An edition of My disillusionment in Russia (1925)

My Disillusionment in Russia

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Last edited by dcapillae
June 11, 2024 | History
An edition of My disillusionment in Russia (1925)

My Disillusionment in Russia

  • 1 Want to read

In 1919, at the height of the anti-leftist Palmer Raids conducted by the Wilson administration, the anarchist activist and writer Emma Goldman was deported to the nascent Soviet Union. Despite initial plans to fight the deportation order in court, Goldman eventually acquiesced in order to take part in the new revolutionary Russia herself. While initially supportive of the Bolsheviks, with some reservations, Goldman’s firsthand experiences with Bolshevik oppression and corruption prompted her titular disillusionment and eventual emigration to Germany.

In My Disillusionment in Russia, Goldman records her travels throughout Russia as part of a revolutionary museum commission, and her interactions with a variety of political and literary figures like Vladimir Lenin, Maxim Gorky, John Reed, and Peter Kropotkin. Goldman concludes her account with a critique of the Bolshevik ideology in which she asserts that revolutionary change in institutions cannot take place without corresponding changes in values.

My Disillusionment in Russia had a troubled publication history, since the first American printing in 1923 omitted the last twelve chapters of what was supposed to be a thirty-three chapter book. (Somehow, the last chapters failed to reach the publisher, who did not suspect the book to be incomplete.) The situation was remedied with the publication of the remaining chapters in 1924 as part of a volume titled My Further Disillusionment in Russia. This Standard Ebooks production compiles both volumes into a single volume, like the original manuscript.

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English

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Cover of: My Disillusionment in Russia
My Disillusionment in Russia
2022, Standard Ebooks
in English
Cover of: My Disillusionment in Russia
My Disillusionment in Russia
2003, Dover Publications
Paperback in English

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Open Library
OL37044763M
Standard Ebooks
emma-goldman/my-disillusionment-in-russia

Work Description

My Disillusionment in Russia is a book by Emma Goldman, published in 1923 by Doubleday, Page & Co. The book was based on a much longer manuscript entitled "My Two Years in Russia" which was an eyewitness account of events in Russia from 1920 to 1921 that ensued in the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and which culminated in the Kronstadt rebellion. Long-concerned about developments with the Bolsheviks, Goldman described the rebellion as the "final wrench. I saw before me the Bolshevik State, formidable, crushing every constructive revolutionary effort, suppressing, debasing, and disintegrating everything".

Much to Goldman's dismay, only upon receiving the first printed copies of the book did she become aware that (1) the publisher had changed the title; and (2) the last twelve chapters were entirely missing, including an Afterword which Goldman felt was "the most vital part" of the book. Sympathetic to the initial Russian Revolution, the complete book is an impassioned left critique of the Bolshevik Revolution as well as Vladimir Lenin's New Economic Policy—an "all-powerful, centralized Government with State Capitalism as its economic expression". The complete book is also critical of Marxian theory, which Goldman describes as "a cold, mechanistic, enslaving formula".

After much back and forth with the publishers, the missing portions of Goldman's original manuscript were published in a second (American) volume My Further Disillusionment in Russia (also titled by the publisher) in 1924. In the preface to the second "volume" of the American edition, Goldman wryly observes that only two of the reviewers sensed the incompleteness of the original American version, one of whom was not a regular critic, but a librarian. A complete version of the complete manuscript was published in England with an introduction by Rebecca West, also with the title My Disillusionment in Russia (London: C. W. Daniel Company, 1925).

(Source: Wikipedia)

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June 11, 2024 Edited by dcapillae Merge works (MRID: 141655)
June 3, 2024 Edited by Freso Move to proper work
June 3, 2024 Edited by AgentSapphire move to correct work
June 1, 2024 Edited by bitnapper merge authors
February 9, 2022 Created by ImportBot Imported from standard_ebooks:emma-goldman record