Union of Russian Workers

UNION OF RUSSIAN WORKERS. In the wake of the failed Russian revolution of 1905, a wave of immigration, mainly of unskilled peasant laborers, reached North America. Forced to leave their homes due to poverty and persecution, many of these immigrants hoped to return to their native land under more favorable conditions. In the meantime, they formed various groups for educational and cultural purposes; some of these groups had an anarchist orientation as a result of the emergence of anarchism as a mass movement in 1904 in Russia.

In 1910 the Russian Labor Group of New York, an organization of “anarchist-minded workers,” invited the anarchist theorist A. A. Karelin, living in Paris, to help them start a newspaper for a Russian anarchist movement in North America. This led to the launching of the monthly Golos Truda (The Voice of Labor) in March, 1911, edited by August Rode-Chervinsky, a veteran revolutionary from Belarus. Over the next three and a half years, Karelin contributed 176 articles plus translated material (six articles were lost when the Titanic sank). The newspaper was supported by a network of independent labor groups, located mainly in the northeastern United States; many of these local groups adopted the name “Union of Russian Workers.” The word “Russian” here refers to the common language of these immigrant workers, who belonged to the many different ethnic groups of the “prison house of nations” that was the Russian empire.

Various anarchist clubs, associations, and circles coalesced into the Federation of Unions of Russian Workers of the United States and Canada (URW) at a founding conference held in July, 1914, in Detroit. The total dues-paying membership was about 600. At that point, the URW had a clearly anarcho-syndicalist orientation, but referred to its ideology as “workers’ socialism.” The basic principles adopted at this conference resembled those in the preamble to the constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), but called upon the workers, organized as a class, to seize the world’s riches “by means of violent social revolution.”

The URW tried to provide for the educational and cultural needs of its members. Free night schools and libraries were organized by many branches, and prisoner and peasant “balls” were a regular means of fund-raising. The URW was in a constant state of war with the Russian Orthodox Church, whose priests received a stipend from the czarist government prior to the 1917 revolution.

Shortly after its founding convention, the URW entered an expansion phase in which Golos Truda acquired a new editor, the anarcho-syndicalist Maksim Raevsky, and became a weekly, four-page broadsheet. These developments were concurrent with the outbreak of World War I in which the URW adopted a consistently internationalist, antiwar position. A stable of effective orators and propagandists developed, including Vladimir (“Bill”) Shatov, Nikolai Mukhin, Morris Bell, Grigory Raiva, Aaron Baron, and Aleksandr Senkevich. The addition of the talented Vsevelod Voline, who arrived from France in 1916, made an immediate impact.

The URW developed a close relationship with the IWW, effectively acting as its Russian division, but a merger did not take place. The URW promoted industrial unionism and encouraged its members to join the IWW, but also advocated a “boring from within” strategy with regard to the craft unions of the American Federation of Labor. And unlike the IWW, the URW was not apolitical, but promoted direct opposition to the state, in accordance with anarcho-syndicalist doctrine.

By 1916 membership began to increase dramatically, but not without turbulence within the organization. One of the New York branches split off and started publishing its own newspaper, and a similar split took place in Pittsburgh. These schisms, which seem to have been anti-syndicalist in essence, were short-lived.

Most of the growth in membership occurred after the February Revolution of 1917 when the Russian-American immigrant community was seized by euphoria following the overthrow of the oppressive tsarist regime. Hundreds of members rushed to return to Russia, including the entire editorial staff of Golos Truda; they took the typesetting equipment with them and restarted the newspaper in Petrograd.

Despite the loss of so many of its activists, the URW continued to grow in 1918‒1919, and reached its maximum size with 156 affiliates and as many as 12,000 members (an estimate, as the URW had no system for keeping an accurate count). A new cadre of propagandists sprang up, including Adolf Schnabel, Peter Bianki, and Lazar Lipotkin.

But tragedy soon struck the movement, both in North America and in Russia. In North America, the Russian anarchist movement was destroyed by the Palmer raids of 1919, which saw its facilities wrecked and its leading activists arrested, beaten, and deported (similar acts of suppression took place in Canada). The movement’s newspapers – Nabat (The Tocsin), Kolokol (The Bell), and Khleb i Volya (Bread and Freedom) – were successively banned by government authorities. Those members who returned to Russia, either voluntarily or as deportees, including around 200 on the USS Buford at the end of 1919, were repressed by the Bolsheviks; eventually, more than 90 percent of the returnees perished at the hands of state terror. Meanwhile, the URW was dissolved at an underground conference in April, 1920.

The Russian anarchist movement in North America had a long afterlife, despite the trauma of the “Palmer reaction.” Surviving first as a network of clandestine organizations, then in the form of schools, mutual aid societies, and cooperatives, the Russian-American anarchists continued to hope for another revolution in the USSR while gradually becoming assimilated into North American society. The movement’s press generated literally thousands of issues of newspapers and journals, the last number appearing in 1963.

Grueter, Mark. “Red Scare Scholarship, Class Conflict, and the Case of the Anarchist Union of Russian Workers, 1919.” Journal for the Study of Radicalism, Vol. 11, Number 1, Spring 2017, pp. 53-81.

Grueter, Mark. Anarchism and the working class: the union of Russian workers in the North American labor movement. Ph.D. Dissertation, Simon Fraser University. 2018. https://summit.sfu.ca/item/18580.

Lipotkin, Lazar. The Russian Anarchist Movement in North America. Translated by Malcolm Archibald. Edmonton: Black Cat Press, 2019.