Following the Russian Civil War and the Kronstandt Uprising, anarchists were suppressed in the Soviet Union, and Schapiro escaped to Western Europe, eventually settling in New York City.
Schapiro associated with many other prominent anarchists throughout his life, including Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and Peter Kropotkin.
He grew up in Constantinople because his father Moses, a member of the secret revolutionary organization Narodnaya Volya, which assassinated Tsar Alexander II in 1881, was forced to flee the Russian Empire.
[1] In the late 1890s, the Schapiro family moved to London and came into contact with the milieu of Jewish anarchists behind the journal Arbeyter Fraynd.
[3] In August 1900, he moved to Paris to attend the Sorbonne and possibly to participate in an international anarchist congress, which in the end was banned by the authorities.
He started studying either engineering or biology with the intention of embarking on a career in medicine, but was forced to drop out for financial reasons.
[4] In Paris, he came to know many of the city's leading anarchists and became a member of Étudiants socialistes révolutionnaires internationalistes, an anarcho-syndicalist group involved in the preparations for the banned international congress.
Schapiro is listed as an author on several publications from Waller's lab, but the job also allowed him to devote a lot of his time to the anarchist movement.
[22] There were numerous disputes at the congress, but it ultimately passed a Declaration of Syndicalist Principles calling for the abolition of the state and capitalism.
[35] After Schapiro's release and the February Revolution in Russia, he campaigned for Russian exiles being allowed to return to their home country.
The three had been on the editorial board of the syndicalist journal Golos Truda (Voice of Labor), the organ of the Union of Russian Workers of the United States and Canada.
Schapiro was the driving force behind Golos Trudas's publishing house, which released Russian translations of works by Western syndicalist theorists like Fernand Pelloutier, Émile Pouget, or Cornelissen.
It supported the soviets emerging in the revolutionary process, but was most excited about the factory committees, which arose after the February Revolution as vehicles of workers' control over production.
[40] In an article in Golos Truda in September, Schapiro called for "complete decentralization and the very broadest self-direction of local organizations" to keep the soviets from becoming a new form of political coercion.
Eventually, Shapiro and Grigorii Maksimov, another member of Golos Truda, rewrote the letter and Rosmer submitted it in February 1921.
[63] In June 1921, Schapiro, along with Goldman, Berkman, and fellow anarchist Alexei Borovoi, anonymously wrote a pamphlet entitled The Russian Revolution and the Communist Party, which was smuggled to Germany and published by Rocker.
They argued that anarchists had refrained from protesting the repression leveled against them in Russia as long as the Civil War was being fought so as not "to aid the common enemy, world imperialism".
The end of the war, however, had made it clear that the biggest threat to the revolution "was not outside, but within the country: a danger resulting from the very nature of the social and economic arrangements which characterize the present 'transitory stage'.
Goldman, Berkman, the anarchist-turned-Bolshevik Victor Serge, and above all Schapiro made sure that the visiting syndicalists were apprised of the imprisonment of anarchists and the hunger strike.
[72] While the negotiations were still ongoing, Nikolai Bukharin addressed the RILU congress in the name of the Bolshevik Party and attacked the Russian anarchist movement.
[74] In November 1921, Schapiro, Berkman, and Goldman received permission from the Soviet government to attend an international anarchist congress in Berlin in December.
With them having already missed the congress, Sweden issued the trio visas two weeks later, but on the train on their way to Stockholm the Latvian police arrested them.
While Berkman and Goldman remained in Stockholm and wrote about their experiences in Russia, Schapiro decided to join the Russian syndicalist exiles in Berlin after entering Germany secretly.
Rocker pointed to the Bolshevik government's treatment of Schapiro in making the case against participation in the RILU and for the formation of a syndicalist international.
Within a few years, the IWMA consisted of union federations in Germany, Italy, Sweden, Spain, Norway, Portugal, the Netherlands, France, Argentina, and Mexico as well as minor affiliates in numerous other countries.
He viewed the IWMA as the continuation of the efforts to unite the international syndicalist movement that had begun before World War I and performed most of the secretariat's work during the organization's first year.
[83] Schapiro and a group of exiles that also included Maksimov edited the anarcho-syndicalist newspaper Rabochii Put' (The Workers' Way), the IWMA's Russian-language organ.
It was printed on the presses of the German syndicalist journal Der Syndikalist with financial support from the IWMA and secretly distributed in Russia.
He concluded that anarchism could only overcome such problematic reactions by giving more attention to a theory of the revolutionary process rather than the ideal of a post-revolutionary society.
[92] He traveled on to France, where he continued to work with the IWMA and edited another anarcho-syndicalist paper, La Voix du Travail (The Voice of Labour).