In the Russian Revolution's centenary year Black Rose Books presents a collection of three books by Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman and Ida Mett that provide eyewitness accounts of its triumphs, disappointments and horrors. Following their scandalous deportation from the United States in 1919, Goldman and Berkman were greeted as heroes by the new Bolshevik government in Russia, with Berkman describing their arrival as the "most sublime day of my life". Why then, barely two years later, did both decide to leave Russia for good? Their books My Disillusionment in Russia and The Russian Tragedy, printed here together for the first time, trace their shared frustration with the revolution's descent from an authentic people's movement to a spectacle of Bolshevik authoritarian violence.
Their works are accompanied by Ida Mett's Kronstadt Uprising, a harrowing account of the Red Army's brutal repression at Kronstadt introduced and contextualised by Murray Bookchin. There is also an introductory poem by Dan Georgakas and chapter each by Cambridge sociologist Thomas Jeffrey Miley and publisher and activist Dimitri Roussopoulos.