People of the Revolution and the USSR

Anarchists 1842–1921 ○ Illness

Rurikid prince, founder of anarcho-communism, geographer of Mutual Aid: escaped the Peter and Paul Fortress

When Kerensky offered him any cabinet post in 1917, Kropotkin replied he considered 'the trade of a bootblack more honest and useful' — Emma Goldman.

A Rurikid prince and geographer who founded anarcho-communism. Escaped a tsarist prison and spent 41 years in European exile writing The Conquest of Bread and Mutual Aid. After returning in 1917, openly criticized the Bolshevik Red Terror.

Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine (Makhnovists) Anarchists 1882–1945 ○ Tuberculosis

Russian anarchist intellectual who theorized anarchist synthesis and chronicled the revolution the Bolsheviks suppressed

In Golos Truda, 1917: 'Once their power has been consolidated and legalized, the Bolsheviks… will start running the life of the country and of the people from the top. They will develop an authoritarian political and state apparatus that will crush all opposition with an iron fist.'

Russian anarchist intellectual and leading theorist of the Makhnovshchina. Editor of Golos Truda in Petrograd, co-founder of the Nabat Confederation in Ukraine, and chairman of the Makhnovist Military Revolutionary Council, he developed the theory of anarchist synthesis to unite communist, individualist, and syndicalist anarchists. After exile from Soviet Russia in 1922, he wrote The Unknown Revolution, the definitive anarchist history of 1917–1921, and opposed the Platformist centralization pushed by his comrade Makhno.

Anarchists 1882–1946 ○ Heart attack

The behind-the-scenes organizer who wove international anarcho-syndicalism from Amsterdam 1907 to the IWMA

February 1921. Behind Kropotkin's coffin, 20,000 anarchists filled Moscow's streets — the last anarchist demonstration permitted in Soviet Russia. Schapiro and Berkman had organized the funeral commission.

The key linchpin of international anarcho-syndicalism. As secretary of the Amsterdam International, he built a cross-continental network; during the Revolution he worked within the Bolshevik state while maintaining his anarchist critique. Expelled in 1922, he co-founded the IWMA in Berlin.

Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine (Makhnovists) Anarchists 1888–1934 ○ Bone tuberculosis

The anarchist peasant commander who fought Bolsheviks, Whites, Germans, and nationalists in succession

Kremlin, June 1918. Lenin told Makhno, "If anarchists were like you, we'd gladly work together." Two years later, Makhno would be betrayed by the Bolsheviks twice.

Ukrainian anarcho-communist revolutionary. Led a peasant army and built the Free Territory, an experiment in anarchist self-governance. Allied with the Red Army twice to defeat the Whites, and was betrayed each time. Exiled in 1921, he wrote his memoirs in Paris.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Anarchists 1890–1947 ○ Heart attack

The Comintern writer-revolutionary who bore literary witness to revolution and the rise of Stalinism

When he left the Soviet Union in 1936, all his manuscripts — two novels and a book of poems written in Orenburg exile — were confiscated. He was able to reconstruct only the poems from memory. "What I bring is not the truth itself, but testimony toward the truth," he later wrote.

Born in Brussels to Russian Narodnik exiles, he came of age in French anarchist circles and served five years in prison. Arriving in Soviet Russia in 1919, he joined the Bolsheviks and worked as a journalist, editor, and translator for the Comintern, also seeing action in the defence of Petrograd during the Civil War. He joined the Left Opposition in 1923; expelled and imprisoned in 1928, he turned to literature, producing Memoirs of a Revolutionary, Year One of the Russian Revolution, and the masterwork The Case of Comrade Tulayev. An international campaign secured his exit from the USSR in 1936; in exile in France and Mexico he continued writing, establishing himself as a giant of 20th-century revolutionary literature.