AnarWiki/markdown/Alexander_Schapiro.md

**Alexander M. Schapiro** (1883 - 1946) was an
[anarcho-syndicalist](Anarcho-Syndicalism "wikilink") active in the
international anarchist movement.

## Life

### Family

Schapiro's father was named Moses Schapiro, who was a member of
[Narodnaya Volya](Narodnaya_Volya "wikilink")

Schapiro was born in 1882 or 1883 in Rostov-on-Don in southern Russia,
but grew up in Constantinople because his father Moses, a member of the
secret revolutionary organization *Narodnaya Volya*, which attempted to
assassinate Tsar Alexander II in 1881, was forced to flee the Russian
Empire. There, he attended the French school. Schapiro spoke Yiddish,
Russian, French, and Turkish, and would later learn German and English.
In the mid-1890s, Moses converted to anarchism and Schapiro started
studying the works of anarchist theorists Peter Kropotkin, Jean Grave
and Élisée Reclus. After finishing school, Schapiro moved to Sofia,
Bulgaria in 1899 to study mathematics and physics. In August 1900, he
moved to Paris to attend the Sorbonne and possibly to participate in an
international anarchist congress, which in the end was banned by the
authorities. He started studying either biology with the intention of
embarking on a career in medicine or engineering. He was forced to drop
out for financial reasons. In Paris, he came to know many of the city's
leading anarchists and was part of an anarcho-syndicalist
group.<sup>\[1\]</sup>

## London

In 1900 or 1901, at Kroptokin's suggestion, Schapiro moved to London,
where he joined his father, an active member of London's anarchist
milieu. In London, Schapiro worked as an assistant for the physiologist
Augustus Waller. This allowed Schapiro to devote a lot of his time to
the anarchist movement, but he is also listed as an author on several
publications from Waller's lab. He recruited the anarchist Thomas Keell
as a test subject.<sup>\[2\]</sup>

In London, Schapiro was a member of the *Arbeter Fraynd* collective.
According to Sam Dreen, another member, he was intelligent and capable,
but also a stubborn and overbearing intellectual who was not in touch
with workers' issues. The collective was split on the question of
participation in trade unions. Schapiro was opposed because he feared
anarchist principles could be compromised by unionism.<sup>\[3\]</sup>
Fermin Rocker, Rudolf Rocker's son, liked Schapiro and considered him
well-educated and intelligent, but dogmatic, intolerant, and
self-important.<sup>\[4\]</sup>

Schapiro was a delegate of the Jewish Anarchist Federation of London at
the 1907 International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam, at which he was
elected one of three secretaries and became one of five members of a
bureau calling itself the Anarchist International.<sup>\[5\]</sup> In
the years after the Russian Revolution of 1905, Russian anarchists were
the targets of severe government repression. Hundreds were executed or
sentenced to long prison terms and many fled to the west. In 1907,
anarchist exiles established the Anarchist Red Cross to protest the
Russian Empire's treatment of anarchists and help imprisoned activists.
Along with Kropotkin, Varlam Cherkezov, and Rudolf Rocker, Schapiro
directed the London headquarters of the network.<sup>\[6\]</sup>
Schapiro took part in the First International Syndicalist Congress in
London in 1913. He did not represent any organization, but was one of
two translators, with Christiaan Cornelissen the other.<sup>\[7\]</sup>
The German delegates praised Schapiro's objective approach, while Alfred
Rosmer deemed him the only participant who did not lose his
poise.<sup>\[8\]</sup>

By the time World War I broke out, Schapiro was an important organizer
in the international anarchist movement.<sup>\[9\]</sup> He was a
signatory to the International Anarchist Manifesto against the First
World War issued in London in 1915.<sup>\[10\]\[11\]</sup> Schapiro was
one of the few anarchist friends of Kropotkin not to cut his ties with
the anarchist communist theorist over the latter's role in the pro-war
*Manifesto of the Sixteen*.<sup>\[12\]</sup>

## Russia

After the February Revolution in 1917, Schapiro returned to Russia via
the Pacific route, arriving in Petrograd in July. He was one of a number
of a number of anarcho-syndicalists returning from exile. He initiated a
Yiddish newspaper in Russia. He joined the Union of Anarcho-Syndicalist
Propaganda and contributed to its journal *Golos Truda* and its
publishing house. *Golos Truda* had previously been published in New
York as the organ of the Union of Russian Workers of the United States
and Canada, but was moved to Petrograd in 1917.<sup>\[13\]</sup> The
anarcho-syndicalists called for workers' control of production through
factory committees, which they expected would be the organizations at
the heart of future non-capitalist society. In this they agreed with the
Bolsheviks.<sup>\[14\]</sup> Like the Bolsheviks they also supported the
soviets, but were wary that they were increasingly dominated by the
former. Schapiro in September called for "complete decentralization and
the very broadest self-direction of local organizations" in order to
avoid the soviets becoming vehicles of political coercion. He called for
the abolition of the state and an immediate general
strike.<sup>\[15\]</sup>

After the October Revolution, which *Golos Truda* supported and
celebrated afterwards, the Bolsheviks took power and relations between
them and the anarcho-syndicalists became more strained.<sup>\[16\]</sup>
Yet even as they criticized Bolshevik policy, the syndicalists
collaborated with the Soviet government in its fight against the White
Army in the Civil War, as they considered the Whites the greater evil
that had to be defeated to allow for a Third Revolution. Schapiro
started working for the Commissariat of Jewish Affairs in 1918,
promoting the Soviet system among Jewish workers, but not specifically
Bolshevism. By 1920, he had transferred to the Commissariat of Foreign
Affairs where he worked as a translator. The Commissariat was led by
Georgy Chicherin, whom he had gotten to know in London.<sup>\[17\]</sup>
Revolutionary anarchist-turned-Bolshevik Victor Serge in his *Memoirs of
a Revolutionary* described Schapiro as a man "of critical and moderate
temper".<sup>\[18\]</sup>

In 1918, government repression against the anarchist movement began. In
May, *Golos Truda* was shut down.<sup>\[19\]</sup> Schapiro turned his
attention to stopping this repression.<sup>\[20\]</sup> In 1920,
syndicalists from several western countries came to Moscow to attend the
second congress of the Comintern. They knew little about conditions in
Russia. While in Moscow, several syndicalists including Augustin Souchy,
Ángel Pestaña, Armando Borghi, and Bertho Lepetit visited anarchists
like Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and Schapiro. Schapiro
relayed to them Russian syndicalists' critique of the regime and their
fears of persecution. Some of those syndicalists then raised these
issues with the Bolshevik leadership.<sup>\[21\]</sup> After the
congress, Alfred Rosmer, a French syndicalist, stayed in Russia. He
supported Bolshevism and was elected to the Comintern's executive.
Rosmer contacted Schapiro and met him at the *Golos Truda* printing
house. The Russian syndicalists had written a letter of protest and
hoped it would receive attention if Rosmer submitted it to the
Comintern. Rosmer and Schapiro discussed the issue and Rosmer was
optimistic it could be resolved. The Russian syndicalists' defiant tone
surprised Rosmer and he refused to submit their declaration unless they
softened it. Eventually, Shapiro and Gregori Maximoff, another member of
*Golos Truda*, rewrote the letter and Rosmer submitted it in February
1921.<sup>\[22\]</sup>

In January 1921, Kropotkin, almost eighty years old and living in
Dmitrov, contracted pneumonia. Schapiro, with Goldman and Nikolai
Ivanovich Pavlov, took a train to visit him, but their train was delayed
and they arrived an hour after he died on February 8. Schapiro and
Berkman organized Kropotkin's funeral.<sup>\[23\]</sup> In early 1921,
the government started to ban syndicalist and anarchist writings,
including those of syndicalist theorist Fernand Pelloutier and some by
the anarchists Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin.<sup>\[24\]</sup> After the
Kronstadt uprising in March, the Bolshevik government began rounding up
anarchists. Schapiro's critique of the regime, which had been fairly
moderate, turned into fundamental opposition.<sup>\[25\]</sup> In May,
Schapiro was one of several signatories of a protest against the
persecution of Russian anarchists, which was circulated in the west. In
July, at the founding congress of the Red International of Labor Unions
(RILU), several European syndicalists protested the persecution of
anarchists and syndicalists in Russia on Schapiro and others' behalf.
One syndicalist delegate demanded that Schapiro be allowed address the
congress, but he was not. The Bolshevik leadership relented and several
anarchist prisoners were released and forced into exile. Among them were
Gregori Maximoff and Volin who had worked with Schapiro in the *Golos
Truda* group.<sup>\[26\]</sup> After the congress, Schapiro denounced
the RILU as "the illegitimate daughter of the Communist International,
and consequently the handmaiden of the Russian Communist Party" and
warned Italian syndicalists against associating with
it.<sup>\[27\]</sup>

In June 1921, Schapiro, along with Goldman, Berkman, and the fellow
anarchist Alexei Borovoi, anonymously wrote a pamphlet entitled *The
Russian Revolution and the Communist Party*, which was smuggled to
Germany and published by Rocker. They argued that anarchists had
refrained from protesting the repression leveled against them in Russia
as long as the Civil War was being fought so as not "to aid the common
enemy, world imperialism". The end of the war, however, had made it
clear that the biggest threat to the revolution "was not outside, but
within the country: a danger resulting from the very nature of the
social and economic arrangements which characterize the present
'transitory stage'."<sup>\[28\]</sup> In December 1921, Schapiro,
Berkman, and Goldman received permission from the Soviet government to
attend an international anarchist congress in Berlin, which was to held
from December 25 to January 2. They were held up in Latvia and therefore
missed the congress. Sweden then allowed the trio to enter the country
and they arrived there in January. Schapiro decided to join the Russian
syndicalist exiles in Berlin.<sup>\[29\]</sup>

In June 1922, he attended a syndicalist conference in Berlin. The
meeting was called to discuss the international organization of the
movement. Schapiro and Mark Mrachnyi, recently deported from Russia,
represented the Russian syndicalist movement, but a representative of
Russia's centralist unions also attended. Schapiro and Mrachnyi used the
meeting as another opportunity to denounce the Soviet government's
repression of syndicalists and anarchists. The meeting decided to create
an international Syndicalist Bureau, to which Schapiro would be the
Russian representative, and discussed the position the syndicalist
movement should take on the RILU. Concerning negotiations with the RILU,
Schapiro presented the congress with two options. Syndicalists could
present the Bolsheviks with minimal conditions, which they might accept,
or harsher conditions, which they could not. The former he deemed a
betrayal of syndicalist principles and the latter a mere ploy. Instead,
he proposed that the syndicalists break off negotiations with the RILU
and go their own way. The assembly adopted a resolution which made no
mention of negotiations with the RILU.<sup>\[30\]</sup> After the
meeting Schapiro decided to return to Russia, feeling he could make a
contribution there. He contacted Chicherin and received assurances he
could safely return to Russia. However, on the night of September 2–3,
two weeks after Schapiro's return to Russia, he was arrested in Moscow.
The secret police charged him with working with underground anarchists,
but was mostly interested in his international contacts. Chicherin
ignored a letter Schapiro sent him from prison and the RILU refused to
notify the Syndicalist Bureau of his arrest. Nevertheless, the news soon
reached the west. After western syndicalists protested his
incarceration, the Soviet government was worried about damaging the
CGTU's relations with the RILU. Schapiro was expelled from Russia
charged with anti-Soviet activities abroad in October
1922.<sup>\[31\]</sup>

## Exile

Schapiro decided to return to Berlin. He become one of the most active
Russian syndicalist exiles. He worked on the anarcho-syndicalist
newspaper *Rabochii Put*' (*The Workers' Way*), which was secretly
distributed in Russia. It was published by a group of exiles which also
included Maximoff. It received financial support from the Syndicalist
Bureau and was printed on the presses of the German syndicalist journal
*Der Syndikalist*.<sup>\[32\]</sup> In December 1922, he participated in
the establishment of the anarcho-syndicalist International Workers
Association (IWA). This move finalized the syndicalist break with
Bolshevism. Berlin was selected as the seat of the IWA. Schapiro,
Souchy, and Rocker were elected to its secretariat. Its membership was
almost entirely European and Latin American.<sup>\[33\]</sup>

*Rabochii Put*' became the IWA's Russian-language organ. Schapiro used
the journal to expound on the lessons he drew from the Russian
Revolution. According to him, anarchists reacted to the revolution in
two ways, both of them partly counter-revolutionary. The first position
was taken by the Soviet anarchists who regarded dictatorship as a
necessary transitional phase on the way to a stateless society. The
second held that the revolution must be immediately fully anarchist and
therefore resorted to militarism like Nestor Makhno. He concluded that
anarchism could only overcome such problematic reactions by giving more
attention to a theory of the revolutionary process rather than the ideal
of a post-revolutionary society.<sup>\[34\]</sup>

He traveled on to France, where he continued to work with the IWA and
edited another anarcho-syndicalist paper, *La Voix du Travail* (*The
Voice of Labour*). Schapiro left Europe for New York, where he remained
a tireless activist in the cause of Russian political prisoners until
his death in 1946.