The Bolshevik Myth

Berkman was a committed anarchist deported from the United States to Russia in 1919, and he arrived expecting to witness the revolution he had championed for decades. This diary, kept between 1920 and 1922, records his growing dismay instead. Traveling across the young Soviet state, he watched the Bolshevik government silence its critics, jail fellow radicals, and crush the Kronstadt sailors who had once been the revolution’s pride. What began as hope curdles into a firsthand indictment of one-party rule and state terror. Berkman writes plainly, letting scenes and conversations carry the argument, and the book endures as a sharp warning from the left about revolutions that devour their own. Free to read here as a PDF and EPUB edition.