Rogdaev, Nikolai 188?-1932 aka Uncle Vanya

Nikolai Ignatievich Rogdaev (Muzil) aka Uncle Vanya 188?-1932
Born Nikolai Ignatievich Muzil, Rogdaev was a follower of Kropotkin from 1900. He was a trailblazer of anarchism in Russia and the Ukraine. Rogdaev was a propagandist in Briansk, Nezhin and Ekaterinoslav in 1903, when the anarchist movement was re-born, after its destruction by the Tsarist regime in the 1880s. Known as Uncle Vanya, he helped set up many anarchist groups. He fought behind the barricades in the Moscow uprising of December 1905. Ignatii Muzil, his brother, was seized in woods near Nizhnii Novgorod with anarchist literature in his possession in 1905.He refused to recognize the court or stand up before questioners and was one of the many victims of the Tsarist clampdown of 1905-1906.
Nikolai was an impressive debater confusing Socialist Revolutionary and Social Democrat opponents and thus recruiting many to anarchism.

He wrote a “huge martyrology” (his own words) in a report he wrote for the International Congress of Anarchists in 1907 in Amsterdam. He was one of the Russian delegates with Zabrezhnev at this conference. The minutes taker reported: “Comrade Nikolai Rogdaev takes the floor to speak about "The Russian Revolution". Rogdaev speaks in Russian and most people attending the Congress do not understand him. Everyone's eyes, however, are fixed on that pale youth in whose eyes burn a strange flame. And everyone can guess at what he is saying. He speaks about the struggle in which Russian anarchists (including himself) are engaged against murderous czarism; he recalls the revolts and the martyrs, the suffering and the executions, all the enormous drama that is being played out in Russia only to be met with the indifference of Europe”.

Rogdaev was joint editor with Maksim Raevskii, a champion of syndicalism, of Stormy Petrel –Burevestnik. This was named after Gorky’s famous poem of the same name. The last line from the poem- “Let the storm burst forth more strongly”- appeared on the masthead. It was founded in Paris in 1906. His articles also appeared in Golos Truda founded in 1911 in New York. In 1909 he brought together an invaluable collection of documents and personal reminiscences of movement from 1903 to 1908. Al’manakh: sbornik po istorii anarchicheskogo dvizheniia v Rossii.
He also engaged in a lengthy polemic with Lenin in Switzerland and continued to be on good terms with him.

After the 1917 Revolution he settled in Samara. He meant to join the Makhnovists but was put off by the presence of Volin who he had never forgiven for being an associate of Vladimir Burtzev, who had uncovered many police agents in the revolutionaries’ ranks and who had had not lifted a finger when he was falsely accused of being an agent provocateur. He became commissar of medical administration. In 1920 Lenin summoned him to Moscow and urged him to persuade Makhno to “subordinate” himself to the Kremlin, and to take an important post (based on his knowledge of foreign languages) on the Red Army staff on the Western front. He refused both. This got him in trouble with the Samara Cheka. This was later smoothed over, and he went on to an educational position in Tiflis. He kept in touch with Dielo Truda in Paris and even managed to send it money.
In 1927 he was one of the anarchists allowed by the Bolshevik regime to sign a petition in favour of Sacco and Vanzetti, the Italian-American anarchists on death row in the USA, a cruel irony when anarchists in the Soviet Union were being murdered and imprisoned.

He died in Tashkent, where he had been exiled after completing a long term in the Suzdal “polit-isolator” in 1932. He collapsed from a cerebral haemorrhage “in a street named, by a mocking coincidence, Sacco-Vanzetti” (Man, June-July 1934).

The last piece Nestor Makhno ever wrote was an obituary to his fondly remembered comrade: “Very dear friend, comrade and brother, sleep easy in the heavy slumber from which there is no awakening. Your cause is our cause. It shall never perish. It will spring to life again in the generations to come who will take it up again and enrich it. It will motivate the open, healthy life of the struggle of toiling humanity. Friend, you will remain with us forever! May shame and damnation rebound upon those who have besmirched your name, who have slowly and cravenly clawed at your soul and your heart to the end” (Makhno was too poor to send it in to the Russian exile anarchist paper Probuzhdenie, not being able to afford the price of a stamp. It finally appeared in the November-December 1934 issue).
NICK HEATH