Golos Truda - Background

Background

Following the suppression of the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the consequent exile of political dissidents from the Russian Empire, Russian-language journalism in New York City enjoyed a revival. Among the fledgling publications were a number of political newspapers and labor union periodicals, including Golos Truda, which the Union of Russian Workers in the United States and Canada began publishing in the city in 1911, initially on a monthly basis. The newspaper adopted the ideology of anarcho-syndicalism, a fusion of trade unionism and anarchist philosophy which had emerged from the 1907 International Anarchist Congress of Amsterdam and along similar lines in America through the influential Industrial Workers of the World. The anarcho-syndicalists rejected state-oriented political struggle and intellectualism, instead proposing labor unions as the revolutionary agents that would bring about an anarchist society characterised primarily by worker collectives.

At the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Russian Provisional Government declared a general amnesty and offered to fund the return of those Russians who had been exiled as political opponents of the Empire; the entire staff of Golos Truda elected to leave New York City for Russia and to move the periodical to Petrograd. In Vancouver on May 26, 1917, the editors, along with Ferrer Center artist Manuel Komroff and thirteen others, boarded a ship bound for Japan. On board, the anarchists played music, gave lectures, staged plays and even published a revolutionary newspaper, The Float. From Japan, the band made their way to Siberia, and proceeded East to European Russia.