just a Stalinist development. The principal lesson Maximoff wished to communicate, though, was that Marxism/Leninism was a theory which, despite its revolutionary style, was in essence counter-revolutionary.
Sam for his part said many times that he knew the Bolsheviks were no good from the moment they slaughtered the Tsar and his wife and children, which he considered a profoundly immoral act.
In 1921, Maximoff and a number of other anarchists were remanded by the Cheka to the notorious Taganka Prison in Moscow. This was tantamount to a death sentence, either by the firing squad, torture, or more slowly by rot in a labor camp. The imprisoned anarchists launched a desperate gamble to save their lives and call attention to Bolshevik tyranny.
They owed the success of that gamble to three people on the outside whose moral and physical courage matched theirs. I speak first of Olga Freydlin. The Tsar had originally sentenced her to eight years hard labor in 1909 for smuggling subversive literature, but because she was barely a teenager, he relented and sent her to lifetime banishment in Yenesink Province, Siberia. She returned to her native Ukraine with the release of political prisoners following the February 1917 revolution and promptly resumed her anarchist activities. A year later she met an earnest young man named Gregorii Petrovich Maximoff, and became his wife/life partner. (Sam spoke of her tenderly many years later: “Loyal, tough, courageous—you can’t imagine!”). The others involved in the gamble are familiar to American radicals. Emma Goldman, deported by that indomitable G-man, J. Edgar Hoover, found herself a destitute guest of Lenin’s regime. How easy it would have been for a lesser woman than Goldman to rationalize, to keep her head down, to stay comfortable. Instead, she and her dearest life-long friend, Alexander Berkman, also deported, rose in opposition, and in support of the imprisoned anarchists.
The three of them were well aware of how short was the distance between their freedom and the Taganka cellar.
The gamble: thirteen anarchists, including Maximoff, declared a hunger strike. The strike was timed to coincide with a prestigious conference in Moscow, that of the International Red Trade Unions (or Profintern). Though it was orchestrated by the Bolsheviks, many of the unions in attendance were independent, and even anarchistic. Olga, Emma, and Alexander—and others—fell upon the delegates and explained the situation. The delegates demanded the prisoners’ release. The tension built. The conference threatened to blow-up in the face of the regime. The hunger strike stretched to ten days.
Lenin and Trotsky were clever men and not without charm. They claimed that there were no anarchists in prison. All of them are free, they said, offering addresses as proof. And sure enough, there was a print shop in a basement somewhere, free to publish. When the delegates arrived they found a harmless crack-pot cranking a crude mimeograph machine. But the charm-offensive backfired. The delegates were leaders of thousands, and in some cases, hundreds of thousands of men. Certainly, they were not fools and not pleased to be taken as such. The basement incident did not sit well. It was the origin of a remark I overheard an elderly man make to my father, some thirty years later: “And I told Lenin, the son of a beetch, I am leaving!” He was Armando Borghi, a leader at that time of the Italian syndicalists.
“Lenin?” I asked Sam, when we are alone. “The Russian guy? He knew Lenin?” I was, maybe, fifteen years old.
“Yeah, Lenin! Who was he? He was a man, flesh and blood, like any man.”
So, finally, Lenin and Trotsky did the expedient thing. They released the anarchists, under the condition of lifetime exile, with the understanding they would be shot should they return. Having no other choice, the anarchists took the “compromise,” and escaped with their lives, Berkman and Goldman among them, first to Berlin. Some remained there, others moved on to Paris, London, and the United States. In 1924, Olga and Gregorii, arrived in Chicago. They wasted no time in joining the IWW—not a symbolic act. Gregorii promptly founded Golus Trushenika (Worker’s Voice) the Russian-language newspaper of the IWW that, at its peak, circulated among perhaps ten thousand exiles throughout North America.
11: Maximoff Educates Sam
In time, Sam came to know many of the anarchists imprisoned with Maximoff during the Taganka hunger strike.
He came to know men who fought at the side of Nestor Makhno.
He came to know at least three men who I know knew Lenin personally and, as delegates to the International, demanded the anarchists’ release.
He came to know I. N. Steinberg, the Minister of Social Justice in Lenin’s first and only coalition government, a man who conferred face to face with Lenin in that room in the Kremlin where he ruled.
He came to know the surviving sister of Fanny Baron, executed by the Cheka.
He came to know the daughter of Peter Kropotkin, Princess Alexandra, who loved to regale Mother with tales of her London childhood in the home of her exiled parents.
He came to know Kropotkin’s disciple, Rudolf Rocker, a powerful intellect and the author of the classic, Nationalism and Culture—in fact, he painted Rocker’s house.
He came to know, with a special affection, Donuluk, the elderly impoverished anarchist who lived among his Ukrainian countrymen in the slums of New York’s Alphabet City—a solitary little guy with a deeply creased face, bald head and rough clothes. In this country fifty years, he barely spoke English and never smiled; he’d come before meetings, prepare the room, and then leave with a nod to Sam.
And most of all Sam came to know Gregorii Maximoff.
When I check the birth dates of the two men it brings me up short that Maximoff was a mere nine years older than Sam. That is because Sam spoke of him with the respect one affords a much older man; he was in a sense his spiritual father. The gap in life experience, knowledge, and poise brushed aside years. Here was a man who had faced down the power of Lenin; had come within hours of a firing squad; had conducted a successful hunger strike in the Cheka dungeons; had organized steel mills and peasant collectives; had served as an editor of important journals and, while in Berlin, helped found an international anarchist organization comprising—it may surprise you—several million people.
Sam first met Maximoff in Chicago, 1926. Yet I witnessed the esteem in which Sam held the man first hand in New York, 1949 or so. Notice I say that I witnessed the esteem rather than the man himself. I remember Sam rising from the kitchen table, waving the just-opened letter excitedly, calling out to Mother, “Esther! Maximoff and Olga! They are coming in three weeks!” I have never seen him react in such a strange way to visitors before or since. At all times he was a warm host, but a decidedly casual one. He thought nothing of greeting guests, male or female, in his undershirt, or if he knew them a little better in his vakokta undershorts. The guests ate what we ate: good, but no special fuss. And if Mother attempted to clean the house a bit, he would take the broom from her and throw it in the closet. All part of his casual, communal self.
But not this time. I had never seen my father actually wash the windows and polish the floor. If he had time he would have painted the place. He went shopping for the best Russian stuff: herrings, smoked salmon, etc., although as it turned out the Maximoffs ate little. No vakokta underwear for the Maximoffs! It was imperative to my father that they see him as a responsible adult worthy of their respect.
As to the man himself, all I remember is this frail, pale individual of uncertain step, accompanied by a concerned Olga. He was obviously a warm man, a sweet man, but not well and they did not stay long. Maximoff died in his mid-fifties a few months later after suffering a massive heart attack. It was the second time I had seen my father weep, the first being the death of his biological father, Grandfather Max.
I have read some
