PAUL AVRICH of the unemployed. Returning to Russia during the Revolution, Baron became a popular lecturer and writer in the Ukraine and was elected by the Bakers' Union of Kiev to the city soviet During the Civil War he was active in the Makhno movement and in the Nabat (Alarm) Confederation until his arrest by the Cheka in 1920. Locked up in Moscow prison, he was released for a few hours on February 13, 1921, to attend the funeral of Kropotkin, which became a political demonstration against the Bolsheviks. At his mentor's graveside Baron vowed « to cry relentless protests against the new despotism : the butchers at work in their cellars, the dishonor shed upon socialism, the official violence that is trampling the Revolution underfoot. » Later that year Fanny Baron fell victim to the butchers in their cellars. Arrested, beaten, and tortured, she was shot without tria! in the Liubianka' (that « legendary pit of horror, » Solzhenitsyn calls it in The First Circle) together with the Anarchist poet Lev Chorny. Emma Goldman was so outraged by the news that she considered chaining herself to a bench in the hall where the Third Comintern Congress was in session and shouting her protests to the delegates. She was dissuaded by friends, however, and, profoundly disheartedned by the turn the Revolution had taken, decided to leave the country. Aaron Baron, meanwhile, was exiled to Siberia and eventually disappeared in the Great Purge. So it was that sorne of the noblest spirits of the Russian revolutionary movement were reviled, arrested, and fina)ly stamped out or driven into exile. The story of their persecution, though previously written and documented by reliable expatriates and scholars - notable examples are Forced Labor in Soviet Russia by the well-known Mensheviks David Dallin and Boris Nicolaevsky and The Guillotine at Work by Gregory Maximoff, a leading Anarcho-Syndicalist who himself was jailed six times between 1919 and 1921 and finally deported to Germany - was all too often ignored and has long since been forgotten. It was left to Solzhenitsyn, in The Gulag Archipelago, to tell it to a worldwide audience \vho, aware of his unassailable honesty, will not be inclined to dismiss it as mere anti-Soviet propaganda. With a literary power unmatched in earlier accounts, he has provided a chronicle of arrests, interrogations, and tortures, buttressed with evidence from a wide range of sources (including hundreds of personal interviews) gathered over many years. He cites specific cases, gives dates, times, and 106
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