The American Spectator

Nearly three decades after the assassination attempt on Frick (and after being imprisoned three times — for inciting a riot, distributing birth-control information, and conspiring to obstruct the military draft), Goldman was deported to the Soviet Union, along with Berkman, in 1919.

Greeted as heroes, Goldman and Berkman met all the leading figures of the Russian Revolution of 1917 — Vladimir Lenin, Gregory Zinoviev, Alexandra Kollontai and Leon Trotsky. Lenin readily accepted Goldman’s proposal that she and Berkman develop a group called “Russian Friends of American Liberty” to advance the rights of political prisoners in the United States.

Instead, what Goldman witnessed firsthand in Russia from 1920 to 1921 was worse than Homestead. “I saw before me the Bolshevik State, formidable, crushing every constructive revolutionary effort, suppressing, debasing and disintegrating everything,” she wrote in her book, My Disillusionment In Russia, published in 1923.

From close range, Goldman observed the slaughter of workers who went on strike in several Petrograd factories. “The ‘conquest’ of the city was characterized by ruthless savagery,” a “bloodbath” of those classified by the government as “counter-revolutionaries,” she reported. “They had dared to raise their voice in protest against the new rulers of Russia.”

Goldman’s conclusion, after witnessing the concentration camps, the destruction of trade unions, the persecution of independent thought, the rampant corruption raging throughout the Soviet government, and the forced labor inflicted upon the masses (and the wholesale arrest of Russia’s anarchists): “The centralized political State was Lenin’s deity, to which everything else was to be sacrificed.”