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Lipotkin, Lazar. The Russian Anarchist Movement in North America. Transl. and Ed. by Malcolm Archibald. Black Cat Press, Edmonton 2019. xii, 292 pp. Ill. $24,95.
The history of Russian immigrant radicals in North America is a conspicuously unexplored topic, and virtually all researchers who have touched upon it do not themselves read Russian. The appearance of The Russian Anarchist Movement in North America, originally written in the mid-1950s by Lazar Lipotkin (real name Eliezer Solomonovich Lazarev), therefore marks a major breakthrough. However, Lipotkin was an activist rather than an academic, so this is neither a scholarly, nor a definitive work. Rather, given its inclusion of extensive extracts from radical manifestos, congresses, and correspondence, as well as Lipotkin's own views, it should be viewed more as a primary source than a work of history. Nevertheless, it is an important historiographical corrective and indispensable resource for scholars of early twentieth-century immigration, labor, and radicalism.
Lipotkin, already a veteran of Russia's 1905 revolution, migrated to the US in 1910 at the age of nineteen, and took part in a number of anarchist organizations and publications over the next five decades. The Russian Anarchist Movement in North America is a translation of his previously unpublished, handwritten Russian manuscript that was donated to the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam after the author's death in 1959, and was virtually unknown to English-speaking scholars until its recent rediscovery by historian Mark Grueter in the course of his groundbreaking research on Russian-American anarchists.1 Now, deftly translated and edited by Malcolm Archibald, anglophone readers are finally privy to a detailed and sweeping overview of this forgotten movement.
The book covers the period from the late nineteenth century to the 1950s, with mixed results. The first four chapters provide brief surveys of the origins of anarchist ideology, the early anarchist movements of the US and Russia, and the late-nineteenth-century beginnings of Russian radicalism in America, none of which include original information or insights. The book's most important sections, and those most likely to be of interest to scholars today, instead comprise its middle portion, and recount the history of the Union of Russian Workers of the United States and Canada (URW), which in its heyday became the largest anarchist organization in...