This image is the cover for the book My Further Disillusionment in Russia

My Further Disillusionment in Russia

From a writer and anarchist the FBI once called, “the most dangerous woman in America,” a leftist critique of the failures of Bolshevik revolutionaries.

The annals of literature tell of books expurgated, of whole chapters eliminated or changed beyond recognition. But I believe it has rarely happened that a work should be published with more than a third of it left out and without the reviewers being aware of the fact. This doubtful distinction has fallen to the lot of my work on Russia. . . .

The present volume contains the chapters missing from the first edition, and I deeply appreciate the devotion of my friends who have made the appearance of this additional issue possible—in justice to myself and to my readers.

So begins political activist Emma Goldman’s second volume, My Further Disillusionment with Russia, which continues her account of the years following the Russian Revolution. Having returned to Russia believing she would find a political utopia, Goldman reveals her disappointment with the Bolsheviks, who betrayed the ideals of the revolution by becoming an authoritarian party. Goldman’s memoir of life in Russia in the early years of the twentieth century is an important work of political commentary by an activist who played a fundamental role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in the United States and Europe.

Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman (1869–1940) was an anarchist 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 twentieth century. Born in present-day Lithuania to a 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. In 1917, Goldman and fellow anarchist writer Alexander Berkman, her lover and lifelong friend, were sentenced to two years in jail for conspiring to “induce persons not to register” for the newly-instated draft. After their release from prison, they were arrested—along with 248 others—in the Palmer Raids during the First Red Scare and deported to Russia. Goldman later left the Soviet Union and in 1923 published a book about her experiences, My Disillusionment in Russia. She died in Toronto, Canada, in 1940, at the age of seventy.

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