People of the Revolution and the USSR

Anarchists 1814–1876 ○ Illness

Marx's greatest rival: founder of collectivist anarchism, at the center of the First International's great split

At the 1869 Basel Congress: 'Take the most fervent revolutionary and give him absolute power — within a year he'll be worse than the Tsar' — cited in Statism and Anarchy

A Tver nobleman, founder of collectivist anarchism. He opposed Marx's statism in the First International, was expelled at the 1872 Hague Congress, and codified stateless federalism in Statism and Anarchy (1873).

Anarchists 1828–1910 ○ Pneumonia

The Count who wrote War and Peace, then declared war on the state and the Church

“But the peasants … how do the peasants die?” — his last words, Astapovo station, 20 November 1910

Russia's greatest realist novelist and a radical moral thinker. After the spiritual crisis of the 1870s, he turned to Christian anarchism, rejecting the state, the Orthodox Church, private property, and all organised violence. His doctrine of nonviolent resistance, set out in The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894), decisively shaped Mahatma Gandhi and later civil rights movements. Excommunicated in 1901, he secretly fled Yasnaya Polyana in 1910 at 82, dying of pneumonia at Astapovo station.

Anarchists 1868–1921 ○ Natural death after illness

An anarchist spark in the crisis of 1917

“The street will organise us.”

Iosif Bleikhman was an anarchist communist revolutionary who came from the artisan world and carried his politics into workers’ organisations and soldiers’ assemblies. After the February Revolution, he became a leading Petrograd anarchist and argued for socialising industry, expropriating landlord property and building communes outside the Provisional Government. On 3 July 1917 he urged the First Machine Gun Regiment to take up arms and march, helping turn a broader crisis into the armed July Days, although the Bolshevik leadership had not initiated the movement. After October he supported the revolution against the old order while criticising the Bolshevik state, which brought repeated arrests, penal labour and illness before his death in 1921.

Anarchists 1870–1936 ✕ Suicide

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).

Soviet Union state institutions Anarchists 1895–1919 ✕ Killed in action

The anarchist sailor who dissolved the Constituent Assembly with 'The guard is tired', an icon of the revolution who fell in battle at 24

Tauride Palace, 4 a.m., 5 January 1918. 'The guard is tired. I ask you to leave the chamber.' With those words, after 13 hours of debate, the Russian Constituent Assembly closed forever.

An anarchist revolutionary from the Baltic Fleet. He took part in the storming of the Winter Palace in October 1917, and on 5 January 1918, as chief of the guard at the Tauride Palace, he dissolved the Russian Constituent Assembly with the immortal words 'The guard is tired,' becoming a legend of the revolution. During the Civil War he fought the Don, Krasnov, and Denikin forces as a machine-gunner and armored train commander, though he never joined the Bolshevik Party. Killed by Denikin's artillery in July 1919, he was posthumously revived as a hero of Soviet songs, poems, and films.