcel of the final purpose," insisting on the inseparability of means and ends. Yet she did not renounce all armed struggle: she acknowledged the tragic inevitability of violence in revolution while drawing a sharp distinction between employing violence as a means of combat and institutionalizing terror as a principle. This insight became a central axis of anarchist debate on the relationship between state power and revolution.