Graham R (Ed.) - Anarchism - A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas Volume One - From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)

The Russian Revolution /307
feel a solid foundation under their feet; they mllst feel truly free; they must know that
the work they do is their own; they must see in every social measure which is adopted
the manifestation of their will, their hopes and their aspirations. In short, the masses
must direct themselves in the largest meaning of those words ...
Proletarians of the world, look into the depths of your own beings, seek out the
truth and realize it yourselves: you will find it nowhere else.
Such is the watchword of the Russian revolution.
87. Voline: The Unknown Revolution (1947)
Valine (V. M. Eichenbaum, 1882- 1 945) joined with the Makhnovshchina in 1919 when the
Bolsheviks began a concerted attempt to crush the anarchist movement within areas under
Bolshevik control. He had been involved in the fo unding of the first workers' Soviet in St. Petersburg
in 1905. In 1907 he was sent into internal exile but escaped to France, where he met
various anarchists, including Sebastien Faure, with whom he later collaborated on the latter's
Encyclopedie anarchiste (paris: Librairie internationale), 1926- 1 934. He actively opposed
the First World War, and had to leave France fo r the United States ill 1915 to avoid
internmellt. He joined the editorial board of the anarcho-syndicalist paper, Golos Truda,
which was thell being published from out of New York. When news of the February Revolution
reached them, the entire group returned to Russia to publish Golos Truda ill Petrograd (St.
Petersburg). In 1918 he helped fo und the anarchist Nabat Confederation in Ukraille, but had
to flee to areas under Makhnovist con/rol when the Bolsheviks began their clampdown all the
anarchist movement. He was ultimately captured by Bolshevik fo rces alld narrowly escaped
execution. He and several other anarchists, including Gregory Maksimov, went on a hunger
strike during the Red Trade Union International Congress in Moscow in 1921, eventually winning
their release from prison but being fo rced into exile. He died in Frallce ill 1945. His analysis
of the Russian Revolution, from which the fo llowing passages are taken, was published
posthumously in 1947 as The Unknown Revolution (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1993).
THE BOLSHEVIK IDEA WAS TO BUILD, on the ruins of the bourgeois state, a new
"Workers' State" to constitute a "workers' and peasants' government," and to establish
a "dictatorship of the proletariat."
The Anarchist idea [was and] is to transform the economic and social bases of
society without having recourse to a political state, to a government, or to a dictatorship
of any sort. That is, to achieve the Revolution and resolve its problems not by political
or statist means, but by means of natural and free activity, economic and social, of the associatiolls
of the workers themselves, after having overthrown the last capitalist government.