Golos Truda - Suppression and Legacy

Suppression and Legacy

See also: Political repression in the Soviet Union

On November 17, 1917, the Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets issued a decree granting to the Bolsheviks control over all newsprint and expansive powers of shutting down dissident newspapers. After the suppression of the Golos Truda by the Bolshevik government in August 1918, G.P Maximoff, Nikolai Dolenko and Efim Yartchuk established Volny Golos Truda (The Free Voice of Labour). At the 10th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (b) in March 1921, Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin declared war against the petite bourgeoisie, and in particular the anarcho-syndicalists, with immediate consequences; the Cheka closed the publishing and printing premises of Golos Truda in Petrograd, as well as the paper's bookstore in Moscow, where all but half a dozen anarchists had been arrested.

Despite the banning of their paper, the Golos Truda group continued on, however, and issued a final edition in the form of a journal, in Petrograd and Moscow in December 1919. During the New Economic Policy period (1921–1928), it released a number of works, including the publication of the collected works of pre-eminent anarchist theorist Mikhail Bakunin from its bookstore and publishing house in Petrograd between 1919 and 1922. What little anarchist activity the regime tolerated ended in 1929, after the accession of Joseph Stalin, and the bookshops of the Golos Truda group in Moscow and Petrograd were closed permanently amidst an abrupt and violent wave of repression. The newspaper was also suppressed by the Post Office Department in the United States, where it was succeeded by the widely-circulated Khleb i Volya (Bread and Freedom), first published on February 26, 1919, which in turn was banned from the United States and Canada for its anarchist position.

Russian revolutionary anarchist-turned-Bolshevik Victor Serge described Golos Truda as the most authoritative anarchist group active in 1917, "in the sense that it was the only one to possess any semblance of doctrine, a valuable collection of militants" who foresaw that the October Revolution "could only end in the formation of a new power".