« Tsars and Commissars week 5  •  Slava Velikaya Oktyabyrskaya Revolutsiia! »

Comintern and Anarchists

November 2, 2007 in Cominform, Spanish Civil War, USSR, anarchism, anarchists, research, soviet

This is going to be a pamphlet - it will give me more space than an article and it will reach a wider audience…

Structure:

  • The founding of the Comintern and anarchists
  • The bolshevization of the Comintern, anarchism as deviance
  • The Comintern and anarchists in the third period
  • The Comintern and anarchists against fascism (including Spanish Civil War)

    • I want to look at two things - anarchist perceptions of the Comintern (already an amount out there), but more importantly Comintern perceptions of anarchists and anarchism. This becomes interesting, particularly given Rudolf Rocker’s assertion that the Bolsheviks adopted anarchist tactics (Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice, and Alexander Berkman’s attack on the lack of inclusion of anarchists in the founding of the Comintern (Berkman, What is Anarchism?), and in the light of a pamphlet from the Kate Sharpley Library, The CNT and the Russian Revolution and a new article in Kritika on the Bolshevik cooption of Kropotkin.

    Share/Save/Bookmark

    1 comment

    Comments feed for this article

    March 27, 2008 at 10:09 am

    ksl

    for ‘Bolsheviks adopted anarchist tactics’ get hold of Maximoff/Maximov’s ‘The Guillotine at Work’ - many copies of the Cienfuegos edition floating about, though that means you miss the horror stories in part two (only in the 1940 printing): the letters from exiles, lists of anarchists killed or disappeared.
    Also try Voline’s ‘Unknown Revolution’ of course.