(Alexander Berkman was a twentieth-century American revolu...)
Alexander Berkman was a twentieth-century American revolutionary. Like the abolitionist John Brown before him, Berkman was hugely idealistic, ready to go to the furthest extreme of self-sacrifice and violence on behalf of justice and civil rights. He decided to assassinate industrialist Henry Clay Frick after reading in the newspaper that Pinkertons hired by Frick had opened fire on the Homestead strikers, killing men, women, and children. Berkman’s bungled attempt cost him fifteen years in a federal penitentiary. Upon his release, he became an effective agitator against conscription and was again imprisoned and eventually deported to Russia, where he saw at first hand the early days of Bolshevism. Berkman’s writings remain a lasting and impassioned record of intense political transformation. Featuring a new introduction by Howard Zinn, Life of an Anarchist contains Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, Berkman’s account of his years in prison; The Bolshevik Myth, his eyewitness account of the early days of the Russian Revolution; and The ABC of Anarchism, the classic text on the nature of anarchism in the twentieth century. Also included are a selection of letters between Berkman and his lifelong companion Emma Goldman, and a generous sampling from Berkman’s other publications.
https://www.amazon.com/Life-Anarchist-Alexander-Berkman-Reader/dp/1583226621?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1583226621
https://www.amazon.com/Prison-Memoirs-Anarchist-Alexander-Berkman-ebook/dp/B004UJDEEQ?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B004UJDEEQ
(Now and After: The ABC of Communist Anarchism is an intro...)
Now and After: The ABC of Communist Anarchism is an introduction to the principles of anarchism and anarchist communism written by Alexander Berkman. First published in 1929 by Vanguard Press, after parts of it had appeared in the Freie Arbeiter Stimme, Now and After has been reprinted many times, often under the title What Is Communist Anarchism? or What Is Anarchism?.
https://www.amazon.com/Now-After-ABC-Communist-Anarchism/dp/1725113686?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1725113686
(5 works of Alexander Berkman Lithuanian anarchist (1870-1...)
5 works of Alexander Berkman Lithuanian anarchist (1870-1936) This ebook presents a collection of 5 works of Alexander Berkman. A dynamic table of contents allows you to jump directly to the work selected. Table of Contents: - Deportation Its Meaning and Menace - Last Message to the People of America - Down With the Anarchists! - Now and After - The ABC of Communist Anarchism - Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist - The Bolshevik Myth
https://www.amazon.com/Works-Alexander-Berkman-ebook/dp/B00BA4AGJ0?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B00BA4AGJ0
(THESE PAMPHLETS, ISSUED HERE in book form for the first ti...)
THESE PAMPHLETS, ISSUED HERE in book form for the first time (The Russian Tragedy, The Russian Revolution and the Communist Party, The Kronstadt Rebellion), are Alexander Berkman’s first writings after leaving Russia in December of 1921. He had entered Russia just two years earlier, filled with devotion to the ideals of the Russian revolution and anxious to contribute his share to the revolutionary process. It was a return home for him, as he had lived his first 17 years in Russia and had grown up among the revolutionaries of that era. Now he was welcomed back as an important revolutionary exile from his adopted United States. Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, and 247 other “politicals” had been deported from the United States on December 21, 1919. Berkman and Goldman, the two most active anarchists in America since the turn of the century, had only recently each completed two year prison sentences for active opposition to the World War I draft (as founders and organisers of the No-Conscription League) and, though resentful of being so abruptly forced to terminate their organising in America, looked forward to enthusiastic participation in the revolutionary experiment in their native land, Russia. Two years in his native Russia, travelling widely for the Museum of the Revolution of which he was Chairman, provided both the background material for this analysis of the revolution and its betrayal by the Communists. Berkman left Russia, disappointed and angry, towards the end of 1921 and spent the remaining 14 years of his life in exile, welcome in no country, attempting to counter the myth of Bolshevism. He shot himself on June 28, 1936.
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Alexander Berkman was born on November 21, 1870, in Vilna, Russia (today Vilnius, Lithuania). He was one of five children, the son of prosperous middle-class Jewish parents. His father died when Berkman was a young boy, and his mother took the family from St. Petersburg, where his father had maintained a business, to Kovno (later Kaunas) in Russian Lithuania.
As a sensitive and impressionable youth, Berkman was considerably influenced by the propaganda acts of the Russian nihilists, which from time to time included assassination of prominent public figures. He emigrated to the United States in 1887 and in a short time became deeply involved in the activities of radical Jewish labor groups in New York City. In particular he came under the influence of Johann Most, the intellectual leader of the communist-anarchist groups of Germanand Russian ancestry in this country. Two years later he met Emma Goldman, who had also recently emigrated to America from the same background and district in Russia, thus beginning an association which was to last almost half a century.
The Homestead steel strike of 1892 catapulted the youthful Berkman into international news as a result of his sensational but abortive attempt on the life of Henry C. Frick, general manager of the Carnegie Steel Company, owners of the Homestead works, on July 23, 1892. His action, an impulsive, idealistic attempt to apply the communist-anarchist doctrine of "propaganda of the deed, " reflected his indignation at the killing of strikers in a pitched battle with Pinkerton agents. Convicted on six counts, he was sentenced to twenty-two years in Western Penitentiary in Pennsylvania. He served fourteen years of this sentence and upon his release in May 1906 spent much of the next five years preparing his Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (1912), a literary work which has been compared to the more famous memoirs of Peter Kropotkin.
Berkman then returned to the anarchist movement, editing a short-lived labor paper in San Francisco, the Blast, in which, among other causes, he began the campaign of demonstrations on behalf of the imprisoned labor leader Tom Mooney in 1916. He spoke in many cities prior to 1917, opposing United States entry into the first World War. His continued opposition to war policies and conscription after that event led to his arrest, along with Emma Goldman, in the summer of 1917. They were found guilty of conspiracy to obstruct the operation of the selective service law, sentenced to two years in federal prison, and fined $10, 000. Released from Atlanta penitentiary on October 1, 1919, Berkman was on December 21 deported to Russia, along with nearly 250 others classed by the Wilson administration as political undesirables - Emma Goldman among them.
Berkman, who had known Leon Trotsky, sympathized with the Russian Revolution in its early stages. Once in Russia, however, his enthusiasm rapidly cooled, especially after the suppression of the Kronstadt sailors' demonstration in 1921, and he finally left Russia in 1922. His diary of these days, The Bolshevik Myth, published in 1925, was one of the first radical criticisms of the Soviet experiment.
After a brief stay in Sweden, where he worked on behalf of political prisoners in Soviet jails and prison camps, he spent the remainder of his life in Germany and, after 1930, in France, trying to furnish aid to imprisoned anarchists and syndicalists, editing and publishing a number of bulletins and journals in which he sought to raise funds for this purpose, and occasionally translating Russian literary masterpieces, among them Gogol's The Gamblers and Marriage. His declining years were spent in loneliness and forced inactivity. Facing invalidism, with his health undermined by repeated prison severities, he took his own life in Nice, France, in which city he was buried.
Alexander Berkman became an important figure in the anarchist movement of the 20th century. He was also famous for his writings: Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (1912), The Russian Revolution and the Communist Party (1922), The Kronstadt Rebellion (1922), My Disillusionment in Russia (1923) and others.
(THESE PAMPHLETS, ISSUED HERE in book form for the first ti...)
(Now and After: The ABC of Communist Anarchism is an intro...)
(5 works of Alexander Berkman Lithuanian anarchist (1870-1...)
(Alexander Berkman was a twentieth-century American revolu...)
Alexander Berkman was a member of the Pioneers of Liberty.
Quotes from others about the person
"He is a man of rare single-mindedness, one of those whom it is a happiness to have known. " - Bertrand Russell
"Berkman is one of the most intelligent and courageous men America produced. " - H. L. Mencken
