Background
Berkman was born in Vilna (Vilnius), then in Russia on November 21, 1869.
(In 1892, Alexander Berkman, Russian émigré, anarchist, an...)
In 1892, Alexander Berkman, Russian émigré, anarchist, and lover of Emma Goldman, attempted to assassinate industrialist Henry Clay Frick. The act was intended both as retribution for the massacre of workers in the Homestead strike and as an incitement to revolution. Captured and sentenced to serve a prison term of twenty-two years, Berkman struggled to make sense of the shadowy and brutalized world of the prison—one that hardly conformed to revolutionary expectation.
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1970
Berkman was born in Vilna (Vilnius), then in Russia on November 21, 1869.
Alexander Berkman emigrated to the United States in 1888. He became a member of the Pioneers of Freedom, one of the first Jewish anarchist groups founded by Russian immigrants, and later joined the German anarchist movement. Together with Emma Goldman, he led the anarchist movement in America.
In 1892 in Homestead, Pennsylvania, Berkman shot and attempted to kill the director of the steelworks as a protest against the treatment of the workers during a strike. Although he only wounded the director, he was sentenced to twenty-two years imprisonment, and was released after fourteen years.
He renewed his association with Emma Goldman and, during World War I, was convicted for engaging in propaganda against conscription and obstructing the draft. He was again sent to prison and upon his release in 1919, was deported to the USSR.
In 1922 he left the Soviet Union for Germany, and in 1925 moved to France.
Berkman’s publications included "Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist" (1970), "The Kronstadt Rebellion" (1922), "The Bolshevik Myth" (1925), "The Anti-Climax" (1925), and "Now and After, the ABC of Communist Anarchism" (1929).
In 1936, he committed suicide in Nice.
(In 1892, Alexander Berkman, Russian émigré, anarchist, an...)
1970Berkman could not reconcile Bolshevik philosophy with his libertarian principles and was disappointed with the Bolshevik regime that he found in the USSR.