For the past seven years, almost, the enemies of the Makhnovist revolutionary movement have wallowed in so many lies about it that one might marvel that these people do not take a red face, once in a while at least. It is rather characteristic that these shameless lies directed against myself and the Makhnovist insurgents, indeed against our movement as a whole, can unite folk from very different socio-political camps: among them one can find journalists of every persuasion, writers, scholars and laymen who place obstacles in their path, mavericks and speculators, who occasionally have no hesitation in putting themselves forward as pathfinders for avant-garde revolutionary ideas. One can also come across supposed anarchists, like Yanovsky, from the Freie Arbeiter Stimme. All such folk, folk of every persuasion and every hue, have no shame about employing lies against us, without even knowing us, sometimes without any real belief in their own allegations. Such lies are rounded off...
Chapter 2. The Birth of the “Soviets” We now arrive at one of the most important aspects of the Russian Revolution: the origin and the initial activity of the “Soviets. “ Another paradoxical fact: this is one of the least understood and most frequently distorted aspects of the Revolution. In all that has been written to this day on the origin of the “Soviets” — I do not only speak of foreign studies, but also of Russian documents — there is a gap which the interested reader cannot fail to notice: no one has yet been able to determine precisely when, where or how the first workers’ “Soviet” was formed. Until today, almost all writers and historians, bourgeois as well as socialist (“Menshevik,” “Bolshevik” or other) dated the origin of the first “Workers’ Soviet” at the end of 1905, at the time of the October gen...
The Unknown Revolution, 1917–1921. Book Two. Bolshevism and Anarchism | The Anarchist Library Voline The Unknown Revolution, 1917–1921. Book Two. Bolshevism and Anarchism Part I: Two Conceptions of the Revolution Chapter 1. Two Opposing Conceptions of Social Revolution Chapter 2. Causes and Consequences of the Bolshevik Conception Part II. About the October Revolution Chapter 1. Bolsheviks and Anarchists Before October Chapter 2. Anarchist Position on the October Revolution Chapter 3. Other Disagreements Chapter 4. Some Reflections Part III. After October Chapter 1. The Bolsheviks in Power; Differences Between the B...