--judged by their American
and anarchist standards respectively--leered at them wherever they went;
the black walls of bureaucracy rose before them at every turn. Perverse
cruelty on the part of the government came to their attention with
distressing frequency. All their early efforts at rationalization failed
to excuse the needless hunger, the mass arrests, the arbitrary
executions. They discussed these events with prominent Bolshevik
leaders, including Trotsky and Lenin, in the hope of persuading them to
mitigate conditions injurious to the revolution. In each instance the
response was either enigmatic or equivocal. Angelica Balabanova, then
secretary of the Third International and later as disaffected an exile
as herself, told Emma that life was "a rock on which the highest hopes
are shattered. Life thwarts the best intentions and breaks the finest
spirits." Alexandra Kollontay, the hard-headed diplomat, chilled her
with the advice to stop "brooding over a few dull gray spots." Even
Lenin impressed her and Berkman as callous and unsympathetic.

Time only deepened their perturbation. After eight months of life in
Russia, Emma began to doubt the revolution itself. "Its manifestations
were so completely at variance with what I had conceived and propagated
as revolution that I did not know any more which was right. My old
values had been shipwrecked and I myself thrown overboard to sink or
swim." The climax of her quarrel with the Bolsheviki came a year later
during the attack upon the mutinous Kronstadt sailors. That hundreds of
true sons of the revolution should be shot down for sympathizing with
striking workers seemed to her a crime worse than any committed by the
Czarist regime. Neither she nor Berkman could any longer stomach such
ruthless authoritarianism and both left the country as soon as they were
able to obtain visas.

Once past the Soviet border, the hapless pair became true Ishmaelites,
without either home or country. No government offered them asylum, and
few were willing to provide them with even temporary visas. Devoted
friends had great difficulty in getting Swedish officials to permit the
two refugees a long-enough stay in Stockholm to procure visas for a
sojourn in Germany.

Their one great mission now became the unmasking of the Bolsheviki, and
their attacks were more virulent and hysterical than those of the most
extreme reactionaries. Berkman's _The Bolshevik Myth_ and Emma's _My
Disillusionment