Specifically, her first-person memoir of the early Soviet period, My Disillusionment in Russia, which can be read online in its entirety. I'll excerpt interesting sections from Chapters 1 through 5 (with more posts to follow).
Excerpts from the original Preface published in Berlin, July 1922:
I found reality in Russia grotesque, totally unlike the great ideal that had borne me upon the crest of high hope to the land of promise.... Each day, each week, each month added new links to the fatal chain that pulled down my cherished edifice. I fought desperately against the disillusionment. For a long time I strove against the still voice within me which urged me to face the overpowering facts.
Emma laments the "institutionalization" of terror through the Cheka and the police. She maintains that her status as a "revolutionist" prevents her from siding with "the master class, which in Russia is called the Communist Party."
Till the end of my days my place shall be with the disinherited and the oppressed.
She wrote this book because she could nothing to reduce the tyranny of the Soviets in Russia, and so she felt it was important to educate others against it, given the extensive agitprop of blinded fellow travelers.
The masses, like the individual, may not readily learn from the experience of others. Yet those who have gained the experience must speak out, if for no other reason than that they cannot in justice to themselves and their ideal support the great delusion revealed to them.
In the Revised Preface from August 1925, Emma speaks even more forcefully against the Russian Soviet regime, openly castigating its perpetual terror machine. Responding to a writer that defends the terror on the basis of expediency, she skewers not only the methods but the intentions of the Bolsheviks:
Nothing can be further from the desire or intention of Leninism than the "preservation of the remnants of civilization."
I grant this human prescience at a time when most intellectuals remained willingly (and structurally ignorant) of what was happening in Russia.
The Russian experiment has proven the fatality of a political party usurping the functions of the revolutionary people, of an omnipotent State seeking to impose its will upon the country, of a dictatorship attempting to "organize" the new life.
A small detail about the deportation that led Emma bad to Russia along with her partner, Alexander Berkman. In her words, of course (historical records vary here):
ON THE night of December 21, 1919, together with two hundred and forty-eight other political prisoners, I was deported from America. Although it was generally known we were to be deported, few really believed that the United States would so completely deny her past as an asylum for political refugees, some of whom had lived and worked in America for more than thirty years.
In my own case, the decision to eliminate me first became known when, in 1909, the Federal authorities went out of their way to disfranchise the man whose name gave me citizenship.
As Emma travels, she discovers a common justification seeping from the lips of those on the left who ought to question the growing police state. The notorious case of John Reed:
Another Communist I saw much of the first weeks was John Reed. I had known him in America. He was living in the Astoria, working hard and preparing for his return to the United States. He was to journey through Latvia and he seemed apprehensive of the outcome. He had been in Russia during the October days and this was his second visit. Like Shatov he also insisted that the dark sides of the Bolshevik regime were inevitable. He believed fervently that the Soviet Government would emerge from its narrow party lines and that it would presently establish the Communistic Commonwealth. We spent much time together, discussing the various phases of the situation.
She continues to question the gap between revolutionary principles and Party privileges:
LIFE went on. Each day brought new conflicting thoughts and emotions. The feature which affected me most was the inequality I witnessed in my immediate environment. I learned that the rations issued to the tenants of the First House of the Soviet (Astoria) were much superior to those received by the workers in the factories.
As she reasons through the discrepancies, Emma decides to consult Maxim Gorky in the hopes that he offer empathy and detangle her concerns.
I began to suspect that the reason for much of the evil was also within Russia, not only outside of it. But then, I argued, police officials and detectives graft everywhere. That is the common disease of the breed. In Russia, where scarcity of food and three years of starvation must needs turn most people into grafters, theft is inevitable. The Bolsheviki are trying to suppress it with an iron hand. How can they be blamed? But try as I might I could not silence my doubts. I groped for some moral support, for a dependable word, for someone to shed light on the disturbing questions.
It occurred to me to write to Maxim Gorki. He might help. I called his attention to his own dismay and disappointment while visiting America. He had come believing in her democracy and liberalism, and found bigotry and lack of hospitality instead. I felt sure Gorki would understand the struggle going on within me, though the cause was not the same.
But the interview with Gorky leaves her "depressed" when Gorky rationalizes the recent creation of prisons for "morally defective children" (think American boot camps). Emma maintains that morality bears a connection to social situation and belief in free will does not allow us to "consider morality a fixed matter," a means for imprisoning errant children.
In Moscow, she notes an overwhelming lack of empathy and "fellow-feeling" among the Russians.
They explained it as a result partly of the general distrust and suspicion created by the Tcheka, and partly due to the absorbing task of getting the day's food. One had neither vitality nor feeling left to think of others. Yet there did not seem to be such a scarcity of food as in Petrograd, and the people were warmer and better dressed.
The cultural shift is problematic in that it questions the legitimacy of a revolution intended to serve all citizens. There are winners and losers, Emma says, and Tsarist methods remain in the heavy-handed promulgations of prisons for children. When she brings these questions to a friend working in the Soviet education department, he tells her that coercive laws and discipline are necessary because the Russian people are not driven to meet the needs of the revolution. The masses are not educated to grasp the whole.
Her Anarchist friends express remorse over the direction of the Bolsheviks:
I sounded my visitors on intervention. "We want none of outside interference," was the uniform sentiment. They held that it merely strengthened the hands of the Bolsheviki. They felt that they could not publicly even speak out against them so long as Russia was being attacked, much less fight their régime. "Have not their tactics and methods been imposed on the Bolsheviki by intervention and blockade?" I argued. "Only partly so," was the reply. "Most of their methods spring from their lack of understanding of the character and the needs of the Russian people and the mad obsession of dictatorship, which is not even the dictatorship of the proletariat but the dictatorship of a small group over the proletariat."
When I broached the subject of the People's Soviets and the elections my visitors smiled. "Elections! There are no such things in Russia, unless you call threats and terrorism elections. It is by these alone that the Bolsheviki secure a majority. A few Mensheviki, Social Revolutionists, or Anarchists are permitted to slip into the Soviets, but they have not the shadow of a chance to be heard."
"The picture painted looked black and dismal," Emma writes, "Still I clung to my faith." At the conference of the Moscow Anarchists, she learns for the first time of the role played by Anarchists in the Kronstadt Rebellion:
Anarchists were doing important work in the Foreign Office and in all other departments. I learned that the Anarchists had virtually helped the Bolsheviki into power. Five months later, in April, 1918, machine guns were used to destroy the Moscow Anarchist Club and to suppress their Press. That was before Mirbach arrived in Moscow. The field had to be "cleared of disturbing elements," and the Anarchists were the first to suffer. Since then the persecution of the Anarchists has never ceased.
Emma decides to organize a Russian Society for American Freedom similar to the Society of the Friends of the Russian Federation she had experienced in the United States. Lenin loves the idea but insists it must be housed "under the auspices of the Third International". Emma bristles:
Since my arrival I found scores of Anarchists in prison and their Press suppressed. I explained that I could not think of working with the Soviet Government so long as my comrades were in prison for opinion's sake. I also told him of the resolutions of the Moscow Anarchist Conference. He listened patiently and promised to bring the matter to the attention of his party. "But as to free speech," he remarked, "that is, of course, a bourgeois notion. There can be no free speech in a revolutionary period.
The conversation with Lenin compounds Emma's concerns:
Free speech, free Press, the spiritual achievements of centuries, what were they to this man? A Puritan, he was sure his scheme alone could redeem Russia. Those who served his plans were right, the others could not be tolerated.
A shrewd Asiatic, this Lenin. He knows how to play on the weak sides of men by flattery, rewards, medals. I left convinced that his approach to people was purely utilitarian, for the use he could get out of them for his scheme. And his scheme--was it the Revolution?
It is Peter Kropotkin who finally offers insight into the Leninist rise to power, and its consequent abandonment of principle, telling Emma "early in the October period the Bolsheviki began to subordinate the interests of the Revolution to the establishment of their dictatorship, which coerced and paralysed every social activity."
He spoke with much feeling of the oppression, the persecution, the hounding of every shade of opinion, and cited numerous instances of the misery and distress of the people. He emphasized that the Bolsheviki had discredited Socialism and Communism in the eyes of the Russian people.
"Why haven't you raised your voice against these evils, against this machine that is sapping the life blood of the Revolution?" I asked. He gave two reasons. As long as Russia was being attacked by the combined Imperialists, and Russian women and children were dying from the effects of the blockade, he could not join the shrieking chorus of the ex-revolutionists in the cry of "Crucify!" He preferred silence. Secondly, there was no medium of expression in Russia itself. To protest to the Government was useless. Its concern was to maintain itself in power. It could not stop at such "trifles" as human rights or human lives. Then he added: "We have always pointed out the effects of Marxism in action. Why be surprised now?"
