Rudolf Rocker

In 1921, he wrote the pamphlet Der Bankrott des russischen Staatskommunismus (The Bankruptcy of Russian State Communism) attacking the Soviet Union.

кусок из педевикии, каких много — для любознательных, СССР был организован в 1922 году

Voltairine de Cleyre

Voltairine de Cleyre (November 17, 1866 – June 20, 1912) was an American anarchist known for being a prolific writer and speaker who opposed state power, the capitalism she saw as interconnected with it, and marriage, and the domination of religion over sexuality and women's lives. She is often characterized as a major early feminist because of her views.

Born and raised in small towns in Michigan and schooled in a Sarnia, Ontario Catholic convent, de Cleyre began her activist career in the freethought movement. She was initially drawn to individualist anarchism, but evolved through mutualism to what she called anarchism without adjectives, prioritizing a stateless society without the use of force above all else. She was a contemporary of Emma Goldman, with whom she maintained a relationship of respectful disagreement on many issues. Many of her essays were collected in the Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre, published posthumously in 1914 by Goldman's magazine Mother Earth.

"Direct Action", her 1912 essay in defense of direct action, is widely cited today. In this essay, de Cleyre points to examples such as the Boston Tea Party, noting that "direct action has always been used, and has the historical sanction of the very people now reprobating it".

In her 1895 lecture entitled Sex Slavery, de Cleyre condemns ideals of beauty that encourage women to distort their bodies and child socialization practices that create unnatural gender roles. The title of the essay refers not to traffic in women for purposes of prostitution, although that is also mentioned, but rather to marriage laws that allow men to rape their wives without consequences. Such laws make "every married woman what she is, a bonded slave, who takes her master's name, her master's bread, her master's commands, and serves her master's passions".

Gregori Maximoff

Born in Smolensk, he studied at the Vladimir Seminary School of Theology, and later at the St. Petersburg School of Agriculture, where he received an agronomist degree. In 1912 he began to agitate for anarchism under the pseudonym Gr. Lapot ("Гр. Лапоть"). Although opposed to the First World War, in 1915 he joined the army to spread revolutionary propaganda among the soldiers. In 1917, Maximoff met his partner, Olga, in Kharkiv. She had been sentenced by Tsarism to 8 years of forced labor for spreading subversive literature, but her sentence was later commuted to exile in Kansk province (Siberia) due to her young age.

During the October Revolution Maximoff participated in the strike movement and in the fighting in Petrograd and was subsequently elected as provincial deputy of the Petrograd factory soviets. In 1918, along with five other colleagues, he was elected as delegate to the First All Russian Congress of Trade Unions. As a member of an anarcho-syndicalist body of the Nabat Confederation, Maximoff collaborated in the drafting of the newspaper Golos Truda.

Between 1918 and 1921 he was imprisoned at least six times by the Bolsheviks. In 1919, he voluntarily enlisted in the Red Army to combat the counter-revolutionary white army, but he was imprisoned in Kharkiv for refusing to disarm workers and suppress protest. On 8 March 1921, during the Kronstadt uprising, he was arrested in Moscow by the Cheka, along with other members of the Nabat confederation. Maximoff was locked in Taganka prison, where he was sentenced to death for spreading anarcho-syndicalist propaganda. After a hunger strike, on December 1921 he managed to attract the attention of workers visiting the Red Trade Union Congress. As a result of pressure from the international community, he and 10 other anarchists were released from prison and expelled from the country.

As a refugee in Berlin, he founded the headquarters of the Anarcho-Syndicalist Confederation abroad, helping anarchists imprisoned in Russia. But he was expelled from Germany on 5 February 1922, for publishing a newspaper named Rabochi Put. He moved to Paris with Olga, and there they participated in the writing of Dielo Truda. In 1925 the couple emigrated to the United States, where they settled in Chicago. There they published the newspaper Golos Truzhenika. Maximoff wrote several works on his experiences in Soviet Russia and his anarchist theories. He also collaborated with the Yiddish newspaper Fraye Arbeter Shtime, was the editor of the anarcho-syndicalist newspaper Dielo Trouda-Probuzhdenie and wrote the book The Guillotine at Work: Twenty Years of Terror in Russia on the Bolshevik repression of anarchists and labor unionists during the 1917 Russian Revolution. He died of a heart attack in New York on 16 March 1950,.

The Guillotine at Work: Twenty Years of Terror in Russia

This one of Maximoff's best remembered works in which he analysis the consequences of the Bolshevik seizure of power in the October Revolution. Quoting from Lenin's pamphlet The Threatening Catastrophe and How to Fight It (Sept 1917), he argues that Lenin is the "first theoretician of fascism". However, when the actions of the working class in seizing control of both industrial and commercial enterprises make such a course of action, Maximoff argues that Lenin then calls for the establishment of state capitalism, with other elements of fascism being added from time to time. He bases this argument on his reading of The Next Tasks of the Soviet Power

Senya Fleshin

He worked for Mother Earth, an anarchist journal published by Emma Goldman.

In 1917 Fleshin returned to Russia to take part in the Russian Revolution, where he had an affair with Louise Berger, another of Goldman's Mother Earth employees who had voluntarily decided to return to Russia, and who had accompanied him on the voyage. Fleshin was soon in conflict with the Bolshevik government; Berger eventually left him and went to Odessa to join a group of naletchiki (armed bandits) carrying out 'bank expropriations'. When Fleshin wrote an article criticizing Bolshevist government policies, he was arrested and imprisoned.

Soon after being released he met Molly Steimer, an anarchist who had been deported from the United States. Angered by the communists' suppression of the Russian anarchist movement, Senya and Molly organized the Society to Help Anarchist Prisoners, traveling to assist incarcerated comrades. On 1 November 1922, the two were themselves arrested by the Soviet secret police on charges of "aiding criminal elements in Russia" (i.e. assisting other anarchists) and "maintaining ties with anarchists abroad" (they had been corresponding with Berkman and Goldman, then in Berlin).

Sentenced to two years' exile in a Siberian labor camp by Soviet authorities, Fleshin and Steimer declared a hunger strike on 17 November in jail in Petrograd jail, and released the next day. They were forbidden, however, to leave the city and were ordered to report to the authorities every forty-eight hours. Before long, the couple had resumed their efforts on behalf of their imprisoned comrades. On 9 July 1923, police raided their apartment and they were again placed under arrest, charged with propagating anarchist ideas, in violation of Art. 60–63 of the Soviet Criminal Code. Sequestered from their fellow prisoners, Fleshin and Steimer again declared a hunger strike. Protests to Leon Trotsky by foreign anarcho-syndicalist delegates, including Emma Goldman, who wrote a personal letter of protest to a congress of the Red International of Trade Unions (Profintern) eventually brought about their release. This time, however, they were notified of their impending expulsion from the country. On 27 September 1923, Fleshin and Steimer were officially deported, and placed aboard a ship bound for Germany.

Together with Molly Steimer, Fleshin opened a photographic studio in Berlin. Fleshin was active in the Joint Committee for the Defense of Revolutionaries (1923–26), and the Relief Fund of the International Working Men's Association for Anarchists (1926–32).

When Hitler came to power, Fleshin and Molly Steimer were forced to flee to Paris. On 18 May 1940, Steimer was arrested by the French government and interned at Camp Gurs.

After seven weeks of imprisonment, Steimer, aided by French anarchist friends, including May Picqueray, editor of Le Réfractaire, managed to escape Camp Gurs during its chaotic turnover to Vichy control. Picqueray helped smuggle Fleshin and Steimer out of the country to Mexico, where they settled, running a photography studio.

Senya Fleshin died in Mexico City, on 19 June 1981, aged 86.

Émile Armand

Important influences in his writing were Leo Tolstoy, Benjamin Tucker, Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Armand was an important propagandist of free love. He advocated free love, naturism and polyamory in what he termed la camaraderie amoureuse. Above all he advocated a pluralism in sex and love matters in which one could find "Here sexual union and family, there freedom or promiscuity". He wrote many propagandist articles on this subject such as "De la liberté sexuelle" (1907) where he advocated not only a vague free love but also multiple partners, which he called "plural love" In the individualist anarchist journal L'EnDehors, he and others continued in this way. Armand seized this opportunity to outline his theses supporting revolutionary sexualism and camaraderie amoureuse that differed from the traditional views of the partisans of free love in several respects.

Later, Armand submitted that from an individualist perspective, nothing was reprehensible about making "love" even if one did not have very strong feelings for one's partner. "The camaraderie amoureuse thesis entails a free contract of association (that may be annulled without notice, following prior agreement) reached between anarchist individualists of different genders, adhering to the necessary standards of sexual hygiene, with a view toward protecting the other parties to the contract from certain risks of the amorous experience, such as rejection, rupture, exclusivism, possessiveness, unicity, coquetry, whims, indifference, flirtatiousness, disregard for others, and prostitution."

He also published Le Combat contre la jalousie et le sexualisme révolutionnaire (1926), followed over the years by Ce que nous entendons par liberté de l'amour (1928), La Camaraderie amoureuse ou “chiennerie sexuelle” (1930), and, finally, La Révolution sexuelle et la camaraderie amoureuse (1934), a book of nearly 350 pages comprising most of his writings on sexuality.

In a text from 1937, he mentioned among the individualist objectives the practice of forming voluntary associations for purely sexual purposes of heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual nature or of a combination thereof. He also supported the right of individuals to change sex and stated his willingness to rehabilitate forbidden pleasures, non-conformist caresses (he was personally inclined toward voyeurism), as well as sodomy. This led him allocate more and more space to what he called "the sexual non-conformists", while excluding physical violence. His militancy also included translating texts from people such as Alexandra Kollontai and Wilhelm Reich and establishments of free love associations which tried to put into practice la camaraderie amoureuse through actual sexual experiences.

The prestige in the subject of free love of Armand within anarchist circles was such as to motivate the young Argentinian anarchist América Scarfó to ask Armand in a letter on advice as to how to deal with the relationship she had with notorious Italian anarchist Severino Di Giovanni. Di Giovanni was still married when they began the relationship. "The letter was published in L’en dehors" on 20 January 1929 under the title "'An Experience', together with the reply from E. Armand". Armand replied to Scarfó, "Comrade: My opinion matters little in this matter you send me about what you are doing. Are you or are you not intimately in accord with your personal conception of the anarchist life? If you are, then ignore the comments and insults of others and carry on following your own path. No one has the right to judge your way of conducting yourself, even if it were the case that your friend's wife be hostile to these relations. Every woman united to an anarchist (or vice versa), knows very well that she should not exercise on him, or accept from him, domination of any kind."


Émile Armand. Anarchist Individualism and Amorous Comradeship
""Emile Armand and la camaraderie amoureuse – Revolutionary sexualism and the struggle against jealousy." by Francis Rousin" (PDF). iisg.nl. Retrieved 6 April 2018.
http://theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/America_Scarfo__Emile_Armand__Letter_of_America_Scarfo_to_Emile_Armand.htmlLetter of América Scarfó to Émile Armand

Fraye Arbeter Shtime

The paper's initial years of publication were dogged with financial issues. Foremost, the core audience—impoverished workers—had little money. The paper suspended printing during a typesetter wage dispute beginning in May 1892. Later that year, Alexander Berkman's prominent assassination attempt on Henry Clay Frick divided the movement, as some anarchists left the movement to denounce all forms of terrorism. As the wage dispute came to a close nearly a year later, the United States entered an economic depression, the Panic of 1893. By April 1894, the Fraye Arbeter Shtime group again stopped production, ending an era of Jewish anarchism as the Pioneers of Liberty and other groups waned or went defunct.[10] In these dormant years, Fraye Arbeter Shtime editors assisted in the launch of the monthly Di Fraye Gezelshaft.[11]

Five years later, Fraye Arbeter Shtime revived publication in October 1899 and Jewish interest in anarchism rekindled with it.[12] Its new editor, Saul Yanovsky, would serve through 1919, a heyday for both the newspaper and the Jewish anarchist movement.[11] It was also a period of stability for the paper, with readership above 20,000 prior to World War I. Yanovsky's own column was popular for its wit, and he selected numerous talented writers with fresh views. Alongside Kropotkin, Most, and Solotaroff, the editor added Rudolf Rocker, Max Nettlau, Emma Goldman, Voltairine de Cleyre, and Abraham Frumkin. The paper ran translations of cultural works (e.g., Henrik Ibsen, Olive Schreiner, Oscar Wilde) and pieces by major Yiddish writers (e.g., Avrom Reyzen, H. Leivick). This selection made the paper both readable and alluring among Yiddish readers.[13] The movement had also drifted from the zealous 1880s and 1890s in which social revolution felt imminent and propaganda of the deed justified. Yanovsky turned against terrorism and regarded anarchism as a philosophy of brotherhood, cooperation, and dignity, and the paper took a piecemeal approach to reform, in favor of libertarian schools and cooperative unions. While the 1901 assassination of William McKinley by an anarchist roiled Yanovsky, Fraye Arbeter Shtime bore part of the fallout, as an angry mob trashed the paper's offices and physically attacked its editor. Additionally, anarchist Jews also tempered their antireligious confrontation to be less pronounced, and some took up Zionism after the Kishinev pogrom.[14]

why I am not

Я же женщина. Только женщина!

Люди, я же женщина. Только женщина. У меня узкие запястья, узкие щиколотки и большая разница между талией и бедрами, уж не говорю – грудью. Ее видно глазами, но на ощупь еще вернее. Чего можно от меня требовать? За что меня нужно ругать?

У меня все так, как природа придумала для женщин – где надо узко, где надо широко, где надо впадинка, где надо бугорок. Это для мужчины, это для детей. Я часть пазла. Все подогнано и смазано. Надо совпасть, и оно работает. Только не требуйте от меня других функций. Смотрите, как красиво, когда я закалываю волосы наверх, а одна прядь выбивается. На мне духи пахнут лучше, чем задумывались парфюмером, на мне браслеты звенят как обещание радости… И это обещание выполняется. Чего еще нужно?

И не нужна мне зарплата, такая же, как у мужчин, я вообще не хочу работать. Я хочу быть дома, и чтоб было время на пожарить мясо и на посмотреть в окно. У меня шелковая кожа, волосы, характер. Из этого который год не получается ничего железного. Все это только горит хорошо. Горит, но не закаляется. Не становится тверже. Потрещит, остынет, нарастет новое и снова жаждет не равных прав, а шелковых простыней.

Ну нет во мне таких материалов и веществ, из которых можно сковать твердый нрав и жизнь, полную свершений. Я не могу быть сама по себе. Я сделана для кого-то. Из ребра, ключицы, копчика, плевать, не знаю. И чувствую себя так, будто во мне много меньше костей, чем надо, чтобы твердо стоять, быстро ходить, высоко прыгать и махать руками: Я! Я!

Я лучше пойду сяду в кресло под плед. Или поцелую ребенка. Или обниму мужчину.

Не умею бороться, умею только отступать. Когда вовремя, когда раньше, чем надо. Не кузнец я своего счастья и вообще не кузнец.Чему там учили в Смольном? Языкам, танцам и варенье варить? Вот я хочу варить варенье. Иногда молчать, иногда говорить, иногда болтать. Зачем мне надо столько всего знать, чтобы жить?!! Почему недостаточно талантливо чувствовать, уметь любить, быть тем мягким, во что можно спрятаться? Просто быть.

И не хочу я говорить ни себе, ни другим: «Я справлюсь, я разберусь, я выстою». Я хочу впадать в панику, в обморок, отключаться, чтобы очнуться, и мне сказали: вам нельзя волноваться, вам нужно отдыхать… И правда нужно. И вообще, горизонтально мне комфортней. И не нужно мне продвижение, мне нужен новый лифчик на тоненьких кружевных бретельках. И чулки со швом.

Я умею быть женой и матерью. Я умею быть честной. Для счастья мне достаточно, чтобы меня любили. Достаточно спать по ночам в той выемке у него на плече, которая тоже часть пазла.