The 1917 Russian Revolution not only changed Russia, it also deeply influenced American society, generating fear that the communists would come to power there as well. Relations between the U.S. government and left-wing communist anarchist movement literally turned into a war. In June, the Italian anarchist followers of Luigi Galleani detonated bombs in eight American cities, targeting judges, immigration officials, and attorneys. Luckily, no one was harmed, but the country was gripped by the fear that it was on the eve of a Russian-style revolution and civil war. One of the intended victims of the June attacks, attorney Alexander Mitchell Palmer, told Congress that revolutionaries were ready to “rise up and destroy the government at one fell swoop.”
We’ve seen in recent times, false flag mail-bombs and ricin powder mailings to left-wing political figures that were clearly false flags meant to support an agenda to label conservatives as domestic terrorists, which they’ve done. All while ignoring real terrorist threats domestically such as tens of thousands of military age immigrants crossing the US border, and radical and violent groups like Antifa also ignored as terror threats. Were these false flags or real? I can’t say for certain, but the threat was certainly used to increase the scope, power and overall budget of the new Bureau of Investigations, now the FBI.
It was Palmer, with his assistant, the future first FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who organized the so-called Palmer Raids, a series of arrests of radical leftists and anarchists. Since the lion’s share of the latter were immigrants from Western and Eastern Europe, the government used the effective method of deporting these non-citizens from American soil.
On December 21, 1919, 249 arrested radicals were put on board the USAT Buford in New York harbor and secretly sent to Russia as “America’s Christmas present to Lenin and Trotsky.” The families of the deportees were given notice of their relations’ expulsion only after the ship had set sail. The newspapers were jubilant. It was them who gave the ship its biblical nickname: “Just as the sailing of the Ark that Noah built was a pledge for the preservation of the human race, so the sailing of the Soviet Ark is a pledge for the preservation of America,” the New York Evening Journal wrote. The Saturday Evening Post shared the same feelings: “The Mayflower brought the first builders to this country; the Buford has taken away the first destroyers.” Others dubbed the Buford the “Red Ark.”
All of them were natives of the Russian Empire. The vast majority – 199 people – were members of the “Union of Russian Workers of the United States and Canada.” Among the rest were members of the communist and socialist parties, a dozen members of the IRM and seven people who were not related to politics.
Since back then the U.S. and Soviet Russia had no diplomatic relations, the ship was sent to Finland. The Soviets were informed of the journey and were very much looking forward to receive the honorable guests. Of particular interest for them were the anarchist leaders and ideologists Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, whom J. Edgar Hoover called “the most dangerous woman in America.”
A native of Kovno, Emma Goldman came to America in 1885. Two years later, she married another emigrant – Jacob Kerschner, but soon divorced him. Then she met a native of Vilna, Alexander Berkman, from whom she became infected with anarchist ideas. In 1892, they together prepared the assassination of Henry Clay Frick, the manager of a steel mill, where nine workers were killed during the power suppression of the strike. The killer did not come out of Berkman. He managed to shoot Frick three times and stab him in the leg with a knife, after which the workers arrived in time and attacked Berkman and severely beat him. By the time the police arrived, he was unconscious.
Alexander Berkman was sentenced to 22 years in prison. In his absence, Emma Goldman began to propagate anarchist ideas. She was arrested several times. In 1906, she founded Mother Earth, the most popular anarchist magazine in America. In the same year, Berkman was released ahead of schedule. He became editor of Mother Earth, and in 1915 began publishing his own anarchist magazine, The Blast (“Explosion”). Police suspected Berkman of involvement in several bombings.
In 1917, Goldman and Berkman created the League Against Conscription. Soon they were arrested. The court sentenced both to two years in prison, a fine of $ 10 thousand and possible deportation from the country after serving the sentence. A native of Odessa, Petr Bianchi, general secretary of the Union of Russian Workers, editor of the newspaper Bread and Freedom, was also well-known among Russian-speaking Americans.
Goldman, known also as “Red Emma,” recalled: “For 28 days we were prisoners. Sentries at our cabin doors day and night, sentries on deck during the hour we were daily permitted to breathe the fresh air. Our men comrades were cooped up in dark, damp quarters, wretchedly fed, all of us in complete ignorance of the direction we were to take. Yet our spirits were high-Russia, free, new Russia was before us.”
The ship landed in Finland, where the so-called Ark’s passengers were escorted by the Finnish military to the Soviet border. Most of them had been born in the Russian Empire, fought against Tsarism, and been forced to leave the country. Now, much inspired, they hoped to stay in the Land of the Soviets forever. The reality, however, turned out to be not so bright as they had expected.
Warmly greeted by the Bolsheviks, the Soviet Ark passengers began to settle into Soviet life. Already on the third day after arrival, some of them were taken into custody. The fate of most of them remains unknown, but the paths taken by the key figures can be followed. As Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman traveled across the country, meeting Lenin, leading Bolsheviks, and ordinary folk along the way, they became much disillusioned with what they saw. Horrified by the actions of the Cheka secret police, Berkman wrote in his book The Russian Tragedy: “From the intended defense of the Revolution the Cheka became the most dreaded organization, whose injustice and cruelty spread terror over the whole country.”
“I found reality in Russia grotesque, totally unlike the great ideal that had borne me upon the crest of high hope to the land of promise,” says Emma Goldman in My Disillusionment in Russia: “I saw before me the Bolshevik State, formidable, crushing every constructive revolutionary effort, suppressing, debasing, and disintegrating everything.” That’s because communism is a lie.
The final straw was the suppression of the Kronstadt Rebellion of sailors in 1921. “The pride and glory of the Revolution,” as Trotsky called them, the sailors demanded the cessation of the Bolshevik dictatorship and the restoration of political freedoms for all socialist movements in the country. Soon after the rebellion was brutally suppressed, Goldman and Berkman left the country, never to return. In the West, both almost immediately began to write books criticizing the Bolshevik regime. In 1933, Goldman even managed to obtain permission to re-enter the United States, where she spent three months giving lectures. She died in 1940 in Toronto.
However, not all the Soviet Ark passengers became disillusioned with their new homeland. Peter Bianki, leader of the once powerful Union of Russian Workers in the U.S., found a place for himself in Soviet Russia as well. Bianki immediately threw himself into all kinds of work for the Soviet Republic: he restored the transportation system in Siberia that had been damaged during the Civil War, and served as a city government official in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) and even as a deputy commissar aboard a hospital ship in the Baltic Sea. On March 10, 1930, Peter Bianki was killed along with ten other Communist Party activists and officials during one of the anti-Soviet uprisings in the Altai region. All of them were proclaimed as Soviet martyrs.
