My Disillusionment in Russia

When the United States deported Emma Goldman to Russia in 1919, she arrived hoping to see the revolution she had championed for decades. What she found instead is the subject of this bitter, clear-eyed memoir. Drawing on two years of travel and interviews across the country, Goldman describes the machinery of Bolshevik power: the silencing of dissent, the persecution of fellow radicals, the crushing of the Kronstadt sailors’ revolt. As an anarchist, she attacks not only Lenin’s policies but the premise that a centralized state could ever deliver freedom. Her disillusionment is personal, written by someone who gave everything to the cause and felt betrayed by its outcome. A firsthand account and a lasting critique of authoritarian socialism, it is free to read as a PDF and EPUB.