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.
Alongside the Russian workers' attempts to create socialism not as some abstract far-off utopia in a political party program, but through confronting and changing the concrete reality of their everyday life were the activities of socialist parties, supposedly sympathetic to working class aspirations. This pamphlet tells the story of the Russian workers' struggle, in particular the efforts of the factory committees.