My Further Disillusionment in Russia

Relive the tumult and bloodshed of the early Soviet years from the eyes of Emma Goldman.

As a student of history, some of us wonder about anarchism and communism coexisting at the same time. Emma Goldman

witnessed chaos and bloodshed from both.

Emma Goldman (June 27, 1869 – May 14, 1940) was a Lithuanian-born anarchist revolutionary, political activist, and writer. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the 20th century.

Born in Kaunas, Lithuania (then within the Russian Empire), to an Orthodox Lithuanian Jewish family, Goldman immigrated to the United States in 1885.[Attracted to anarchism after the Chicago Haymarket affair, Goldman became a writer and a renowned lecturer on anarchist philosophy, women's rights and social issues.

Some years ago Emma Goldman was deported from the United States and went to Russia to investigate personally what she believed to be the nearest approach to a Utopia which the world had yet produced.

Her experiences so thoroughly disillusioned her that she conceived it to be her duty to set forth these experiences and her conclusions, which she did in a book entitled “My Disillusionment in Russia.” The rights in this material she sold to an American newspaper syndicate from whom we purchased the book rights, and by whom we were furnished with the copy for the book. We published the book under date of October 26, 1923, and not until it was in circulation did we learn that it was minus the last twelve chapters which had never been turned over to us by the newspaper syndicate, nor had any intimation been given us that the copy turned over to us was incomplete. While the conclusion of the book as we published it was abrupt it was not{vi} more so than is frequently the case; and, therefore, there was no internal evidence to indicate its incompleteness.