Anatoly Grigorievich Zheleznyakov

Zheleznyakov was a disciple of Kropotkin and Bakunin and remained an anarchist to his last breath. Throughout the October Revolution and the Civil War, he cooperated with the Bolsheviks, yet he never joined their party. His own words to his comrade Volin make his conviction unmistakable: "Whatever may happen to me, and whatever they may say of me, know well that I am an anarchist, that I fight as one, and that whatever my fate, I will die an anarchist."

This identity produced inevitable tensions with the Bolsheviks. In the spring of 1918, when Trotsky reorganized the Red Army, appointing former tsarist officers to command positions and abolishing rank-and-file self-government, Zheleznyakov joined many other revolutionary fighters in vigorous opposition, seeing it as a return to old-regime military methods. In response, the Bolsheviks outlawed him, just as they outlawed the Black Guards in Moscow and Makhno's forces in Ukraine.

Zheleznyakov, however, entered Moscow illegally and met directly with Sverdlov, chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. Sverdlov assured him it was all a misunderstanding and offered him a high-ranking military post. Zheleznyakov declined and departed for Odessa to continue the fight against the Whites. When the Bolsheviks approached him again in 1919, he finally accepted a command, not as a political convert, but as a practical revolutionary determined to fight the counter-revolution.

After his death, the Soviet regime celebrated him as a revolutionary hero, yet systematically erased his anarchist identity. Official Soviet histories claimed he had joined the Bolshevik Party: a falsehood. His anarchism also entailed a principled rejection of representative democracy: for anarchists, parliament was a nest of fraud and compromise, an instrument of propertied-class domination. The dissolution of the Constituent Assembly was not merely an act carried out on Bolshevik orders; it was consistent with Zheleznyakov's own anarchist political convictions.

During his imprisonment by the Provisional Government in the summer of 1917, Zheleznyakov wrote his only surviving poem, 'Falcon.' In it he casts himself as a persecuted fighter for freedom who 'burned with a rebellious flame' and vows to break his chains. The poem, which reveals a literary sensibility alongside his indomitable revolutionary spirit, was first published posthumously in 1923 in the journal Krasny Flot (Red Fleet) and was reprinted in the 1970 Soviet poetry anthology Den' poezii (Poetry Day).

Zhelezniakov's historical role lay in acting as an armed anarchist sailor and commander during the 1917 Revolution and Civil War. Posthumous memory, however, muted that political tension and joined the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly to his fighting against the Whites in a Soviet narrative of revolutionary heroism.

Paul Avrich observes that the Soviet regime, which had rejected Zhelezniakov during his lifetime, appropriated him as a hero after his death. Official accounts claimed that he had joined the Bolshevik Party, while the evidence cited by Avrich indicates that he remained an anarchist to the end. His legacy should therefore be read not simply as a Bolshevik hero story, but as a case in which revolutionary cooperation collided with political independence.

His name was repeated in songs, poems, and films, making him a durable popular symbol of the Revolution. Mikhail Golodny's song 'Partisan Zheleznyak' and Aleksandr Prokofiev's 1930 poem presented him chiefly as a courageous sailor, while his anarchist identity was generally pushed into the background. This cultural recasting preserved his real military importance, yet compressed disagreement within the Revolution into a single state narrative.