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