The Kate Sharpley Library are pleased to announce two new publications dealing with Bolshevik repression of Anarchists: An eyewitness account of the 1921 hunger strike in Moscow; and a special double issue of “KSL: Bulletin of the Kate Sharpley Library”, dealing with Anarchists in the Gulag, prison and exile under the Bolsheviks.
1) New pamphlet: A Grand Cause: The Hunger Strike and the Deportation of Anarchists From Soviet Russia by Grigorii Petrovich Maksimov (G. P. Maximoff) with a biographical essay by Anatoly Dubovik, translated by Szarapow.
Grigorii Petrovich Maksimov (better known to Western readers as G. P. Maximoff) was Secretary of Russia’s Anarcho-Syndicalist Confederation and editor of Golos Truda (The Voice of Labour). He experienced at first hand the Bolshevik repression which crushed other revolutionaries and subordinated popular revolt to party dictatorship. This is his story of the 1921 hunger strike in which some of the leading lights of Russian anarchism staked their lives in a desperate gamble to expose Bolshevik repression – and win their freedom.
This text comes from his indictment of the Bolshevik regime The Guillotine at Work: Twenty Years of Terror in Russia (1940). It has been footnoted by the Kate Sharpley Library to throw the light on the stories of other Russian anarchists as part of our Anarchists in the Gulag, Prison and Exile Project.
2) Special double issue of “KSL: Bulletin of the Kate Sharpley Library”.
This issue of the KSL Bulletin includes a Latvian anarchist’s view of Moscow in 1918, a tribute to Khodounov, one of the anarchist activists killed by the Cheka in the raids there in April 1918, texts on two Italian anarchist victims of the Bolshevik regime, a letter from Efim Yarchuk, (author of “Kronstadt in the Russian Revolution”) and a new biographical essay on Alexei Borovoi, one of the most important anarchists who stayed, and died, in Russia. Leaving the Soviet Union, we finish off with a review of the memoirs of Polish anarchist and 1944 Warsaw Rising survivor, Pawel Lew Marek.
See also : Anarchism 3 Socialist Alternative 0 | Lenin On Trial | Don’t know what i want, But i know how to get it | Resistance is Utile: Critchley responds to Zizek (Harper’s Review, May 2008)