PEOPLE:

ANOTHER MOLLY:

MOLLIE STEIMER:

Molly is very happy to see that the LibCom.Org organization has now put Paul Avrich's wonderful biography of the anarchist Mollie Steimer into their online collection. LibCom,by the way, has one of the best online collections on anarchist people, movements, history, texts, etc. available anywhere, and their site is well worth a visit. Avrich's writing was always a delight to read, and his biography of Steimer is merely one jewel in a very long necklace.

Steimer was born on November 21st, 1897 in the village of Dunaevtsy in southwest Russia. Along with her parents and five brothers and sisters she emigrated to the USA in 1913 where they lived in the New York City Jewish community. She immediately began work in a garment factory and began to read radical literature, first by Marxists and populists and later by anarchists. By 1917 she had become an anarchist. At the time of the Bolshevik Revolution she was active with an anarchist group publishing an underground Yiddish journal called Der Shturm (The Storm). Following infighting amongst the group they reorganized as Frayhayt (Freedom) towards the end of 1917. They published 5 issue s of their journal in the early part of 1918. This newspaper had been outlawed by the American government because of its anti-war position, let alone its anarchist anti-capitalist and anti-state ideology. It was delivered to mailboxes in the dead of night.

In the Spring of 1918 American troops landed in Soviet Russia as part of an intervention against the Revolution. The Frayhayt group drafted a leaflet calling on American workers to launch a general strike in support of the Russian Revolution. Five thousand copies of the leaflet were produced in English and in Yiddish. The group distributed them through the summer of 1918, and on August 23rd Steimer took the remainder to the factory where she worked, distributed some by hand and threw the remainder out of a washroom window on the upper floor. passersby picked them up, informed the police who informed military intelligence who sent two sergeants to the building. Going from floor to floor they interrogated one of the members of the Frayhayt group, Hyman Rosansky, who turned informer and implicated other members of the group.

The police rapidly descended upon the other members of the group, raiding their headquarters and dealing out an inordinate number of beatings. The trail that followed was one of the landmark cases of repression of civil liberties in the USA. It was the most important prosecution under the Sedition Act, the main instrument of repression in the 'Red Scare' that spread across the USA in the wake of WW1 and the Russian Revolution. The trial of the accused opened on October 10th, 1918 at the Federal Courthouse in new York One defendant was missing. Jacob Schwartz had died from the beatings administered by the police. Nobody was charged in this murder, and the official record read that he had died of the 'Spanish Flu', then raging in NY.

The trial wound on to its predetermined conclusion in front of a biased judge. Even though the accused were charged under an act specifically directed towards support for Germany and its allies in WW1 they were found guilty of sedition for opposing an American military action after WW1. Mollie Steimer delivered a speech at the trial that defined her vision of anarchism,

"By anarchism I understand a new social order, where no group of people will be governed by another group of people. Individual freedom shall prevail in the full sense of the word. Private ownership will be abolished. Every person shall have an equal opportunity to develop himself well, both mentally and physically. We shall not have to struggle for our daily existence as we do now. No one shall live on the product of others. Every person shall produce as much as he can, and enjoy as much as he needs-receive according to his need. Instead of striving to get money, we shall strive towards education, towards knowledge. While at present the people of the world are divided into various groups, calling themselves nations, while one nation defies another-in most cases considers the others as competitive- we, the workers of the world, shall stretch out our hands towards each other with brotherly love. To the fulfillment of this idea I shall devote all my energy, and, if necessary, render my life for it."

All but one of the defendants were found guilty. The men in the case were sentences to a 20 years term for distributing leaflets. Steimer received 15 years. The sentences for the "crime" of distributing leaflets became a cause celebre, and the judgement was appealed. Freed on bail Steimer was arrested no less than 8 times in the next 11 months. At one point she was taken to Ellis Island and went on hunger strike to protest the solitary confinement conditions of her imprisonment. This event prompted Emma Goldman to say that, "The entire machinery of the United States government was being employed to crush this slip of a girl weighing less than 80 pounds." Mollie was released from prison while her deportation order was in process. She took the opportunity in the fall of 1919 to visit Emma Goldman in New York, and the pair struck up a lifelong friendship. Goldman was offput by Steimer's diminutive stature, calling her, "altogether Japanese in features and stature".

Steimer was once more arrested and spent another six months in solitary confinement on Blackwell's Island until April 29, 1920. Her conviction was upheld. The male defendants in the case had tried to jump bail and were caught trying to escape to Mexico. Steimer had been informed of the plan, but had refused to cooperate because it meant forfeiting the $40,000 bail contributed by ordinary workers for their surety. Steimer was transferred to the Jefferson City Prison where she spent another 18 months. Meanwhile the legal defense committee had been working to secure their release on the condition of their deportation to Russia. Steimer was initially reluctant to accept the offer citing the thousands of other political prisoners in jail in the USA, but another of her co-accused, Jacob Abrama, gave their lawyer the key of how to approach her. "She must be approached like a good Christian, with a Bible of Kropotkin or Bakunin. Otherwise you will not succeed.".

He succeeded. On November 24th, 1921, Mollie Steimer, along with 4 other companions set sail for the new Soviet Union on the SS Estonia. Another anarchist paper, the Fraye Arbeiter Shtime, issued a warning, that they would land in a country of authority and repression. This proved to be true. Arriving in Moscow on December 15th, 1921 they found that Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman had already departed for the West, disillusioned with the Bolshevik tyranny. Kropotkin was dead, and the Kronstadt rebellion had been suppressed the previous March. Nestor Makhno's army had been dispersed, thousands of anarchists languished in Soviet jails and the Soviets had become a mere tool of the dictatorship.

The exiles tried to adjust to life under the communist tyranny as best they could. Some joined the Communist Party. Others returned to the West as Goldman and Berkman had. While in Russia Steimer met her future lifelong companion, Senya Fleshin. He had been born in Kiev in 1894, emigrated to the USA at the age of sixteen and later returned to Russia in 1917 to participate in the Revolution. After taking part in the Golos Truda group in Petrograd and afterwards in the Nabat Confederation in Ukraine he was imprisoned by the Communists. Released from prison he began work at the Museum of the Revolution in Petrograd where he met Mollie. The two fell immediately in love.

The pair organized a Society to Help Anarchist Prisoners, and travelled around the country on this task before they were arrested on November 1st, 1922. Originally sentenced to two years deportation to Siberia they began a hunger strike on November 17th and were released two days later. They resumed their activities in support of imprisoned anarchists and were rearrested on July 9th, 1923 and charged with "propagation of anarchist ideas" which had become a crime in the Soviet Union by that time. Because of protests by foreign anarcho-syndicalist delegates to the first congress of the Red International of Trade Unions in 1923 they were released, but were ordered deported. On September 27th, 1923 they were placed on a ship bound for Germany.

Once in Germany they went to Berlin where they met up with Goldman and Berkman. Steimer sent articles to the London anarchist journal 'Freedom' denouncing the Bolshevik tyranny. Steimer and Fleshin began relief work for imprisoned Russian anarchists, first in Berlin and later in Paris. By 1927 they were aiding anarchist exiles not only from Russia but also from Italy, Spain, Portugal and Bulgaria. They joined Voline, Berkman and others in denouncing the 'Anarchist Platform' initiated by Peter Arshinov, Nestor makhno and other Russian exiles. Fleshin meanwhile discovered a great talent for photography and launched a career that took him to Berlin. Here he and Steimer staying until 1933 when Hitler came to power, and the exiles were forced to return to Paris. They lived there under the outbreak of WW2.

After the fall of France Steimer was imprisoned in an internment camp, but she managed to escape and rejoined Fleshin in Marseilles. In the autumn of 1941 they boarded ship for Mexico where they lived until their death. Through the rest of her life until her death at the age of 82 years of heart failure in Cuernavaca, Mexico she kept up a worldwide correspondence (she was fluent in Russian, Yiddish, English, German, French and Spanish) and contributed to the anarchist press in many languages. She became something of a movie star in her old age, appearing in 1976 in a Dutch documentary about Emma Goldman and again in a documentary in 1980 made by the Pacific Street Collective of New York. Her companion Senya Fleshin was devastated by her sudden death and died himself in less than ayear.

To read the complete biography of Mollie Steimer see the LibCom site HERE. To this Molly at least Steimer was always a much more sympathetic figure than Goldman. While she was apparently the consummate fanatic she lacked many of Goldman's other faults. The anarchist movement awaits a full biography of this remarkable woman.