Anarchists in the state: new perspectives on Russian anarchist participation in the Bolshevik government, 1917-1919

Every anarchist knew that Michael Bakunin had been involved in vicious ideological combat with Karl Marx over control of the First International and further, that Peter Kropotkin, after his return to Russia in 1917, spent his last years strongly disagreeing with Lenin over a number of Bolshevik edicts, especially the seizing and detaining of political opponents as hostages of the regime, and the repression of anarchist collectives.3 Nevertheless, many anarchists expressed great enthusiasm at the time of the overthrow of both the monarchy in February and the Provisional Government in October in 1917, at times even envisioning the nascent Bolshevik state administration as a transcendent historical event with messianic expectations. SOME NEW PERSPECTIVES Historians of the anarchist movement working in post-Soviet Russia have provided us with narratives based on new evidence, including sources drawn from regional archives, which help us contextualise more accurately the dilemmas of antagonists of the state like Berkman and Goldman who found themselves drawn toward working to construct one.\n The anarchists who did explicidy throw in their lot with the Bolsheviks did so for a variety of reasons.