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The man who most influenced Sam’s adult life was of an entirely different sort: self-disciplined, ascetic, scientific, deeply intellectual, prolific scholar, writer; a person of impeccable ethical behavior, and courageous beyond imagination. His name was Gregorii Petrovich Maximoff: one of the great figures in the history of twentieth-century Russian anarchism. They met in 1926, two years after Maximoff’s arrival in Chicago and four years after he was expelled from the Soviet Union with the stipulation of summary execution should he return. He taught Sam many things, most importantly how to live.

We need historical context to appreciate this remark.

Maximoff was born in 1893 in the village of Matyushenko, Smolensk Province. His parents sent him to Seminary to study for the priesthood, but he renounced religion the year before his ordination and switched to the study of science instead. He graduated Petrograd Agricultural Academy as a qualified agronomist in 1915. That same year he was required to fulfill his military obligation; educated and privileged, he was of course to be sent to officer’s training school. But Maximoff turned that down, preferring to serve as a common soldier.

The Tsarist regime was crumbling, the German’s were invading on the western front, conditions in the countryside and the cities were deteriorating rapidly, the nation was in turmoil, there was general agreement that something had to be done. Maximoff applied his rational self to the problem. He delved deeply into the radical literature of the period, trying to determine which ideas best applied to the Russian situation. He was urgently concerned with the kind of society that would emerge after the fall of the Tsar. The ideas that most impressed him were expressed by two Russian anarchists of markedly different temperaments: Michael Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin—the latter was a prince, who hated that title, and threw it all away for a stay in the Tsar’s dungeon, the same residence Bakunin had occupied a generation earlier, chained to a wall. Maximoff became an anarcho-communist (or communalist, as he sometimes described his credo).

To simplify a complex relationship, the Bolsheviks and anarchists were genetic enemies. The Bolsheviks, from their first moment, were dedicated to establishing a totalitarian State. The anarchists for their part did not believe in the State, certainly not in the exercise of centralized State power by the Communist Party, itself centralized into the authority of one individual—namely Lenin. They believed power should rest in freely associating committees of workers, peasants, and soldiers: naturally evolved societal units, such as on-the-job unions and farm cooperatives, whose representatives are freely elected, rotated, and given no special privileges. These grass-roots structures, which grew organically in the course of the Revolution, were the Soviets.

“All power to the Soviets!” That was the rallying cry of the Revolution, which was a spontaneous event, engineered by no single party or group, and certainly not the Bolsheviks, who in those early days dared not make that claim. They were in fact a distinct minority. But once in power they immediately set about to crush, capture, and emasculate the Soviets—to keep them in name only, and reduce them to organs of the State. They did this through a combination of state-induced terror (the Cheka, grandfather of the KGB), relentless propaganda, and dedicated Bolshevik worms “boring from within.” Revolts were put down by military force, often with troops imported from far away and lied to, because those familiar with the issues could not be trusted to turn against their people. The anarchists fought the Bolsheviks, and their fate was slander, exile, imprisonment, and murder.

Sam writes in the introduction to The Guillotine at Work that Maximoff coordinated the anarchist resistance to the domination of the labor movement by the Bolshevik state, organizing the All-Russian Conference of Factory Committees (October 1917) and before that the Petrograd Factory Committees (June 1917). He was active not only in student and workers’ circles, but also among the peasants, where his agricultural knowledge and understanding of their problems proved most effective.

Maximoff was an editor of the Golos Truda (Voice of Labor)printing collective, which, along with its bookshops in Moscow and Petrograd, circulated anarcho-syndicalist books and pamphlets throughout Russia: most importantly the works of Bakunin, Kropotkin, and others. Golos Truda was soon suppressed and—in an act of courage—Maximoff and comrades promptly proceeded to publish Volny Golos Truda (Free Voice of Labor).

Sam later wrote that “Maximoff’s pre-eminent place in this history of Russian anarchism rests upon his ability to adjust theory to the practical needs of the workers. He formulated workable, constructive libertarian alternatives to Bolshevism: free Soviets; grass-roots housing and neighborhood committees; self-management of industry through federations of factory committees; industrial unions; agricultural collectives and communes; networks of non-­interest, non-profit co-operative agencies for credit and exchange. He envisioned a vast network of voluntary organizations embracing the myriad operations of a complex society.”

In the spring of 1919 Maximoff went to Kharkov (a major center of steel production and heavy industry—you might call it the Pittsburgh of the Ukraine ) to work in the statistics department of the Northern Bureau of the All-Russian Union of Metal Workers. When the Bolsheviks conscripted him into the Red Army for propaganda work, he refused. Instead, he volunteered for something far more dangerous: frontline combat against the advancing White Guards, who had invaded Russia seeking to install the old regime…but on the condition that Lenin abolish the Cheka, stop breaking strikes and terrorizing the peasants, and restore civil liberties and power to the Soviets. Fat chance! Maximoff was arrested and summarily sentenced to death. He was saved from “the wall” by the Kharkov Steel Workers, who threatened a general strike; such was the standing of the man.

He remained in prison, however. He described that delightful experience in “One Day in the Cheka’s Cellars,” a chapter in his masterful The Guillotine at Work. Think of it as precursor to Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, as Lenin was precursor to Stalin.

Maximoff’s imprisonment was part of a larger pattern: the subjugation of the entire society to Bolshevik rule. In those early days Lenin’s regime was shaky and he saw the biggest threat came not from the right, but from the left—from those instrumental in forging the Revolution. He cracked down hard on all elements, and especially the anarchists. Thousands were imprisoned, thousands murdered, their fates lost to history. Yet the anarchists had strong support in the still to be tamed unions, and most importantly they had military power in the Ukraine. There, Nestor Makhno led an informal, shifting, but in its own way disciplined army of guerrilla fighters—massing at its peak to thirty-thousand men. Makhno has been called a bandit, an anti-Semite, a rapist, a plunderer—and much more—by apologists for the Bolshevik and the feudal regimes alike. None of that is true. In fact, independent historians have verified the opposite. I see a rough analogy between Makhno and the anarchist insurrectionary peasant leader Emiliano Zapata, who fought in Mexico during the same period. Like Zapata, Makhno was a brilliant strategist and the Red Army needed him to blunt the advance of the Whites across the Ukraine and into Russia. So Lenin and Trotsky agreed to Makhno’s demand: That all anarchists be released from prison and from the control of the Cheka. And so Maximoff was released.

His “freedom” was brief. With the Makhno partisans playing a key role, the Whites were driven from the Ukraine, and were in retreat on other fronts as well. Confident now, Lenin and Trotsky turned against Makhno, treating previous agreements as so much toilet paper. They brought overwhelming Red Army force to the Ukraine, and also luck; a typhus epidemic had decimated half of Makhno’s men before a shot was fired. Makhno and the remnants of his followers crossed the border into Romania, and I will leave their sad story to others, saying only that Makhno died in Paris as he was born in the Ukraine: in poverty and obscurity. He was forty-five years old. Not all was lost, however. While in Paris he befriended a young Spaniard, on the run, by the name of Buenaventura Durruti.

The Bolshevik ascendancy was successful on other fronts as well. Independent unions were abolished. The revolt—or more accurately the protest—of the Kronstadt sailors, who demanded that the regime restore civil liberties and the free elections of the Soviets, was drowned in the blood of the same eighteen-thousand men Trotsky had exalted as “the flower of the revolution” a few years earlier. Widespread strikes and peasant rebellions were put down with a ruthlessness that would have shocked the Tsar. Pitched battles in the streets—among other actions, the anarchists raided prisons to free all political prisoners—were doomed. The back of the resistance was broken.

The Guillotine at Work: Twenty Years of Terror in Russia is Maximoff’s masterpiece. Over six-hundred pages, in two volumes, it stands after all these years as a searing indictment of Bolshevik rule, of Marxism, of the dangers of the concentration of state power. He lays the origin of that vast crime, the Soviet State, at the doorstep of Lenin, and not at his demented successor, Stalin, as apologists have done. These passages are from Bill Nowlin’s excellent preface to the 1979 edition (rearranged slightly for our purposes).

Lenin, according to Maximoff, “followed in the footsteps of the French Jacobins.” He believed in the necessity and even desirability of terror to implement his programme.… and the legitimacy of his authority. Maximoff presents scores of quotations from Lenin’s published works in which Lenin urged shootings of political opponents, urged against sentimentality in the waging of political struggle and urged his fellow Bolsheviks to adopt unashamedly a policy of red terror. Maximoff charges that Lenin deliberately chose to provoke civil war in the countryside, to terrorize the peasantry and force their compliance with the forced grain requisitions, to subject them to state regimentation: “That we brought civil war to the village is something that we hold up as a merit,” wrote Lenin.

The use of the death penalty was very rare in Tsarist Russia. When the Bolsheviks came to power one of the first things they did (in Lenin’s absence) was to abolish the death penalty. Lenin reacted furiously, “beside himself with indignation” in Trotsky’s description. “How,” he demanded to know, “can a revolution be made without executions?” Maximoff compiles, from official Bolshevik sources, statistical summaries of the number of executions in each year of Lenin’s rule. Estimates based on these figures range from 200,000 to over 1,500,000 shootings during Lenin’s period of leadership. Maximoff is willing to settle for the most conservative of all figures.

There is no question but that the Russian Revolution was a bloody affair. It would be unfair for anyone to attribute all of the deaths to Lenin’s policies, all 10,000,000 to 12,000,000 lives. Any revolution takes lives. The white guardist ­counter-revolutionaries were certainly responsible for many deaths. The point is that many, if not most, of these millions of lives were shed not just because of the inevitable cost of revolutionary struggle but because Lenin insisted on implementing his own view of how that struggle should develop.… [Maximoff’s] book stands as one of the most comprehensive documentations of the terror of the early Soviet state, which began under Lenin and was not just a Stalinist development. The principal lesson Maximoff wished to communicate, though, was that Marxism/Leninism was a theory which, despite its revolutionary style, was in essence counter-revolutionary.

Sam for his part said many times that he knew the Bolsheviks were no good from the moment they slaughtered the Tsar and his wife and children, which he considered a profoundly immoral act.

In 1921, Maximoff and a number of other anarchists were remanded by the Cheka to the notorious Taganka Prison in Moscow. This was tantamount to a death sentence, either by the firing squad, torture, or more slowly by rot in a labor camp. The imprisoned anarchists launched a desperate gamble to save their lives and call attention to Bolshevik tyranny.

They owed the success of that gamble to three people on the outside whose moral and physical courage matched theirs. I speak first of Olga Freydlin. The Tsar had originally sentenced her to eight years hard labor in 1909 for smuggling subversive literature, but because she was barely a teenager, he relented and sent her to lifetime banishment in Yenesink Province, Siberia. She returned to her native Ukraine with the release of political prisoners following the February 1917 revolution and promptly resumed her anarchist activities. A year later she met an earnest young man named Gregorii Petrovich Maximoff, and became his wife/life partner. (Sam spoke of her tenderly many years later: “Loyal, tough, courageous—you can’t imagine!”). The others involved in the gamble are familiar to American radicals. Emma Goldman, deported by that indomitable G-man, J. Edgar Hoover, found herself a destitute guest of Lenin’s regime. How easy it would have been for a lesser woman than Goldman to rationalize, to keep her head down, to stay comfortable. Instead, she and her dearest life-long friend, Alexander Berkman, also deported, rose in opposition, and in support of the imprisoned anarchists.

The three of them were well aware of how short was the distance between their freedom and the Taganka cellar.

The gamble: thirteen anarchists, including Maximoff, declared a hunger strike. The strike was timed to coincide with a prestigious conference in Moscow, that of the International Red Trade Unions (or Profintern). Though it was orchestrated by the Bolsheviks, many of the unions in attendance were independent, and even anarchistic. Olga, Emma, and Alexander—and others—fell upon the delegates and explained the situation. The delegates demanded the prisoners’ release. The tension built. The conference threatened to blow-up in the face of the regime. The hunger strike stretched to ten days.

Lenin and Trotsky were clever men and not without charm. They claimed that there were no anarchists in prison. All of them are free, they said, offering addresses as proof. And sure enough, there was a print shop in a basement somewhere, free to publish. When the delegates arrived they found a harmless crack-pot cranking a crude mimeograph machine. But the charm-offensive backfired. The delegates were leaders of thousands, and in some cases, hundreds of thousands of men. Certainly, they were not fools and not pleased to be taken as such. The basement incident did not sit well. It was the origin of a remark I overheard an elderly man make to my father, some thirty years later: “And I told Lenin, the son of a beetch, I am leaving!” He was Armando Borghi, a leader at that time of the Italian syndicalists.

“Lenin?” I asked Sam, when we are alone. “The Russian guy? He knew Lenin?” I was, maybe, fifteen years old.

“Yeah, Lenin! Who was he? He was a man, flesh and blood, like any man.”

So, finally, Lenin and Trotsky did the expedient thing. They released the anarchists, under the condition of lifetime exile, with the understanding they would be shot should they return. Having no other choice, the anarchists took the “compromise,” and escaped with their lives, Berkman and Goldman among them, first to Berlin. Some remained there, others moved on to Paris, London, and the United States. In 1924, Olga and Gregorii, arrived in Chicago. They wasted no time in joining the IWW—not a symbolic act. Gregorii promptly founded Golus Trushenika (Worker’s Voice) the Russian-language newspaper of the IWW that, at its peak, circulated among perhaps ten thousand exiles throughout North America.