Sofía Casanova and Emma Goldman from Difference to Convergence on the Russian Revolution

Abstract

This article compares the reactions of Sofía Casanova (1861–1958) and Emma Goldman (1869–1940) to the Russian Revolution. On most issues, the Gallegan Catholic, bourgeois, conservative, monarchist, and anti-communist Sofía Casanova did not agree with the Russian and North American socialist, communist, anarchist, internationalist, and advocate of free love Emma Goldman. But political labels are surprisingly unhelpful when comparing the attitudes of these two thinkers to the Russian Revolution. From rather different starting points, they ended up with very similar conclusions: starting by welcoming the revolution, they both ended up excoriating it. They may form part of a more common pattern in which people with opposite political labels may have more in common than the labels prepare us to expect.

1. Introduction

This article is about two authors who began with very different viewpoints on most political issues, such that no one would expect to find in them very similar analyses of the evolution of the Russian Revolution. We are going to show that indeed they converged on similar interpretations—not the same, because sometimes they had different reasons for their similar reactions, but nevertheless very much alike. We believe that this emphasizes the point that political labels are often misleading and can make us miss what authors have in common. Sofia Casanova (1861–1958) has often been labeled bourgeois, Catholic, conservative, monarchist, patriot, anti-communist, and even fascist, and Emma Goldman (1869–1940) is usually labeled a socialist, communist, anarchist, internationalist, and an advocate of free love. In this, we are following up at length on what has been called a ‘risky comparison of the life experiences of the Galician conservative and the North American anarchist’ (Ochoa Crespo 2017, pp. 108–9).

The years of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia were crucial in the lives and writings of both authors, and, of course, of the world. We will start with brief outlines of the main features of their lives, then move on to their general ideas, and then to their interpretations of the evolution of this revolution. Since neither author is as well-known as they deserve to be, we shall quote at length from their texts to document our points. Our method is interpretation of the texts of our authors in the contexts of their lives, their locations, and their background ideologies. Comparisons, like this one, of very different people have the merit of bringing out unexpected convergences like the ones we will see here.

The two authors are the same gender and were fairly close in age, but the real interest is in the fact that they were both writers for prestigious public newspapers and journals at a time when very few women were published in those outlets. As good writers, their added value was their ability to bring what they saw to life.

2. Sofía Casanova

Sofía Casanova was born in 1861 in La Coruña, Galicia, Spain, to a family with social status but not much money. Her father disappeared in 1865. She was raised in Galicia, but her family moved to Madrid in 1875 or 1876 with the idea of improving her education. Casanova worked her way into literary circles in Madrid which eventually brought her to the attention of the court. In those circles she met a visiting Polish philosopher, Wicenty Lutoslawski, and they were married in 1887. Over the next few years they lived at her husband’s family estate in Russian Poland, in Moscow, London, Madrid, Kazan, Cracow, Moscow again, and Galicia. During these years she consolidated a reputation as a woman of letters and made many friends in the literary world. In 1903 Lutoslawski began to spend long periods away from the family, and in 1917 he married another woman he had been living with for some time, but Casanova maintained contact with his family, who supported her and her children at various times during the following decades. During the Great War she worked as a volunteer nurse for wounded Polish and Russian soldiers. She remained in Poland for much of the time after 1914 and was stranded there in 1939 when the Second World War broke out. She remained there even after 1945 (which meant that she was deprived of her Spanish nationality) because that was where her children and grandchildren were.

Casanova’s first publications were verses brought out in several Galician newspapers in 1878, followed by similar writings in newspapers in Madrid (Ochoa Crespo 2017, p. 114; Hooper 2008, p. 176). She wrote novels, other fiction, and translations from the Polish, including the famous novel Quo Vadis? by Henryk Sienkiewicz. She began writing as a correspondent from Poland for ABC and other Spanish newspapers in 1914. She wrote that in her role as a war correspondent she always tried to remain impartial (Casanova 2022, p. 200). We are going to see that there are dominating points of view in her work that do not have anything to do with either side in the war, but with the defense of ideals such as peace and justice. Her last publications were in 1944 (Hooper 2008, pp. 180, 207). She achieved substantial prestige in her lifetime: in 1916 she was given the gold medal of the Military Order of Santa Ana by the Russian government and in 1918 the king of Spain, Alfonso XIII, granted her the Orden Civil de Beneficencia [Order of Civil Beneficence] for her work as a volunteer nurse during the war (Ochoa Crespo 2017, pp. 69, 214). She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature and was also made a member of the Galician Royal Academy and the Spanish Academy of Poetry.

An interesting novel about her life may be the best introduction to her life (as close as a novelist can get to knowing someone): Azules son las horas by Martín Rodrigo (2016). The standard biography is Josep Bosch, Sofía Casanova, corresponsal en dos guerras mundiales (2022).

Casanova was not a philosopher nor a political theorist in any sense, and thus she did not try to develop a system of fundamental ideas that could be applied at different levels and to distinct contexts. And yet there was a certain consistency of themes in her work that can be identified and juxtaposed with other writers such as Goldman.

3. Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman was born in 1869 in Kovno (now Kaunas) in what is now Lithuania but was then part of the Russian empire. She moved to Rochester in the United States in 1885, married another immigrant, Jacob Kershner, in 1887, which gave her American citizenship, and divorced him in 1888. She moved around between various cities in the northeast, including New York, becoming more and more involved in the labor movement, and especially in German- and Russian-speaking immigrant causes. She soon met her life-long friend and sometime lover, Alexander Berkman, who was imprisoned in 1892 for an attempt on the life of steel magnate Henry Clay Frick. She found another partner, Ben Reitman, and lived for many years with him, championing the independence and freedom of the relationship. She was deported to Russia in 1919–1920, and at first was delighted by the Bolshevik Revolution, but then greatly disappointed. After leaving Russia, she lived in England, France, and Canada.

Goldman’s first publications were articles in the German-language communist paper Der Anarchist, in 1892 (Goldman 2003a, pp. 116–23). She wrote hundreds of articles in many different newspapers, also many pamphlets; and published her autobiography, Living My Life, in 1931 (Goldman 2006a). In the late 1930s she spent some time in Spain and covered the Spanish Civil war for the London press, favoring the anarchists and excoriating the communists for turning against the anarchists. She died in Canada after a stroke in 1940.

Goldman was not a philosopher any more than Casanova was, but much more involved in political action than Casanova. Her rhetoric is often recognizable as labor-movement, socialist, anarchist, and other such ideas. But much of it is personal, recognizing people as people before classifying them in parties. In 1923 she wrote ‘till the end of my days my place shall be with the disinherited and oppressed’ (Goldman 2003b, p. xv). In 1939 she asserted that ‘I do not care whether anyone is a Catholic or a Communist or a working man or a middle-class man, if he is in distress, hounded, persecuted, his liberty fettered, his freedom encroached upon—I stand for him’ (Goldman 2006b, p. 197), as well as ‘I feel that the humanity of people is infinitely more important at times than their theories’ (Goldman 2006b, p. 319). This concentration on the human and personal is something she had in common with Casanova, as we shall see below.

4. Christianity

Casanova was a self-described Christian. One scholar has observed that she was a ‘convinced Catholic, and even a ‘fervent’ one, according to what friends and biographers have written’ (Casanova 1989, p. 43). ‘Especially after the death of her daughter Jadwiga in 1895 her faith became a necessity, a corrective that permitted her to counter the cold scientific dogmatism of Professor Lutoslawski and the ambience around her and survive her deep personal crisis’ (Ibid.). She never divorced her husband even after he remarried, and retained her Catholic faith throughout her life.

Goldman was clearly an anti-Christian. In ‘Woman Suffrage’ (1911) she asserted that ‘Religion, especially the Christian religion, has condemned woman to the life of an inferior, a slave. It has thwarted her nature and fettered her soul, yet the Christian religion has no greater supporter, none more devout, than woman. Indeed, it is safe to say that religion would have long ceased to be a factor in the lives of the people, if it were not for the support it receives from woman’ (Goldman 1970, pp. 51–52). Goldman also published an essay titled ‘The Failures of Christianity’ in 1913 which asserted that ‘never could society have degenerated to its present appalling stage, if not for the assistance of Christianity’ (Goldman 2012, p. 421). She takes for granted that ‘religion is a poison and institutionalized Christianity the greatest enemy of progress and freedom’ (Ibid.). Over and over she rejects Christianity, and concludes that it is ‘the conspiracy of ignorance against reason, of darkness against light, of submission and slavery against independence and freedom’ (Ibid. p. 426).

A few years later Goldman made the case for her alternative to Christianity: atheism. In ‘The Philosophy of Atheism’ of 1916, Goldman writes that ‘religion is the largest, the most corrupt and pernicious, the most powerful and lucrative industry in the world, not excepting the industry of manufacturing guns and munitions’ (Goldman 2012, p. 554). Against it, ‘the philosophy of Atheism expresses the expansion and growth of the human mind’ and ‘the triumph of the philosophy of Atheism is to free man from the nightmare of gods’ (Ibid. pp. 556–7). With much more like this in her writings, it becomes clear that Emma Goldman could not be further apart from Sofía Casanova on the issue of religion.

5. Feminism

It is safe to say that Casanova was a kind of feminist. Sofía Alayeto calls her a ‘conservative feminist’, but this must be unpacked (Alayeto 1992, p. 1). Some of her feminism is revealed in her life, since the mere act of achieving self-sufficiency and professional success amounted to more public involvement for a woman than the traditional model. Her Catholic faith meant that she never divorced the philandering husband who left her, but there is a sort of feminism that is compatible with religious belief. Her Catholic faith also led her to Christian socialism and its concern for the material situation of the working class (Ochoa Crespo 2017, pp. 129–30). In 1894 she wrote a largely autobiographical novel, El doctor Wolski (republished in 2008). Describing Mara, the main character (who in many respects represents Casanova), the editor of the most recent edition, Kirsty Hooper, makes a distinction between the retrograde and repressive Catholicism of Spain of the Inquisition and the Catholicism of Mara, which is a social Catholicism ‘that promotes an ambiance centered in women, and fundamentally in philanthropy and social work’ (Casanova 2008, p. 47).

The need for economic independence, the consciousness of her own merit as a writer, and the sense that she had something unusual to say drove her to assert herself. Some of what she had to say was Polish nationalism, echoing the beliefs of her Polish family, which helped her understand that to the Poles Russian imperialism was just as bad as German imperialism. Some was self-consciousness as a woman with a woman’s perspective. And this was very important when the time came to confront the realities of war.

Compared with the masculine sensibility, oriented around heroism and virility, the feminine perspective was more objective and realist about what political events really meant, she thought. One of the most valuable aspects of her chronicles of the war was that they often centered on the suffering of the civil population behind the lines. She reported on their forced displacements, cold, hunger, and the pain and anguish of the wounded in the hospitals (Casanova 2022, p. 99). All of this was from the perspective of one who had lived these experiences in the hospitals and knew the people up close, and who wanted to inform her readers about what it was like. There is no epic exaltation of the supposed virtues that might be expected to emerge from war. Her conclusion is exactly the opposite: ‘in six weeks that I have been in the hospital I have seen such pitiful cases and such horrors of war, that all of the wars that have been and will be in the future are for me an irrefutable proof of the spiritual bankruptcy of humanity’ (Ibid., p. 49).

The feminine sensibility was also one of her reasons for her confidence, in 1921, in the benefits that would emerge from allowing women to vote (Casanova 1989, p. 52). She was convinced that women do not want war and always opposed ‘that crime legalized by barbarous laws’, which was her way of defining war in 1933 (Casanova 2022, p. 568). As she writes, ‘The bloodthirsty statesmen should go through those hundreds of cemeteries that have fewer crosses -although there are so many- than bodies of soldiers that disappeared in the explosions in the trenches, and ask the mothers of the six hundred thousand Frenchmen in the fields of Verdun what they think of war. What do the mothers think of the 13 million dead in combat, and of the 11 million invalids who starve and live by begging at the doors of churches?’ (Casanova 2022, p. 569). Immediately afterward she observes that Freud was not wrong: the instinct for life includes an instinct for destruction, ‘but this could be overpowered by the feelings and conscience of all the women united in a crusade for peace’ (Ibid.).

It is true that her vision of women is largely traditional or conventional. The men have energy and drive, and the women have the latent force of sentiment (Casanova 2022, p. 588), but these stereotypes lead to the conclusion of the need for collaboration and the importance of the incorporation of women into public life. That is the reality that has been imposing itself against the conservatives who cry that ‘intrusive women should get out of the very established order’ (Casanova 2022, p. 589). On the other hand, Casanova reveals no sympathy for those who ‘are not content with anything less than arming feminine hands with guns, imposing obligatory military service on the girls in the name of an illusory equality’ (Ibid.). In one of her articles she presents herself as consulting feminists of various types and groups and observes that their theories and attitudes are interesting, although she adds that ‘some of their arguments are vulgar’ (Casanova 2022, p. 590). It is worth noting that the feminist reasoning that she presents is very convincing, and there is nothing vulgar about it, which makes the reader suspect that the mention of vulgarity is a rhetorical ploy to make the novelty of those positions at the time more palatable.

What was the reasoning? There have been Queens, but women are denied places in a ministry or a court of her country. We can ask the question ‘isn’t that a contradiction?’ A woman is, like a man, an ‘operator, fisherwoman, worker’. Why should she be refused the right to participate in the Ministry of Labor, which regulates the functions of the mass of workers? Given that all human beings are responsible before the law, and both sexes can be punished by the death penalty, why stop women from participation in the Courts of Justice and in their decisions? After these questions she arrived at the following conclusion: ‘A woman who is prepared by education, studies, and specialization in a science or art for cooperation with a man, in sociological breadth, is worth as much as he is -sometimes more- and is an indispensable element of the fundamental balance of the people’ (Ibid.).

Playing the devil’s advocate, Casanova objects that women are different from men, but also observes that the feminists answer that that difference does not imply incompatibility in working together for the country: ‘Men and women work in the fields, in industry, and working together they should work for the welfare and perfection of the nations. Civilization is a feminine project, too’ (Ibid. p. 591). And in answer to her question, surely rhetorical, about who would take care of the education of the children of women ministers, deputies, judges, etc., she brings out the point that some feminists ask ironically, why hasn’t it occurred to the middle-class and aristocratic women to ask this question about the children of the working class? The children of the feminists will be raised as the parents wish, at home or in schools, and there will be women who decide not to have children. All women do not have the same vocation, and therefore the individual and collective interest requires freedom of choice, the feminists say, concluding her argument in the following way: ‘if the doors of the convents are not closed, the doors of effective emancipation of the woman should not be closed to the women who have the ability and desire to equal men in the legal, economic, and political terrains of their fatherland’ (Ibid.). And Casanova admits, as if she recognizes her own prejudices, that the only thing that occurs to her in answer to the question why there should not be a woman ‘President of the Republic’ is that it would be ridiculous. Did she believe that, or was it an artifice to make it clear that there are no good arguments to oppose that aspiration?

Goldman was a feminist in a much more radical sense than Casanova. Among her principles were free love and the right to sexual satisfaction. In 1910 she published ‘The White Slave Traffic’, later retitled ‘The Traffic in Women’, in which she blamed prostitution on capitalism and asserted in the anti-Christian mood that we have seen is so widespread in her writings that ‘the history of the Christian church’ is ‘a history of prostitution, since the two always went hand in hand and furnished thereby great revenues for the Church’ (Goldman 2012, pp. 182–83). In 1911 she brought out ‘Marriage and Love’ asserting that ‘marriage is a failure’ and that keeping women in ignorance of sex before marriage had a disastrous effect, and recommending ‘free motherhood’ or motherhood outside of marriage (Ibid., pp. 266–71).

More controversial were her speeches about birth control and ‘sex problems’ in a period in which these matters were not discussed in public (Ibid., pp. 352–55, and more). Goldman ran into trouble frequently with the Comstock Act of 1873, which criminalized the distribution of materials about birth control across state lines, and she was arrested in Oregon in 1915 for violating a city ordinance by distributing improper literature concerning it (Ibid., p. 526). In 1916 she published ‘The Social Aspects of Birth Control’, which brought out the benefits to women, men, and society as a whole of birth control (Ibid., p. 573). In this sense she was one of the most radical feminists of her age (Weiss and Kensinger 2007).

Ultimately, Casanova was what we have described as a conservative feminist, and Goldman was a radical feminist demanding every level of women’s rights and opportunities.

6. Antiwar/Pacifism

It is important to underline that Casanova’s Christianity and her specific sort of feminism were related to her preference for peace (Bernárdez Rodal 2013). In her view, men are more predisposed to war and women to peace. As we have seen, she was very critical of war: in 1919 she wrote that ‘I have to say, before anything else, that I abhor war and the present war, which concentrates in itself all evils, with the original sin of imperialism, is a crime against civilization, and that the results of this war will be criminal’ (Casanova 1989, p. 27). This appreciation of peace brings her to a certain sympathy for the Bolsheviks early on, surprising in a conservative Catholic, because she thinks they are seeking peace. In 1917 she wrote that they ‘get supporters because they want to end the war, which makes the country so anxious’, but she went on to note that it is an irony that they are willing to fight their brothers for peace (Casanova 1989, p. 88). And later the same year she wrote with some admiration that ‘they face down without fear the powers of the earth: England, Austria, France, the United States, inciting the proletariat of all the nations to cease the hateful killing and move to universal peace’ (Casanova 1989, pp. 112–13). There is more along these lines. As Ochoa points out, there is a feminist pacifism element in Casanova’s articles for the ABC newspaper that intertwines with sympathy for the working class, both of which contradict the general line of the conservative newspaper (Ochoa Crespo 2017, pp. 168–70).

Casanova based her pacifism on her personal experiences. ‘It is in the ambulances that one sees, knows, and hates the consequences of war’ (Casanova 2022, p. 55). Referring to herself, she writes ‘poor woman, horrified by the pain of the world, she does not understand the horrendous science of winning a piece of land, a commercial hegemony, by exterminating the primordial force of the peoples, their life itself: men.’ (Ibid., p. 77). It is also a matter of principle: ‘the only truth of war is its negation of divine and human laws’ (Ibid.). She compared the military headquarters of armies, where they plan destruction, calculate the probabilities of killing, and live and work for death, with places like laboratories, workshops, and studios where they create beauty and good things that dignify, expand, and immortalize life (Ibid., p. 93).

It is interesting to see that this pacifism is subject to revision when Casanova discusses the Polish-Soviet War (1919–1921). In the case of the Battle of Warsaw of August 15, 1920, which she notes is the Day of the Virgin, she writes in all seriousness of what was called the ‘miracle of the Vistula’, and adds that Europe should honor the Polish people for that day, when ‘by sacrifices and with faith they beat the sacrilegious Asians’ (Ibid., p. 405). The Poles, the dead and the survivors of the battle, shone with the light of ‘faith in supernatural help if we implore it or deserve it’ (Ibid., p. 406). From that moment on her antipathy for the Russian Revolution continued to grow. She described Lenin as an absolute monarch, a ‘red Tsar’, who could have had as his slogan the slogan of the French King: ‘L’Etat c’est moi’ [the state is me], and never hesitates to lie. Casanova tells us that Lenin would always tell his subordinates in moments of doubt that ‘The world revolution cannot be done without making big promises to the masses. Carrying them out or not is of no importance’ (Ibid., p. 451). Nevertheless, one cannot fool oneself. Not only did the failure of his policies lead him to a return to a free market and the return of properties previously taken, which led to a confrontation with the most orthodox of the communists; but at the end he died convinced that ‘a proletarian revolution in the entire world is not possible’ (Ibid., p. 452). Then what is left? On one side, a great moral and economic disaster that in no way gave the people the happiness they had been promised, and on the other the rivalry between Stalin and Trotsky, which Casanova described in 1927 with great clarity: the rivalry ‘will lead in an inevitable way to the death of one of them, together with his legions of supporters’ (Ibid., p. 486).

Early in her career, Goldman was involved with people who carried out anarchist bombings even though she did not herself do so, but especially later she turned toward pacifism. In 1939 she even wrote that as ‘much as I loathe Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and Franco… I would not support a war against them and for the democracies which, in the last analysis, are only Fascists in disguise’ (Wexler 1989, p. 236). She died in 1940, so she did not live to see what horrors they caused. Closely related to pacifism is non-violence in general. In 1937 she wrote that ‘if I ever believed in taking a human life… I was entirely cured of it after Sasha’s act [the attempted assassination of Frick]’, but she adds that ‘I have always tried to understand the individual act and the collective act of the oppressed and the disinherited’ (Goldman 2006a, p. 230). The same year she wrote that ‘Anarchism is the only philosophy which does not promote violence’ (Ibid., p. 238). For Casanova anarchism was almost a synonym for violence, but for Goldman it had become a symbol of peace.

7. Conservatism Versus Anarchism

Casanova has often been labeled both conservative and monarchist. But Casanova was by no means an ideologue or propagandist for every aspect of these ideologies. In fact, many of her claims and assertions were subversive of the establishment, both in Spain and in Poland/Russia. For example, she wrote that ‘My thoughts and my heart, now and always, are on the side of the people; of the artisan and the peasant, who if they were not forced into war would live in peace with their beloved wife and children’ (Bosch 2022, p. 294). The context was her worries about the hard conditions imposed at the end of World War I on Germany. In her opinion these conditions were terrible for the people, who had not been responsible for the breaking out of the war. We can observe here that calling attention to the artisan and the peasant, but not to the industrial proletariat, is a clue to her conservative vision of class harmony. Her ideal of society seems to have been a rural utopia where there are social differences, but everyone lives in peace and satisfied with their situation. Among other things, the upper classes would have a paternal or maternal concern for the lower classes. This brings her to defend a social sense of the right to property and of the right of the exploited to rebellion when these conditions are not met: ‘The beneficiaries of good fortune do not deserve it if they use it only to benefit themselves’ (Ibid., p. 307). ‘The moment has arrived when the villager, the worker, those who are exploited without conscience demand what has been denied to them until now’ (Ibid.). Casanova refers here to rights and reflects, as we could expect, her Christian sensibility, but her conclusion is also founded on a consequentialist or utilitarian argument: ‘Those countries that disarm their anger with equitable reforms will be the ones that are least threatened by the red danger’ (Ibid., p. 304). She is referring here to the Bolshevik revolution, but it surely also conditioned her later vision of the Spanish Civil War. Better a reform than a stagnation that makes a revolution with all of its violence and suffering inevitable.

Goldman labeled herself in many ways. In the earliest years of her career, she used the labels ‘socialist’, ‘communist’, ‘liberal’, ‘libertarian’, and ‘anarchist’ almost interchangeably. As early as 1895 she raised money to support an ‘anarchist communist’ newspaper (Goldman 2003a, p. 229). In 1898 she described the ideas she was sympathetic to as ‘liberal’, and in 1899 she praised ‘liberal tendencies’ (Ibid., p. 355). In 1899 a reporter described her as an ‘anarchist communist’, and in 1900 she called herself an ‘Anarchist-Communist’ (Ibid., pp. 362, 365, 393). Befitting a rebel and anarchist, she was against all known attempts to institutionalize any of these ideas. And other anarchists can be ‘disgusting fanatics’, she noted in 1900 (Ibid., p. 413). She also observed that some socialists are sometimes ‘hypocritical liberals’, who do not live up to liberal ideals (Ibid., p. 418). One observer has noted that ‘Goldman and many anarchists often used the term ‘socialist’ interchangeably with ‘anarchist’’, but that did not stop her from criticizing the Socialist party in the United States for its rejection of her ideas (Ibid., p. 54). Although she could be critical of anarchism at times, as a general rule she supported it, identified with it, and used the term with extremely positive connotations. As we are going to see below, Casanova always gave the labels ‘anarchist’ and ‘anarchy’ very negative connotations. What for one of our authors was a utopia was a terror for the other.

A few years later Goldman was more likely to distinguish the political labels we have been discussing, although never in a systematic, definitive way. In 1906 she sold her journal, Mother Earth, at ‘various radical and liberal meetings’ (Goldman 2005, p. 207). In 1907 she tried to enlist a friend in the ‘fight for libertarian communism’ (Ibid., p. 216). In 1911 she wrote that she would ‘utterly repudiate the sympathy and assistance of any set of so-called ‘liberals’, if they gave it to me on the condition that they would deny my Anarchism’ (Goldman 2012, p. 309). In 1911 she published an article titled ‘Anarchism: What it Really Stands For’ in which she explained that anarchism ‘is the great liberator of man’ and ‘the great surging, living truth that is reconstructing the world, and that will usher in the dawn’ (Ibid., pp. 276, 285). All of this indicates an effort to reconcile the ordinary-language uses of the terms with distinctions that were made in political polemics.

A decade later, in her denunciation of the Bolsheviks, she clearly distinguished libertarianism from communism, to the benefit of the libertarians (Goldman 2003b, pp. 250–51). Libertarian principles call for ‘emancipation from all oppressive and limiting forces’, where Bolshevism used ‘the authoritarian spirit and principles of the State’ to stifle ‘the libertarian and liberating aspirations’ of the people (Ibid., p. 250). It was ‘Marxism, however modified; in short, fanatical governmentalism’ (Ibid.). Russian ‘State Socialism’ was morally bankrupt, but that did not defeat the ‘libertarian idea’: ‘only the libertarian spirit and method can bring man a step further in his eternal striving for the better, finer and freer life’ (Ibid., p. 252).

By the time of her reporting on the Spanish Civil War, Goldman was anti-communist because she thought that the communists betrayed the anarchists. By this time, her most common self-description was as an ‘anarchist communist’ or ‘libertarian communist’ (Goldman 2006b, pp. 150, 188, 243, 298, 85). She accused the communists and Marxists of betraying the revolution: in 1934 she wrote that ‘the Communists, like the Jesuits they are, always succeeded in undermining’ the anarchists (Ibid., p. 99). ‘The average Communist is like the average Catholic’, she wrote in 1937, and this was no flattery: ‘You might give him the facts a thousand times over. He will still believe that his Communist church can do no wrong’ (Ibid., p. 163). And in 1939, ‘the introduction of Marxist theories into the world has done no less harm, indeed I would say more, than the introduction of Christianity’, and we know that for Goldman the results of Christianity had been terrible (Ibid., p. 170). In 1937 she wrote that ‘All Marxists in power have proven alike’: ‘it is the theory itself which tends to annihilate all freedom and initiative’, but ‘I believe too much in personal freedom’ to impose my views of Marxism on you, she writes to a correspondent (Ibid., p. 300).

In 1937 Goldman asserted that ‘there is a vast difference between Fascism and Democracy. The one stifles everything, tortures and kills; under the other, one can still breathe, speak out and use one’s pen’ (Ibid., p. 122). In 1938 she distinguished socialism from liberalism: ‘everywhere and every time the socialists got into power they became worse than the liberals’ (Ibid., p. 123). At this point, Goldman believed that organized socialism and communism were actually worse than liberal democracy. In a speech in London in 1939 she spelled out the untrustworthiness of the communists: ‘the Communists would rather have Franco than the Anarchists’ (Ibid., p. 171). But in 1939 she also told a London audience that liberal democracy was no better: ‘in the last analysis democracy means Fascism in disguise… you are supposed to have democracy in England: better consult India and Africa and the Arabs… and they will tell you that your Empire and your democracy are covering the same kind of crimes and sins and horrors that exist in Germany’ (Ibid., p. 196). Only the anarchists were trustworthy.

At this point we can see that each author preferred very different labels for their political ideas than the other. Now we turn to the Russian Revolution, and we are going to see that despite their differences in the foregoing areas of religion, feminism, pacifism, and conservatism vs. anarchism, the two converged in their interpretations of the Russian Revolution. The interesting thing is that they converge on similar conclusions on the basis of reasoning from such different points of departure.

8. Casanova on the Russian Revolution

Casanova’s treatment of the Russian Revolution is surprisingly generous for someone who has been called conservative and anti-communist. In 1920 she published The Bolshevik Revolution. Diary of a Witness. At least at the beginning, she saw something admirable in it, a revolution against a clear and age-old abuse. ‘I admire the Russian Revolution’, she wrote in November 1917 (Casanova 1989, p. 125). After all, as she put it in 1918, ‘the proud idleness [of the elites], the vices paid for with gold supplied by unearned rents’ characterized the upper echelons of society before the revolution (Ibid., p. 174). In contrast, in 1917 the Bolsheviks were the most original and brave men in Russia and the objective of Lenin and Trotsky was to ‘pull the Russian ship off of its stranding and bring it to the shores of universal happiness’ (Ibid., p. 106). In an interview with Trotsky, she quoted him for saying that ‘Our policy is the only one that we can do at present. The world is hungry for peace, and we have the hope that peace will be made, not only in the isolated case of Russia, but in general, among all of the warring peoples’ (Ibid., p. 129).

In the early months of the revolution, she noted that ‘they have freed all the prisoners without distinction of sex, and the happiness and calm of those thousands of people who speak of the liberty of the people, the rights of mankind, and equality among all of the citizens of great Russia is impressive’ (Casanova 2022, p. 173). Being free, the Russian people have become more dignified, she argued. After all, the idea is to replace tyranny with justice, dignity, and prosperity for all citizens. Besides, in breaking the shackles that enslaved the people they were not thrown into pools of blood because crime and murder have not tarnished ‘the first laurels of liberty in Russia with the collective drunkenness of anarchism’ (Ibid., p. 175). In fact, the death penalty was abolished. In her opinion, at least in its first moments it was not a bloody revolution. It was true that there were deaths, but when most of the officers came into the presence of the soldiers after the abdication of the Czar became known, they were accepted and now ‘live together with the soldiers as comrades’ (Ibid., p. 194).

Yes, Casanova added, there was violence, but according to ‘an equitable balancing by our dispassionate judgment, one has to say that, apart from some bloody cases, neither here nor in Moscow have the revolutions been worse than other such fights in all times and places’ (Casanova 1989, p. 107). Unfortunately, although the revolution began as a search for peace and rejected the death penalty and therefore respected the dethroned Tsar’s family, later it evolved toward a dehumanized despotism. For Casanova, Russia was drowning in anarchy, and that term always has negative connotations for her consisting of chaos, disorder, and a kind of war of all against all: pillage and the law of the strongest. This is in stark contrast to Emma Goldman, for whom anarchy would be a paradise of self-government and self-control.

What Casanova says sounds like an application avant la lettre of the theory of Hirschman (1991) about the perverse outcomes of well-intended initiatives: in 1918 she could see that ‘the world that they dream of will not emerge from the hands of Lenin and Trotsky, but rather it will be a monstruous mash’ (Ibid., p. 157, see also p. 213). That same year, she judged that ‘Russia is not going to democratize, but to become even more vile…’ entering a ‘delirium tremens of unheard-of destruction’ (Ibid., p. 131). In this sense, Casanova compared the Russian Revolution with the French Revolution. In December 1917 she observed that although Trotsky and his followers were barbarous, ‘they were not as barbarous as the sans-culottes of long ago’, precisely because they were less violent (Casanova 2022, p. 275). In the middle of a terrible context the communists excluded the death penalty from their people’s code; and that to the extreme that ‘the dethroned Tsar’s family is respected and lives in exile in Tobolsk’ (Ibid., p. 296). She wrote that Grand Duke Michael, brother of Nicholas II, who was designated to inherit the throne, lived in St. Petersburg and strolled quietly around the city and ‘nobody bothers him’, while ‘the revolutionaries of 1793 would have dragged him out of the Temple to take him to the guillotine’ (Ibid., p. 275). We know, of course, that these things changed drastically shortly afterward. As late as June 1918 she wrote that ‘I cannot believe that the Russian Revolution -in many ways a parody of the French Revolution- would commit the execrable crime of regicide’ (Casanova 1989, p. 205). But reality imposed itself, and the Bolsheviks became even more violent than the previous autocracy. ‘Today, like in earlier times, what is absolutely missing in Russia is liberty’, she wrote in August. The terrible order to execute people without due process would leave bodies lying in the streets and the countryside. What started as an ideal of fraternity was turning into abuses, personal vengeance, and unpunished crime. She was witnessing acts of violence that were ‘detestable imitations of the crimes of 1793 in France’ (Ibid., p. 217). The sense of betrayal was all-encompassing: ‘there is piercing anguish in watching the hand that wounds us come out from among our erstwhile friends’ (Ibid., p. 221). She seems to be bringing out the conservative conclusion that all utopias turn to violence to achieve their goals. The revolution ends up devouring its own children. And that conclusion is even more peremptory coming from someone who thinks that human life is sacred and that killing people is against ‘the laws of God and of men’ (Ibid., p. 222). By creating an intolerable anarchy, the Bolsheviks were ‘debasing the revolution that gave us hopes of humanitarian achievements’ (Ibid., p. 223).

Casanova was a reluctant witness to a civil war. On the one hand were the Bolsheviks, ‘beasts of slavery transformed into hungry wild animals’ (Casanova 2022, p. 336). For Casanova, they do not know anything about the world, or men, or God. They were pushed into a libertarian and utopian revolution, that gave them the lands of the rich. At the same time, they were given arms, telling them to defend the rights of man to the death. The capitalists want to come back and enslave them again, and unless they want the shackles to be brought back and the murder of those who liberated the Soviet republic, they must defend themselves. In contrast to the Bolsheviks are those who Casanova calls, with irony, ‘the soldiers of civilization’, who in reality defend a very bad cause, that of imperialism and the desire to obtain other people’s treasures. If the Germans won and took advantage in the Treaty of Brest, now it is others (the British and Americans) who want to take their spoils. She is facing a chain of injustices. So she concludes that she feels pain for all of the suffering, which leaves her exhausted.

Casanova knew very well that it is easier to destroy than to build upon the ashes and rubble of war (Ibid., p. 191), and this was going to be manifest when the time came to decide whether to continue participating in the Great War or not. On the one side were those who argued that Russia had to remain with its allies and stay in the war until the end, because a separate peace would be dishonorable. On the other side, it was asked, who wants to die now that Russia is free and people feel more strongly the desire and need to live? The result was a civil war: soldiers have shot other soldiers and women who accompanied the workers. ‘The same Russians who, united in a beautiful and fraternal feeling, made the liberating revolution, have machine gunned each other in the streets where the flags of their noble victory still fly. For me, this fratricidal fighting has been what most darkened my soul of all the horrors that I have shared for the last three years’ (Ibid., pp. 232–33). Against those who wanted to continue the war were those who Casanova describes as unrolling flags with messages such as ‘Down with war’, ‘Universal peace’, ‘Turn swords into plowshares’, ‘war on war’, etc. (Ibid., p. 237). The outcome of this civil war is well known. Casanova wrote that the red guards had been calumniated with the charge that they were cowards. ‘No, they aren’t, and they never were, and they defended their rights to peace and the triumph of communism with their blood’ (Ibid., p. 271). This was in a context of lack of order, of bands of primitive brutes ‘who purposely dehumanized the barbarous despotism’ (Ibid., p. 287). By that she meant the Tsars. Thus, we have a Russia given over to anarchy, because for Casanova anarchy is another word for the disorder in which common crime grows without control. In a speech by Trotsky that she reports, he recognizes that they had dissolved the Constituent Assembly, violating the principles of democracy, but that they had done it in the name of a higher principle: social revolution on a global scale. Casanova warns that if its ambition is to change the world, the revolution ‘will lose its energy breaking lances in foreign lands’ (Ibid., p. 299). What she calls the maximalist system, transplanted to other countries, will have laughable and fatal results. ‘That is how nations with healthy instincts understand it, those which count the workers, artisans, and farmers among their free citizens: where men are dignified by labor, as happens in my Spain’ (Ibid.).

Meanwhile, what happens in the real world is the cruelty of firing squads without trial when the death penalty is restored. Casanova feels sadness because of this result. It is not surprising that the slaves of the past, who had been kept in brutalizing ignorance, go beyond the bounds of justice. They were never given the dignity of a citizen, and the Church did not Christianize their understanding or their hearts (Ibid., p. 309). In summary, ‘the crime of the proletariat is the child and the grandchild of those committed by the heartless autocrats’ (Ibid., p. 318). Here the position of Casanova is a kind of no-man’s land. If she distances herself from a revolution that is being covered with blood, she also rejects the anxious reaction of the upper-class Russians and the priests, ‘convinced that the Russian proletariat deserve only the whip, the shackle, and the jail’ (Ibid., p. 321).

The situation only got worse when Lenin was wounded in an assassination attempt by the socialist Dora Kaplan. The revolutionaries began to kill each other, and the attempted assassination of Lenin seemed to require his followers to take vengeance: ‘without distinction of nationality, innocence, or blame, they took large numbers of people out of the prisons and killed them with machine guns in the black of the night… we do not even know the names of the executed’ (Ibid., p. 330). And, of course, Dora Kaplan, who Casanova compares to Charlotte Corday, assassin of Marat, was also condemned. ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ said Trotsky before the bloodied body of Lenin (Ibid., pp. 335–36). On the other hand, Casanova’s two brothers-in-law, Jósef and Marian, were shot by a firing squad for their activism in favor of the Polish cause. To these deaths we have to add the news of the assassination of Nicholas II, before anything was known for sure about the fate of the Tsarina and her children. She would later find out about their murder (Alayeto 1992, p. 99).

In summary, Casanova is a reformer, not a revolutionary. In a dialogue with a Bolshevik, and in response to his assertion that the two parts of humanity, the imperialists and the miserable proletariat, were face to face in a mortal duel, her answer would be that victory does not go to the destroyers but to those who create at the same time as they respect the principles of order. Those who seek a progressive society should seek fundamental stability at the same time. A moment of delirious anarchy might be justified if it passes quickly and does not have long-term consequences, but it is completely different if such anarchy becomes part of the system. For Casanova, the humanitarian ideology does not fit well with the Bolshevik emphasis on class warfare. Putting into practice their principles of persecution and violence they intended ‘to prevent the previous owners of Russia from coming back out of the ruins but also prevented a grand federation of happy peoples which their vanity as utopians made them dream’ (Casanova 1989, p. 154).

In Casanova’s view, Russia was entering a spiral of violence. It is true that she thought that the crimes of the proletariat are the sons, or the grandsons, of the crimes committed by the autocrats with no conscience, as we have seen. But we can ask, if that is what Casanova thought, can this explanation avoid a negative moral judgment about revolutionary violence that does not produce the hoped-for results? She was disappointed by the revolution, and not the only one in that situation. She was, or became, anticommunist, not as matter of simple conservative bourgeois ideology but rather as a reaction to its excesses, and she was always ambivalent (Ochoa Crespo 2017, pp. 104–5, 111).

One line of approach of Casanova to the Bolsheviks is a good Catholic one: more than once she says that she would like to be a socialist like Jesus Christ (Casanova 1989, p. 45). It is sometimes forgotten how close other socialisms are to Christian socialism, especially as a matter of emotions and sense of fairness. What was wrong with Bolshevik socialism was its violence and lack of respect for individuals’ rights, not the fact that it was supposed to help the poor. López Cordón has observed that ‘a providentialist in her own way, she thought that the strength of Christianity was not limited to individuals, but fought to make its way into history’ (Ibid., p. 43). That is why she thinks she can see its impulse in confusing and contradictory movements such as the Russian Revolution and the ‘maximalism’ of the Bolsheviks (Ibid.).

We have seen that for Casanova the Russian Revolution was justified by the abuses of the previous system and provided some freedom and progress at the beginning, but then descended into chaos and violence and began to create perverse outcomes. The civil fratricide and disorder together with the cruelty of a class war exacerbated the poverty that was already there, and made the whole enterprise a humanitarian disaster. We are going to see that with some differences, Goldman’s understanding of the Russian Revolution had many similarities.

9. Goldman on the Russian Revolution

Goldman was also disappointed by the Russian Revolution. Her vocabulary was sometimes different: where Casanova attributed some of the horror of the Revolution to ‘anarchism’, Goldman thought that political ideology was the solution. But the substance was very similar, as we shall see. Goldman’s books on the revolution were titled My Disillusionment in Russia (1923) and My Further Disillusionment in Russia (1924) (Goldman 2003b). She was deported from the United States to Russia in January 1920 and fled that country in December 1921. She started out as a fervent supporter of the Bolsheviks, and ‘clung to my faith and belief for more than a year after my coming to Russia’ (Ibid., p. xi). In these two books and in her autobiography she records the process of disillusionment. For an anarchist, the fact that ‘one could not get in or out of our hotel without a permit’ must have been outrageous (Goldman 2006a, p. 411). Her host in Russia upon her arrival, Zorin, told her early on that ‘free speech is a bourgeois superstition’ and that there could be no free speech in a revolutionary era (Goldman 2003b, p. 14). As she reported in the 1925 preface to her second volume on the revolution, they were still saying that in that year, long past any need for repression (Ibid., p. xix). It had to be difficult to accept for someone who had always claimed a right to freedom of expression. ‘People raided, imprisoned, and shot for their ideas!’, she exclaimed in her autobiography (Goldman 2006a, p. 426). Not much about the incipient Soviet Union was calculated to make a good impression on an anarchist.

Her books on her Russia experience were full of denunciations of the Bolsheviks and their violence. They have been interpreted as a theoretical analysis that focuses on the usurpation of power by authoritarian statists, and the need to prevent such usurpations. For her, ‘the center of the aims and principles of a revolution’ was ‘human values’ such as ‘equity, justice, dignity, and liberty for the individual’ (Carroll 2007, pp. 170–71). This much of her analysis could have been endorsed by Casanova. There are many passages that recall Casanova: ‘I should have been content if the Russian workers and peasants as a whole had derived essential social betterment as a result of the Bolshevik régime’, but that was not the case (Goldman 2003b, p. xiii). Rather, her informants ‘told me of the over-filled prisons, of the violence practiced on the workers and peasants’ (Ibid., p. 12). ‘I never understood the meaning of revolution’, she wrote in her autobiography, ‘I certainly never believed that it would signify callous indifference to human life and suffering’ (Goldman 2006a, p. 415).

Goldman realized that what the Bolsheviks had done was create an oppressive ‘Bolshevik State… suppressing, debasing, and disintegrating everything’ (Goldman 2003b, p. vii). A ‘conservative’ could not have been harsher in her judgment. In the Afterword to her books on Russia, she defended ‘libertarian principles’ and asserted that ‘it was Marxism… in short, fanatical governmentalism’ that had usurped the revolution (Ibid., p. 250; see also p. 257). ‘The Russian Revolution was a libertarian step defeated by the Bolshevik State, by the temporary victory of the reactionary, the governmental idea’, she wrote (Ibid., p. 251). In her autobiography, she asserted, with reference to Bolshevik Moscow, that ‘every seat of government inevitably breeds the martinet and the flunkey, the courtier and the spy, a herd of hangers-on fed by the official hand’; this was only avoidable by minimizing the state (Goldman 2006a, p. 436). Casanova was a monarchist, and thus not in principle against the existence of state, but most previous monarchical states had not been as pervasive in regulating the lives of the people as the Bolsheviks were. Goldman made it an issue because of her anarchist theories. ‘Only the libertarian spirit and method can bring man a step further in his striving for the better, finer, and freer life’, she wrote (Goldman 2003b, p. 252). Not only Bolshevism, but ‘all other Socialist parties’ had wrong ideas about states and revolution (Ibid., p. 258). Although she had called herself a socialist in earlier years, it was no longer her label.

Goldman’s own interest in the anarchists came to the fore frequently, but by the term ‘anarchists’ she did not mean the violent thugs and bomb-throwers that Casanova meant. She meant the kind of people she had known for the last 30-plus years, idealists who joined clubs, read pamphlets like the ones she wrote, and listened to speeches like the ones that she gave. She had hoped they would be part of the revolution and influence its outcome, but she had to report that in 1918 ‘machine guns were used to destroy the Moscow Anarchist Club and to suppress their Press’ (Ibid., p. 31). The anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin, whom she much admired, was in virtual house arrest and other anarchists were violently persecuted (Ibid., p. 36, 97ff, 201). She told Lenin that she had been assured that ‘the Anarchists in Russia enjoyed full freedom of speech and Press’, but since her arrival ‘I found scores of Anarchists in prison and their Press suppressed’ (Ibid., p. 33). He answered that ‘as to free speech, that is, of course, a bourgeois notion. There can be no freedom of speech in a revolutionary period’ (Ibid.). Goldman visited Kropotkin twice before he died, and one scholar has observed that Goldman essentially accepted Kropotkin’s theory that Bolshevism was a conspiracy against the revolution, rather than a part of the revolution (Wexler 1989, p. 32). She was deeply disappointed in the Bolshevik treatment of his funeral, which censored funeral statements and refused to release some Anarchist prisoners to attend the ceremony (Goldman 2003b, p. 190).

Goldman began to admire one of the independent leaders of the peasants in Ukraine, Nestor Makhno. ‘Whenever Makhno captured a city, freedom of speech and press for Anarchists and Left Social Revolutionaries was established’, she wrote (Ibid., p. 66). When the Bolsheviks needed him in their fight against the counter-revolutionaries, they agreed to give his forces liberty of speech and the press, and free participation in soviet elections (Ibid., pp. 170–71). But she no longer trusted them, and expected the Bolsheviks to try to destroy them (Ibid., p. 171). They did.

In the only extended comparison of Casanova and Goldman that we have found, Carmen Blanco García emphasizes the almost religious fervor of Goldman’s attitude toward the revolution in the ship on her way to Russia (Blanco García 2010, p. 132). For her to turn against it, she had to be very disillusioned by many things she saw and heard.

The suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion was the last straw for Goldman. When the Bolsheviks ordained that the rebels should surrender or be exterminated, she wrote a protest letter, but it was ignored (Goldman 2003b, pp. 197–98). She called the siege and destruction of Kronstadt ‘more dreadful than anything I had known in Russia’ (Ibid., p. 199). It ‘broke the last thread that held me to the Bolsheviki’ (Ibid., p. 200). She left Russia, writing that ‘my dreams [were] crushed, my faith broken, my heart felt like a stone’ (Goldman 2006a, p. 527). Like Casanova, and unlike many men who wrote about the matter, she was not afraid to discuss it in very personal terms. But she also supplied the analysis that the proletarian democracy of the beginning of the revolution had been suppressed and all power taken over by the party elite and its state apparatus (Avrich and Avrich 2012, p. 312).

We have quoted more from Goldman’s two books on her disillusionment (written 1922) than from her autobiography of 1931, mostly because they were written closer in time to the actual events she witnessed. These are her own after-the-fact recollections, subject as all such writings are to changes in attitudes, both deliberate and unconscious, and changes in the way she presents herself. Earlier, she might have bragged about her work for the Petrograd Museum, but not long afterward she began to downplay her earlier enthusiasm for the revolution (Wexler 1989, pp. 54–55).

From the foregoing we can see that Goldman followed the path of Casanova from high hopes for the revolution to deep disappointment, and for many of the same reasons. The poor were worse off than they had ever been, and violence permeated society. Although Casanova thought that anarchism was part of the problem and Goldman thought it was the solution, in fact they meant different things by the term: one used it to mean chaos and violence and the other used it to mean an alternative to an authoritarian state. One had hoped a revolution could restore religious values of fairness and justice in an unjust system, and the other hoped it would replace that unjust system with a system of anarchist self-government. Both were disillusioned with the result. From different starting points, they converged on an overall similar evaluation.

10. Conclusions

One thing that both writers had in common was endurance in the face of defeat. Both suffered numerous defeats in their efforts to live a useful life and create peace and dignity in the world, and although they lived through times of depression, neither one ever gave up. But the point here is that they came to similar disillusionment about the Russian Revolution from very different starting points. The Revolution did not live up to their early hopes and expectations. It did not inaugurate an epoch of peace and liberty but produced a new dictatorial system in which the revolution devoured its own children. Casanova’s path led from Catholicism and feminism to pacifism, then to an early acceptance of the Revolution as liberal and democratic, and from there to a ferocious criticism as the Revolution developed. Goldman’s path led from anarchism which was enthusiastic about the Revolution at first because she thought it was libertarian to the recognition that what was actually created was a supremely oppressive state. Casanova’s parallel between the decline and corruption of the French Revolution reflected the opinion of both writers.

We may still call Casanova a conservative and Goldman an anarchist, but now we have seen that often there are comparable impulses behind their converging conclusions about the Russian Revolution. Casanova was not conservative because she was defending class interests, and Goldman was not an anarchist because she had no respect for any rules of society. Rather, Casanova was conservative because she thought that certain elements of conservatism were better for everyone, including the poor, and Goldman was an anarchist because she thought that many of the rules of society were stifling and unnecessary. Both intended well for the people around them, especially for the poor and disenfranchised. Both were anti-communist because they had observed the actual practices of the party. Both were willing to sacrifice a lot of their own self-interest for others. They just did so in different ways. It may be a general truth that people have more in common than the political stereotypes may suggest. People with labels that indicate opposite political tendencies may have more in common with one another than we tend to realize.