from The Slow Burning Fuse.. shared with thanks by G. MAXIMOFF (Delo Truda, December 1934)
The following is taken from Russian anarchists’ manifesto: For a free Russia! https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/c2fsgf
The émigré workers and peasants yearned with all their hearts to go back to the old Russia which was at last working wonders in terms of overhauling society. But the war and the ensuing blockade erected insurmountable obstacles between them and the land of their birth.
Eventually the war and the blockade ended: there was no civil war in Russia as yet and many of those enthusiastic emigrants flowed back to their homeland as if to a promised land.
And what did they find there?
There they found a horrible reaction posing as “revolution”. They found a ferocious crackdown on all of the most basic human rights and all freedoms.
Stalin’s state terror
They found despotism ensconced there in the shape of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”; more specifically, they found dictatorship in a brand-new guise, the dictatorship of the “bureaucracy” over the proletariat and the entire population.
They found “state-controlled” economic enslavement, compared to which the wage-slavery in the capitalist countries was mere child’s play.
There they met up again with their old acquaintances: famine, deaths by the thousands, shootings, overcrowded prisons, concentration camps and the same old locations to which they had been banished under tsarism.
They ran up against the Asiatic tyranny of a powerful military and police state.
Finally, all of our people’s revolutionary gains and all the outcomes of the progressive efforts by generations prior to the revolution were not found to be alive and well but kept under glass in the Museum of the Revolution. And freedom and the Revolution itself were also under glass!
Such an arrangement is liveable only if we forget about human dignity completely in order to become a beast of burden. Our emigrants were forced to leave the country again, but this time cruelly wounded at heart.
Whereas freedom in a democratic republican society along capitalist lines and which rules out any economic equality is an illusion, socialism without freedom is slavery and brutishness (Bakunin made that sociological truth plain back in the 19th century).
We delo-trudovik anarchists want neither of those forms of oppression, not in Russia nor anywhere else. We find ourselves abroad again and for the very same reasons as in tsarist times. We hold it our sacred duty to our people and the whole of toiling humanity, to fight for a free Russia, for the welfare of all her population, for the economic equality without which any freedom is impossible; consequently, we declare ourselves irreconcilable enemies of the current Russian regime and we proclaim it and will proclaim to the workers of every land; we shall fight that regime until ultimate victory is achieved.
Russia’s experience has shown us that it is not enough (as all the statist socialists claim) to destroy economic ownership. Our country’s experience is proof that in order to achieve that we must also tear down the Sate which, even in its most liberal format, is inevitably destructive of all freedom, institutes privileges, generates a brand-new ruling class – the bureaucracy – and conjures up a statist brand of slavery, the most horrific of all forms of slavery in that it is all-encompassing.
Restoration and a deepening and broadening of the gains of November 1917. That is our goal.
We delo-trudovik anarchists want to see Russia become a free Federation of free communes, a free economic Federation of Factories, and “producer communes” harnessing the entirety of the people’s economy to the interests and for the welfare of all.
We want to see free, socially useful labour, equally incumbent upon all and morally mandatory for all as the basis for a brand-new free order.
What Stalin’s Great Terror can tell us about Russia today
We urge you to organize that order in our homeland; we call upon all our comrades, scattered abroad, to commit to this struggle..
We stand for equality, liberty and fraternity!
Join us!
G. MAXIMOFF (Delo Truda, December 1934)
The Free 