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.
Activities and affiliations
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
Related historical events
Pre-revolutionary formation: from artisan to anarchist
Bleikhman's birth year is recorded as 1868 in some accounts and 1874 in others; the sources diverge, so it cannot be fixed with confidence. He was born in Vidzy, in the Novoaleksandrovsk district of Kovno Governorate in the Russian Empire, in what is now Belarus, into a petty bourgeois family, and worked as a shoemaker and a tinsmith.
He joined the revolutionary movement in 1897 and soon emigrated to the United States, where he became an anarchist communist in 1904. Returning to the Russian Empire in 1906, he organised an anarchist group in Dvinsk (Daugavpils), where he was active until September 1913. Until July 1914 he then conducted anarchist propaganda among the tailors', bakers' and leatherworkers' unions in Saint Petersburg.
He treated workers' organisations as the ground into which he pressed his politics, and this trade-union work became the base for his later activity in Petrograd. Arrested in July 1914 during workers' unrest, he was exiled to Siberia; one account holds that he escaped and lived clandestinely, while another holds that he was released by the February Revolution. Conditions there left him with tuberculosis. This formative period, running from an artisan upbringing through emigration and union agitation to Siberian exile, precedes and shapes his emergence as a Petrograd anarchist leader in 1917.