Wick Welker's Reviews > My Further Disillusionment in Russia

Emma Goldman: the pinnacle critical thinker.

Welcome weary traveler who has come across my review for My Further Disillusionment with Russia. Like you, I have read plenty of communist sympathetic texts as well as western society critiques. Like you, I enjoy the Marxist critiques of capitalism and generally endorse social democratic policy. Like you, I’m horrified by the history of the Soviet communist regime. Like you, my mind has been utterly blown away when I’m gaslighted by modern day communists when I criticize Soviet Russia and have been belittled into believing that I’m simply an indoctrinated western propagandist. Well, my friend, this book is for you.

Is there anyone more apt to critique and provide an unbiased opinion of Soviet Russia and the Bolshevik revolution than a lefty leftist anarchist who was imprisoned and then deported from the US for being too radical left who visited Russia in 1921? In this book, there is no “western revisionist history”. Anarchist Emma Goldman simply gives her unadulterated opinion of the Bolshevik movement and what does she find?

It was bad. Very bad.

Goldman was hoping for an anarchist promised land when she came to Russia but she only found state-inflicted famines, political prisoners, rationing of food, tiered salary from the state, arrest and writers with dissenting opinions, state capitalism and an overall oppressive authoritarian regime. Hmm, sounds like everything else I’ve read about the USSR that is allegedly just western propaganda. All the bolshevik revolution did was a scene-change from the Romanovs sitting on a throne to Lenin sitting on that throne. Lenin was a politician, contorting his rhetoric and actions to stay in power just like any other politician before and after. The bolshevik’s bastardized the concept of revolution.

Goldman’s observations in the Afterword are simply brilliant. She is a fiercely intelligent thinker (she was also kind of a terrorist who plotted the assassination of Henry Clay Frick, so she’s no paragon of virtue). Goldman argues that the peasant class revolution that happened in Russia actually subverted Marxist ideas. Marx argued that a society needed a sufficient degree of industrialization to then move to a socialist revolution. Goldman states that the largely agrarian people of Russia didn’t even know about Marx theory and went ahead and started a revolution anyway, totally upending that theory. It was then the bolsheviks and the Lenin cadre that co-opted the movement and rebranded their own authoritarianism.

Reading this book was an exercise in confirmation bias for me and it honestly felt very good. I won’t let another modern day communist lead me to believe that the Soviets were “building communism” and how wonderful they were because they gave free education and healthcare to people. I got news for you: other modern “western” societies have done that except without the overt authoritarianism and overt civil rights violations. I’m sick and tired of the Soviet apologetics. It’s unfathomable insulting to the victims of that terrible, terrible, regime.