Anarchists

Social movements and organizing Affiliation unconfirmed 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).

Literature and arts 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.

Social movements and organizing Affiliation unconfirmed Anarchists 1830–1905 ○ Pneumonia

Montmartre teacher who fought on the Commune’s barricades, was deported to New Caledonia and became the anarchist “Red Virgin”

Louise Michel led Montmartre’s Women’s Vigilance Committee and fought in the Paris Commune. Deported to New Caledonia after its defeat, she returned to France in 1880 and devoted herself to workers’ meetings and anarchist activism.

Born in a château in Haute-Marne to a servant, she became a teacher, opened a school in Montmartre in the 1850s and frequented republican and socialist clubs. On 18 March 1871 she turned out to defend the cannon on Montmartre, and during the Commune she served on the vigilance committee, in ambulance work and with a Guard battalion. After Bloody Week she surrendered in place of her mother, demanded death in court and was sentenced to deportation to New Caledonia, where she supported the Kanak revolt of 1878. Amnestied in 1880, she spoke and was jailed again and again as an anarchist, dying on a lecture tour in Marseille in 1905.

Scholarship and theory 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.

Social movements and organizing Affiliation unconfirmed 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.

Literature and arts Anarchists 1869–1940 ○ Died

Exiled revolutionary who made anarchism an international political movement

After witnessing the crushing of Kronstadt, Goldman wrote: 'Kronstadt broke the last thread that held me to the Bolsheviki.' She left Soviet Russia in December 1921.

Russian-born anarchist revolutionary, writer, and orator who emigrated to the United States. Politically awakened by the Haymarket affair, she played a pivotal role in developing anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe. Known as 'Red Emma,' she drew thousands to lectures on birth control, free love, and antimilitarism, and was deported to Soviet Russia in 1919. After the Kronstadt rebellion, she became a prominent critic of Bolshevik authoritarianism, documenting her disillusionment in My Disillusionment in Russia (1923).

Social movements and organizing Affiliation unconfirmed Anarchists 1870–1919 ✕ Beaten and shot

German anarchist thinker who served in Bavaria’s revolutionary government and was killed by counterrevolutionary troops in 1919.

The state is a social relationship. Create new communities, and it can be replaced by a different social relationship.

Landauer argued that the state was not merely an apparatus to overthrow but a social relationship that could be replaced by creating voluntary communities. In 1908 he founded the Socialist Bund to pursue socialism through cooperatives and communal association. He opposed the First World War and came to Munich at Kurt Eisner’s request in 1918 to support the revolution. In April 1919 he joined the Bavarian Soviet Republic as Commissioner for Enlightenment and Public Instruction. After government forces crushed the republic, he was arrested and killed at Stadelheim Prison on 2 May.

Social movements and organizing Affiliation unconfirmed 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).

Ideology and propaganda 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.

Social movements and organizing Affiliation unconfirmed 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.

Military command 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.

Literature and arts 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.

Military command Soviet Union 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.

Social movements and organizing Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) Anarchists 1896–1936 ✕ Killed in action

The anarchist metalworker who broke the rising in Barcelona and led the column that carried his name

Reported from an interview with the Canadian journalist Pierre van Paassen in Barcelona in 1936: “We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth. The bourgeoisie may blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world, here, in our hearts.” The words are famous, though the exact wording of the interview is disputed.

A metalworker born into a railwayman''s family in León. Sacked after the general strike of 1917, he fled to France and became an anarchist, and through Los Solidarios and Los Errantes he passed from bank expropriations and an attempt on the king''s life to prisons across Europe and Latin America. In July 1936 he led the workers who stormed the Atarazanas barracks and broke the military rising in Catalonia, losing his old comrade Francisco Ascaso in the fight. He then raised the six-thousand-strong Durruti Column, took it to the Aragon front and pressed the collectivization of land and factories in the liberated zone. In November he joined the defence of Madrid, was shot at the Casa de Campo front on the 19th and died the next day; whether the bullet came from the enemy, from his own side or from his own malfunctioning weapon is still argued. Hundreds of thousands followed his coffin through Barcelona.

Military command Spanish Republic Anarchists 1897–1975 ○ Died

The anarchist IV Army Corps commander who saved Casado's Madrid coup from Communist counter-attack

'I was aghast at donning a military uniform, but I could see no other option. From here on my conduct will bear witness to my integrity.'

A Madrid bricklayer who led the CNT construction union and was jailed on the eve of the war, he was freed when the rising began and organized a column that crushed the revolt in Guadalajara and Cuenca. Rising to command the 14th Division and then the IV Army Corps, he routed the Italian CTV at the Battle of Guadalajara and became one of the Republic's most prominent anarchist commanders. In March 1939 he backed Casado's coup against the Negrín government's Communist dependence, and when Communist forces were closing in on Madrid, Mera's IV Corps reserves entered the city and crushed the resistance in three days, sealing the path by which the war would end.

Social movements and organizing Affiliation unconfirmed Anarchists 1898–1958 ↓ Died

Heroic Corps founder who evolved from anarchist bombings to DPRK cabinet, lone figure spanning the Korean revolutionary spectrum

On first meeting Kim Ik-sang in Beijing, Kim Won-bong told him: 'Freedom is won by our strength and our blood… We must be the first to shed it.' Kim Ik-sang joined the Heroic Corps on the spot and weeks later walked into the Japanese Government-General building in Seoul and threw a bomb.

Anarchist militant who founded the Heroic Corps (Ŭiyŏltan) in 1919 and led a six-year campaign of bombings and assassinations against Japanese colonial authorities. After military training at the Whampoa Academy, he founded the Korean National Revolutionary Party (1935) to build a united front, commanded the Korean Volunteer Corps, and later joined the Provisional Government as Deputy Commander of the Korean Liberation Army and Minister of Military Affairs. Following liberation he pursued left-right cooperation, but after Yeo Un-hyeong's assassination he joined the 1948 North-South talks and remained in the DPRK as State Inspection Commissioner and Minister of Labor until his purge in 1958. His trajectory, from anarchist bombings to united-front politics to DPRK cabinet, makes him the only figure to span the entire Korean revolutionary spectrum.

Government and administration Spanish Republic Anarchists 1905–1994

Spanish anarchist who served in the Republican government

In November 1936 she accepted a cabinet post. Her dispute with Emma Goldman over government participation exposed strategic differences among anarchists supporting the same revolution.

Spanish anarchist and writer associated with the CNT. She served as minister of Health and Public Assistance from November 1936 to May 1937. Her participation in the Republican government raised a difficult question for an anti-statist movement: could taking state office defend the revolution without compromising its principles? Her exchanges with Emma Goldman reveal disagreements over the relationship between anti-fascist war and social revolution.