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107-461: At first, the Anarchists , Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries enjoyed a special status there and were not made to work. Gradually, prisoners from the old regime (priests, gentry, and White Army officers) joined them and the guards and the ordinary criminals worked together to keep the "politicals" in order. This was the nucleus from which the entire Gulag grew, thanks to its proximity to

214-544: A Revolutionary Tribunal , with many either being sentenced to internal exile or sent to concentration camps , where they endured harsh living conditions. Anarchist political prisoners in the Solovki prison camp protested their internment with a series of hunger strikes , some even committing self-immolation , which led to their removal from the Solovetsky Islands and their dispersal to various other Gulags in

321-656: A "militarist", while also expressing a distaste with Fleshin and Steimer's factionalism. During the late 1920s, a number of anarchist exiles decided to return to Russia and appealed to the Soviet government for permission. With the aid of the Right Oppositionist Nikolai Bukharin , Efim Iarchuk was permitted to return in 1925, after which he joined the Communist Party. In 1930, Arshniov also returned to Russia under amnesty and joined

428-516: A centralized one-party rule. A few prominent anarchist figures such as Bill Shatov and Yuda Roshchin, despite their disappointment, encouraged anarchists to cooperate with the Bolsheviks in the present conflict with the hope that there would be time to negotiate. But most anarchists became disillusioned quite quickly with their supposed Bolshevik allies, who took over the soviets and placed them under Communist control. The sense of betrayal came to

535-410: A contract concluded in 2011 with the head of the now disbanded Gulag section of the museum and evict its former head, Olga Bochkaryova, and her daughter from their two-room apartment. The author of several books about Solovki, Yury Brodsky, was accused by an Orthodox website of displaying "religious hatred" in his latest publication. Members of the intelligentsia , representing both Tsarist Russia and

642-473: A critique of Marxism in 1940 that concluded it was an ideology of "a privileged class of politico-economic organisateurs" rather than of workers, and further characterized the Russian Revolution as a "managerial revolution". Gordin increasingly gravitated towards nationalism , culminating in his adoption of Zionism and his eventual emigration to Israel , where he would die in 1964. Following

749-521: A fiery tirade against Russia , which caused his expulsion from France . The revolutionary movement of 1848 gave him the opportunity to join a radical campaign of democratic agitation, and for his participation in the May Uprising in Dresden of 1849 he was arrested and condemned to death. The death sentence , however, was commuted to life imprisonment , and he was eventually handed over to

856-663: A head in March 1918, when Lenin signed the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty with Germany. Though the Bolshevik leaders claimed that the treaty was necessary to allow the revolution to progress, anarchists widely saw it as an excessive compromise which counteracted the idea of international revolution. The Bolsheviks had begun to see the anarchists as a legitimate threat and associated criminality such as robberies , expropriations and murders with anarchist associations. Subsequently,

963-531: A holding area for many prisoners subsequently executed, there or on the mainland, during the Great Terror of 1937–1938. Until documents confirming their execution were found in 1996, it was long thought that a transport of over one thousand prisoners, a quota for "1st category arrests" (executions), died from drowning after the barges on which they were travelling were deliberately sunk in the White Sea. It

1070-705: A key episode in Marina Goldovskaya 's 1987 film, Solovki Power ) was a sign of the harshening regime. Many of those on Solovki later in the 1930s fell victim to Stalin 's Great Purge and were shot, either in autumn 1937 at Sandarmokh or on Solovki in February 1938. 65°1′28″N 35°42′38″E  /  65.02444°N 35.71056°E  / 65.02444; 35.71056 Anarchism in Russia Anarchism in Russia developed out of

1177-549: A large role in inciting the people of the city to action. In any case, Lenin was not amused by the revolt and instructed those involved to quiet down until he told them otherwise. In spite of some tension between the groups, the anarchists remained largely supportive of Lenin right up to the October Revolution. Several anarchists participated in the overthrow of the Provisional Government, and even

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1284-589: A more instinctive form of revolution. One of them, Bill Shatov, described the anarchists as “the romanticists of the Revolution.” Their eagerness to get the ball rolling became apparent during the July Days , in which Petrograd soldiers, sailors and workers revolted in an attempt to claim power for the Petrograd Soviet . While this was not an anarchist-driven event, the anarchists of Petrograd played

1391-638: A network of workers' councils . Maxmioff later moved to the United States , where he edited The Laborer's Voice , a Russian language publication of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Meanwhile, the anarcho-communists around the Workers' Cause journal began to develop the platformist tendency , calling for the construction of a tightly coordinated anarchist organization, which

1498-487: A philosophy that amounted to advocating resistance to the state, and influenced the worldwide development of anarchism as well as pacifism worldwide. In a series of books and articles, including What I Believe (1884) ( Russian : В чём моя вера? ) and Christianity and Patriotism (1894), ( Russian : Христианство и патриотизм ) Tolstoy used the Christian gospels as a starting-point for an ideology that held violence as

1605-659: A radical Christian sect who maintained a belief in pacifism and a communal lifestyle while rejecting secular government. In 1899, the most zealous third (about 7,400) Doukhobors fled repression in Imperial Russia and migrated to Canada , mostly in the provinces of Saskatchewan and British Columbia . The funds for the trip were paid for by the Religious Society of Friends and the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy . Peter Kropotkin suggested Canada to Tolstoy as

1712-595: A safe-haven for the Doukhobors because while on a speaking tour across Canada, Kropotkin observed the religious tolerance experienced by the Mennonites . The first anarchist groups to attract a significant following of Russian workers or peasants, were the anarcho-communist Chernoe-Znamia groups, founded in Białystok in 1903. They drew their support mainly from the impoverished and persecuted working-class Jews of

1819-539: A short stay to Switzerland, where he joined the Jura Federation . In 1877 he went to Paris , where he helped to start the anarchist movement there. He returned to Switzerland in 1878, where he edited a revolutionary newspaper for the Jura Federation called Le Révolté , subsequently also publishing various revolutionary pamphlets. After an assassination attempt, Count Mikhail Tarielovich Loris-Melikov

1926-462: A small scale as the Civil War began. The urban anarchist movement, however, was dead. The anthropologist Eric Wolf asserts that peasants in rebellion are "natural" anarchists. After initially looking favorably upon the Bolsheviks for their proposed land reforms, by 1918 peasants largely came to despise the new government as it became increasingly centralized and exploitative in its dealings with

2033-516: A step back from their revolutionary aims, and subsequently resigned from their posts in order to pursue scholarly activities. The Congress also instituted the suppression of any remaining opposition to Bolshevik rule, which banned internal party factions such as the Workers' Opposition and ordered a purge of anarchist and syndicalist elements. Anarchists were rounded up by the Cheka and tried by

2140-602: A threat to the freedom of the individual. Scholars including Avrich and Allan Antliff have interpreted this vision of society to have been greatly influenced by the individualist anarchists Max Stirner , and Benjamin Tucker . Subsequent to the book's publication, Chernyi was imprisoned in Siberia under the Russian Czarist regime for his revolutionary activities. On the other hand, Alexei Borovoi (1876?-1936),

2247-404: A very favourable essay, which praised the beauty of nature on the islands, but some authors believe he understood the real conditions he was witnessing. The exact number of prisoners sent to Solovki from 1923 to the closure of its penitentiary facilities in 1939 is unknown. Estimates range between tens and hundreds of thousands. In 1923, Soloviki contained "no more than 3,000" prisoners; by 1930,

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2354-526: Is now known that they were shot on the mainland in late October and early November 1937; subsequent quotas for execution came too late in the year to sail across the White Sea and were shot on the islands, near Sekirnaya Hill. All but five of the 1,116 prisoners sent from Solovki across the White Sea on 27 October 1937 were executed by NKVD Captain and senior executioner Mikhail Matveyev at Sandarmokh between that date and 10 November 1937, when he reported his task complete. Among those killed were 289 members of

2461-554: The Bolsheviks came to power. Following the abdication of Czar Nicholas II in February 1917 and the subsequent creation of a Provisional Government, many Russian anarchists joined the Bolsheviks in campaigning for further revolution. Since the repression after the Revolution of 1905 , new anarchist organizations had been slowly and quietly growing in Russia, and in 1917 saw a new opportunity to end state power. Though within

2568-532: The Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom) decided to liquidate criminal recklessness which was associated with anarchists and disarm all anarchist groups in the face of their militancy. After months of increasing anarchist resistance and dwindling Bolshevik patience, the Communist government decisively split with their libertarian agitators in the spring of 1918. In Moscow and Petrograd the newly formed Cheka

2675-588: The Crimean War , and the Russian Civil War . In the autumn of 1922 the process of transitioning from a monastery to concentration camp began. All wooden buildings were burned, and many of the monks were murdered, including the Igumen . The remaining monks were sent to forced labour camps in central Russia. The unpublished decree of 3 November 1923 led to the conversion of the monastery buildings into

2782-707: The Kronstadt rebellion and the defeat of the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine . The anarchist movement lived on during the time of the Soviet Union in small pockets, largely within the Gulag where anarchist political prisoners were sent, but by the late 1930s its old guard had either fled into exile, died or disappeared during the Great Purge . Following a number of uprisings in

2889-521: The Peter and Paul Fortress , and he won the confidence of revolutionary-in-exile Mikhail Bakunin and his friend Nikolay Ogarev . Bakunin played a prominent part in developing and elaborating the theory of anarchism and in leading the anarchist movement. He left a deep imprint on the movement of the Russian "revolutionary commoners" of the 1870s. In 1873, Peter Kropotkin was arrested and imprisoned, but escaped in 1876 and went to England , moving after

2996-808: The Spanish Revolution briefly revived the exile movement, but after the defeat of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War , the exiles largely ceased activity. During this period a number of the exiled anarchist old guard began to die off, including Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman during the late 1930s, and Voline, Alexander Schapiro and Grigorii Maksimov in the wake of the Allied victory in World War II . The surviving Abba Gordin had since shifted away from communism, publishing

3103-861: The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk . This was immediately followed by an artillery attack on the Kremlin and the occupation of the telegraph and telephone buildings by the Left SRs who sent out several manifestos appealing to the people to rise up against their oppressors and destroy the Bolshevik regime. But whilst this order was not followed by the people of Moscow, the peasants of South Russia responded vigorously to this call to arms. Bands of Chernoe Znamia and Beznachaly anarchist terrorists flared up as rapidly and violently as they had done in 1905. Anarchists in Rostov , Ekaterinoslav and Briansk broke into prisons to liberate

3210-466: The Urals and Siberia . Some key figures of the anarchist old guard began to die off during this period, including Peter Kropotkin , Varlam Cherkezishvili , Jan Wacław Machajski and Apollon Karelin . The Bolshevik government did allow some anarchist activity to continue peacefully through the 1920s. The bookshop owned by Golos Truda remained open and published Mikhail Bakunin 's collected works,

3317-577: The Winter Palace , he was mortally wounded by hand-made grenades and died a few hours afterwards. The conspirators Nikolai Kibalchich , Sophia Perovskaya , Nikolai Rysakov , Timofey Mikhailov , and Andrei Zhelyabov were all arrested and sentenced to death. Hesya Helfman was sent to Siberia . The assassin was identified as Ignacy Hryniewiecki (Ignatei Grinevitski), who died during the attack. Although he did not call himself an anarchist, Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) in his later writings formulated

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3424-413: The anarcho-syndicalists around Grigorii Maksimov , Efim Yarchuk and Alexander Schapiro establishing The Workers' Way as their organ, while anarcho-communists around Peter Arshinov and Volin established The Anarchist Herald as their own. The anarcho-syndicalists looked to remedy the issue of anarchist disorganization through the foundation of a new international organization, culminating in

3531-581: The populist and nihilist movements ' dissatisfaction with the government reforms of the time. The first Russian to identify himself as an anarchist was the revolutionary socialist Mikhail Bakunin , who became a founding figure of the modern anarchist movement within the International Workingmen's Association (IWA). In the context of the split within the IWA between the Marxists and

3638-586: The " Pale "-the places on the Western borders of the Russian Empire where Jews were "allowed" to live. The Chernoe Znamia made their first attack in 1904, when Nisan Farber, a devoted member of the group, stabbed a strike-breaking industrialist on the Jewish Day of Atonement. The Chernoe Znamia, Left SRs and Zionists of Bialystock congregated inside a forest to decide their next action. At the end of

3745-537: The "free association of independent individuals." On his return from Siberia in 1917 he enjoyed great popularity among Moscow workers as a lecturer. Chernyi was also Secretary of the Moscow Federation of Anarchist Groups , which was formed in March 1917. He was an advocate "for the seizure of private homes", which was an activity seen by the anarchists after the October revolution as direct expropriation on

3852-514: The 1880s Tolstoy's pacifist anarchism gained a following in Russia. In the following decades the Tolstoyan movement , which Tolstoy himself had not expected or encouraged, spread through Russia and to other countries. Resistance to war had particular meaning in Russia since Emperor Alexander II had implemented compulsory military service in 1874. From the 1880s into the early 20th century, an increasing number of young men refused military service on

3959-626: The Civil War over in 1920, the Red-Green war persisted for some time. Red Army generals noted that in many regions peasant rebellions were heavily influenced by anarchist leaders and ideas. In Ukraine, the most notorious peasant rebel leader was an anarchist general named Nestor Makhno . Makhno had originally led his forces in collaboration with the Red Army against the Whites. In the region of Ukraine where his forces were stationed, Makhno oversaw

4066-443: The Communist Party, leaving Dielo Truda in the editorial hands of Grigorii Maksimov. Under Maksimov, the publication took on a notable syndicalist stance while also offering a platform to other anarchist tendencies, becoming the Russian anarchist exiles' most important publication. Maksimov attempted to bridge the divide between the anarcho-syndicalists and anarcho-communists, publishing a social credo that attempted to synthesise

4173-549: The French revolutionary Maximilien Robespierre . They positioned themselves in opposition to the Bolshevik government, calling for the destruction of Russian state capitalism and its replacement with workers' self-management by factory committees and councils . But while anarchist exiles were united in their criticisms of the Bolshevik government and their recognition that the Russian anarchist movement had collapsed due to its disorganization, their internal divisions remained, with

4280-633: The Leningrad Region. On 28 November 1936, together with two other future Sandarmokh executioners (A.P. Polikarpov and P.D. Shalygin)—and the notorious V.M. Blokhin —Captain Matveyev received the Order of the Red Banner for his "struggle to secure the socialist system", viz. they acted as executioners of those supposed to be its enemies. Matveyev was personally involved in the shooting of

4387-575: The Military Revolutionary Committee that orchestrated the coup. At first it seemed to some Anarchists the revolution could inaugurate the stateless society they had long dreamed of. On these terms, some Bolshevik-Anarchist alliances were made. In Moscow, the most perilous and critical tasks during the October Revolution fell upon the Anarchist Regiment, led by the old libertarians, and it was they who dislodged

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4494-634: The Opposition upon his return to the country, but predicted its defeat at the hands of reactionary forces within the party. The Opposition was defeated at the 15th Party Congress , with many of its members being expelled from the party and forced into exile, where Serge became an outspoken critic of the authoritarian way that Stalin governed the country - describing the Soviet government as " totalitarian ". The anarcho-syndicalist Maksim Rayevsky , who had previously edited Golos Truda and Burevestnik ,

4601-920: The Pale reached a bloody climax in November and December 1905 with the bombing of the Hotel Bristol in Warsaw and the Cafe Libman in Odessa . After the suppression of the December Uprising in Moscow, the Anarchists retreated for a while, but soon returned to the Revolution. Even the small towns and villages of the countryside had their own Anarchist fighting groups. But the tide was turning against

4708-637: The Red Army sought to take control of Makhno's forces. They resisted, but the officers (not including Makhno himself) were arrested and executed by the end of 1920. Makhno continued to fight before going into exile in Paris the next year. The attempted Third Russian Revolution began in July 1918 with the assassination of the German Ambassador to the Soviet Union in order to prevent the signing of

4815-407: The Reds and Whites alike. These forces had no grand political agenda like their enemies, for the most part they simply wanted to stop being harassed and be allowed to govern themselves. Though the Green Armies have largely been ignored by history (and by Soviet historians in particular), they constituted a formidable force and a major threat to Red victory in the Civil War. Even after the party declared

4922-434: The Revolution finally petered out in 1922. Although the Revolution was mainly a Left SR initiative, it was the Anarchists who had the support of a greater number of the population and they participated in almost all of the attacks the Left SRs organized, and also many on completely their own initiative. The most celebrated figures of the Third Russian Revolution , Lev Chernyi and Fanya Baron were both Anarchists. Following

5029-404: The Revolution, infiltrating Bolshevik ranks and striking when least expected. On 25 September 1919, the Underground Anarchists struck the Bolsheviks with the heaviest blow of the Revolution. The headquarters of the Moscow Committee of the Communist Party was blown up, killing 12 and injuring 55 Party members, including Nikolai Bukharin and Emilian Iaroslavskii. Spurred on by their apparent success,

5136-417: The Russian authorities, by whom he was imprisoned and finally sent to Eastern Siberia in 1857. Bakunin received permission to move to the Amur region, where he started collaborating with his relative General Count Nikolay Muravyov-Amursky , who had been Governor of Eastern Siberia for ten years. When Muravyov was removed from his position, Bakunin lost his stipend. He succeeded in escaping, probably with

5243-452: The Solovki "special" camp: the Solovetsky Lager Osobogo Naznachenia or SLON in Russian (the acronym is a play on the Russian word for elephant). One of the first "forced labor camps ", Solovki served as a prototype for the Gulag as a whole. In early 1924, it was sometimes given a double name, Severnye (Solovetskiye) Lagerya OGPU (Northern (Solovki) camps of OGPU ). Its remote situation made escape almost impossible and in Tsarist times

5350-418: The Solovki transport were questioned and investigated after Stalin's death as part of the process of rehabilitating their victims. Like Matveyev, Major Pyotr Raevsky (1892-1967) was also arrested in 1939. He was accused of being "one of the leaders of a counter-revolutionary, insurgent organisation among the convicts on Solovki" and was sentenced in 1941 to 8 years in the camps. There he was employed as head of

5457-425: The Soviet Union brought a quick end to the anarchist activity that had been tolerated during the 1920s under the NEP, as a new wave of political repression was unleashed, with many anarchists being arrested and internally exiled to Siberia and Central Asia . While internally exiled in Tobolsk , the anarchist Dmitri Venediktov was arrested on the charges of "Disseminating rumors about loans and dissatisfaction with

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5564-463: The Soviet regime", and within three days was sentenced to execution without appeal. Mikhail Rodionovich Matveyev Mikhail Rodionovich Matveyev (Russian: Михаил Родионович Матвеев; 1892–1971) was a senior NKVD executioner, sent to begin the mass shootings at Sandarmokh in Karelia in the late 1930s. After completing two years of education at a village school, the young Matveyev moved to St Petersburg where he held various occupations: he

5671-448: The Soviets!” as the potential for a Russia run by autonomous collectives without the burden of central authority. Lenin also described the triumph of Communism as the eventual “ withering away of the state .” All this time, however, anarchists remained wary of the Bolsheviks. Mikhail Bakunin , the hero of Russian anarchism, had expressed skepticism toward the scientific, excessively rational nature of Marxism. He and his followers preferred

5778-430: The Ukrainian intelligentsia, the Executed Renaissance . A further transport was prepared to sail to the mainland for execution, but it was too late in the year to cross the frozen sea. Instead, between 200 and 300 prisoners were shot on Solovki itself, near the Sekirnaya Hill. One of the many victims was Yelizaveta Katz, an engineer, who was 8 months pregnant. She was due to be shot with the others on 17 February 1938, but

5885-506: The Underground Anarchists proclaimed a new "era of dynamite" that would finally wipe away capitalism and the State. The Bolsheviks responded by initiating a new wave of mass arrests in which Kovalevich and Sobalev were the first to be shot. With their leaders dead and much of their organization in tatters, the remaining Underground Anarchists blew themselves up in their last battle with the Cheka, taking much of their safe house with them. Numerous attacks and assassinations occurred frequently until

5992-418: The Whites from the Kremlin, the Metropole and other defenses. In addition, it was the Anarchist sailor who led the attack on the Constituent Assembly in October 1917. For a while, the Anarchists rejoiced, elated at the thought of the new age that Russia had won. Bolshevik-anarchist relations soon turned sour as the various anarchist groups realized that the Bolsheviks were not interested in pluralism, but rather

6099-410: The anarchist participation in the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 . Though initially supportive of the Bolsheviks , many anarchists turned against them in the wake of the treaty of Brest-Litovsk , launching a " Third Revolution " against the government with the intention of restoring soviet democracy . But this attempted revolution was crushed by 1921, definitively ending with the suppression of

6206-413: The anarchist prisoners and issued fiery proclamations calling on the people to revolt against the Bolshevik regime. The Anarchist Battle Detachments attacked the Whites , Reds and Germans alike. Many peasants joined the Revolution, attacking their enemies with pitchforks and sickles. Meanwhile, in Moscow, the Underground Anarchists were formed by Kazimir Kovalevich and Piotr Sobalev to be the shock troops of

6313-409: The anarchists, the Russian Land and Liberty organization also split between a Marxist faction that supported political struggle and an anarchist faction that supported " propaganda of the deed ", the latter of which went on to orchestrate the assassination of Alexander II . Specifically anarchist groups such as the Black Banner began to emerge at the turn of the 20th century, culminating with

6420-479: The authorities were "gradually removing all traces of the labor camp". In January 2016 the Gulag section in the Solovki Museum was closed by its new director, Vladimir Shutov who, as Archimandrite Porfiry, was head of the monastery. In August 2017, the local authorities asked police to investigate the 29th annual Days of Remembrance as an "unauthorised" gathering. Early in 2018, a court in the Arkhangelsk Region heard an unsuccessful plea by Archimandrite Porfiry to annul

6527-444: The basis of a Tolstoyan moral objection to war. Such actions moved Tolstoy, and he often participated in the defense of peaceful objectors in court. Many people inspired by Tolstoy's version of Christian morality set up agricultural communes in various parts of Russia, pooling their income and producing their own food, shelter and goods. Tolstoy appreciated such efforts but sometimes criticized these groups for isolating themselves from

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6634-436: The bourgeoisie. He died after being accused of participation in an episode in which this group bombed the headquarters of the Moscow Committee of the Communist Party. Although most likely not being really involved in the bombing, he might have died of torture. Chernyi advocated a Nietzschean overthrow of the values of bourgeois Russian society, and rejected the voluntary communes of anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin as

6741-437: The collusion of the authorities and made his way through Japan and the United States to England in 1861. He spent the rest of his life in exile in Western Europe , principally in Switzerland . In January 1869, Sergey Nechayev spread false rumors of his arrest in Saint Petersburg , then left for Moscow before heading abroad. In Geneva , he pretended to be a representative of a revolutionary committee who had fled from

6848-545: The desire for a complete overturn of all values accepted by bourgeois society- political, moral, and cultural. Furthermore, strongly influenced by Max Stirner and Benjamin Tucker , the German and American theorists of individualist anarchism, they demanded the total liberation of the human personality from the fetters of organized society." Some Russian individualist anarchists "found the ultimate expression of their social alienation in violence and crime, others attached themselves to avant-garde literary and artistic circles, but

6955-443: The development of an autonomous system of government based on the productive coordination of communes. According to Peter Marshall, a historian of anarchism, "For more than a year, anarchists were in charge of a large territory, one of the few examples of anarchy in action on a large scale in modern history. Unsurprisingly, the Bolsheviks came to see Makhno's experiment in self-government as a threat in need of elimination, and in 1920

7062-455: The establishment of the International Workers' Association (IWA) in December 1922. The IWA analyzed the events of the Russian Revolution as having been a project to build state socialism rather than revolutionary socialism , called for the construction of trade unions to win short-term gains while building towards a general strike and declared their goal to be a social revolution that would abolish centralized states and replace them with

7169-522: The events in Russia. In his later years, Maksimov published his history of the Soviet Union The Guillotine at Work and edited the collected works of Mikhail Bakunin. The remnants of the Russian anarchist exiles began to wane during the 1930s, as their journals became less frequent and filled with republications of old texts, their activities mostly consisted of celebrating the anniversaries of past events and their criticisms became increasingly levelled at Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler . The events of

7276-448: The experience of the Russian Revolution had fully justified Mikhail Bakunin's earlier declaration that "socialism without liberty is slavery and bestiality." Russian anarchists living abroad began to openly attack the "new kings" of the Communist Party , criticising the NEP as a restoration of capitalism and comparing Vladimir Lenin to the Spanish inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada , the Italian political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli and

7383-418: The fighting. Anarchists joined Mensheviks and Left Socialist revolutionaries in boycotting the 1918 May Day celebrations. Bolshevik repressions of anarchist organizations prompted a series of assassination attempts on the Russian Communist leadership . By this time some belligerent anarchist dissenters armed themselves and formed groups of so-called “ Black Guards ” that continued to fight Communist power on

7490-425: The first great construction project of the Five-Year Plans, the White Sea–Baltic Canal . In one way, Solovki and the White Sea Canal broke a basic rule of the Gulag: they were both far too close to the border. This facilitated a number of daring escapes in the 1920s; as war loomed in the late 1930s it led to the closure of the Solovki special prison. Its several thousand inmates were transferred elsewhere, or shot on

7597-530: The ignominy of arrest, many Anarchists preferred suicide when cornered. Those that were caught would usually deliver a rousing speech on Justice and Anarchy before they were executed, in the manner of Ravachol and Émile Henry . By 1909 most of the Anarchists were either dead, exiled or in jail. Anarchism was not to resurface in Russia until 1917. In 1917, Peter Kropotkin returned to Petrograd , where he helped Alexander Kerensky 's Russian Provisional Government to formulate policies. He curtailed his activity when

7704-626: The mainland and on Solovki. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called Solovki the "mother of the GULAG ". Historically, the Solovetsky Islands were the location of the famous Russian Orthodox Solovetsky Monastery complex. It was a centre of economic activity with over three hundred monks, and also a forepost of Russian naval power in the North, repelling foreign attacks during the Time of Troubles ,

7811-518: The majority remained "philosophical" anarchists who conducted animated parlor discussions and elaborated their individualist theories in ponderous journals and books." Lev Chernyi was an important individualist anarchist involved in resistance against the rise to power of the Bolshevik Party. He adhered mainly to Stirner and the ideas of Benjamin Tucker . In 1907, he published a book entitled Associational Anarchism , in which he advocated

7918-573: The meeting the shouts of "Long Live the Social Revolution" and "Hail Anarchy" attracted the police to the secret meeting. Violence ensued, leaving many revolutionaries arrested or wounded. In vengeance, Nisan Farber threw a homemade bomb at a police station, killing himself and injuring many. He quickly became a Revolutionary Martyr to the Anarchists, and when Bloody Sunday broke out in St Petersburg his actions began to be imitated by

8025-769: The monastery had been used, on occasion, as a political prison by the Russian imperial administration . The treatment of the prisoners in the Soviet-era camp attracted much criticism in Western Europe and the United States after a book came out in England, An Island Hell , by S. A. Malsagoff . After a thorough clean-up and careful staging, the Soviet government sent the proletarian writer Maxim Gorky there in an attempt to counter this negative publicity. He wrote

8132-481: The more prominent anarcho-communism and anarcho-syndicalism . The ranks of the Russian individualist anarchists were predominantly drawn from the intelligentsia and the working class . For anarchist historian Paul Avrich "The two leading exponents of individualist anarchism, both based in Moscow , were Aleksei Alekseevich Borovoi and Lev Chernyi (Pavel Dmitrievich Turchaninov). From Nietzsche , they inherited

8239-463: The most loathed capitalists. Workers were encouraged to overthrow their bosses and manage the factory for themselves. Workers and peasants throughout the Empire took this advice to heart and sporadic uprisings in the remote countryside became a common sight. The Western borderlands in particular - the cities of Russian Poland , Ukraine and Lithuania flared up in anger and hatred. The Revolution in

8346-488: The museum's future, and the following year the establishments owned by Golos Truda were permanently closed down by the authorities. The Tolstoyan movement was also forced to relocate its Life and Labor Commune to Siberia , where a number of their members were arrested. Following the establishment of the Soviet Union , Vladimir Lenin was left incapacitated by a stroke and a Troika made up of Lev Kamenev , Joseph Stalin and Grigory Zinoviev assumed control of

8453-473: The next year they would come to consider the Bolsheviks traitors to the socialist cause, urban anarchist groups initially saw Lenin and his comrades as allies in the fight against capitalist oppression. Understanding the need for widespread support in his quest for Communism, Lenin often deliberately appealed to anarchist sentiments in the eight months between the February and October Revolutions. Many optimistic anarchists interpreted Lenin's slogan of “All Power to

8560-612: The number had jumped to "about 50,000", with another 30,000 held on the mainland at the nearest railhead of Kem . In the early 1930s, many of the prisoners from the camp were transferred to the newly established Belbaltlag to man the construction of the White Sea – Baltic Canal . In 1936, the Solovki camp was renamed a "special" prison (STON, an acronym that reads "Groan" in Russian) and from then until its closure in 1939 it served as

8667-567: The post-revolutionary USSR, were prominent among the prisoners on Solovki. In the 1920s many of those sent to Solovki were released, but often arrested and imprisoned (or exiled) a second time. Naftaly Frenkel was a prisoner on Solovki who became a leading cadre in the security services during the First Five-Year Plan . Arrested by the OGPU in 1923, he was sentenced to ten years imprisonment and sent to Solovki. There his sentence

8774-409: The prisoners of the "lost Solovki transport" between 27 October and 3 November 1937, who included many members of Ukraine's Executed Renaissance . The Sandarmokh killing field was only found in July 1997 after lengthy searches and at first it was not known how many thousands had been shot and buried there. The identity of the 1,111 prisoners brought from the Solovki "special" prison in the White Sea

8881-596: The rest of the Chernoe Znamias. Obtaining weapons was the first objective. Police stations, gun shops and arsenals were raided and their stock stolen. Bomb labs were set up and money gleaned from expropriations went to buying more weapons from Vienna . Bialystock became a warzone, virtually everyday an Anarchist attack or a Police repression. Ekaterinoslav , Odessa , Warsaw and Baku all became witnesses to more and more gunpoint hold-ups and tense shootouts. Sticks of dynamite were thrown into factories or mansions of

8988-485: The rest of the country, feeling that the communes did little to contribute to a worldwide peace movement. Although Tolstoy's actions frequently diverged from the ideals he set for himself (for example, he owned a large estate), his followers continued to promote the Tolstoyan vision of world peace well after his death in 1910. Individualist anarchism was one of the three categories of anarchism in Russia, along with

9095-542: The revolutionaries. In 1907, the Tsarist Minister Stolypin set about his new "pacification" program. Police received more arms, orders and reinforcements to raid Anarchist centres. The police would track the Anarchists to their headquarters and then strike swiftly and brutally. The Anarchists were tried by court martial in which preliminary investigation was waived, verdicts delivered within 2 days and sentences executed immediately. Rather than succumb to

9202-564: The right-wing policy of socialism in one country , the Troika broke up, with Kamenev and Zinoviev forming a " United Opposition " in coalition with the left-wing. The Opposition demanded freedom of expression within the party, called for an end to the New Economic Policy (NEP), and proposed the rapid industrialization of the economy and a reduction of state bureaucracy . The "anarcho-Bolshevik" Victor Serge subsequently joined

9309-587: The rural population. Marxist-Leninists had never given the peasants great credit, and with the Civil War against the White Armies underway, the Red Army primarily used peasant villages as suppliers of grain, which it “requisitioned,” or in other words, seized by force. Abused equally by the Red and invading White armies, large groups of peasants, as well as Red Army deserters, formed “Green” armies that resisted

9416-457: The state. The Troika government was briefly opposed by the council communists of the Workers' Group , but they were swiftly expelled from the Communist Party and eventually repressed entirely. When Lenin died of his ailments, a power struggle broke out between the Communist Party's various factions: the right-wing led by Nikolai Bukharin , the centre led by the Troika and the left-wing led by Leon Trotsky . When Stalin allied himself with

9523-470: The suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion , the Communist Party's 10th Congress implemented the New Economic Policy (NEP), which put an end to war communism and transformed the Soviet economy into a form of state capitalism . Many of the "Soviet anarchists" that had previously sought conciliation with the Bolshevik government quickly became disillusioned with the policies of the NEP, which they regarded as

9630-439: The suppression of the anarchist movement in Russia, a number of anarchists fled the country into exile, such as Emma Goldman , Alexander Berkman , Alexander Schapiro , Volin , Mark Mratchny , Grigorii Maksimov , Boris Yelensky , Senya Fleshin and Mollie Steimer , who went on to establish relief organizations which provided aid for anarchist political prisoners back in Russia. To the disillusioned Russian anarchist exiles,

9737-604: The taking over of product distribution by a network of housing and consumer cooperatives . He also denounced the Communist International and claimed that the IWA was the true successor to the First International of Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin , due to their adherence to the idea that "the liberation of the working class is the task of the workers themselves", condemning centralization as leading inevitably to bureaucracy - as evidenced by

9844-405: The two along the lines of Peter Kropotkin 's earlier works. Maksimov suggested the establishment of agricultural cooperatives and factory committees that could oversee the improvement of conditions and reduction of working hours during the transition to communism , the replacement of prisons with public welfare institutions and disbandment of standing armies in favor of a "people's militia", and

9951-434: The ultimate evil. Tolstoy professed contempt for the private ownership of land, but his anarchism lay primarily in his view that the state exists essentially as an instrument of compulsory force, which he considered the antithesis of all religious teachings. He once wrote, "A man who unconditionally promises in advance to submit to laws which are made and will be made by men, by this very promise renounces Christianity." In

10058-433: The wake of the death of Stalin , libertarian communism began to reconstitute itself within the dissident human rights movement , and by the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union , the anarchist movement had re-emerged onto the public sphere. In the modern day, anarchists make up a part of the opposition movement to the government of Vladimir Putin . In 1848, on his return to Paris , Mikhail Bakunin published

10165-534: The work of the Kropotkin Museum was allowed to continue without interference, and a number of prominent anarchists secured permission to publicly protest against the execution of the Italian American anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti . However, by 1928 a factional dispute had broken out over control of the Kropotkin Museum, in spite of Kropotkin's widow Sofia's attempts to secure

10272-513: Was a doorman at an apartment block, for instance, before becoming in 1913 an assistant to a metal-worker at the Vulcan works. Following the 1917 February Revolution he joined the Bolsheviks and soon was serving as a Cheka executioner. In 1923 he took a few years away from his new occupation. From 1927 onwards Matveyev was back with the successor organisations, the OGPU and NKVD , as an executioner in

10379-457: Was a professor of philosophy at Moscow University, "a gifted orator and the author of numerous books, pamphlets, and articles which attempted to reconcile individualist anarchism with the doctrines of syndicallism". He wrote among other theoretical works, Anarkhizm in 1918 just after the October revolution and Anarchism and Law . The origin of the Doukhobors dates back to 16th- and 17th-century Muscovy . The Doukhobors ("Spirit Wrestlers") are

10486-618: Was added to the museum on the islands, the first anywhere in the USSR to be devoted to the Gulag. In June of that year, the first Days of Remembrance for Victims of Political Repression were held on the islands; in subsequent years this event would take place in August. The Orthodox Church reestablished the monastery in 1992, and that year the ensemble was added to UNESCO 's World Heritage List . In 2015, human rights activists expressed disquiet that

10593-536: Was allowed to give birth, then shot three months later on 16 May, aged 28. In 1939, the prison was closed. It was situated too close to the border with Finland , and the Second World War was imminent. The buildings were transformed into a naval base and a cadet corps was deployed there. (One of its students was the future author Valentin Pikul .) In 1989, a permanent exhibition, "The Solovki special camp",

10700-456: Was also arrested for publishing the Opposition's platform. With the Opposition purged, Joseph Stalin had completed his rise to power . He subsequently broke with the New Economic Policy (NEP) and shifted the economy towards a five-year plan of rapid industrialization and forced collectivization , marking the beginning of the Stalinist era . The introduction of totalitarianism in

10807-564: Was appointed the head of the Supreme Executive Commission and given extraordinary powers to fight the revolutionaries. Loris-Melikov's proposals called for some form of parliamentary body, and the Emperor Alexander II seemed to agree; these plans were never realized as of March 13 (March 1 Old Style ), 1881, Alexander was assassinated: while driving on one of the central streets of St. Petersburg, near

10914-533: Was first established in the summer of 1996. Their deaths were followed over the next 13 months by those of a further 3,500 inhabitants of Karelia and 4,500 workers from the White Sea Canal , leading to a total of 9,500 killings, with the bodies buried in 236 communal pits. The executions were part of the Great Purge that ran from 1936 to 1938. On 20 December 1937, Captain Mikhail Matveyev

11021-537: Was given a commemorative gift, a radiogram and a set of gramophone records, for his "selfless work in the struggle against counter-revolution", i.e. his work at Sandarmokh between 27 October and 10 November that year. On 11 March 1939 he was himself arrested on the orders of the new head of the NKVD Lavrenty Beria and sentenced to 10 years in a corrective labour camp. (On hearing this news, his fellow executioner Alexander Polikarpov shot himself.) Matveyev

11128-782: Was not deprived of his awards and medals, however, and soon his sentence was reduced to three years, which he served in a camp in the Vologda Region. Released early when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, during the Leningrad Blockade Matveyev was made komendant (chief executioner) of the NKVD internal prison in the city. He later received the highest Soviet award, the Order of Lenin , for his work in those years. He retired in December 1949. Certain of those involved in selecting, escorting and then shooting

11235-539: Was reduced and in 1927, he was released and appointed head of production at SLON before being sent as representative of the camp to Moscow in 1929. Soon he was in charge of production throughout the Gulag and oversaw work on the White Sea Canal. His activities in the Gulag paralleled the forced industrialisation and collectivisation of agriculture throughout the Soviet Union. The mass shooting on Solovki in 1929 described by Dmitry Sergeyevich Likhachov (it forms

11342-557: Was sent in to disband all anarchist organizations, and largely succeeded. On the night of April 12, 1918, the Cheka raided 26 anarchist centres in Moscow , including the House of Anarchy , the headquarters of the Moscow Federation of Anarchist Groups. A fierce battle raged on Malaia Dimitrovka Street. About 40 anarchists were killed or wounded, and approximately 500 were imprisoned. A dozen Cheka agents had also been killed in

11449-402: Was supported chiefly by Peter Arshinov and Nestor Makhno . This platform was criticized as authoritarian by a number of dissenting voices, including Voline, Senya Fleshin and Mollie Steimer . Arshinov and Makhno's short-tempered response to these criticisms drew the ire of other Russian exiles such as Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman , who denounced them respectively as a "Bolshevik" and

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