This book provides first-hand documentation of events in the Soviet Union when the Civil War was ending and Bolshevik regime was consolidating its position. The author was an American anarchist of Russian origin deported to Russia in 1919. The book is based on his diaries written between 1919-21.
Anarchist, journalist, drama critic, advocate of birth control and free love, Emma Goldman was one of the most famous - and notorious - women in the early twentieth century. Against a dramatic backdrop of political argument, show trials, imprisonment, and tempestuous romances, Goldman chronicles the epoch that she helped shape: the reform movements of the Progressive Era, the early years of and later disillusionment with Lenin's Bolshevik experiment, and more.
Matthew Quest, writing for Insurgent Notes, details CLR James' treatment of Lenin across decades of James' work. While CLR James broke with with Trotskyism and Trotsky as well as the Leninist party form, he never properly broke with Lenin or his works.
Through a critical examination of the limits of SWP guru Tony Cliff's analysis, Marot demolishes the popular myth that Trotsky and his Left Opposition within the Bolshevik Party in Russia were, during the 1920s, a heroic attempt to defend working class interests against a Stalinist 'socialist construction' and repression that they disagreed with. An effective factual antidote to leftist and ICC-type left-communist apologetics for Trotsky and Trotskyism's anti-working class character in Soviet Russia.