was a spontaneous event, engineered by no single party or group, and certainly not the Bolsheviks, who in those early days dared not make that claim. They were in fact a distinct minority. But once in power they immediately set about to crush, capture, and emasculate the Soviets—to keep them in name only, and reduce them to organs of the State. They did this through a combination of state-induced terror (the Cheka, grandfather of the KGB), relentless propaganda, and dedicated Bolshevik worms “boring from within.” Revolts were put down by military force, often with troops imported from far away and lied to, because those familiar with the issues could not be trusted to turn against their people. The anarchists fought the Bolsheviks, and their fate was slander, exile, imprisonment, and murder.
Sam writes in the introduction to The Guillotine at Work that Maximoff coordinated the anarchist resistance to the domination of the labor movement by the Bolshevik state, organizing the All-Russian Conference of Factory Committees (October 1917) and before that the Petrograd Factory Committees (June 1917). He was active not only in student and workers’ circles, but also among the peasants, where his agricultural knowledge and understanding of their problems proved most effective.
Maximoff was an editor of the Golos Truda (Voice of Labor)printing collective, which, along with its bookshops in Moscow and Petrograd, circulated anarcho-syndicalist books and pamphlets throughout Russia: most importantly the works of Bakunin, Kropotkin, and others. Golos Truda was soon suppressed and—in an act of courage—Maximoff and comrades promptly proceeded to publish Volny Golos Truda (Free Voice of Labor).
Sam later wrote that “Maximoff’s pre-eminent place in this history of Russian anarchism rests upon his ability to adjust theory to the practical needs of the workers. He formulated workable, constructive libertarian alternatives to Bolshevism: free Soviets; grass-roots housing and neighborhood committees; self-management of industry through federations of factory committees; industrial unions; agricultural collectives and communes; networks of non-interest, non-profit co-operative agencies for credit and exchange. He envisioned a vast network of voluntary organizations embracing the myriad operations of a complex society.”
In the spring of 1919 Maximoff went to Kharkov (a major center of steel production and heavy industry—you might call it the Pittsburgh of the Ukraine ) to work in the statistics department of the Northern Bureau of the All-Russian Union of Metal Workers. When the Bolsheviks conscripted him into the Red Army for propaganda work, he refused. Instead, he volunteered for something far more dangerous: frontline combat against the advancing White Guards, who had invaded Russia seeking to install the old regime…but on the condition that Lenin abolish the Cheka, stop breaking strikes and terrorizing the peasants, and restore civil liberties and power to the Soviets. Fat chance! Maximoff was arrested and summarily sentenced to death. He was saved from “the wall” by the Kharkov Steel Workers, who threatened a general strike; such was the standing of the man.
He remained in prison, however. He described that delightful experience in “One Day in the Cheka’s Cellars,” a chapter in his masterful The Guillotine at Work. Think of it as precursor to Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, as Lenin was precursor to Stalin.
Maximoff’s imprisonment was part of a larger pattern: the subjugation of the entire society to Bolshevik rule. In those early days Lenin’s regime was shaky and he saw the biggest threat came not from the right, but from the left—from those instrumental in forging the Revolution. He cracked down hard on all elements, and especially the anarchists. Thousands were imprisoned, thousands murdered, their fates lost to history. Yet the anarchists had strong support in the still to be tamed unions, and most importantly they had military power in the Ukraine. There, Nestor Makhno led an informal, shifting, but in its own way disciplined army of guerrilla fighters—massing at its peak to thirty-thousand men. Makhno has been called a bandit, an anti-Semite, a rapist, a plunderer—and much more—by apologists for the Bolshevik and the feudal regimes alike. None of that is true. In fact, independent historians have verified the opposite. I see a rough analogy between Makhno and the anarchist insurrectionary peasant leader Emiliano Zapata, who fought in Mexico during the same period. Like Zapata, Makhno was a brilliant strategist and the Red Army needed him to blunt the advance of the Whites across the Ukraine and into Russia. So Lenin and Trotsky agreed to Makhno’s demand: That all anarchists be released from prison and from the control of the Cheka. And so Maximoff was released.
His “freedom” was brief. With the Makhno partisans playing a key role, the Whites were driven from the Ukraine, and were in retreat on other fronts as well. Confident now, Lenin and Trotsky turned against Makhno, treating previous agreements as so much toilet paper. They brought overwhelming Red Army force to the Ukraine, and also luck; a typhus epidemic had decimated half of Makhno’s men before a shot was fired. Makhno and the remnants of his followers crossed the border into Romania, and I will leave their sad story to others, saying only that Makhno died in Paris as he was born in the Ukraine: in poverty and obscurity. He was forty-five years old. Not all was lost, however. While in Paris he befriended a young Spaniard, on the run, by the name of Buenaventura Durruti.
The Bolshevik ascendancy was successful on other fronts as well. Independent unions were abolished. The revolt—or more accurately the protest—of the Kronstadt sailors, who demanded that the regime restore civil liberties and the free elections of the Soviets, was drowned in the blood of the same eighteen-thousand men Trotsky had exalted as “the flower of the revolution” a few years earlier. Widespread strikes and peasant rebellions were put down with a ruthlessness that would have shocked the Tsar. Pitched battles in the streets—among other actions, the anarchists raided prisons to free all political prisoners—were doomed. The back of the resistance was broken.
The Guillotine at Work: Twenty Years of Terror in Russia is Maximoff’s masterpiece. Over six-hundred pages, in two volumes, it stands after all these years as a searing indictment of Bolshevik rule, of Marxism, of the dangers of the concentration of state power. He lays the origin of that vast crime, the Soviet State, at the doorstep of Lenin, and not at his demented successor, Stalin, as apologists have done. These passages are from Bill Nowlin’s excellent preface to the 1979 edition (rearranged slightly for our purposes).
Lenin, according to Maximoff, “followed in the footsteps of the French Jacobins.” He believed in the necessity and even desirability of terror to implement his programme.… and the legitimacy of his authority. Maximoff presents scores of quotations from Lenin’s published works in which Lenin urged shootings of political opponents, urged against sentimentality in the waging of political struggle and urged his fellow Bolsheviks to adopt unashamedly a policy of red terror. Maximoff charges that Lenin deliberately chose to provoke civil war in the countryside, to terrorize the peasantry and force their compliance with the forced grain requisitions, to subject them to state regimentation: “That we brought civil war to the village is something that we hold up as a merit,” wrote Lenin.
The use of the death penalty was very rare in Tsarist Russia. When the Bolsheviks came to power one of the first things they did (in Lenin’s absence) was to abolish the death penalty. Lenin reacted furiously, “beside himself with indignation” in Trotsky’s description. “How,” he demanded to know, “can a revolution be made without executions?” Maximoff compiles, from official Bolshevik sources, statistical summaries of the number of executions in each year of Lenin’s rule. Estimates based on these figures range from 200,000 to over 1,500,000 shootings during Lenin’s period of leadership. Maximoff is willing to settle for the most conservative of all figures.
There is no question but that the Russian Revolution was a bloody affair. It would be unfair for anyone to attribute all of the deaths to Lenin’s policies, all 10,000,000 to 12,000,000 lives. Any revolution takes lives. The white guardist counter-revolutionaries were certainly responsible for many deaths. The point is that many, if not most, of these millions of lives were shed not just because of the inevitable cost of revolutionary struggle but because Lenin insisted on implementing his own view of how that struggle should develop.… [Maximoff’s] book stands as one of the most comprehensive documentations of the terror
