Kate Sharpley Library (BM Hurricane, London, WC1N 3XX, UK; PMB 820, 2425 Channing Way, Berkeley CA 94704, USA), 2008. 34 p. (Anarchist Library #20), ISBN 9781873605745 .
Grigorii Petrovich Maksimov (better known to Western readers as G. P. Maximoff) was Secretary of Russia’s Anarcho-Syndicalist Confederation and editor of Golos Truda (The Voice of Labour). He experienced at first hand the Bolshevik repression which crushed other revolutionaries and subordinated popular revolt to party dictatorship. This is his story of the 1921 hunger strike in which some of the leading lights of Russian anarchism staked their lives in a desperate gamble to expose Bolshevik repression – and win their freedom.
This text comes from his indictment of the Bolshevik regime The Guillotine at Work: Twenty Years of Terror in Russia (1940). It has been footnoted by the Kate Sharpley Library to throw the light on the stories of other Russian anarchists as part of our Anarchists in the Gulag, Prison and Exile Project.
Contents:
Introduction
Gregory Petrovich Maximoff (1893-1950) by Anatoly Dubovik, translated by Szarapow
The Hunger Strike and the Deportation of Anarchists From Soviet Russia
I The sickness and death of P. A. Kropotkin
II Kronstadt events, arrests
III The Taganskaya Prison
IV The confinement was to be long
V All decide to declare a hunger strike
VI Cell no. 4 on hunger strike
VII We are released
VIII We are deported
IX We start out
X Stettin Prison. We are no more Czechs
Appendices
– Trotzky’s reply
– An agreement between the committee of the foreign delegates and the Bolshevik government
– A ray of light from Moscow