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My Further Disillusionment in Russia
My Further Disillusionment in Russia is a 1924 non-fiction book by Emma Goldman, her continuation of My Disillusionment in Russia, the original publication in which the last twelve chapters were entirely missing, including the Afterword.
98 pages, Paperback
Published August 10, 2018
About the author
Emma Goldman
413 books1,068 followersEmma Goldman was a feminist anarchist known for her political activism, writing and speeches. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the twentieth century.
Born in Kovno in the Russian Empire (present-day Kaunas, Lithuania), Goldman emigrated to the US in 1885 and lived in New York City, where she joined the burgeoning anarchist movement.Attracted to anarchism after the Haymarket affair, Goldman became a writer and a renowned lecturer on anarchist philosophy, women's rights, and social issues, attracting crowds of thousands.
She and anarchist writer Alexander Berkman, her lover and lifelong friend, planned to assassinate Henry Clay Frick as an act of propaganda of the deed. Although Frick survived the attempt on his life, Berkman was sentenced to twenty-two years in prison. Goldman was imprisoned several times in the years that followed, for "inciting to riot" and illegally distributing information about birth control. In 1906, Goldman founded the anarchist journal Mother Earth.
In 1917, Goldman and Berkman were sentenced to two years in jail for conspiring to "induce persons not to register" for the newly instated draft. After their release from prison, they were arrested—along with hundreds of others—and deported to Russia.
Initially supportive of that country's Bolshevik revolution, Goldman quickly voiced her opposition to the Soviet use of violence and the repression of independent voices. In 1923, she wrote a book about her experiences, My Disillusionment in Russia. While living in England, Canada, and France, she wrote an autobiography called Living My Life. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, she traveled to Spain to support the anarchist revolution there. She died in Toronto on May 14, 1940, aged 70.
During her life, Goldman was lionized as a free-thinking "rebel woman" by admirers, and derided by critics as an advocate of politically motivated murder and violent revolution.Her writing and lectures spanned a wide variety of issues, including prisons, atheism, freedom of speech, militarism, capitalism, marriage, free love, and homosexuality. Although she distanced herself from first-wave feminism and its efforts toward women's suffrage, she developed new ways of incorporating gender politics into anarchism. After decades of obscurity, Goldman's iconic status was revived in the 1970s, when feminist and anarchist scholars rekindled popular interest in her life.
Born in Kovno in the Russian Empire (present-day Kaunas, Lithuania), Goldman emigrated to the US in 1885 and lived in New York City, where she joined the burgeoning anarchist movement.Attracted to anarchism after the Haymarket affair, Goldman became a writer and a renowned lecturer on anarchist philosophy, women's rights, and social issues, attracting crowds of thousands.
She and anarchist writer Alexander Berkman, her lover and lifelong friend, planned to assassinate Henry Clay Frick as an act of propaganda of the deed. Although Frick survived the attempt on his life, Berkman was sentenced to twenty-two years in prison. Goldman was imprisoned several times in the years that followed, for "inciting to riot" and illegally distributing information about birth control. In 1906, Goldman founded the anarchist journal Mother Earth.
In 1917, Goldman and Berkman were sentenced to two years in jail for conspiring to "induce persons not to register" for the newly instated draft. After their release from prison, they were arrested—along with hundreds of others—and deported to Russia.
Initially supportive of that country's Bolshevik revolution, Goldman quickly voiced her opposition to the Soviet use of violence and the repression of independent voices. In 1923, she wrote a book about her experiences, My Disillusionment in Russia. While living in England, Canada, and France, she wrote an autobiography called Living My Life. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, she traveled to Spain to support the anarchist revolution there. She died in Toronto on May 14, 1940, aged 70.
During her life, Goldman was lionized as a free-thinking "rebel woman" by admirers, and derided by critics as an advocate of politically motivated murder and violent revolution.Her writing and lectures spanned a wide variety of issues, including prisons, atheism, freedom of speech, militarism, capitalism, marriage, free love, and homosexuality. Although she distanced herself from first-wave feminism and its efforts toward women's suffrage, she developed new ways of incorporating gender politics into anarchism. After decades of obscurity, Goldman's iconic status was revived in the 1970s, when feminist and anarchist scholars rekindled popular interest in her life.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
February 26, 2025
Emma Goldman: the pinnacle critical thinker.
Welcome weary traveler who has come across my review for My Further Disillusionment with Russia. Like you, I have read plenty of communist sympathetic texts as well as western society critiques. Like you, I enjoy the Marxist critiques of capitalism and generally endorse social democratic policy. Like you, I’m horrified by the history of the Soviet communist regime. Like you, my mind has been utterly blown away when I’m gaslighted by modern day communists when I criticize Soviet Russia and have been belittled into believing that I’m simply an indoctrinated western propagandist. Well, my friend, this book is for you.
Is there anyone more apt to critique and provide an unbiased opinion of Soviet Russia and the Bolshevik revolution than a lefty leftist anarchist who was imprisoned and then deported from the US for being too radical left who visited Russia in 1921? In this book, there is no “western revisionist history”. Anarchist Emma Goldman simply gives her unadulterated opinion of the Bolshevik movement and what does she find?
It was bad. Very bad.
Goldman was hoping for an anarchist promised land when she came to Russia but she only found state-inflicted famines, political prisoners, rationing of food, tiered salary from the state, arrest and writers with dissenting opinions, state capitalism and an overall oppressive authoritarian regime. Hmm, sounds like everything else I’ve read about the USSR that is allegedly just western propaganda. All the bolshevik revolution did was a scene-change from the Romanovs sitting on a throne to Lenin sitting on that throne. Lenin was a politician, contorting his rhetoric and actions to stay in power just like any other politician before and after. The bolshevik’s bastardized the concept of revolution.
Goldman’s observations in the Afterword are simply brilliant. She is a fiercely intelligent thinker (she was also kind of a terrorist who plotted the assassination of Henry Clay Frick, so she’s no paragon of virtue). Goldman argues that the peasant class revolution that happened in Russia actually subverted Marxist ideas. Marx argued that a society needed a sufficient degree of industrialization to then move to a socialist revolution. Goldman states that the largely agrarian people of Russia didn’t even know about Marx theory and went ahead and started a revolution anyway, totally upending that theory. It was then the bolsheviks and the Lenin cadre that co-opted the movement and rebranded their own authoritarianism.
Reading this book was an exercise in confirmation bias for me and it honestly felt very good. I won’t let another modern day communist lead me to believe that the Soviets were “building communism” and how wonderful they were because they gave free education and healthcare to people. I got news for you: other modern “western” societies have done that except without the overt authoritarianism and overt civil rights violations. I’m sick and tired of the Soviet apologetics. It’s unfathomable insulting to the victims of that terrible, terrible, regime.
Welcome weary traveler who has come across my review for My Further Disillusionment with Russia. Like you, I have read plenty of communist sympathetic texts as well as western society critiques. Like you, I enjoy the Marxist critiques of capitalism and generally endorse social democratic policy. Like you, I’m horrified by the history of the Soviet communist regime. Like you, my mind has been utterly blown away when I’m gaslighted by modern day communists when I criticize Soviet Russia and have been belittled into believing that I’m simply an indoctrinated western propagandist. Well, my friend, this book is for you.
Is there anyone more apt to critique and provide an unbiased opinion of Soviet Russia and the Bolshevik revolution than a lefty leftist anarchist who was imprisoned and then deported from the US for being too radical left who visited Russia in 1921? In this book, there is no “western revisionist history”. Anarchist Emma Goldman simply gives her unadulterated opinion of the Bolshevik movement and what does she find?
It was bad. Very bad.
Goldman was hoping for an anarchist promised land when she came to Russia but she only found state-inflicted famines, political prisoners, rationing of food, tiered salary from the state, arrest and writers with dissenting opinions, state capitalism and an overall oppressive authoritarian regime. Hmm, sounds like everything else I’ve read about the USSR that is allegedly just western propaganda. All the bolshevik revolution did was a scene-change from the Romanovs sitting on a throne to Lenin sitting on that throne. Lenin was a politician, contorting his rhetoric and actions to stay in power just like any other politician before and after. The bolshevik’s bastardized the concept of revolution.
Goldman’s observations in the Afterword are simply brilliant. She is a fiercely intelligent thinker (she was also kind of a terrorist who plotted the assassination of Henry Clay Frick, so she’s no paragon of virtue). Goldman argues that the peasant class revolution that happened in Russia actually subverted Marxist ideas. Marx argued that a society needed a sufficient degree of industrialization to then move to a socialist revolution. Goldman states that the largely agrarian people of Russia didn’t even know about Marx theory and went ahead and started a revolution anyway, totally upending that theory. It was then the bolsheviks and the Lenin cadre that co-opted the movement and rebranded their own authoritarianism.
Reading this book was an exercise in confirmation bias for me and it honestly felt very good. I won’t let another modern day communist lead me to believe that the Soviets were “building communism” and how wonderful they were because they gave free education and healthcare to people. I got news for you: other modern “western” societies have done that except without the overt authoritarianism and overt civil rights violations. I’m sick and tired of the Soviet apologetics. It’s unfathomable insulting to the victims of that terrible, terrible, regime.
October 29, 2016
Don't meet your heroes. That's what they say. Emma Goldman is kind of a hero--she was a true radical in early 20th Century America, and they expelled her for it. This book is a chronicle of her disappointment in the radical revolution--arguably the revolution with the greatest potential for paradigm change in human history--in Russia, and her gradual realization that humans massing under aspirational banners and behind idealistic rhetoric are nonetheless subject to human vices. I say don't meet your heroes because this book was quite boring. Boring, repetitive, and without much poetic voice--and this from the woman who deployed the rallying cry "No gods, no masters!"
Still, it's admirable that Goldman didn't take the wholesale refutation of the Communist principle and go all Ayn Rand on us. It must have been superhuman to have resisted that impulse, but Goldman succeeds, as we know from history, and continued on as a radical and anarchist for the rest of her life.
I think next I may read a book about Emma Goldman, as opposed to a memoir by her own hand.
Still, it's admirable that Goldman didn't take the wholesale refutation of the Communist principle and go all Ayn Rand on us. It must have been superhuman to have resisted that impulse, but Goldman succeeds, as we know from history, and continued on as a radical and anarchist for the rest of her life.
I think next I may read a book about Emma Goldman, as opposed to a memoir by her own hand.
February 1, 2020
This is a continuation of Goldman's "My Disillusionment in Russia", to which I gave five stars and wrote a goodreads review. Here she does two things. She continues to provide evidence of what she saw and heard talking to many people high and low in several locales during nearly two years (1920-1921) in Russia following the 1917 revolutions there: the crushing of the revolution by the top-down brutal dictatorship imposed by the Bolsheviks where the ends justified any means whatever and the means then replaced the ends.
Goldman finishes with an afterword that is about a fifth of the book and discusses her ideas about revolutions. It is not without interest, but it has anarchist view, rather unlike the rest of these two books which appear to be fairly neutral reporting of facts. Goldman writes well, thinks well and has done her own thinking. She cares about people.
With these two first-hand accounts and later similar reports by others about the Soviet system, there was no excuse whatever for the worship of Soviet communism that swept socialists, communists and others off their feet around the world during subsequent decades, worship that hardly abated after the Moscow show trials of the late 1930's, the crushing of the Hungarian revolution 0f 1956 and the Czech uprising of 1968, the Berlin Wall of 1961, and many other outrages. There are worshipers still.
Goldman finishes with an afterword that is about a fifth of the book and discusses her ideas about revolutions. It is not without interest, but it has anarchist view, rather unlike the rest of these two books which appear to be fairly neutral reporting of facts. Goldman writes well, thinks well and has done her own thinking. She cares about people.
With these two first-hand accounts and later similar reports by others about the Soviet system, there was no excuse whatever for the worship of Soviet communism that swept socialists, communists and others off their feet around the world during subsequent decades, worship that hardly abated after the Moscow show trials of the late 1930's, the crushing of the Hungarian revolution 0f 1956 and the Czech uprising of 1968, the Berlin Wall of 1961, and many other outrages. There are worshipers still.
November 26, 2017
(This is a joint review of "My Disillusionment in Russia" and "Further Disillusionment," as they were intended to be one book.)
Reads almost like a crude parable about how the ends don't always justify the means and authoritarian "socialism" is bad, except it's taken from Emma's actual experience. Bolshevik apologists tell her that free speech is bourgeois and that the level of repression was only necessary because Russia was under threat from outside forces (both sentiments not uncommon among contemporary leftists). At first she wants to believe them, but as she sees the preponderance of crushing poverty, corruption, and state violence, and speaks to more people outside of the Party, she realizes the Revolution has been quashed. Important to note this is years before Stalinism--Lenin and Trotsky come off looking reeeeal bad.
Most of it is told in a linear narrative structure that would get boring if the content weren't so engrossingly horrific. I was struck by the prominent role of straight-up corruption--it's not just bad ideology of powerful actors that will get you, but unequal power distribution itself. Emma also talks a lot about the political repression of anarchists and any dissidents really, there's some ugly stuff that eventually moves her to speak out against the Bolshevik state, though at first she didn't want to give ammunition for Western capitalist propaganda (sound familiar?). She saves most of her analysis for the afterword, and pins the blame on the whole statist model of revolution itself. I don't know that she's wrong.
Reads almost like a crude parable about how the ends don't always justify the means and authoritarian "socialism" is bad, except it's taken from Emma's actual experience. Bolshevik apologists tell her that free speech is bourgeois and that the level of repression was only necessary because Russia was under threat from outside forces (both sentiments not uncommon among contemporary leftists). At first she wants to believe them, but as she sees the preponderance of crushing poverty, corruption, and state violence, and speaks to more people outside of the Party, she realizes the Revolution has been quashed. Important to note this is years before Stalinism--Lenin and Trotsky come off looking reeeeal bad.
Most of it is told in a linear narrative structure that would get boring if the content weren't so engrossingly horrific. I was struck by the prominent role of straight-up corruption--it's not just bad ideology of powerful actors that will get you, but unequal power distribution itself. Emma also talks a lot about the political repression of anarchists and any dissidents really, there's some ugly stuff that eventually moves her to speak out against the Bolshevik state, though at first she didn't want to give ammunition for Western capitalist propaganda (sound familiar?). She saves most of her analysis for the afterword, and pins the blame on the whole statist model of revolution itself. I don't know that she's wrong.
Want to Read
April 8, 2015pdf - us.archives.org
July 31, 2023
The final second part- hammers home the problems with the Bolshevik communist revolution and painting it as a failure- something I think history would corroborate. What I like here is that this isn’t about vilifying the left but in essence stating that the Russian experiment did not go far enough to allow self and community determination- a form of liberalism that even some staunch republicans could buy into- a very interesting document.
June 10, 2022
It was a surprise to me how clearly Emma saw the Russian reality. The history she writes about was part of my life. I was liberated in 1990 from the terrible regime that tore my family apart. The wounds will never heal. And the Russians will make sure that the suffering never ends.
January 3, 2024
Defender el bolchevismo en el siglo XxI en como ser Confederado, no te enteras de en qué mundo vives
March 12, 2025
As much as I like EG, this is sobering to see how wrong she was in her optimism and praise of Russia. Different system, same problems.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews