Emma Goldman (1869–1940)

This is a continuation of Goldman's "My Disillusionment in Russia", to which I gave five stars and wrote a goodreads review. Here she does two things. She continues to provide evidence of what she saw and heard talking to many people high and low in several locales during nearly two years (1920-1921) in Russia following the 1917 revolutions there: the crushing of the revolution by the top-down brutal dictatorship imposed by the Bolsheviks where the ends justified any means whatever and the means then replaced the ends.

Goldman finishes with an afterword that is about a fifth of the book and discusses her ideas about revolutions. It is not without interest, but it has anarchist view, rather unlike the rest of these two books which appear to be fairly neutral reporting of facts. Goldman writes well, thinks well and has done her own thinking. She cares about people.

With these two first-hand accounts and later similar reports by others about the Soviet system, there was no excuse whatever for the worship of Soviet communism that swept socialists, communists and others off their feet around the world during subsequent decades, worship that hardly abated after the Moscow show trials of the late 1930's, the crushing of the Hungarian revolution 0f 1956 and the Czech uprising of 1968, the Berlin Wall of 1961, and many other outrages. There are worshipers still.… (más)

This is an excellent look at how the Bolsheviks destroyed the promise of the Russian revolution. The writer was a defender of Bolshevism before her exile from the United States to to Russia in 1919 and reluctantly arrived at that realization after living and traveling there for two years and talking to many people at every level and viewing living conditions and the operations of the Bolsheviks.

Due to a publishing error, about a third of this book was left out but was later published as "My Further Disillusionment in Russia". Both are free at archiv.org.… (más)