My Disillusionment in Russia quotes

The decision to record my experiences, observations, and reactions during my stay in Russia I had made long before I thought of leaving that country. In fact, that was my main reason for departing from that tragically heroic land.

The strongest of us are loath to give up a long-cherished dream.

I had come to Russia possessed by the hope that I should find a newborn country, with its people wholly consecrated to the great, though very difficult, task of revolutionary reconstruction.

I fought desperately against the disillusionment. For a long time I strove against the still voice within me which urged me to face the overpowering facts. I would not and could not give up.

Then came Kronstadt. It was the final wrench. It completed the terrible realization that the Russian Revolution was no more.

I saw before me the Bolshevik State, formidable, crushing every constructive revolutionary effort, suppressing, debasing, and disintegrating everything.

I could have received many more had I been willing to serve the powers that be. It is that very circumstance which has made it bitter hard for me to speak out against the evils as I saw them day by day.

But finally I realized that silence is indeed a sign of consent.

Not to cry out against the betrayal of the Russian Revolution would have made me a party to that betrayal.

The Communist dictatorship seemed inclined to relax its stranglehold upon the thoughts and lives of the people. But the hope was short-lived. Since the death of Lenin the Bolsheviki have returned to the terror of the worst days of their regime.

Despotism, fearing for its power, seeks safety in bloodshed.

More timely even than in 1922 is my book today.

On the Russian border we were met by a committee of the Soviet Government, headed by Zorin. They had come to greet the first political refugees driven from America for opinion’s sake.

It was a cold day, with the earth a sheet of white, but spring was in our hearts.

Soon we were to behold revolutionary Russia. I preferred to be alone when I touched the sacred soil: my exaltation was too great, and I feared I might not be able to control my emotion.

The houses looked like broken old tombs upon neglected and forgotten cemeteries. The streets were dirty and deserted; all life had gone from them. The population of Petrograd before the war was almost 2,000,000; in 1920 it had dwindled to 500,000.

The people walked about like living corpses; the shortage of food and fuel was slowly sapping the city; grim death was clutching at its heart.

Emaciated and frostbitten men, women, and children were being whipped by the common lash, the search for a piece of bread or a stick of wood. It was a heartrending sight by day, an oppressive weight at night.

“The cursed interventionists, the blockade—they are responsible,” said my escort. Why, yes, the counterrevolutionists and the blockade are responsible, I reassured myself. I tried to dismiss the thought of that huddled group, but it clung to me.

I felt something snap within me.

At last we reached the Anarchist quarters, in a dilapidated house in a filthy backyard. I was ushered into a small room crowded with men and women.

My escort smiled sadly. The Soviet Government had closed the houses of prostitution and was now trying to drive the women off the streets, but hunger and cold drove them back again; besides, the soldiers had to be humoured.

It was too ghastly, too incredible to be real, yet there they were⁠—those shivering creatures for sale and their buyers, the red defenders of the Revolution.

“The cursed interventionists, the blockade—they are responsible,” said my escort. Why, yes, the counterrevolutionists and the blockade are responsible, I reassured myself. I tried to dismiss the thought of that huddled group, but it clung to me. I felt something snap within me.

On the way home I spoke to Zorin about it. He laughed.

“Free speech is a bourgeois superstition,” he said; “during a revolutionary period there can be no free speech.”

I was rather dubious about the sweeping statement, but I felt that I had no right to judge. I was a newcomer, while the people at the Tauride Palace had sacrificed and suffered so much for the Revolution. I had no right to judge.

Meanwhile, they should work with us. Look at William Shatov, for instance, who has helped save Petrograd from Yudenich. He works with us and we appreciate his services. Shatov was among the first to receive the order of the Red Banner.”

Free speech, free press, the spiritual achievements of centuries, what were they to this man?

A Puritan, he was sure his scheme alone could redeem Russia. Those who served his plans were right, the others could not be tolerated.

Never mind the evils—I would say to myself—as long as there are such as the Zorins and the Balabanovas, there must be something vital in the ideas they represent.

I held on tenaciously to the phantom I had myself created.

“The workers have achieved control,” Lisa replied; “they are now in power, and they have more important things to attend to than rest rooms—they have the Revolution to defend.”

Lisa Zorin had remained very much the proletarian, but she reasoned like a nun dedicated to the service of the Church.

The thought oppressed me that what she called the “defence of the Revolution” was really only the defence of her party in power. At any rate, nothing came of my attempt at social welfare work.

Even some Communists resented the degrading innovation. The Anarchists who protested against it were arrested by the Cheka. When certain leading Communists were approached in the matter they repeated what Lenin had said: “No Anarchists of ideas are in our prisons.”

The aureole was falling from the Communists. All of them seemed to believe that the end justified the means.

I recalled the statements of Radek at the first anniversary of the Third International, when he related to his audience the “marvellous spread of Communism” in America. “50,000 Communists are in American prisons,” he exclaimed.

For the Bolsheviki the end to be achieved was the Communist State, or the so-called Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Everything which advanced that end was justifiable and revolutionary. The Lenins, Radeks, and Zorins were therefore quite consistent.

Obsessed by the infallibility of their creed, giving of themselves to the fullest, they could be both heroic and despicable at the same time.

They could work twenty hours a day, live on herring and tea, and order the slaughter of innocent men and women. Occasionally they sought to mask their killings by pretending a “misunderstanding,” for doesn’t the end justify all means?

Though Russian by birth, training, and revolutionary traditions, Angelica had become rooted in the soil of Italy. Well I understood her and her sense of strangeness in the country, the hard soil of which was to bear a new and radiant life.

Angelica would not admit even to herself that the much hoped-for life was stillborn.

But knowing her as I did, it was not difficult for me to understand how bitter was her grief over the hapless and formless thing that had come to Russia. But now her beloved Italians were coming!

Six months and the close proximity with the reality of things quite changed the picture for me. The spontaneity, the enthusiasm, the vitality had all gone out of it.

Only a pale shadow remained, a grinning phantom that clutched at my heart.

On the Uritski Square the masses were growing weary with long waiting. They had been kept there for hours before the Italian Mission arrived from the Tauride Palace.

Do the visitors know anything about us?” The speeches went on, the “Internationale” was being repeated for the tenth time, the sailors performed their fancy exercises and the claqueurs on the reviewing stand were shouting hurrahs.

I rushed away. I, too, was weeping, though my eyes remained dry.

The Italian, like the English, Mission was quartered in the Narishkin Palace. One day, on visiting Angelica there, I found her in a perturbed state of mind.

Now the fluttering spirits of the heroic dead may rest in peace: their dream has come true. But what is this strange writing on the wall?

“Tonight I am to be shot because I had once acquired an education.”

I had almost lost consciousness of the reality. The inscription roused me to it. “What is this?” I asked the guard. “Those are the last words of an intelligent,” he replied. “After the October Revolution the intelligentsia filled this prison.

Here is the common grave of Ulianov, Mishkin, Kalayev, Balmashev, and many more. The black tablet inscribed with their names speaks louder than the voices silenced forever. Not even the roaring waves dashing against the rock of Schlüsselburg can drown that accusing voice.

Petropavlovsk and Schlüsselburg stand as the living proof of how futile is the hope of the mighty to escape the Frankensteins of their own making.

In the great upheaval it was forgotten that the Communists are a political party firmly adhering to the idea of a centralized State, and that as such they were bound to misdirect the course of the Revolution.

The Bolsheviki were the Jesuits of the Socialist Church: they believed in the Jesuitic motto that the end justifies the means.

Their end being political power, they hesitate at nothing. The means, however, have paralysed the energies of the masses and have terrorized the people.

The Communist dogma that the end justifies all means was also doing much harm. It had thrown the door wide open to the worst human passions, and discredited the ideals of the Revolution.

The Tolstoyan spoke sadly, as one speaks of a hope cherished and loved, and lost.

The next morning our visitor donated to our collection the kandali he had worn for many years in prison.

It was strange to see these hungry and ragged peasants, huge loads on their backs, standing about entirely forgetful of their environment, pouring their hearts out in folk songs.

A peculiar people, these Russians, saint and devil in one, manifesting the highest as well as the most brutal impulses, capable of almost anything except sustained effort.

I have often wondered whether this lack did not to some extent explain the disorganization of the country and the tragic condition of the Revolution.

They were passive, though bitter against the Bolshevik regime. It was claimed that the Bolsheviki made no pogroms and that they do not persecute the Jews, they said; but that was true only in a certain sense.

There were two kinds of pogroms: the loud, violent ones, and the silent ones.

Of the two the Zionists considered the former preferable. The violent pogrom might last a day or a week; the Jews are attacked and robbed, sometimes even murdered; and then it is over. But the silent pogroms continued all the time.

But she explained that Makhno was determined to reach us; he would trust no one else with the message, and therefore she had volunteered to come. It was evident that danger had lost all terror for her.

“We have been living in constant peril for years,” she said simply.

Divested of her disguise, she revealed much beauty. She was a woman of twenty-five, with a wealth of jet-black hair of striking lustre. “Nestor had hoped that you and Alexander Berkman would manage to come, but he waited in vain,” she began.

I spoke to the girl of the activities of the advanced women of America, of their achievements and of the work yet to be done for woman’s emancipation. I mentioned some of the literature dealing with these subjects. She listened eagerly.

“I must get hold of something to help our peasant women. They are just beasts of burden,” she said.

Early the next morning we saw her safely out of the house. The same day, while visiting the Anarchist club, I witnessed a peculiar sight. The club had recently been reopened after having been raided by the Cheka.

I had seen a great deal of sabotage in various Soviet institutions in every city I had visited. Everywhere the numerous employees deliberately wasted their time while thousands of applicants spent days and weeks in the corridors and offices without receiving the least attention.

The greater part of Russia did nothing else but stand in line, waiting for the bureaucrats, big and little, to admit them to their sanctums.

But bad as conditions were in other cities, nowhere did I find such systematic sabotage as in Odessa. From the highest to the lowest Soviet worker everyone was busy with something other than the work entrusted to him.

It was rather hard on those Jewish boys, for it was a sin to ride on Yom Kippur. But no inducement could persuade the peasant to venture through the woods without military protection.

Life is indeed a crazy quilt made of patches.

The peasant, a true Ukrainian, would not have hesitated a moment to beat and rob Jews in a pogrom; yet he felt secure in the protection of Jews against the possible attack of his own coreligionists.

The soldiers stood up in the wagon, their rifles ready for action; the peasant crossed himself and lashed the horses into a mad gallop, keeping up the pace till we reached the open road again. It was all very exciting but we met no bandits.

They must have been sabotaging that night.

We reached the station too late to make connections and had to wait until the morning. I spent the night in the company of a girl in soldier uniform, a Communist. She had been at every front, she declared, and had fought many bandits.

After considerable effort we got her to her feet. Hysterical, she was taken in the waiting auto to her hotel and put to bed. Outside, the sky was clothed in gray and was weeping upon the fresh grave of Jack Reed.

And all of Russia seemed a fresh grave.

While in Moscow we found the explanation of the sudden change of tone of the Communist press toward Makhno. The Bolsheviki, hard pressed by Wrangel, sought the aid of the Ukrainian povstantsi army.

I had known in America that the Interventionists, the blockade and the conspiracy of the Imperialists were wrecking the Revolution. But what I had not known then was the part the Bolsheviki were playing in the process.

Now I realized that they were the gravediggers.

I was oppressively conscious of the great debt I owed to the workers of Europe and America: I should tell them the truth about Russia. But how could I speak out when the country was still besieged on several fronts?

It was badly played and poorly staged, and fell flat.

To me the celebration was more like the funeral than the birth of the Revolution.

There was much excitement in Petrograd all through the month of November. Numerous rumours were afloat about strikes, arrests, and dashes between workers and soldiery. It was difficult to get at the facts.

He had many in his department who had been considered counterrevolutionary, but now they were all doing good work. It was the most extraordinary thing I had heard from a Communist. “Aren’t you considered a sentimental bourgeois?” I asked.

“Yes, indeed,” he replied smilingly, “but that is nothing. The main thing is that I have been able to prove that my sentimentalism works, as you can see for yourself.”

The carpenter was the artist of the studio. He had never been taught, but he did beautiful carving and was a master in every kind of wood work.

the Kronstadt sailors, far from being counterrevolutionists, were devoted to the Revolution. Facing Zinoviev he reminded him that the Bolshevik authorities were now acting toward the workers and sailors just as the Kerensky Government had acted toward the Bolsheviki.

“Then you were denounced as counterrevolutionists and German agents,” he said; “we, the workers and sailors, protected you and helped you to power. Now you denounce us and are ready to attack us with arms. Remember, you are playing with fire.”

Then a sailor spoke. He referred to the glorious revolutionary past of Kronstadt, appealed to the Communists not to engage in fratricide, and read the Kronstadt resolution to prove the peaceful attitude of the sailors.

Some of the kursanti, among them the man I had spoken to, refused to accept the special privileges.

“They want to pay us for murder,” they said.

Fearing that the whole institution would be influenced by these awakened victims, the management ordered them removed to a separate ward, the “Communist ward,” as the patients called it.

“They want to pay us for murder,” they said. Fearing that the whole institution would be influenced by these awakened victims, the management ordered them removed to a separate ward, the “Communist ward,” as the patients called it.

Kronstadt broke the last thread that held me to the Bolsheviki.

The wanton slaughter they had instigated spoke more eloquently against them than aught else. Whatever their pretences in the past, the Bolsheviki now proved themselves the most pernicious enemies of the Revolution. I could have nothing further to do with them.

what was but yesterday considered a heinous offence was now flaunted before them in an open and legal manner. I overheard a Red soldier say:

“Is this what we made the Revolution for? For this our comrades had to die?”

The slogan, “Rob the robbers,” was now turned into “Respect the robbers,” and again was proclaimed the sanctity of private property.

what was but yesterday considered a heinous offence was now flaunted before them in an open and legal manner. I overheard a Red soldier say: “Is this what we made the Revolution for? For this our comrades had to die?”

The slogan, “Rob the robbers,” was now turned into “Respect the robbers,” and again was proclaimed the sanctity of private property.

Russia was thus gradually resurrecting the social conditions that the great Revolution had come to destroy. But the return to capitalism in no way changed the Bolshevik attitude toward the Left elements.

Yet, in spite of their bitter experiences and martyrdom under the Bolshevik regime, most of the Anarchists clung tenaciously to the hand that smote them. It needed the outrage upon Kronstadt to rouse them from the hypnotic spell of the Bolshevik superstition.

Power is corrupting, and Anarchists are no exception.

It must in truth be admitted that a certain Anarchist element became demoralized by it; by far the largest majority retained their integrity.

They sent them forth into the world generously equipped in every sense, to perpetuate the monstrous delusion that the Bolsheviki and the Revolution are identical and that the workers have come into their own “under the proletarian dictatorship.”

Woe to those who dare to tear the mask from the lying face.

In Russia they are put against the wall, exiled to slow death in famine districts, or banished from the country. In Europe and America such heretics are dragged through the mire and morally lynched.

Works of art, like newborn man, come in pain and travail. Verily the five years of Revolution should have proved very rich spiritually and creatively.

For in those years the soul of Russia has gone through a thousand crucifixions.

Yet in this regard Russia was never before so poor and desolate.

It was the cry of a tortured poet’s soul in protest against the continued terror. The editor was promptly arrested and his little shop closed. The author would probably have been shot had his whereabouts been known.

No doubt there are many agonized cries in Russia, but they are muffled cries.

No one may hear them or interpret their meaning. The future alone has the key to the cultural and artistic treasures now hidden from the Argus eyes of the Department of Education and the numerous other censorial institutions.

Stanislavsky looked forlorn and discouraged among his still unpacked boxes of stage property. I saw him also on several other occasions and found him almost hopeless about the future of the theatre in Russia.

“The theatre can grow only through inspiration from new works of art,” he would say; “without it the interpretive artist must stagnate and the theatre deteriorate.”

But Stanislavsky himself was too much the creative artist to stagnate. He sought other forms of interpretation. His newest venture was an attempt to bring singing and dramatic acting into cooperative harmony.

On the contrary, they applauded the playwright, for those sycophants depended on Lunacharsky for their rations. They could not afford to be critical.

Vanity and power break the strongest character, and Lunacharsky is not strong.

It is his lack of will which makes him submit, against his better judgment, to the galling discipline and espionage placed over him. Perhaps he avenges himself by forcing upon the public at large and the actors under his charge his dramatic works.

I remember the shocked expression of Zorin when I asked him if the young people could not occasionally meet for a dance free from Communist supervision.

“Dance halls are gathering places for counterrevolutionists; we closed them,” he informed me.

The emotional and human needs of the people were considered dangerous to the regime.

I remember the shocked expression of Zorin when I asked him if the young people could not occasionally meet for a dance free from Communist supervision. “Dance halls are gathering places for counterrevolutionists; we closed them,” he informed me.

The emotional and human needs of the people were considered dangerous to the regime.

On the other hand, the dreadful existence—hunger, cold, and darkness—was sapping the life of the people. Gloom and despair by day, congestion, lack of light and heat at night, and no escape from it all.

There was, of course, the political life of the Communist Party—a life stern and forbidding, a life without colour or warmth. The masses had no contact with or interest in that life, and they were not permitted to have anything of their own.

A people bottled up is a menace.

Some outlet had to be provided, some relief from the black despair. The theatre, the opera, and the museum were that relief. What if the theatres gave nothing new? What if the opera had bad singing?

The only exceptions were the politicals, whose courage and devotion to their ideals defied the Bolsheviki as it had the Romanovs. I knew many of those brave spirits, and I saw in them the only hope to sustain one amid the general wreckage.

They were the living proof of the powerlessness of terror against an Ideal.

Typical of this class was a certain Anarchist who had long been sought for by the Cheka as an important Makhnovetz. He was a member of the military staff of the revolutionary povstantsi of the Ukraine and the close friend and counsellor of Makhno.

With great difficulty he was finally prevailed upon to leave his beloved Russia, as the only way of saving his family.

What a commentary on the Socialist Republic, whose bravest and truest sons must keep in hiding or forsake their native soil!

Life in Russia had become to me a constant torture; the need of breaking my two years’ silence was imperative.

the need of breaking my two years’ silence was imperative. During all the summer I was in the throes of a bitter conflict between the necessity of leaving and my inability to tear myself away from what had been an ideal to me.

It was like the tragic end of a great love to which one clings long after it is no more.

In the midst of my struggle there happened an event which further served to demonstrate the complete collapse of the Bolsheviki as revolutionists.

The Russian peasants began to expropriate the landlords and the workers took possession of the factories without taking cognizance of Marxian dicta. This popular action, by virtue of its own logic, ushered in the social revolution in Russia, upsetting all Marxian calculations.

The psychology of the Slav proved stronger than social-democratic theories.

That psychology involved the passionate yearning for liberty nurtured by a century of revolutionary agitation among all classes of society.

The Russian people had fortunately remained politically unsophisticated and untouched by the corruption and confusion created among the proletariat of other countries by “democratic” liberty and self-government.

The Russian remained, in this sense, natural and simple, unfamiliar with the subtleties of politics, of parliamentary trickery, and legal makeshifts.

On the other hand, his primitive sense of justice and right was strong and vital, without the disintegrating finesse of pseudo-civilization. He knew what he wanted and he did not wait for “historic inevitability” to bring it to him: he employed direct action.

After hearing him speak on several occasions and reading his works I became convinced that Lenin had very little concern in the Revolution and that Communism to him was a very remote thing.

The centralized political State was Lenin’s deity, to which everything else was to be sacrificed.

Someone said that Lenin would sacrifice the Revolution to save Russia.

Lenin’s policies, however, have proven that he was willing to sacrifice both the Revolution and the country, or at least part of the latter, in order to realize his political scheme with what was left of Russia.

Lenin was the most pliable politician in history.

He could be an ultra-revolutionary, a compromiser and conservative at the same time. When like a mighty wave the cry swept over Russia, “All power to the Soviets!” Lenin swam with the tide.

He knew how to make his comrades in Russia and outside of it believe that his scheme was true Socialism and his methods the revolution. No wonder that Lenin felt such contempt for his flock, which he never hesitated to fling into their faces.

“Only fools can believe that Communism is possible in Russia now,” was Lenin’s reply to the opponents of the new economic policy.

As a matter of fact, Lenin was right. True Communism was never attempted in Russia, unless one considers thirty-three categories of pay, different food rations, privileges to some and indifference to the great mass as Communism.

Numerically and in point of revolutionary fibre they were still in their childhood. By declaring adherence to the trade unions obligatory the Russian labour organizations gained in physical stature, but mentally they remained in the infant stage.

The Communist State became the wet nurse of the trade unions. In return, the organizations served as the flunkeys of the State.

“A school for Communism,” said Lenin in the famous controversy on the functions of the trade unions. Quite right. But an antiquated school where the spirit of the child is fettered and crushed.

It was the authoritarian spirit and principles of the State which stifled the libertarian and liberating aspirations. Were any other political party in control of the government in Russia the result would have been essentially the same.

It is not so much the Bolsheviki who killed the Russian Revolution as the Bolshevik idea.

It was Marxism, however modified; in short, fanatical governmentalism. Only this understanding of the underlying forces that crushed the Revolution can present the true lesson of that world-stirring event.

in short, fanatical governmentalism. Only this understanding of the underlying forces that crushed the Revolution can present the true lesson of that world-stirring event. The Russian Revolution reflects on a small scale the century-old struggle of the libertarian principle against the authoritarian.

For what is progress if not the more general acceptance of the principles of liberty as against those of coercion?

The Russian Revolution was a libertarian step defeated by the Bolshevik State, by the temporary victory of the reactionary, the governmental idea.