Long concerned about developments with the Bolsheviks, Goldman described the rebellion as the "final wrench.

I saw before me the Bolshevik State, formidable, crushing every constructive revolutionary effort, suppressing, debasing, and disintegrating everything.

[2] Sympathetic to the February Revolution, the complete book is an impassioned left critique of the subsequent Bolshevik Revolution, as well as Vladimir Lenin's New Economic Policy—an "all-powerful, centralized Government with State Capitalism as its economic expression".

[3] The complete book is also critical of Marxian theory, which Goldman describes as "a cold, mechanistic, enslaving formula".

[2] A complete version of the full manuscript was published in England with an introduction by Rebecca West, also under the title My Disillusionment in Russia (London: C. W. Daniel Company, 1925).