Alexander Berkman

The house in Saint Petersburg had servants and a summer place. Alexander Berkman was born in Vilna in 1870, the youngest child of a prosperous leather merchant, and the family moved to the capital when his father won the right to live outside the Pale of Settlement. Two things broke it. His favorite uncle, Mark Natanson, was sentenced to death for revolutionary activity. Then his father died, the business was sold, and the family had to leave the city. At school he handed in an essay titled There Is No God and was demoted a year for precocious godlessness. His mother died in 1887. He was expelled the same year, caught stealing exam papers and labelled a nihilist conspirator, and in 1888 he sailed for New York.

The trial took four hours. Berkman shot and stabbed Henry Clay Frick on July 23, 1892, during the Homestead lockout, and Frick lived. He refused a lawyer, told the court he did not recognize its authority, was convicted on six counts, and drew 21 years plus a year in the workhouse. He served 14. The rest of the work came after: Mother Earth from 1907, The Blast in San Francisco in 1916, the defense of Tom Mooney, and the No Conscription League of 1917, which put him in Atlanta and then on a boat to Russia.

The point of the act was the workers. Berkman had never worked in steel and had no tie to the union, and he expected the shooting to show the Homestead men that the anarchists were with them and that the system could be struck. It did the opposite. The men who wrestled him down were workers in Frick's building, though accounts of the scuffle differ. Workers and anarchists condemned the attempt. Johann Most, who had preached propaganda by the deed, wrote that in America such acts could only backfire and called this one a total failure. Public support for the union fell away, the strike collapsed that autumn, and the Amalgamated Association never recovered. Emma Goldman, who had helped plan it, wrote in 1931 that the end in this case justified the means. She never took it back.

The government deported him on December 21, 1919, aboard the Buford, one of 249 people on a ship the press called the Soviet Ark. He had never applied for citizenship. He reached Russia exhilarated and left two years later, after Trotsky sent troops against the Kronstadt sailors, writing that the revolution was dead. What lasted was the writing. Paul Avrich called Now and After the clearest exposition of communist anarchism in any language, and Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist has been reprinted steadily since 1912. He shot himself in Nice on June 28, 1936, and took a day to die. He wanted his ashes buried near the Haymarket graves in Chicago. There was no money for it.

Alexander Berkman's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Prison Blossoms other
  Some 60 hand-written issues passed cell to cell inside Western Penitentiary 1897
• Mother Earth other
  Edited, not founded — he ran Emma Goldman's journal from 1907 to 1915 and took circulation to 10,000 1907
• The Blast other
  His own San Francisco paper, published for 18 months 1916
• Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist book
  Mother Earth Publishing Association — the 14 years, written from the inside out 1912
• The Bolshevik Myth (Diary 1920-1922) book
  Boni and Liveright — what he saw in Russia and why he left 1925
• Now and After: The ABC of Communist Anarchism book
  Vanguard Press — reprinted for decades as What Is Anarchism? 1929

• 1887 aged ~17 Expelled from the gymnasium and labelled a nihilist conspirator Caught stealing exam papers. His mother died the same year.
• 1888 aged ~18 Reaches New York knowing no one and no English He fell in with the campaign to free the men convicted after Haymarket and joined the Pioneers of Liberty.
• 1889 aged ~19 Meets Emma Goldman He took her to hear Johann Most speak. They were inseparable for the next four decades.
• July 23, 1892 aged 21 Shoots and stabs Henry Clay Frick in Pittsburgh Frick survived and told the men holding Berkman to leave him to the law.
• September 19, 1892 aged 21 Tried, convicted and sentenced in four hours He refused counsel and read a 40-page statement in German through a translator he judged incompetent.
• May 18, 1906 aged 35 Released after 14 years, the last 10 months in the county workhouse One stretch of solitary had run 16 months.
• June 15, 1917 aged 46 Arrested with Goldman for conspiring against the draft Two years in Atlanta, a 10,000 dollar fine, and the possibility of deportation.
• December 21, 1919 aged 49 Deported to Russia aboard the Buford One of 249 aliens on the ship the press called the Soviet Ark.
• June 28, 1936 aged 65 Dies in Nice of a self-inflicted gunshot He lived most of the day. Goldman reached him before he lost consciousness.

• Henry Clay Frick 1849–1919
  Dominated coke supply for steelmaking and ran Carnegie Steel during the Homestead strike. attempted to kill
• Emma Goldman 1869–1940
  Anarchist orator and editor whose free-speech and birth-control agitation led to her 1919 deportation. comrade and co-defendant
• Andrew Carnegie 1835–1919
  Steel magnate who built one of the largest steel empires in history and later became a major philanthropist. opposed
• J. Edgar Hoover 1895–1972
  Longtime FBI director who built a powerful national police institution while conducting extensive political surveillance and abuses. deported by
• Eugene V. Debs 1855–1926
  Socialist Party leader who ran for president five times from prison and championed labor rights. fellow anti-draft defendant
• Leon Czolgosz 1873–1901
  Anarchist whose assassination of William McKinley put Theodore Roosevelt in the White House. later attentat