OBITUARY: Paul Avrich (1931-2006)
Paul Avrich, historian of the anarchist movement, died on February 16th 2006 in New York as a result of complications from Alzheimer’s disease, from which he was suffering for the last few years.
He was born in Brooklyn in 1931. His mother was an actress in the Yiddish theatre and his father, a dress manufacturer. His family had origins in Odessa and Avrich was able to go there to study after Kruschev, leader of the Soviet Union, authorised student exchanges in 1959. There, whilst working on his thesis The Russian Revolution and the Factory Committees (published in 1961) he discovered the Kronstadt uprising and the role of anarchists in the Revolution. This interest in anarchism was strengthened when he met anarchists at a meeting convened by Der Freie Arbeiter Stimme, the Yiddish anarchist paper.
Paul Avrich’s first book was the massively informative The Russian Anarchists (1967, soon to be republished by AK Press). Over the course of the years he wrote ten more books, as well as articles for reviews. Another book on Russian anarchism was his Anarchists in the Russian Revolution, a collection of documents from the period, with his commentaries. His Kronstadt 1921 examined all the available evidence on the sailors uprising against the Bolsheviks.
He next tackled the anarchist movement in the United States. He wrote The Haymarket Tragedy in 1984, about the events that led up to the State murder of a number of anarchists who had organised among the Chicago working class, and in 1991 wrote Sacco and Vanzetti, about the Italian American anarchists framed and murdered by the State. Others of his works were An American Anarchist: the life of Voltairine de Cleyre (1978), the biography of a woman who devoted her life to anarchism after the deaths of the Chicago anarchists, and Anarchist Portraits (1988), which not only looked at the heavy hitters like Bakunin and Kropotkin, but also chose to sketch out the lives of lesser known individuals like the Englishman Charles Mowbray and John “Chummy” Fleming, active in Australia. But perhaps his finest work was Anarchist Voices. He conducted over 200 interviews with veterans of the movement in the States, and then brought out a selection of these with his notes and commentary. The anarchist movement springs to life in this book, with many intriguing stories about fascinating personalities. Fervour and conviction jostle with the disillusionment and tragedies of those who witnessed the ebb of the movement and the problems of poverty, infirmity and old age (the full length version has just been published by AK Press, 2005).
Avrich was a likeable and friendly person and it was this conviviality that opened up many veterans, sometimes suspicious and lonely, to his probings. Above all, he let these old anarchists talk. Not only that, he put them in contact with each other, and became a friend of many, visiting many of them on a regular basis, and seeing them vanish from this life. He never openly called himself an anarchist, but he had great admiration and affection for those who had given so much of their lives for ‘the Idea’. He donated 20,000 of the documents he had collected to the Library of Congress. He gave generously to CIRA (Centre International de Recherches sur l’Anarchisme), the anarchist archive and library based in Switzerland both financially and with contributions of documents, as well as the Russian publication of Voline’s The Unknown Revolution. He did so much to save many anarchist lives from obscurity, lives that were worth recognizing and recording. Now he himself has gone. The anarchist movement has lost a great friend.