Anarchism in Russia
Bakunin received permission to move to the Amur region, where he started collaborating with his relative General Count Nikolay Muravyov-Amursky, who had been Governor of Eastern Siberia for ten years.
In Geneva, he pretended to be a representative of a revolutionary committee who had fled from the Peter and Paul Fortress, and he won the confidence of revolutionary-in-exile Mikhail Bakunin and his friend Nikolay Ogarev.
[3] Tolstoy professed contempt for the private ownership of land, but his anarchism lay primarily in his view that the state exists essentially as an instrument of compulsory force, which he considered the antithesis of all religious teachings.
[3] Many people inspired by Tolstoy's version of Christian morality set up agricultural communes in various parts of Russia, pooling their income and producing their own food, shelter and goods.
[3] Although Tolstoy's actions frequently diverged from the ideals he set for himself (for example, he owned a large estate), his followers continued to promote the Tolstoyan vision of world peace well after his death in 1910.
[4] For anarchist historian Paul Avrich "The two leading exponents of individualist anarchism, both based in Moscow, were Aleksei Alekseevich Borovoi and Lev Chernyi (Pavel Dmitrievich Turchaninov).
Furthermore, strongly influenced by Max Stirner and Benjamin Tucker, the German and American theorists of individualist anarchism, they demanded the total liberation of the human personality from the fetters of organized society.
[5] Chernyi advocated a Nietzschean overthrow of the values of bourgeois Russian society, and rejected the voluntary communes of anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin as a threat to the freedom of the individual.
[10] On the other hand, Alexei Borovoi (1876?-1936),[11] was a professor of philosophy at Moscow University, "a gifted orator and the author of numerous books, pamphlets, and articles which attempted to reconcile individualist anarchism with the doctrines of syndicallism".
Following the abdication of Czar Nicholas II in February 1917 and the subsequent creation of a Provisional Government, many Russian anarchists joined the Bolsheviks in campaigning for further revolution.
[12] Though within the next year they would come to consider the Bolsheviks traitors to the socialist cause, urban anarchist groups initially saw Lenin and his comrades as allies in the fight against capitalist oppression.
[23] By this time some belligerent anarchist dissenters armed themselves and formed groups of so-called “Black Guards” that continued to fight Communist power on a small scale as the Civil War began.
[25] After initially looking favorably upon the Bolsheviks for their proposed land reforms, by 1918 peasants largely came to despise the new government as it became increasingly centralized and exploitative in its dealings with the rural population.
This was immediately followed by an artillery attack on the Kremlin and the occupation of the telegraph and telephone buildings by the Left SRs who sent out several manifestos appealing to the people to rise up against their oppressors and destroy the Bolshevik regime.
"[31] Russian anarchists living abroad began to openly attack the "new kings" of the Communist Party, criticising the NEP as a restoration of capitalism and comparing Vladimir Lenin to the Spanish inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada, the Italian political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli and the French revolutionary Maximilien Robespierre.
[36] Meanwhile, the anarcho-communists around the Workers' Cause journal began to develop the platformist tendency, calling for the construction of a tightly coordinated anarchist organization, which was supported chiefly by Peter Arshinov and Nestor Makhno.
[38] Arshinov and Makhno's short-tempered response to these criticisms drew the ire of other Russian exiles such as Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, who denounced them respectively as a "Bolshevik" and a "militarist",[39] while also expressing a distaste with Fleshin and Steimer's factionalism.
[46] The remnants of the Russian anarchist exiles began to wane during the 1930s, as their journals became less frequent and filled with republications of old texts, their activities mostly consisted of celebrating the anniversaries of past events and their criticisms became increasingly levelled at Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler.
[49] Following the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion, the Communist Party's 10th Congress implemented the New Economic Policy (NEP), which put an end to war communism and transformed the Soviet economy into a form of state capitalism.
[50] Many of the "Soviet anarchists" that had previously sought conciliation with the Bolshevik government quickly became disillusioned with the policies of the NEP, which they regarded as a step back from their revolutionary aims, and subsequently resigned from their posts in order to pursue scholarly activities.
[53] Some key figures of the anarchist old guard began to die off during this period, including Peter Kropotkin, Varlam Cherkezishvili, Jan Wacław Machajski and Apollon Karelin.
[58] Following the establishment of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin was left incapacitated by a stroke and a Troika made up of Lev Kamenev, Joseph Stalin and Grigory Zinoviev assumed control of the state.
The Opposition demanded freedom of expression within the party, called for an end to the New Economic Policy (NEP), and proposed the rapid industrialization of the economy and a reduction of state bureaucracy.
He subsequently broke with the New Economic Policy (NEP) and shifted the economy towards a five-year plan of rapid industrialization and forced collectivization, marking the beginning of the Stalinist era.
[57] While internally exiled in Tobolsk, the anarchist Dmitri Venediktov was arrested on the charges of "Disseminating rumors about loans and dissatisfaction with the Soviet regime", and within three days was sentenced to execution without appeal.
A number of members of the anarchist old guard such as Alexander Atabekian, German Askarov and Alexei Borovoi were noted to have died during the Purge,[57] with others such as Aron Baron disappearing upon their release from prison.
A dissident protest movement began to emerge in the public sphere for the first time in decades, with a number of libertarian communists inspired by Yugoslavian socialist self-management developing anti-statist tendencies and some even going on to call themselves anarchists.
Led by the libertarian socialist, Alexander Skobov, they established a commune in the city, which acted as a meeting place for left-wing Soviet dissidents, and published their own journal Perspektivy.
Some more radical members of the group, inspired by the Red Army Faction, even called for the use of armed struggle and illegalist methods against the state,[68] but its leaders Arkady Tsurkov and Alexander Skobov encouraged nonviolence.
[72] (later this organization was renamed "People's Self-Defense"[73]) On October 31, 2018, Mikhail Zhlobitsky, a seventeen-year-old college student, committed a suicide bombing against a local FSB headquarters in Arkhangelsk.
