Alexander berkman

Alexander Berkman (Vilnius, Lithuania, November 21, 1870 – Nice, France, June 28, 1936) was an anarchist writer.

Biography

He was the son of a wealthy Jewish businessman. He was orphaned before he was eighteen and decided to emigrate to the United States, where he met his future partner and lover Emma Goldman, a Russian immigrant who was then working as a clerk in a textile factory.

Heavily influenced by the works of Johann Most, Berkman and Goldman became activists by becoming involved in the campaign for the release of the men who were taken prisoner in the Haymarket bombing in 1886. Thereafter they remained closely linked to the anarchist movement.

When in 1892 Henry Clay Frick, a wealthy businessman and owner of a Homestead steel mill, decided to put down his workers' strike attempts, causing a violent day-long confrontation that resulted in sixty injuries and the murder of ten workers, Berkman decided to echo the anarchist doctrines that defended violent actions or Attentats as a means to achieve revolutionary change. Thus, he entered the tycoon's offices and tried to kill Frick with two shots, who nevertheless escaped, and Berkman was arrested and sentenced to twenty-two years in prison, of which he finally served fourteen.

Freed in 1906, Berkman and Goldman spearheaded the anarchist movement in the United States, clandestinely publishing radical weeklies such as Mother Earth or Blast, and books such as Anarchism and Other Essays (1910) by Goldman or Memoirs of an Anarchist in Prison (1912) by Berkman, the latter published in Spanish by the Melusina publishing house. After various incidents and accusations, they were deported to the Soviet Union during the Red Scare of 1919, but after the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921 they moved to Sweden, Germany and finally France, continuing to denounce the Soviet government with their books. The Bolshevik Myth (1925), Letters from Russian Prisons (1925) or The ABC of Libertarian Communism (1929).

Berkman's health and finances at the time were quite precarious and he decided to end his life. He committed suicide in Nice on June 28, 1936.

Disenchantment in Russia: 1920-1922

In 1919, Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman and 247 others (socialists, anarchists, trade unionists) are deported from the United States to revolutionary Russia.

In his book The Bolshevik Myth, Alexander Berkman recounts his journey through Russian geography in the 1920s, from Moscow to Siberia via Georgia, but also his personal change from unsupported fissures to the Bolsheviks and their revolutionary process to their frontal opposition to the Soviet regime. Berkman's testimony, translated into Spanish for the first time in 2013, traces the Russian Revolution just before the Kronstadt rebellion of 1921.

The Kronstadt Rebellion

Alexander Berkman wrote his text The Kronstadt Rebellion, which was one of the first public denunciations of these events.

Book Cover The Kronstadt Rebellion

A short time later, Alexander Berkman left Russia for good.

Works

• The Bolshevik myth, La Malatesta editorial, 2013. PDF
• The Kronstadt Rebellion, La Malatesta editorial, 2011.
• Memories of an anarchist in prison, 2007.
• The ABC of libertarian Communism.