Virgilia d’Andrea
Born Sulmona-Abruzzi, Italy, 11 February 1890, died New York, 11 May 1932

Virgilia d’Andrea is a reminder of the passion that anarchism could (and should!) inspire. It is the ideal, the source of hope and beauty. Like Luigi Galleani she writes in emotive and powerful language- a far cry from the formulaic and cold prose that can be found in some areas of our movement. Anarchism is about life, about individual realisation, about infinite possibility...

Virgilia d’Andrea was born on the 11th of February, 1890 in Sulmona- Abruzzi (Italy). At an early age she became an orphan and was taken to a Catholic college when she was six years old. She was to stay there until she got her teacher’s degree.

This period of her life may be of some interest to those who would like to know something of her psychological make-up. As far as I am concerned, without having many details of her life spent in the college, I can assume that in such an arid, superstitious atmosphere, lacking freedom and affection, her vivid intelligence could not be placated. Instead of adapting herself to the environment, she had been nurturing a rebellious spirit against the institution of a social order which condemned her and many others to grow up in such inhuman conditions. Even so, she was never overcome by desperation for she found a substitute for life in books and she developed a great passion for poetry, which was to remain with her to the end of her life.

As a teacher she met Armando Borghi and from then on she dedicated her life to anarchism. For her anarchism is not a dogma and neither is it a utopia. Or, to be specific, if there is an anarchist utopia, there is also an anarchist reality, and it is this anarchist reality that she is most concerned with communicating to us. A reality found in the aspirations of the human spirit, which is a constant struggle with the environment and convention for self determination and the realisation of freedom. She found it in the writings Homer, Aeschylus, in the mythological Prometheus who, as the son of Justice, lit the spark of thinking in man and put the great hope of liberation in his heart; and who, to assert himself, gave up the beatitude of divine life and rebelled against Jupiter. She found it in Euripides, Shakespeare, Cervantes, etc. a reality passing like a red thread through the works of many writers, painters, artists and litterati.

This reality was part of her life in her struggle against authoritarianism, and particularly against Fascism. Even after her opposition to fascism had forced her to leave Italy, she was not defeated, but continued the struggle in Germany, Holland and France, where she lived from 1923 to 1928. Then she went to America where, in 1932, on the 11th of May, she died in New York, aged forty-three.

Her literary output is slender; it consists of: "Tormento," a volume of poetry published in 1922 in Italy; "L’Ora di Marmaldo," a collection of prose published in France in 1928; and "Torce nella Notte," a collection of articles and treatises published in New York a few days before her death. There are also a lot of papers she gave, mainly in America, and a few unpublished articles, but as far as I know, none of her writings have been translated into English.

This article is taken from the Italian anarchist paper, "Umanita Nova." This article I later found to be part of a paper given in New York on the 20th of March, 1932.

By J. Grancharoff

Russia in 1917 was a hybrid society. Whilst there were free peasant farmers out-side European Russia the majority of its peasants represented the serfs partially emancipated in 1981 (1). These latter were not independent farmers who might be expected to have developed rapidly to at least a petty bourgeois level of conciousness, but were rather on a medieval plane of consciousness – traditionalist, parochial and xenophobic – and continued to live and work within the confines of the traditional Russian commune or mir. This latter, from which the slavophiles expected the salvation not only of Russia but of the whole world, was not the germ cell of the future socialist commonwealth but rather absolutism’s latest and most efficient device for controlling the countryside (2). The terms of the 1861 emancipation made the villages rather than the individual peasants the owners of the land and the villages rather than the individual the responsible agent for the payment of taxes to the government and the of redemption dues to the now completely functionless nobility. Nor had the peasantry received all the land; the settlement had given them too little to live on at a time of rising population and to pay their taxes and redemption dues the peasants had to work on the estates of the nobility and the few capitalist famers.

Industrialisation in Russia did not have the revolutionising effect on the countryside that theories of modernisation usually attribute to it. The surplus needed for capital investment was not obtained by the exchange of consumer and light industrial goods for the products of the countryside but rather the grain surplus was extracted through the system of taxes and redemption payments which forced peasants to continue to work noble estates and sell some of their own product for money. The grain was then sold abroad (even in times of famine) to provide the equipment needed for heavy industry. Thus the effect was an intensification of the feudal/absolutist exploitation of the peasantry rather than an encounter with a new type of society that would foster individualist and non-traditional attitudes. A partial consequence of this – and of the antiquated system of land tenure and redistribution – was the continuing low level of agricultural technique. When it was seen that this threatened the programme of modernisation and capital accumulation deemed necessary for defence reasons, the government changed its agricultural policies but it was too late and the war and revolution re-established the mir stronger (and more reactionary) than ever.

Since industrialisation had only taken place in isolated areas and there was no unified capitalist market – commodity production for domestic use being predominantly still in the hands of artisans – the social relations of the majority of the Russians had remained unchanged. It is no surprise then that it was in Petrograd with its industrial barracks of proletarianised former peasants that the revolutionary impetus was centred. The change in social relationships can be seen in terms of the alteration of a world-view. The peasants in Russia in 1917, or for that matter in 1560, could only be described as xenophobic and ethnocentric. It was the workers, whose peasant world-view had been transformed by urbanisation and proletarianisation, who were capable of attempting a revolution but whether they were capable of succeeding is another question entirely.

Quite evidently Russia was far from a society described by Marx as one where “…the concentration of the means of production and the socialisation of the tools of labour has reached the point where they can no longer be contained within their capitalist shell. The shell bursts…”(3). The explosion occurred in Russia certainly, but not as the result of the internal contradictions of capitalism. Russian society may have limped along to a complete social and economic stagnation punctuated by peasant revolts; Stolypin’s “wager on the strong” may have succeeded in abolishing rural backwardness after several decades; but what Russia could not do was play the great power in a world increasingly dominated by the capitalist West. Technology, efficiency and organisation inevitably triumphed over asiatic backwardness and aristocratic decadence.

The 1917 Revolution catapulted Russia out of the middle ages into the twentieth century. Psychologically the Russian peasant had remained medieval, i.e. paraochial and xenophobic; the outside world (including capitalism) was seen as both evil and undesirable because it challenged their security, a security not material but rather intimately bound up with the ideological legitimations of the tsarist regime. Neither the revolutionaries who wanted to liberate the peasants nor the liberals who wanted to ameliorate their conditions ever really struck a sympathetic chord in the peasant mind. The former they turned over to the police; the latter were suspect as jews and foreigners. As late as 1920 Red Cross workers and volunteers were attacked and some killed while attempting to distribute food to starving peasants.(4)

Good and evil were quite clear-cut: the Tsar was good as was the Church and all official authority; Jews, Germans, intellectuals, an city people were all bad both because they were alien and because they represented change and changed threatened tradition. Tradition was the basis of Russian authority; overtime legitimacy had become synonymous with it. From the Tsar to the village, patriarchy stood as the basis of all authority. In between Russian society was a complex wed of rank and class clearly defined and determined from birth. One’s rank in society carried with it a set of expectations, world-view, self-image and ideology. Change of any description in this society challenged this intricate and, by 1917, fragile balance of social relationships. Russian society was total; liberalism was synonymous with revolution.

Tsarism could not have been changed; it had to be overthrown. It was too much of a liberal institution to become liberal anyway. Its rationale was tradition, absolutism and repression; after hundreds of years of ruthless oppression one couldn’t lift the lid even lightly or it would explode – which was eventually bound to happen anyway. Just as Vorster cannot as this stage liberalise South Africa without facilitating revolution, tsarist Russia too was paralysed. It was doomed, whilst its institutions and authority were crumbling visibly, to cling to its belief in these as being God-given.

Along with the Tsars, the world of the peasantry was crumbling too. A disastrous economic crisis coupled with the war made it impossible for them to continue their traditional way of life. The mass conscriptions and desertions were creating an enormous rural crisis. While many were moving to the cities because of the famine in the countryside many more were returning to their native villages because there was no food in the towns. They had no understanding of or wish to comprehend what was going on. A couple of issues, however, stood out clearly as the sentiments of the peasantry: land reform, food, an end to the war, and a desire for society to be reorganised as to allow the peasant farmer to return to his village and live unhindered by “politics”.

Anarchist was the anti-thesis of the whole world-view of the peasantry. the basis of a libertarian society is a complete lack of oppression, total self-awareness, lack of xenophobia and break with patriarchy and religion. It can only function with fully free and responsible individuals who are morally accountable for their actions. none of these elements were present in the world-view of the peasants in 1917. contrary to a popular belief in the anarchic tendencies of the peasantry they were not libertarian. Outbursts against authority are meaningless unless there is an analysis be8bd the political action that negates the legitimacy of the power it is rebelling against. Burning down the landlord’s castle may seem to be a step in the right direction but only if the aim behind the action is to abolish private property. If the aim of the outburst is merely to transfer ownership of land the libertarian and social … (glued line missing here) because it could not be easily divided among private individuals. Wolf(5) seems to think that the fact that such explosions against authority occur c9nfirms the anarchy innate in the peasantry. What is more likely is that these outbursts confirm the impotence of the peasant to change his circumstances, all he1 can perceive are his short-term interests. When the peasant has no land all he wants is land; when he has land he wants to keep it. His outbursts are more an expression of desperation and frustration than a revolutionary manifestation against authority or the state. A distrust of government is not necessarily anarchistic; the John Birch society wants to limit government as much as possible, probably though much the same motivations as the peasants, it is rather an awareness of the individual and communal needs of society and a confidence that they can be met by the people themselves that is anarchism.

The limitations of the Russians are well expressed by Gorky: “The character of the Russian people, moulded both by resistance to despotism and submission to it, engenders an ‘anti-authoritarian complex’, that is to say a potent element of spontaneous anarchism which has generated periodic explosions throughout history” (6). This “chaotist” trend within the Russian peasantry that is frequently equated with anarchism has historically been the full extent of Russian peasant revolutions. The peasantry after enduring such monstrous oppression eventually rebelled without any comprehensive political theory or any real rise in their own level of consciousness: they attacked the local land lord but never questioned the institution of tsarism as a whole.

The belief that the Russian people were capable of the massive leap in consciousness from the middle ages to libertarian socialism was an illusion that all anarchists shared but what ground was their to it? This would have been an enormous feat; after centuries of servile oppression by tsarism and Russian orthodox Christianity one could not expect the Russian people to be capable of approaching political liberty in an intelligent and creative way. What was happening in Petrograd was seen as largely irrelevant by the peasants once they had got their land, indeed it was irrelevant to them until the breakdown of the tax and market mechanism for extracting grant to feed the cities forced the Bolsheviks to send armed detachments to requisition food. Freedom and individuality were irrelevant to the peasant who derived his security and socioeconomic status from membership in a patriarchal village community presided over by a council of elders, individualism was not part of the peasant world view except in the obvious sense that each was out for what he could get in the existing framework For the workers and soldiers who were really politically conscious it had been a major transformation to step out of their peasant role into one with a far more definite image of themselves as individuals and as citizens.

The anarchists believed they were appealing to a people crying out for liberty and self expression. If this was so why was it that the Bolsheviks succeeded and not the anarchists? If one compares what they Bolsheviks were prepared to offer with what the anarchists could offer ne can see what bolshevism was a logical response to the situation. Had the Bolsheviks not gained power (and it was touch and go for a while in 1917) then another “total” answer would have succeeded. The measures that needed to be taken for the survival of Russia in 1917 could only be carried out by a power that was efficient to the point of ruthlessness and absolutely confident in the correctness of its actions. What bolshevism was offering was very attractive. They were prepared to take control of the situation which is something the anarchists would never do even though the situation plainly called out for someone to do so. They were going t carr out long awaited changes: land reform; withdrawal from the war; marriage reform; modernisation of the economy; improvements in public health and education etc.(7) They were prepared to take Russia out of the middle ages into the twentieth century; this they did and this is exactly what was needed.

Bolshevism looked like a doctrine that had all the answers. The Bolsheviks inspired confidence. From the outset Lenin convinced the workers he would look after their interests; he believed it and so did they; who was the Patriarch now? The tight organisations of the Bolsheviks enabled the leadership to be in contact with what was happening in the factories and garrisons and have a plan of strategy that worked out for taking command in any situation this was the purpose of its military organisation and factory branches; in practice up to October 1917 they tended to push the party leaders forward. June and July 1917 showed this quite clearly. Not only were the Bolsheviks not directing the upsurge of radicalism among the workers and soldiers in Petrograd, they too were being forced into pursuing a much more radical stance because of pressure from below. The military organisation and the Petrograd central committee were being pushed further and further to the left merely to keep up with the soldiers and workers. the Bolsheviks survived the purges that followed the June and Jul days but the anarchists did not. The failure of such an armed and militant mass of people to overthrow the government must have confirmed to Lenin the need for central organisation to turn the spontaneous outburst into a revolution. The masses were plainly not yet self-directed; no social revolution had occurred which could make them capable of concretely visualising and achieving their class aims,

But why should anything have changed? How much had the Bolsheviks themselves achieved a new consciousness? The Marxist attempts to challenge accepted conditioning were largely made on the fringes of the Bolsheviks by individuals such as Gorky, Lunacharsky and Balabanoff. On issues such as the role of women thre were forward-thinking members such as Kollontai who had a more astute grasp of the problems of a social revolution yet on the whole such problems were pushed into pigeon holes for future reference. Lenin’s own views on such matters as free love are classic: who indeed “would drink water from a dirty glass soiled with many lips?”(8). The Bolsheviks’ minds were a product of historical development, of the values of western bourgeois respectability overlaying those of Russian patriarchal autocracy; not surprisingly they abolished one form of government to set up another more efficient but no less tyrannical than tsarism. Their goals were clear cut and traditional: they would alter the economic basis of society and modernise Russia, that was what was needed. As Lenin said to Berkman, “it is impossible to speak of liberty as this stage of economic development”(9)> He should have added “psychological development” which would have been more to the point.

Bolshevism was an authoritarian voluntaristic doctrine. A strong belief that leadership and will were capable of overcoming the results of centuries of tsarism was a fundamental tenet. Marriage and the family were never challenged to the extent that their survival was imperilled. Despite legal equalisation of the sexes there was little improvement in the status of women. The attitude of male communists may be gauged from the following quotation: “it is not surprising that increasing numbers of communists are refusing to marry party comrades, and prefer to marry women outside the party who will remain at home and manage the household… if they married communists they would go about in rags and see their children die” (10). The Bolsheviks were and remained blind to the paradox of their situation; they did not see that in overthrowing the old society and constructing the new that the way 8n wh8ch they built the new society was in a sense predetermined by the old. insofar as they considered this they could only see it in terms of objective economic conditions and not in terms of personality and conditioning.

In many ways the anarchists had a deeper understanding of what was happening and saw that an all-embracing revolution was essential for any real change, They realised that a total social and political reorganisation could not come from above but for real change it had to come from the people without coercion and direction from above. It was obvious to them that there was no point in banning religion; if the peasants or workers had not transcended a religious world-view for themselves then one could not force them to. Either they would refuse or substitute for religion a secular dogma providing the same feelings of security (11). The anarchist critique of the Bolsheviks was perceptive and astute but it offered no real alternative. Most anarchists, and particularly the anarchist-communists, were ideologically committed to the idea that when the revolution came the masses would spontaneously seize power and organise revolutionary communes and factory committees. Yet just as the end of the world never came for the millenarians the masses never abolished the state for the anarchists and the latter were left without any role in the revolution.

Although most anarchists were precarious allies of the Bolsheviks up to October both parties were aware of the irreconcilable antagonism between them. After the Bolsheviks seized power in October it was obvious they would not tolerate any threat to their power. The anarchists responded to this in quite diverse ways: many considered the plea for unity in the face of counter revolution justified and cooperated with the bolsheviks until 1921 or else as did Shatov and Roschin, submerged themselves in the Bolshevik party because they considered being part of a bad revolution better than inaction. The syndicalists kept on organising under their unions were banned and they were arrested and exiled; some individualists and anarcho-communists joined the left social-revolutionaries in underground revolutionary terrorist activities and either fled or were eventually shop. Although most of them had a theoretical awareness of what would happen if the Bolsheviks succeeded, they were still stunned by the cheka raids, the mass arrests of anarchists, the military … (one pasted line missing here) … le protest they watched themselves and the revolution being destroyed. They were limited by the belief, so aptly put by Bakunin, that “social change does not depend on a gradual maturation of objective historical facts” but that on the contrary men shape their own destiny, every man already possessed “the impulse for liberty, the passion for equality, the holy instinct for revolt”(12). Their role as anarchist intellectuals was, as Voline put it, to be “radio transmitters disseminating libertarian ideas to be rejected or put into practice by autonomous workers, councils and peasant communes” (13).

When these autonomous communes failed to arise on any large scale the anarchists were helpless. They did not see why these organisations did not just spring up an they certainly had no intention of organising them themselves. Overemphasizing the power of an idea, the believed that one merely had to want freedom and independence in order to achieve it. It was a naïve analysis of human nature and did not account for the fact that spontaneous outbursts never succeeded in revolution.

In the above criticism one is speaking mainly of the individualists and the anarchist-communists. The distinction between the two becomes blurred in terms with how in touch with reality they were. Anarcho-individualists such as Brovoi and the Gorodin brothers seem to have had a rather mystical view of the revolution. They felt that there was in Russia a throbbing mass ready to overthrow all authority and build a free society. They were influenced by western thought – Stirner an Tucker – but retained a populist faith in the masses who thy considered to be innately free and consequently to desire anarchy. Not surprisingly (and although their rhetoric was completely removed reality and could not have been further removed from the concerns of the masses) they were anti-intellectuals.

Whilst sharing the apocalyptic rhetoric of the individualists the anarcho-communists had real links with the working class. Centered in the Vyborg district they were a leading influence on the workers in that area and at Kronstadt. Unlike the individualists they were aware of the necessity of organisation and of direct links with the working class and consequently could compete with the Bolsheviks on a more realistic level. There were also, of course, “chaotist” elements amongst them such as the “black bands” that would attack bourgeois houses at night, yet overall they were closer to rank and file bolsheviks and workers than were the Bolshevik leaders.

The syndicalists too had real links with industry and a comprehensive organisational prescription for revolution. Their principle drawback was that they were too western. Voline, Maximoff and Shapiro had all lived abroad and been influenced by either French syndicalism or by the IWW but as a revolutionary doctrine syndicalism could only appear to the small proletarian sector of Russian society within which Bolshevism was already quite well entrenched (although the leadership of the trade unions was mainly Menshevik). Thus the syndicalists success in gaining seven unions was impressive in itself but irrelevant to the great issues of the revolution. The anarcho-communists criticised the syndicalists as western elitists. They argued that the latter, by their concentration on the numerically insignificant proletariat and neglect of the peasants, vagabonds and marginal workers, divided rather than united the revolutionary elements.

The main problem with the anarchists as a whole was that they were relating not to the revolution as it was in reality but rather to the idealist form it assumed in their own minds (14). They were sure that the Russian people were capable of libertarian socialism and they believed that the revolution was a popular attempt in this direction. Thus when the desired outcome failed to materialise they blamed the Bolsheviks rather than trying to discover why bolshevism rather than anarchism succeeded. there were of course quite good organisational reasons for the Bolsheviks gaining power than the anarchists smashing it. When Voline arrived in Russia in mid-1917 he was amazed to see Petrograd covered in Bolshevik propaganda and not one anarchist poster in sight (15), yet for all that the relinquishing of revolutionary freedom by the people to the Bolsheviks demonstrates more than the inadequacies o the anarchists.

Why would a people who had fought heroically in a revolution for freedom and had overthrown tsarism give in so easily to yet another authoritarian government? Why did the Petrograd workers only produce a stifled protest when Trotsky massacred their “little brothers” in Kronstadt for their demands? Why would the Red Army, whilst refusing to fire on Kronstadt, allow themselves to be severely disciplined while non-political garrisons massacred the erstwhile revolutionary heroes of “red” Kronstadt?(16) Soldiers were shot by the Red Army for surrendering to Kronstad. (17) Why? The workers were aware thy had legitimate claims and that the small gains made by the revolution – factory committees, legal unions, the right to strike, freedom of speech, autonomous soviets etc. – were being negated by the Bolsheviks in the name of the workers’ state. Surely the Cheka must have demonstrated a reversion to the old ways of despotism and terror just as the reinstitution of army officers and military discipline must have been familiar to any who had experienced tsarist military despotism.

The complete reversion to despotism is indicative of more than incidental historical factors; it points the justice of those earlier commentators who saw in the Russian “soul” a chaotist tendency and an inability to produce anything new without external authority and control. A faith in leadership, lack of confidence, insecurity and inability to take responsibility for initiating new departures were deeply ingrained in the Russian character as a consequence of centuries of patriarchal and autocratic oppression. Solzhenitsyn expresses the situation quite well in his account of how when in Yaraslav in 1921 representatives of a trade union attempted to persuade workers of the necessity of a union to protect their rights against the administration, the workers were apathetic but when the party representative spoke and rebuked them for their laziness and demanded overtime without pay and other such sacrifices for the revolution they were elated.(18)

Solzhenistyn says that “we spent ourselves in one unrestricted outburst in 1917 and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure”! (19) but it was not so much masochism as a conditioned incapacity to handle freedom. Of course all the examples of submission to the will of the Party can be explained by various specific and isolated determining factors, for example, the massic propaganda campaign against Kronstadt and the massive violence the Bolsheviks were prepared to use against their oponents, but there are too many such incidents not to point to something deeply rooted in the character of the Russian people.

The reality of the situation in 1917 was that there was not a deep cry for liberty from within all men for if there had been the workers would not so quickly have handed over their newly won liberty to the Bolsheviks. What the situation in 1917 really called for was the gratification of immediate and pressing material needs. In such a complex situation of internal turmoil, external war and economic breakdown, the workers and peasantry had neither the skill, initiative or confidence to meet the demands of the situation. The Bolsheviks did.

Before October when the tide of radicalism was running high and Lenin was writing State and Revolution, the former Bolshevik Goldenberg had charged that Lenin was proposing himself as candidate for the long vacant throne of Bakunin. After October when the problem was no longer to secure power but to hold onto it, and when the Bolsheviks had either to reintroduce order and stability or go under, Lenin quite easily abandoned his anarchist image (which had never deceived the anarchists) and centralised power and authority to meet the overwhelming problems facing both the survival of his government and of Russian society as a whole. The point here is that Lenin was a pragmatist, he consistently responded to the demands of the situation, not directing them or setting the pace insofar as his actions were directed towards retaining power for the Bolsheviks. Opposition had to be crushed if they were to retain power and the workers would not have allowed such despotism as the Check to rule had they not also felt it to be their right at the time.

For the anarchists responsibility lay with the workers and peasants. Power had to be won over by them and then destroyed. Anarchism failed because the call for total freedom was far from the more pressing concerns moving the majority of the workers and peasants, but the fundamental error of the anarchists was that they did not see that this had to be so. Libertarian society was an impossibility in Russia in 1917. Whilst the anarchists correctly perceived that bolshevism meant authoritarianism and there was no freedom under any state they lacked the perception to see that we are all products of our historical and cultural background and that unless there can develop a movement that challenges the totality of the old society (as Spanish anarchism might be thought to have done) revolutions can only continue the old society in the shell of the new.

Yet even if the anarchists had perceived this they would still have been trapped into inaction. They could not support lenninism without jettisoning anarchism and so they had to oppose the Bolsheviks with the tragic result of absolute elimination. Their valiant attempts to expose bolshevism fell on deaf ears because there was no alternative to offer. The Russian people were not equipped or prepared to assume control of their own lives and it was not so hard to surrender something so abstract as liberty for psychological security and the fulfilment of material needs.

Epilogue

The burden of the argument above is that the specific character of the Russian peasantry precluded a libertarian solution in 1917. The deficiencies of the anarchists – quantitative, qualitative and organisational – were also important but these are susceptible of a similar analysis. (Russian peasants and Russian anarchists were afterall both products of Russian history). In order to give such an analysis we have broken with the peculiarly Russian and anarchist conception of all men everywhere and at all times being equally capable of freedom and have proceeded from the viewpoint that what people are capable of is a function of their total history. For dealing with questions of classes and peoples this means that the socio-economic structure of a society, its history and culture are the determinants of mass consciousness and that this consciousness can only be changed by the impact of ideas external to the society or by the unification and generalisation of individual oppositional viewpoints arising from the specific life histories of individuals (which may well differ within the society). Both of these processes of consciousness change will be slow except in periods of rapid socio-economic-political change which disrupt traditional patterns of thought. It seems to us that one of the many failings of Russian anarchism was that it was anti-enlightenment and anti-intellectual. For this reason it did not constitute a challenge to the popular mentality and hence could not form a component of a development towards a libertarian and socialist consciousness. By identifying… (pasted line missing)… development of a genuine revolutionary consciousness. At most they encouraged chaotist tendencies.

In this Russian anarchism contrasts sharply with Spanish anarchism. Spanish anarchism was the enlightenment on Spanish soil despite the fact that it was purest Bakuninism and hence had other tendencies as well. Spanish anarchism stood for literacy, science and popular education; it looked forward to the modern world and was not adverse to spelling out its social program and organising to implement it. Spanish anarchism was at worst insurrectional but never chaotist. The Spaniards revolted for an idea; they did not rebel through accumulated resentment and oppression.

The Spanish peasant also differed from the Russian peasant. At the time that Russia was making the transition from feudalism to an Asiatic absolutism, Spain was already an insipid bourgeois society. Its economy was ruined in the price revolution caused by the discovery of gold in Spanish America but this also gave its people a very different history to the Russian one. It is impossible to give a detailed analysis here but several facts relevant to an analysis of Spanish anarchism – which is usually dismissed as a peasant phenomenon – should be mentioned. Firstly certain rural and fishing communities had maintained cooperative economics since the middle ages. (The Russian mir held land in common but was a private economy.) Secondly even in rural Spain anarchism seems to have been based on towns – although villages also had resident propagandists and on occasions were totally anarchist. Thirdly, and probably as a result of continuous propaganda, rural anarchism transformed the countryside in a collectivist direction in 1936 wherever it was powerful. This was a very different thing from what happened in 1917 in Russia.

There were also differences between the Russian and Spanish proletariats. In part these stemmed from their formation from different peasantries but in part also from the effect of anarchist propaganda and organisation. For anarchist writers the high point of the Russian revolution is often the formation of the factory committees and the seizure of the factories from below in 1917-18. What should be noted here is that as well as being the form of industrial organisation closest to the revolutionary workers the factory committee was also the most primitive one. One suspects that in many cases the seizure of the factory by the workers corresponded to the seizure of land by the peasants in being the end point of their action rather than the first stage in a social reorganisation. Certainly one hears little of inter-factory or industry organisation from below except among the syndicalists. The factory committees either didn’t think of it or were leaving it to the state. Here again one has a striking contrast with Spain where the unions seized industries through their local committees. The problem in Spain was the avoidance of autonomist, i.e capitalist, tendencies in industries rather than in individual plants and this was much more susceptible of a solution by the revolutionary organs involved.

We hope that anarchists will reflect on these difference and come to see firstly, the necessity of comprehensive organisational(20) and constructive propaganda work, and secondly, the complete falsity of the received anarchist doctrine that 1917 was a libertarian revolution aborted by the authoritarians.

References

1. Most of the free peasants other than special ethnic groups represented the descendants of serfs who had emigrated eastwards to escape the pressure of the state and nobility.
2. It is worth quoting Bakunin’s letter of 1866 to Herzan on the character of the Great-Russian commune (and hence the peasantry composing it) “Why has this commune, from which you expect such wonders in the future, failed to bring about, in the course of ten centuries of its existence, anything but heinous slavery? The odious putridity and the complete injustice of patriarchal habits, the absence of freedom for the individual in the face of the mir, the stifling pressure which the mir exercises, killing every possibility of personal initiative, depriving its members not only of juridical rights but of single justice in its decisions… the ruthless severity of its attitudes towards every weak and poor member, its systematic oppression of those members who display the slightest independence, and its readiness to sell out truth and justice for a pail of vodka.” (Quoted in Lampert Studies in Rebellion. p. 147)
3. Berkman quoted in Maximoff The Guillotine at Work. p. 670
4. In 1921 after Kronstadt and the state of the New Economic Policy, Victor Serge and some friend who were at loss to know what to do found a large estate north of Petrograd near Lake Lagada of several hundred acres with a landlords residence. The estate had been abandoned because the peasants would not agree to run it collectively; they demanded it be shared out amongst them. Two chairmen of the short-lived commune had been murdered there in 8 months. The village boycotted Serge’s group when they came there. Everything they had was stolen and the peasants refused to sell anything to the “jews” and “antichrists”. The blockade was broken when one of the group, a tolstoyan doctor, wearing a gold cross on his breast, went to the village and bought eggs from one of the villagers, saying “we are Christians too little sister”. After that they were accepted. (Serge Memoirs of a Revolutionary. p. 149).
5. In Shanin Peasants and Peasant Society. p. 272
6. Quoted in Serge Memoirs of a Revolutionary. P. 121
7. The degree to which reform was needed may be illustrated by Luacharsky’s remark to Goldman that some teachers still favoured prison for mental defectives. See Living My Life. P. 758
8. See his letter to Klara Zetlin in T. Deutscher Not by Politics Alone. Pp 222-3
9. Avrich (ed) The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution. p. 130. Bukharin also made this point. “Proletarian compulsion in all its forms, beginning with summary execution and ending with compulsory labour is, however paradoxical it might seem, a method of reworking the human material of the capitalist epoch into communist humanity” See Berkman in Anarchy 2
10. Fuelop-Miller The Mind and Face of Bolshevism. p. 217. (Quoted from an unnamed Bolshevik.)
11. “Only a few versts from Moscow in Ivar government region a woman found a bit of wood with possessed the peculiar property of shining all night. She immediately imagined this chip to be a sign of God, nay God itself, she prayed to the wood and as the news spread other peasants began to worship the new God. On receiving information of this from the priest the Government finally sent 300 soldiers, who attacked the village with a machine gun in an attempt to deprive the peasants of this piece of wood. But the peasants armed themselves, repulsed the attack and captured the gun, and it cost the authorities a great deal of trouble before they finally got possession of this peculiar ‘God’. It now adorns a glass case in a museum in North Russia”. Feuler-Miller, Op. cit., p.218. Museums of atheism could hardly have any impact on this sort of peasantry – particularly since they would never see a museum.
12. Quoted in Avrich The Russian Anarchists. Pp. 21-2
13. Voline Nineteen Seventeen. p. 16.
14. The problem with the anarchists was that they tended to see the revolution as a unified phenomenon: a massive and popular libertarian upsurge. Despite their considerable talent for ideological self-deception the Bolshevik leaders did not and if they had they could not possibly have seized and held power. In his 1916 article “The results of the discussion on self-determination” Lenin polemicized against the idea that there would ever be a “pure” social revolution and stressed that without the participation of petty bourgeois and “backward” workers mass struggle and revolution (i.e the seizure of power) were impossible.
15. Voline Nineteen Seventeen. p. 14.
16. Ida Mett The Kronstadt Commune. p. 22.
17. ibid. p. 14
18. Solzhenitsyn Gulag Archipelago. p. 13
19. ibid. p. 14.
20. Not of course that we are partisans of the lenninist view – later adopted by Makhno and others in exile – that organisation overcomes all material obstacles.

Taken from http://www.kieransreview.com/2013/09/23/from-the-archives-russia-1917-why-not-anarchism-from-red-black-no-6-1975/

• 1 libcom note: we don't approve of the use of the exclusively male pronoun here, nor the sweeping generalisations about Russians in this text, however we reproduce it for reference.

Rosa Luxemburg, referring to the Russian Marxists, stated: “It is interesting to observe that Russian Marxists are developing more strongly into ideological champions of capitalism.1 ” Her prophecy has been verified by the events that followed. When in power, Marxist-Leninists in historical and pragmatic terms, have proven the veracity of Luxemburg’s statement. It is equally applicable to non-Russian Marxists, such as Euro-Communists and Social Democrats who, without scruples, are also openly assuming the role of champions of capitalism.

Naturally some Marxist scholars will question and even object to the truth of the foregoing statements, despite the fact that “Russian society, like Eastern European societies, China etc. is an asymmetrical and antagonistically divided society – or, in traditional terms, a ‘class society’2 .” These objections are based on the ahistoricity of the historical method of social analysis. Used as a tool to dissect bourgeois reality and thus prove its bankruptcy, it is denied the same status in relation to Marxist-Leninist historical reality, which, in socialist terms, is the greatest ideological fraud perpetrated in the 20th century.

On the other hand, it may be justly argued, that the socialist scholars, bearers of the classless order, have a vested interest as a new class in obscuring and manipulating issues, in falsifying history, suppressing evidence and deceiving for their own benefit. To err is human, but when this is combined with the vanguardist role, the spirit of elitism and the urge to dominate, it becomes a conspiracy of scholars, conscious or unconscious, to minimize the evils of Marxist-Leninist bureaucratic capitalism and to present it as an attractive alternative to western style capitalism.

Whatever the case, Marxism-Leninism is a capitalist orientated movement. “The enslavement of the workers at the workplace is not merely an important or secondary ‘defect’ of the system, nor merely a deplorable and inhuman trait. Both, on the most concrete as well as on the philosophical level, it denounces alienation as the essence of the Russian regime. Strictly in rems of the labour process, the Russian working class is just as subject to a ‘wage’ relation as any other working class. The workers have control of neither the means not the product of their labour, nor of their own activity as workers. The ‘sell’ their time, their vital forces and their life to the bureaucracy, which disposes of them according to its interests. The constant effort of the bureaucracy is time decreasing its remunerations – and this by the same methods used in the West.3 ” This is true of the Soviet Union as well as China and other communist countries.

What makes Marxism-Leninism a bourgeois movement? Many factors but basically they can be reduced to three: 1) acceptance of the State – a bourgeois institution – as a vehicle of social transformation; 2) emphasis on centralization at all possible levels: economic, political and social and 3) related to the first and second, the hierarchical mode of organization and its preservation as a social reality.

The State is the acme of the concentration of political power. The centralization of political power in the hands of the State is a bourgeois theory. The bourgeois economists, such as Turgel, Quesney, Letronne and others, saw in the State an institution whose function was to mold the spirit of citizens and to provide ideas and sentiments useful and necessary for the society, the bourgeois society. At the same time the State has to fight against and suppress all ideas and sentiments contrary to its essence and its reality. A bourgeois dream turned into a nightmare by Marxist-Leninists.

The socialist State is superior to the bourgeois State. It is another form of bureaucratic capitalism. “The Russian regime is an integral part of the world system of contemporary domination. With the United States and China, it is one of the three pillars. In collaboration with the others, it controls and guarantees the preservation of the status quo on a global scale.4 ” Thus, to look at the socialist State as a threat to capitalism is to sound a false alarm. Socialism enthroned in power is capitalism. In the Marxist-Leninist society, the managers of capital are converted into socialist managers, the technologists and intellectuals into bureaucrats and apparatchiks, the trade unions into appendages of the State and the workers into slaves without rights and voice but a lot of duties. Once the means of production and distribution are a State monopoly, slavery is absolute. There are no alternatives.

Centralization, one of the many streams in Marxist thought, follows from the theory of the polarization of class struggle. “Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.5 ” The Proletariat, according to the Marxist pattern of thinking, inevitably, necessary and in the final analysis, will become the dominant class. In power, the Proletariat will continue the bourgeois process of centralization and production, reversing it to its own benefit. “The proletariat will use its political supremacy, to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production into the hands of the State i.e. of the proletariat organized as the ruling class, and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.6 ” In practical terms the outcome of this economic interpretation of history ended in the modern monstrosity: State bureaucratic capitalism. “From the organization of production and the concentration of capital, entail the elimination of ‘independent’ individual capitalists and the emergence of a bureaucratic stratum that organizes the labour of thousands of workers into gigantic enterprises, assumes the effective management of these enterprises and controls the incessant modifications of the means and methods of production.7 ”

Since each mode of production corresponds to definite social relations within the fram work of capitalism. Marxist-Leninists distinguish various stages of capitalist development. Some of them are laissez-faire capitalism, monopoly capitalism and imperialism. The latter according to Lenin, “is the eve of Social Revolution of the proletariat,8 ” and definitely proves “the truth of the teaching of Karl Marx in concentration.9 ” It proves the truth of the concentration of power and capital in the socialist State but it does not prove the advent of socialism and the classless society. On the contrary, the concentration of capital and the centralization of power in the hands of the Marxist-Leninists State proves the greatest victory of monopoly capitalism; a prelude to socialist imperialism. But socialist imperialism is not a step nearer to socialism and classless society. “Thus what they retain of Marx is only the metaphysical and deterministic account of history: there is supposed to be a predetermined stage in history of mankind, socialism, as the necessary sequel to capitalism. But socialism is not a necessary stage of history, It is the historical project of a new institution of society whose content is direct self-government, collective management and direction by all humans of all aspects of their social life, and explicit self-institution of society.10 ” Economic concentration and centralization of power lead to a heavy bureaucratizations of life and a rigid hierarchically structured society. Hierarchy is the matrix of the authoritarian social order. It divides people into categories: masters and slaves, order-giving and order-obeying, husbands and wives, parents and children, intellectuals and workers, apparatchiks and citizens etc. Divided, atomized, alienated and unable to communicate with each other, people are easily manipulated and governed. The old adage of the Roman ruling class “divide and rule”, summarizes the function of hierarchy. Cleverly used by the bourgeoisie, it has been perfected as a weapon by the Marxist-Leninist society based on sado-masochistic relationships which are necessary prerequisites for political, economic and personal enslavements.

Being rigid hierarchy, Marxist-Leninist society is definitely a class society: “Deprived of political, civil and union rights, forced into ‘unions’ that are mere appendages of the State, the Party, and the K.G.B, subject to a regime of internal passports and work papers under permanent police control and surveillance in the workplace and outside it: constantly harassed by omnipresent official propaganda, the Russian working class is subjected to totalitarian oppression and control, mental and physical expropriation that very clearly outdoes fascist and Nazi models and has not been surpassed anywhere expect Maoist China.11 ” Thus, Marxist-Leninist society is but an extension of the bourgeoisie into irs infra-red form. This bourgeoisie, despite the fact that it does not own the means of production, rips off the surplus value. It is in its interest to preserve, by all means, the capitalist mode of production and to save capitalism. This is true not only within socialist countries but in western capitalism too.

In the uprising in France as well as in Czechoslovakia who “favored and produced the return to normality in the factories and in the streets? Well, in both cases the communists: in Paris thanks to the unions, in Prague thanks to the Red Army.12 ” In Italy, in the Hot Autumn of 1969-70, when capitalism was seriously challenged by the workers, the communist party stood up for the State and the status quo.

Marxist-Leninism is the state’s stage of monopoly capitalism. Monopoly capitalism, the Leninist will argue, “has grown out of colonial policy.13 ” Yet, paradoxically as it may sound, state socialism has grown out of colonial policy. In the first place, the party is the colonizer of the workers – the colonies; in the second the biggest state absorbs and economically exploits the small ones, e.g. Russia and its Satellites. The order is colonial too: the summit, the center, the bureaucracy are essential structural features to which the subalterns are workers, peasants and provinces, The socialist monopoly can be represented as an octopus whose head is in Moscow, or for that matter in Peking, while its tentacles are in the factories, in the fields, in the provinces, in the small states sapping the energy of the workers and peoples and suffocating any attempts at self-determination, self-assertion and independence. This makes the Marxist-Leninist State the zenith of monopoly capitalism, because the unity of economic exploitation and political enslavement is achieved. The words Lenin uttered against monopoly capitalism: “striving for domination instead of striving for liberty14 ”, are a proper description of socialist capitalism. Once monopoly capitalism and the state merge into state monopoly capitalism, capitalism becomes more virulent, aggressive and expansionary and reaches the final stage, imperialism, which is “the exploitation of small nations but a handful of the richest and most powerful nations.15 ” What an ironical indictment of Lenin is the state Lenin has created.

Now, if Marxist-Leninist Statist monopoly capitalism is a perfection over its bourgeois counterpart then, it follows, Leninist imperialism is a rather more perfect and atrocious form of oppression and exploitation. It is not accidental that the multi-nationals find it profitable to pump millions of dollars into socialist economic system to ensure its blood circulation. State socialist economies are reliable and pay secure dividends.

In conclusion, it may be stated that Marxism-Leninism, far from being a revolutionary science, is a reaction against revolution and especially against the Social Revolution, leveler of all class distinctions and privileges. The success of Marxism lies in its ability to create illusions in the heads of its followers, which affirm rather than refute its bourgeois essence as a movement. Marxism-Leninism does not make the world safe for socialism but it definitely makes it safe for capitalism. Not only is Marxism-Leninism a vehicle of capitalism, it is the savior of capitalism, it is capitalism par excellence. It does not engender revolution, it sprinkles rose oil for smooth capitalist exploitation.

• 1Georg Lucacs, History of Class Consciousness, London, 1971. P.26
• 2Conrelius Castoriadis, The Social Regime in Russia, in Telos 38, 1978-79, Washington University, St Lois. U.S.A. p.32
• 3Ibid, pp. 33-34
• 4Ibid p. 38
• 5K. Marx and F. Engels, Mainfesto of the Communist Party, London 1948, p. 61
• 6Ibid p. 79
• 7Cornelius Castoriadis, Op. Cit. p. 40
• 8V.I. Lenin, Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Pekin, 1970. P. 10
• 9Ibid, p. 16
• 10Cornelius Castoriadis, Op. Cit. p. 40
• 11Ibid, p. 34
• 12Censor, Rapporto Veridico, Milano, Italy, 1975. P. 51.
• 13V.I. Lenin, Op. Cit. p. 149
• 14Ibid, p. 150
• 15Ibid p. 150

Born, bred and educated in Bulgaria, I had never thought that one day I would spend most of my life in exile. The innocence of childhood precluded such ideas, since its niche was limited to the immediate environment. Carelessly absorbed in chasing butterflies, playing with the colours in the meadows of flowers was an unforgettable joy, even if in tatters of poverty and barefooted. In the delights of liberty, in a picturesque world where reality and fantasy fused, how could one perceive the evil omen hidden in the stormy sea of life that eventually would cripple imagination, thoughts, emotions and bodies.

Socialisation starts in the early stages of childhood since parents are anxious to see their physical features, as well as mental and emotional, reflected in their children, often with the intention of making them a paradigm example of their own vision. Thus a child's individuality is fashioned to fit certain rules and regulations. Hence, some desires are repressed, others invoked, some are described as good, others as bad. All in all a mechanism is set up to inhibit or encourage, to reward or punish. Even the most noble sentiments and affections are used often to create a dependency syndrome rather than to stimulate independence and the emotional enrichment of the person. Thus the child is entangled in multiple authoritarianisms, each trying to model him or her according to its own image by pruning objectionable thoughts, clipping the wings of imagination and sublimating the heart's desire into adoration of adult's icons. The castrated spirit is left wandering in the labyrinths of hierarchies in search of his or her own identity while leaden shadows weigh on the quest for self- realization.

A small, but relevant, event occurred when I was six years old. The house we lived in, consisted of a) a ground floor accommodating a donkey and a horse and their forage; b) first floor that humans occupied. It had a small entrance, a big room for all the family and a storage room. We ate, slept and lived in the big room. It was our study, dormitory, playground, especially in winter, and rest room. No chairs, no tables, no beds. The wooden floor was the mattress we slept on. It was here that my first sister was born. It was a cold night since I clearly remember the play of flames, lights and shadow. The midwife delivered the child close to the chimney. My face was covered to ensure that the birth scene would not have a corruptive influence on me. Crackles of the fire, murmur of the winds and the movement of the vestals intertwined to celebrate the birth of life. My little heart was throbbing with excitement at the thought of having a brother or sister.

In the morning, surrounded by a few women, the midwife announced the news to me.

-The stork brought you a baby sister.
-The stork?
-Yes, through the chimney.

I stormed out of the house. I was cheated out of the veracity of my own observation. A rage set in in my heart. A dense fog clouded the serenity of my childhood .My heart sank into taciturn despair. A behaviour that did not escape my mother's attention. One day she asked me:

-Are you sulky because of your sister?
-I am sulky because of your brazen lie that storks bring babies.
-Well, this is the story which we, usually, tell kids.
-A fairy tale when I've seen everything'?

Mum apologised and I was at the same time relieved of some undefinable weight and elated. Perhaps this unimportant episode, well engraved in my consciousness, had a lot to answer for in my subsequent suspicion of official truths and my subsequent rebellion to officialdom.

At the age of 13 I was locked in a police station for vandalism, more precisely vandalising some teachers' houses. It was an act of protest against the injustices perpetrated by the education system which favoured the middle class, if such a concept could be applied in a not prosperous town.

What infuriated me was the class teacher's statement that good or bad marks were irrelevant to me since, coming from a poor family, I would not be able to further my education. I retorted:

-Why the hell am I forced to attend school? Why should I waste my time with a lot of bullshit instead of enjoying the mountains in company with my grandfather's sheep? At least I could do something useful. Here and now I am challenging these middle class brats (I mentioned the objects of my grievances) in front of the class. If I fail will be happy to repeat the year, but if they fail the pass mark should not be granted.
-It is preposterous to question the authority of a teacher -said my class teacher.
-Why should not I if justice is at stake?

The remark fell on deaf ears. Without much mental elaboration, I had resorted to retaliatory actions as above. Police interrogations were simply invectives against deviationist behaviour . I ought to respect elders, parents, teachers, established values, law and order and, if in doubt, ask the authority for guidance. Naturally authority itself was beyond any question. While in custody, I began questioning the power of God. If he was as almighty as presented to us then, if after an hours or so he were to fail to open the lock of the cell and Jet me out, it would mean that he was powerless. The miracle did not occur. God failed the test.

The head master called me to his office and, in the presence of ~ the teachers, asked me to apologise to my class teacher. I refused; 'adding that she was to apologise to me. On this note. and since I was within the age of compulsory attendance, I was expelled from school temporarily.

A profascist government was in power. The official creation of fascist organisations in and out of schools, was a bad social omen. My search for alternatives to fascism landed me in troubles. I was invited to a secret political meeting in the wood by a group which later I learned was very nationalistic. but for some inexplicable reason was detested by the Nazis. The Nazis were pretty violent and aggressive and had the support of the local police, at least at official level. It was incongruous that most of the people belonging to this group moved to the left. Whether it was a communist front, remains a mystery. It was the army that arrested and questioned us.A young officer..interrogated me:

-Look young boy, forget about politics and communism. Go home and continue your study. School is better than politics. Politics will get you nowhere but they definitely will lead you to either jailor losing your life. Anyhow you are too young for politics. Leave it to the others.

Freed, I went home. But from that point of time, my interest in communism began. Freedom to read subversive literature was a proscribed act and, therefore, was a kind of underground activity. A friend of mine lent me a book of poetry by a communist writer which I at the time, and now, appreciated a lot. He lent me the book on condition that if the police raided my place I would never mention his name. Such was the social climate in which alternative ideas had to operate. Anybody could be arrested, tortured. sent to jail, concentration camp or hard labour: the price of intellectual awakening. Also by fluke I had discovered somle communist literature belonging to my uncle. Thus I came to realise that my uncle. as well as my father, was a communist but neither of them had ever mentioned anything to me. It was not advisable to openly air ideas that were biased against the government. The weak point of Fascism was that its aim of total domination was apparent rather than real since it had failed to penetrate the psychology of the masses and to become amass movement. There was a newspaper with leftist leaning where the undesirable thoughts appeared in disguise. as the dreams of our subconscious mind, to escape the censor.

Nonetheless I had established contacts with communists, moved within communist circles, read communist literature but, despite all this. somehow I remained skeptical about communism as a practice in the Soviet Union. In other words I had preserved my independent critical thinking. There were a few aspects that troubled my mind. The blind faIth in the leadership was Indistinguishable from the Nazi adoration of the Furher. but I considered it to be a temporary discrepancy. Hierarchical organization was another questionable aspect but, under the circumstances, it seemed acceptable. Anyhow my humble contribution was supplying bread to political prisoners. A task facilitated by the fact that I was working in my uncle's bakery which was close to the Prison.

In 1943 the winds began to change. Stalingrad signalled the defeat of the German might. This was the opinion of workers and peasants, with some exceptions -the German strategists and rabid Nazi and fascists. AntI- fascist activities increased and so did the activities of the gendarmerie in pursuit of partisans and subversives.

In September 1944 the Soviet Union declared war on Bulgaria and invaded the country. Fascism had already collapsed and the Red Army encountered no resistance. People were generally rejoicing to what was referred to as "liberation". All power was in the hands of various committees which spranQ up on all aspects of social and economic organisations. Many political organisations, unknown to us, came into existence. The partisans came down from the mountains. Prisoners were freed. The Fatherland Front (Popular Front) was established as a government. Euphoria of freedom. Proliferation of ideas, flourishing of activities, creativities and catharsis. Emotional and intellectual upheavals. a revolutionary ethos and praxis. Assertiveness in all spheres of life. Society was adopting more and more libertarian practices. Society was moving to the left. But the revolutionary euphoria prevented us from seeing the menacing tentacles of a new reactionary force masked as communism. Its aim was to occupy the vacant throne of monarcho-fascist power . Incorporate the former into its own structure, and establish complete social control.

I was asked by an ex-Nazi to attend the inaugural meeting of the communist youth. It gave me quite a shock to see a Nazi transformed into a communist activist within 24 hours. I declined the offer. Asked to explain my behaviour I told them that I had nothing to do with turn-coats as communist emissaries. I was flabbergasted to be told that their consciousness was transformed and that they were good comrades. For a little while I stood aloof from party politics. Later on I intentionally joined the Agrarian Party so that a youth organization could be formed in the town. A party equivalent to the Russian Socialist Revolutionary movement, at least in my way of seeing it then: factories to the workers. land to the peasants. The communists hindered its formation by some flimsy pretext that two antifascists had to be at the head of the new youth organization. I was one of them. My ex-comrades were outraged and began an aggressive and abusive campaign against me. I was a reactionary, sold out to Anglo- American capitalism. Even worse, they hated my guts because I became the Agrarian Youth representative on the Popular Front.

Behind the slogans of socialism, Popular Front Unity, people's democracy and workers' control were lurking the real features of communism: total social control under its fist, hammer and sickle. Anyone who disagreed with its policy was a dupe, a traitor or an agent of some or other kind of capitalism. In reality it was the communist bureaucrats and leaders who were agents of Stalinism and stooges of the Soviet interests. Maf;-xism was an ideology, Lenin was the saint, Stalin the hero, the vicar of Marxism on this earth. He was beyond criticism. Taking over the Ministry of the Interior, they set on to chain the mouth of qissent, to repress the difference in thinking and, most importantly, to transform the proletariat into a cog of an oppressive machine.

Due to the Communist Party's pressure to establish its hegemony over the Popular Front, the latter split into two factions. Those in Government, including the communists, and the Opposition without them. The scenario was set for a struggle to a bitter and tragic end for the Opposition and for the Bulgarian people.

I was the first in my town to publicly declare support for the Opposition by bill-postering. For this act I was arrested and delivered to Popular Front Headquarters. I was held for four hours. Threats, cajoling and bribes were the methods of interrogation. They told me repeatedly that I was treading a dangerous path. I was reminded of my progressive past, of my proletarian origin. As a communist, a bright future and excellent opportunities waited for me: a grant to study in the Soviet Union. But only if I was to change my mind. I bluntly rejected all offers. They were infuriated: "There is no future for you in Communist Bulgaria. Think seriously!" To which I replied:

-As long as I am healthy I don't care. I can do any kind of work.
-There wilI be no jobs for you! -was the response.

Thus the destiny of a proletarian peasant was sealed: enemy of the people, enemy of communism, enemy of the State. I was at odds with my father too. I had missed the chance of my lifetime. I could escape poverty, persecution, damnation. I knew I broke my old man's heart. I broke his hopes and, inadvertently, his life and the life of my family who paid dearly for my actions. But I could not betray the support of the peasants I had in my district nor could I betray myself. This would have been equal to suicide. I looked at my father. His face sank in despair while I hardly could hold my emotional outburst at seeing the eradication of his hopes and the loss of his son. It was also the point of realization that I had lost my father, mum and my sisters. It was a matter of time only.

Participation in the Popular Front, first as an activist for the government and, secondly, in opposition to it, I acquired a clear vision of wide differences between those in power and the powerless majority. Also the magic spell and real corruption that power exerted on its holder and the way it changed the human psyche for the worse. It dawned to me that the emancipation of peasants, workers and people is not to conquer political power, but to abolish it. That freedom, land; bread and peace for all could not be achieved by delegating power to government or institutions but by directly participating in decision making and taking our life in our own hands. Talking about it to one of my female comrades she quipped: "But then you are an anarchist." Then I told her that if that was anarchism then I was an anarchist. I read some of the anarchist publications but it was difficult to obtain them since the stationers were mostly controlled by the Communist Party. Anarchist literature was never displayed. To buy an anarchist newspaper I had to buy the communist one too. The anarchists were the first to be suppressed by the Popular Front government. Anarchism was feared by the communists since it was a reminder of an authentic socialist consciousness. Fascism, nazism, imperialism were catch words to mobilize and manipulate the masses, whereas anarchism was feared because it was carrying in itself the hopes of the proletariat, of the people: the seeds of the Social Revolution, already in inception.

To cut the story short I ended up in a concentration camp, euphemistically referred to as a "camp of reeducation". If in Nazi Germany "Work makes you free'", them in socialist Bulgaria "Work educates you. It changes the reactionary bourgeois consciousness into a socialist one, as understood by the Party". It was in these camp that I, for the first time, met anarchists and joined their group. It was the acme of my political struggle, the synthesis of thoughts, dreams, emotions and ethics in pursuit of social and personal justice and freedom. At the end of 1947, at the request of the Popuiar Front of my town, I was freed. On my way home I decided to pay a visit to my communist uncle. I told him of becoming an anarchist.

-Anarchist now!
This genuine communist looked at me with amazement and bewilderment.
-You are mad! Do you know what you are doing? You've signed your death warrant!
-But we fought for communism, didn't we? -I retorted.
-Look son, this is not communism, this is Stalinism. They don't play games, they kill!

Later on this was the reaction of my father too.

Three weeks after my arrival home I was arrested. But the temporary freedom I had enjoyed was to my advantage. From the first day of my arrival, the secret services were collecting information about my plans, movement and thinking. I was aware that the real danger would come from the inner circle of my friends. Two of them confessed to be police informers and I used them as a vehicle for informing about myself. Knowing what the police knew about me I succeeded in being temporarily released which gave me the chance to escape from their clutches and cross the border into Turkey.

It was at the end of 1947 that I touched the soil of Turkey. Sense of relief!

Death was cheated! I crossed the Bulgarian border, my Rubicon, not with fanfare, but stealthily, not to conquer but to inhale freedom. The die was cast. The curtain fell and I found myself in Limbo with tears in happiness and happiness in sadness. Suddenly the world behind me vanished, engulfed in the flames of nothingness and turning the soul into ashes. In the pyre of destiny I sacrificed my comrades in concentration camps or prisons, my parents and sisters.

The old memory, forced into exile in the recesses of the brain, lingered for a long time tormenting my consciousness. On the other side the inception of a new memory, within the confined space of the "Free" world's cell was not a good omen either. The only dream-like future lay in the ashes of nothingness, as a potentiality like the resurrection of the Phoenix. Nonetheless a resurrected Phoenix in the "Free World", if pursuing freedom, justice, social and economic equality could well be sacrificed to the altar of political expediency: but hopes lingered.

After a few months at "leisure" in Political Police Headquarters, then Birinci Sube, we were found jobs and let free. Out of the pen, in the open air, freedom exhilarated the spirit, but it recoiled when faced with the bronze face of brutality, of slavery and exploitation. A society that combines the filthy opulence of a few with the opulent immesiration of the many is a parody of democracy and freedom. Beginning with Ataturk, Turkey was moving towards modernisation but the western cold war produced condiments that had made it subservient to the political expediency of the USA policy of encirclement of the Soviet Union. Instead of diversification and democratization of society the American presence hastened its militarization.

As refugees we were privileged because, not understanding the language, we were seen as innocuous observers of the spectacle. And to a great extent that was the case. For most of the migrants Turkey was seen as a transit country, all eyes were looking westward. The majority of the refugees were settled in hotels and hostels provided by the government, with the help of UNRA. Ghettoisation of the mind, self-imposed censorship not to offend the host country and the lack of language as a tool of communication with the locals, prevented undesirable thoughts contaminating the gentle ripples of malcontent.

In a country where the media was daily vomiting anti-communist slogans, emphatically stating the evil of the red menace, and a government affected by CIA cold war bacillus, the slightest hint of something approximating leftism was to be silenced or liquidated. As was the case of Sabatin Ali, a well-known journalist in Turkey, who was killed in an alleged attempt to escape to Bulgaria. A great number of students who dared to voice their thoughts were drowned in the wells of the city of Istanbul.

Politically speaking the Bulgarian refugees were divided into two main groups: Agrarians, the majority, and then Nationalists and others. Within these groups subsisted various trends, sometimes antagonistic and irreconcilable which led to inner struggles, splinter groups, to accusation and counter-accusation. The struggle against communism degenerated into internal squabbles. Deracinated, separated from the mother earth, with broken illusions, a life vacillating between nostalgic depressions and a future without horizons, they were often pitiful toys in the hands of cruel destiny. Frustrated by the life of coercive familiarity, simmering with ra~e, some expressed the most dark aspects of their submerged world: uSIng violence to arbitrate disputes, and the hated methods of their enemies to silence dissent. Obviously, in the bosom of their being they harboured authoritarianism, intolerance to otherness and others' ideas, antagonism to any free thought and fear of freedom. Some succumbed to the pressure of Anglo-American and the State's security services to form diversionist groups in order to destabilize the established communist governments. The repercussions of this policy played into the hands of communist oppression, providing them with sufficient justification to uproot whole families. But often these dupes of foreign interests would be betrayed by the hands that had fed and armed them, and consequently eliminated by the Bulgarian security forces. Thus many lost their lives being pawns in this dirty game. But this game was elevated to a patriotic scenario to placate the guilt of traitors and collaborators.

At the time the Turkish Trade Union movement was invisible since it was Identified with communism. The Eight Hour Day was exceptionally rare. The working day lasted from 12 to 16 hours, sleeping on the premises and poorly paid. I worked and lived in Kuchuk Langa ( then market gardens, in a huge cardboard box in a shed covered with corrugated iron to protect us from rain) in Aksaray and sometimes worked as a plumber on building sites. This gave me some opportunities to meet socialist oriented workers who could not understand why an atheist and a kind of socialist would escape from Bulgaria. Trying to prove the incongruity of my stand, some of them took me on a guided tour of Istanbul, a town virtually within the walls of old Konstantinopolis: walls which gave shelter to many poverty stricken, to those who lived in the garbage bins of society.

I had difficulty in putting a socialistic critique of socialism, to make them discern the contradictions between socialism as a theory and as a praxis, to those who had unwavering faith in socialism. My explanation was hindered by language limitations. To what extent I succeeded in clarifying that socialism as a theory, and the Stalinist "socialist" import, are contrarieties, I was not sure. ..

Nonetheless, I insisted that socialism that had the State as its master; that managed nationalized and private capital; where decision making was made by top dogs and imposed on the underdogs; where labour was glorified while bu reaucrats and apparatchiks reaped the rewards: was socialism in name but not in virtue. A society where workers' critical faculties had been crushed, where workers were mere numbers, where their contribution was measured by productivity rather than participation in social affairs, had no claim to socialism. It might occupy volumes of endemic exercises, entertain the egos of Ideological elites but it remained irrelevant to socialist praxis.

When my Turkish comrades (I called them comrades since they harboured sincere socialist feelings) pointed at the mosques as crystallization of ignorance and argued that religion was the opium of the people, we were in agreement. When I stated that socialism as the function of the State is the opium of the proletariat or, at least, a soporific pill to quiet discontent and smooth the burden of exploitation, they were rather sceptical and perplexed.

Despite everything, they had made my stay in Turkey pleasant and gave some significance to my new becoming. When I departed the country, I was sad to leave behind those who, in stealth, argued the virtues and vices of socialism, never to see or hear from them again. Thus another page was closed forever. But the memory has remained.

After fifty years I decided to pay my second visit to Istanbul. The visit exceeded my expectation in spite of the fact that the new Istanbul, a phallic jungle like other big cities, had obliterated most of the bench marks of my memory. While the first visit was a necessary outcome of a harassed soul in search of respite, the second was an attempt to step twice in the same current of life and resurrect the unresurrectable.

Turkey, despite attempts towards secularization, reform and openness, could not erase the elusive religious-secular authoritarian armour imbedded in the collective consciousness that helped to derail the original intentions. The smell of power transformed Kemalism into a rabid nationalism reasserting Turkish centrality within the boundary of Modern Turkey. Shifting the capital from Istanbul to Angora (Ankara) was to the point. Centralisation of power undermined the genuine will for reform, strengthened the hands of bureaucracy and allowed the resurgence of reaction in new attire.

Thus on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire a new imperialism was born headed by the radical bourgeoisie which had channelled the revolutionary zest to its own power proclivities. It forged national revolutionary images to quiet the bewilderment of the doubtfuls and to marginalize the recalcitrants.

Turkish nationalism was strengthened by a booster injection in allowing the USA to establish bases on its territory , and by becoming a pawn in the hands of the US military strategy. In this scenario multi-cultural life had eroded. Turkey was not Serbia or Iraq, a thorn in the USA's endeavour to hegemony. That some ethnic groups were on the verge of disappearance due to the process of assimilation or violence was irrelevant since the USA and Turkish interests converged.

The largest ethnic group, the Kurds, are referred to as the Turks of the mountains, implying either some kind of inferiority or lack of civilization, and therefore, have to be domesticated, assimilated or eliminated. In this case, human rights means dehydration of life since they opposed the USA and Turkish oppressions. Ethnic groups which are not subordinated to global and local capitalism or which hinder the profitability of multinational investments are not desirable inhabitants of the global village. Since Kurdistan is failing to satisfy such prerequisites, therefore its integration into Turkey was an ought. Emotional exhilaration with liberation, self determination and independence are marketable commodities if they are in the service of Capital and Power. Otherwise, the rebels are terrorists, the victims delinquents and the people subversives. They are of no value to the State. The army, police and gendarmerie have values. They enjoy carnage. It is their occupation. Their massacres are not crimes against humanity or acts of terrorism. They are acts of law and order. Violence against terrorism is enshrined in the Neo Liberal Order. And it is pretty obvious by humanitarian wars, impoverished uranium missiles, intelligent and smart bombs on impoverished people.

Revisiting Turkey coincided with the capture of Ocalan. The "evil" man was delivered to his "good" captors, especially trained to deal with dangerous political criminals who threaten stability, tranquillity and the peace of the country. What stability? Stability of the rich to use people as manure of capital gains? Stability of order that condemns millions to pauperism? What tranquillity does rebellion disturb? Tranquillity of those who, hiding behind the law, calmly suck the blood of the exploited? Tranquillity that justifies pillage? Tranquillity that sends youth to the battle fields to fight the dirty war of governments and Capital? The real danger to social cohesion, stability, tranquillity and peace are the pillars of the government, the army, the police and the merchants of human souls. They are the enemy of society!

At the same time, Turkey was in the grip of election fever. A comic show of clowns and display of the voluntary servitude of the masses. It looked like a fancy dress party for the outside world to show that democracy in Turkey is not simply apparent, but also functional. The election was a match between patriots-nationalists. On the one hand, were the fundamentalists whose absolute moral virtues were incarnated in Allah; on the other hand, secularists having as a reference point, Ataturk.

Within the climate of electoral euphoria, tension and oppression were easily detected. Istanbul University was surrounded by the police and the army in full combat gear. Inside there were more detectives, with guns hidden under their coats, than there were students. Any visitor to the bastion of learning, free inquiry and impartiality was checked thoroughly - and this in the house of intellect? It was obvious where the real power lay. But behind the scenario of oppression lurked the dark figure of the avatars of globalization, and the invisible hand of the CIA.

Like a wild beast, Ocalan was chased from Syria, through Athens to Moscow, where the latter refused him political asylum since tsar Boris preferred a plate of golden metal to saving the life of his destitute ex- comrade-in-arms. From Russia to Rome where another ex-communist rejected his status as a refugee and sent him back to Russia, Ocalan's life was a life on tenterhooks. Back to Moscow, then Greece, Minsk, unsuccessful attempts to enter Holland, back to Greece: the circle tightened around him, The CIA greyhounds smelled blood and victory after Pangalos decided to "boot him out" of Greece and deport him to Kenya, On 15th of February Ocalan ended up in the hands of the Turkish Security Services, The newspaper "Huriyet" as quoted by The Economist {20-26 February, 1999 p, 34) boasted that "Turkey showed the world it was a great state by capturing the baby-killer" .Ecevet was quick to assure that "justice is very free in Turkey. . . It need not last too long because the PKK's leadership are well known" (Time, March 1, 1999)

To top it all off, was the discovery that: "Ocalan has a brutal, capricious and autocratic record, even within his own movement" and "his arrest, may allow the group to refashion itself in a more civilized, democratic guise" (The Economist, as above).

Leadership implies brutality, sometimes in suave colours to enhance popularity! Capriciousness to assert authority on wavering souls and to create fear by its unpredictability! Autocratic, if he is to be a successful machiavellian prince to dominate, manipulate, impose and humiliate. But its success depends also on the servile consciousness and wilful submission of his subjects, Ocalan in power, would not be an iota better that the Ecevets or Clintons of this world, As to the baby-killer, how many babies have died and are dying in Iraq, due to Turkish invasions from time to time in north Iraq in order to wipe out the Kurdish partisans, and to American wilful bombing and non-violent embargo?

The Kurdish question was created by the great democratic tradition based , as any power, on the Roman "civility": Divide and Rule. It was England and France, which, with the treaty of Sevres in 1920, cut Kurdistan into pieces to ensure their imperialistic interests, the petrol. Was it not England that crushed the Kurdish rebellion in Iraq in 1918? And when,after the Second World War, the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), supported by the Soviet Union, was formed trying to establish an autonomous republic, it was another "great" democratic country, the champion of self-determination and human rights, the USA, using Iranian troops, that buried any hopes, The abdication of the Shah in 1979 changed nothing. Around 50,000 Kurds and 5,000 peshmergas lost their lives fighting for liberation. And in Turkey, avant post of American Strategy, from 1960 to 1991, 100,000 Kurds were incarcerated, not to count those killed.

While the Kurds are stuck in the permanent Limbo of ethnic cleansing, the democratic press, with few exceptions, is silent. The USA which is financing, modernizing and arming the Turkish army, has no time for the Kurds. The latter's fight or claim for freedom, independence or autonomy run contrary to American and other capitalist interests. Undermining the sovereignty of a friendly State, the Kurdish struggle is presented as terrorism, Human rights? It is a con job, They only have value if they are at the service of the New Liberal Order and function in accordance to its prescriptions.

Despite the gloomy picture I have painted of the damned, where poverty, exploitation, servitude. ethnic cleansing and war are endemic, there are many human beings that continue to dream, defying the heavy odds of global economics, financial and political criminality and carry the flame of a libertarian utopia. In Turkey there are hearths of such groups that radiate light in the darkness of the political night, that plough furrows in the consciousness of the oppressed and sow the seed of rebellion, freedom and radical imageries. They are young, enthusiastic and within the alchemy of modem politics. carry a fevered revolutionary imagination without the fanfare of exhibitionism. Surrounded by rabid nationalists, religious bigotry , fundamentalists and the concubines of the liberal World Order , they live. function and work in harsh conditions. Harsh! Certainly harsh, since tyranny is not born in Anarchy but springs forth from the shadows of Authority.

A small event to remember. A tiny basement room crammed with books - such familiar names: Bakunin, Kropotkin, etc. Here the weavers of the revolution spin the thread of Ariadne to get out of the catacombs of marginalization. Here they write, publish, distribute and read books with anarchist contents. My friend and I have come here several times and enjoyed their company and hospitality as we sip tea and coffee, smoke and debate. A friendly place! No weapons! No bombs\ Only thoughts, ideas and struggle. Now we enter again. But this time two impeccably dressed gentlemen are taking "notes". Seeing us, they ask: "Who are they?" The answer is spontaneous: "Friends, visitors". My friend is naively amazed. "What an orderly and quiet meeting" she whispers to me "How carefully they take the Minutesl". "Naturally" -I said later -"It was the Thought Police, the limbs of the law. Judges of subversivity. They were taking Police notes, not Minutes". They question, investigate, order and indict. One comrade was charged with sedition because he wrote an article dealing with the Kurdish issue. The editor was given an option: either resign or face jail; either freedom to be silent or the limbo of free slavery. Is it not terrorism to regard thoughts and ideas as subversive acts that have to be suppressed?

Nonetheless, it was a pleasure to see the pale face of anarchism, this faint spark that might one day ignite a rebellion. Rebellion accompanied by a process of liberation which will ensue, not in substituting one power for another, but in radical changes in favour of the oppressed. As for me the dialogue with these genuine comrades was an existential experience that captured my heart and strengthened my faith in anarchism.

Jack
Red and Black - An anarchist journal
Issue No 29, Autumn 2001
Taken from http://www.takver.com/history/sydney/grancharoff.htm