                                            Boris Yelensky
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Introduction
By Arthur Topham
Editor & Publisher
©RadicalPress.com
It’s hard to believe that ten years have passed by since the Radical Press first began publishing Boris Yelensky’s anarchist memoirs of the Russian Revolution back in July of 1998. The plan then was to run the complete text in serial form but due to the demise of the monthly hard copy edition of The Radical in June of 2002 I was only able to print up to the first half of Chapter 24 thus leaving the final seven chapters unpublished and regular readers of the tabloid hanging in the air suspended. The eventual aim was to publish the book in hard copy but that too has not happened due to financial restrictions.
Later on, after the newspaper folded, I was able to get the completed text of the book online in the forum section of my website but that also came to a sudden halt back in the fall of 2007 when my server was forced by B’nai Brith Canada and their “League for Human Rights” to cease hosting my site thanks to threats of “racism” and “anti-Semitism” and “hate” literature being alleged against myself and my website.
Since November of 2007 when I was formally charged by the Canadian Human Rights Commission with allegedly publishing articles of a discriminatory nature contrary to section 13(1) of the Canadian Human Rights Act I have been literally in an all-out battle with B’nai Brith Canada and the CHR Commission and had little time to reformat and repost this amazing historical document.
In retrospect the timing of its reappearance may be most appropriate. Today Canada and the whole of Western civilization is facing a very real and present threat from the very same mindset that Boris Yelensky describes in his memoirs of the 1917 coup d’etat euphemistically called by the Zionist media the “Russian Revolution.” Yelensky, a Russian Jew born in Krasnodar, southern Russia in 1889, had emigrated to the United States after having been involved in the unsuccessful revolutionary activities of 1905. He remained in the states until word arrived of the successful overthrow of Tzar Nicholas II in 1917 at which time, like many other Russians who had left the country, he returned to his home country to help create what he believed to be a new beginning for the Russian people and for the world in general.
Yelensky’s story, told from a fundamentally different perspective than most known historic recordings of the period, reflects the views of the anarchist movement as it existed during the early years of the 20th Century. Told in a prosaic, yet detailed fashion, unadorned by romanticism (which the anarchists argued for and against endlessly), Yelensky’s account of his time spent during the turbulent period leading up to and following the successful take-over of the former Russian monarchy by Lenin and the Bolshevik forces, provides history with an alternative viewpoint and an important third position with respect to how the events of that momentous period were viewed by a segment of the political dramatis personae known to the world as the anarchists.
In the Social Storm: Memoirs of the Russian Revolution is an attempt by the anarchist Boris Yelensky to try and discern the modus operandi of the Bolsheviks and the reasons for why they willingly sacrificed the one great opportunity to truly implement the socialist ideals that had been fleshed out over the previous half century or more and now were given the opportunity to be realized. But it is a whole lot more than merely an analysis of the mindset of the Bolsheviks. Yelensky provides the reader with vivid examples of how the anarchist movement was a living and vital part of the forces that were at play during the period. His accounts of the anarchists’ struggles and the contributions by men such as Nestor Makhno and his army of partisans who played a crucial role in the struggles during the period of civil war following the coup are both highly instructive and a necessary aspect of the history of the time in order for students of today to grasp the numerous nuances of intrigue that permeated the overall dynamics which necessarily come into play during periods of massive political and social upheaval.
Along with Yelensky’s descriptions of the unfolding events of the time are his own accounts of how the anarchists living and struggling within this maelstrom of sudden change were doing their utmost to live and exemplify their ideas by manifesting the anarchist perspective in everyday life. The experiments in actual anarchist projects which Yelensky was a part of and which he describes in detail and in which he played a vital role are positive examples of redefining social organizations so as to make them fair and liberating to those who were fortunate enough to have been able to partake of them. It was a window for the anarchists and a time, short as it was, where they were able to illustrate the positive aspects of their philosophy and how by example it held promise of exemplifying an alternative manner of social and industrial organization to those of the Bolsheviks who represented a repressive, totalitarian, brutal state dictatorship and that of the capitalists who likewise used a strong and centralized authoritarian government system disguised as “democracy” to fulfill similar ends.
For anarchists and political researchers Yelensky’s book is a revealing account of anarchism in action and a first-hand description of the lives and the efforts of those who went to Russia in good faith believing that positive changes were at hand only to come to the sudden and grim realization that instead of a new utopia, Russia had fallen into the hands of a powerful cabal of Marxist warlords who, along with their dreaded cheka terror squads, were hell-bent on gaining total power and control over one of the largest empires on earth and in the process murdering anyone who stood in the way of achieving their heinous ambitions.
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In the Social Storm: Memoirs of the Russian Revolution
By Boris Yelensky
Author’s Preface
I was born February 17th, 1889, in the city of Yekotirenodar (the gift of Catherine the Great), now known as Krasnodar, located in the province of Kuban, in the northern part of southern Russia. I was the fourth child of a middle-class family. My father had a shop that manufactured fur hats for the Cossacks.
When I was five years old we moved 125 miles south to the city of Novorossiysk on the shores of the Black Sea.
It was my parents’ ambition that I should become a doctor. My mother particularly, who could neither read nor write, was prepared to make any sacrifice to fulfill this dream. Since only a very small percentage of Jewish children were accepted at the Gymnasium, I was tutored privately to prepare me for examinations. My parents’ ambitions for me were to remain only dreams though for from an early age my thoughts were concerned mainly with the simple questions of why the majority of the people had nothing while the few had so much.
In Russia, the transfer of prisoners from one city to another in large groups was called Etap. Since Novorossiysk was a port city, groups of these prisoners were continually coming through town, transferring from ships to trains. They would come in by ship, spend the night in the city, and the next day be marched up the main street to the train station.
The picture of these worn-out groups of human beings, chained hand and foot, and the clink of their irons were with me all of my childhood as a continual reminder of oppression.
When I was twelve years old I accidentally found a handful of underground revolutionary literature. I brought it home innocently enough and nearly got a beating from my father when he saw it. The fear in the faces of my parents and the few pages that I read started my mind working, and within a year I was involved in the underground revolutionary movement in our city.
But even if you don’t join in, just reading the various threads and studying the positions taken is, in itself, guaranteed to be an eye-opener in terms of gaining a broader perspective on how other Canadians perceive both sec. 13(1) of the Canadian Human Rights Act and the actions of Harry Abrams and B’nai Brith Canada. Most questions are cogent and the issues are wide-ranging.
