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.
Career Timeline
- 1897Joined the revolutionary movement
- 1904Adopted anarchist communism in the United States
- 1906Organised an anarchist group in Dvinsk
- 1913–1914Agitator in Petersburg trade unions
- 1917Secretary of the Petrograd Federation of Anarchist-Communists and editor of Kommuna
- 1917Agitator of the First Machine Gun Regiment during the July Days
- 1917–1919Secretary of the Petrograd Federation of Anarchist Groups
- 1920–1921Moscow trade-union council worker; arrested and sent to penal labour