Wolf Gordin

[1] In 1908, Wolf and Abba Gordin opened Ivria, an experimental cheder, a school for the teaching of secular Hebrew, in the town of Smorgon (within the Vilna Governorate, part of the Russian Empire).

Working together, the two brothers created their own educational press, Novaya Pedagogika, writing and publishing numerous pamphlets on pedagogy between 1907 and 1914 as well as a single issue of a Yiddish-language journal, Der yunger yid [Jewish Youth] in Vilna in 1911.

[2] Their libertarian teaching philosophy bridged the non-authoritarian style of Leo Tolstoy's school for peasant children at Yasnaya Polyana and the egoism of Max Stirner.

There, in April 1917, Wolf founded an organization, the Union of the Five Oppressed—a title expressing the combination of struggles against capitalism, conformism, patriarchy, colonialism, and ageism—and became chief editor of the anarchist newspaper Burevestnik (The Petrel) in November, following a split in the editorial collective.

Tireless orators and propagandists, prolific writers, journalists, pamphleteers, and initiators of multiple enterprises, combatants at the barricades of July and October 1917, thanks to their ever-working imaginations they have greatly contributed to creating and sustaining both the life and the waste of this movement.

[7] In keeping with the prefix pan-, in the sense of "all", "pananarchism" was to be "an expanded and articulate anarchism" that encompassed the concerns of the Five Oppressed groups, addressing them via a comprehensive program of communism, individualism, "gynanthropism" (feminism), "cosmism" (or "national cosmopolitanism"), and "pedism" (the liberation of youth via libertarian education).

[7] Pananarchism also entailed an extension of anarchist principles to "everything", including the fields of knowledge and culture: it meant a critique of both religion and science from a "sociotechnical" perspective.

[10] Cheka director Felix Dzerzhinsky, after "a long personal conversation with the Gordins," decided that "both they and their 'Social-Technicum' group had neither taken part, nor even knew about the impending assassination attempt on the Mosc.

In their "pan-technical" utopia, technology has so completely overcome the difference between nature and artifice that "[t]he winds and thunderstorms and storms and thunder and lightning obey us", the guide explains, but then clarifies:I only figuratively put it: "obedient."

In our language there is no imperative [povelitel’nogo], but only an intercessory [prositel’noye, “pleading” or “prayer”]... You had lying, hypocrisy, flattery; these three forces weakened, defiled, destroyed the word.

In 1927, in honor of the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution and Konstantin Tsiolkovskii's seventieth birthday, the AIIZ curated an international exhibit of designs for interplanetary vehicles.

The historian Paul Avrich writes that after his 1925 arrest, Wolf Gordin "fled to America and became, mirabile dictu, a Protestant missionary", attributing this to "a reliable source".

[23] However, these may be in error, perhaps confusing Wolf with his younger brother, Morris Gordin, whose disenchantment with the Soviet Union, after his early involvement in Bolshevism, led him to Trotskyism and then to a religious conversion to Protestantism and missionary work.