My Disillusionment in Russia

Unknown Narrator

She arrives possessed by hope, determined to become an active part of revolutionary reconstruction, and instead finds reality grotesque and unlike the great ideal that bore her there. Each day adds a new link to the fatal chain pulling down her edifice, yet she fights desperately against the still voice urging her to face the facts. Her slow, resisted disillusionment is the book's engine: everything she witnesses matters because she cannot bring herself to stop believing.

Nestor Makhno

Makhno never sits across from the narrator; he reaches her through a friend in hiding, a man with a baby asleep in a dreary room who talks in subdued voices about the Ukrainian peasantry and the Makhno movement. That friend knows every phase from personal experience and is writing the book that will finally tell the world the truth about Makhno and the povstantsi. The movement becomes a measure of what the Revolution promised and what the Bolshevik State crushed.

Angelica Balabanova

The narrator finds her huddled on a sofa in a small, cheerless room, gracious as an old friend, ordering the inevitable samovar. Where others recite the old refrain, Balabanova admits that life itself is mean and limited, a rock on which the highest hopes are shattered. She gives away her own rations to the stranded Italians and anyone else in need, and her comrades call her a sentimentalist who wastes her time in philanthropy.

Lenin

From her first interview the narrator reads him as a man who knows exactly what he is about and will stop at nothing to achieve his ends. He swims with the tide when the cry for Soviet power sweeps Russia, then issues slogans like 'Rob the robbers' that confuse the people and injure revolutionary idealism. His compromises form a chain toward an all-powerful centralized Government, and his contempt for his own followers is never hidden.

Peter Kropotkin

In two days at his household the narrator learns more of his personal life than in all the years she had known him: the drawings of great merit, the piano he played with unusual ability. He lies on his couch as if peacefully asleep, his face as kindly in death as in life, while the whole village follows his remains to the station. The Anarchist Funeral Commission must beg the Moscow Soviet for printing and transport, and the Cheka refuses to release imprisoned comrades to attend.

Maria Spiridonova

The narrator zigzags through back streets to a top-floor room where Spiridonova sits before a desk piled with letters, having escaped from a Kremlin prison. Told she had broken down into hysteria, the narrator instead finds her self-contained and clear on every point, reciting the Brest-Litovsk peace, the razverstka, and the terrorism against revolutionary criticism. When she detects doubt, she reaches for peasants' letters and reads aloud as proof.