Alexander Berkman
Russian-American anarchist writer and activist (1870–1936), born in Vilna into a well-off Jewish family and emigrated to the United States in 1888 fleeing tsarist repression, where he quickly joined New York's anarchist circles and became the lifelong romantic partner and political collaborator of Emma Goldman. His best-known act was the 1892 attempted assassination of industrialist Henry Clay Frick, in retaliation for the bloody repression of the Homestead steelworkers' strike; the attack failed and Berkman served fourteen years in prison, an experience he documented with stark introspection in his memoir Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (1912), considered one of the most important testimonies in American prison literature and a profound reflection on revolutionary violence, remorse and the moral discipline of individual anarchism. Once released, he resumed political activism as co-editor, with Goldman, of the anarchist magazine Mother Earth, and took an active part in the campaign against the First World War; in 1917 both were arrested under the espionage laws and eventually deported to Soviet Russia for their opposition to compulsory military conscription. In revolutionary Russia, Berkman moved from initial enthusiasm for the Bolshevik revolution to deep disillusionment as he witnessed the growing state repression of anarchists and other left-wing dissidents, culminating in the brutal crushing of the Kronstadt revolt in 1921, an experience he recounted critically in his book The Bolshevik Myth (1925), one of the earliest anarchist denunciations of Soviet authoritarianism. He also wrote ABC of Anarchism (1929), a popular and didactic exposition of anarcho-communist principles aimed at a broad readership. Exiled in Europe for the rest of his life, ill with prostate cancer and impoverished, he took his own life in Nice in 1936.