• year or so while he published his pamphlets on the Russian Revolution, after which he went to France. There he wrote " The BolshevikMyth" and the "ABC of Communist Anarchism." The inability to take part in the struggle in America, whither the deportation order prevented him returning, and his ill-health made his life after the last war one of increasing disappointment. Yet he was intensely interested in the workei:s' struggle, and in his last letter discusses and acclaims the great stay-in strikes in France in 1936. At the beginning of 1936 ·he underwent a serious operation. Unfortunately it was unsuccessful, and left him wjth the prospect of slowly dying in great pain. On June 28th, 1936, he shot himse1f. He died just three weeks before the Spanish workers opposed Franco's fascists with the social revolution on the barricades of Madrid and Barcelona. Emma Goldman said of him in the preface she contributed to the last American edition of the "ABC of Communist Anarchism " : "If only he had lived a little longer! But the many years in exile, the unbelievable humiliations to which he was subjected; having to beg the right to breathe from creepy officials, the enervating and exhausting struggle for existence, and his severe illness combined to make life intolerable. Alexander Berkman hated dependence ; he hated to become a burden to those he loved, and so he did what he had always said he would do : he hastened his end by his own lu>nd." 6 B blioteca Gmo Bianco
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