Zines are more than thoughts from the left, and ways to connect; they’re also repositories of culture and revolution resistance from our sector, the class of the have-nots.
One of my favorite underground zines is on the life of Maria Nikiforova a.k.a. Marusya. She was an anarchist from the Ukraine who was virtually expunged from the Soviet histories during the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917. Born in poverty, she left home at 16: she emerged a terrorist in defense of the people and spent most of the years of her life underground.
Born in 1885 in Alexandrovsk, a city experiencing rapid industrial growth at the time with a large and militant working-class population. She made ends meet by babysitting, working as a sales clerk, and then from washing bottles at a vodka distillery at the turn of the 19th century.
She began doing factory work, and it was around this time she joined a local group of anarchist-communist revolutionaries who actively advanced the “philosophy of class struggle, an end to capitalism, and all forms of oppression”, as brother Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin aptly defines it. Based largely on the theories of Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, anarchist communism advocates for community and worker councils being in control of the means of production and distribution instead of the private owners who profit off the sweat of working-class labor. It’s not to be confused with communism based on state ownership of the economy, control of production and distribution, or on party dictatorship. It has no support or connection with Lenin or Stalin or Trotsky. Essentially speaking, it’s a revolutionary tendency where communities benefit fully from the working-class production instead of bosses or any other exploiter.
While the ideas of anarcho-communisn developed in the 1870s Russia, it began spreading and reaching the Ukraine in 1903, becoming so dynamic a force that there were as many as 90 anarcho-communist groups organized there between 1905 and 1907. During this time in 1906, around the world in Philadelphia Pennsylvania, a list of principles were being signed for a new Jewish-Anarchist paper Broyṭ Un Frayheyṭ (“Bread and Freedom”), which included:
1. Immediately awaken the degraded and depressed to struggle against all that degrades and oppresses humanity;
2. Encourage and develop the anarchist and revolutionary movement among all people and nations;
3. Educate and lighten the labor movement everywhere especially in America;
4. Maintain and further develop the militancy and fighting spirit in which our young comrades brought from cold Russia and their contempt for the dismissive indifference of the bourgeois and the slavish patience of the workers.
The members of the anarchy-communists in Ukraine being even stronger and more organized than in Russia provides a glimpse in just how far advanced Maria Nikiforova aka Marusya was in the cause.
Whereas political tyrants were targets of earlier Russian terrorists, Maria belonged to a group that engaged in “motiveless terror”, which advocated the necessities of attacking agents of economic oppression based solely on the class position they occupy.
The pent-up frustrations of the Russian empire’s lower classes subjected to an existence run by a monarch who is an honorary member of the Union of the Russian People, an organization roughly equivalent to the Ku Klux Klan, permeated the atmosphere.
After a series of bombing attacks, including on an agricultural plant that killed a chief cashier and guard, she was arrested when the bomb she tried to blow herself up with to avoid capture failed to explode. She was sentenced to death, but then she was underage; not yet 21. She was sentenced to 20 years of hard labor Siberia after her transfer from the Peter and Paul Fortress.
Not long after she escaped, reaching as far as Japan, finding refuge by anarchists in New York and Chicago, she published articles under various aliases in the Russian language press.
Around 1912, she settled in Paris, after being wounded in an anarchist bank robbery in Barcelona, being treated clandestinely in a clinic in France. She liked painting and sculpture, and attended school for art; met other artists and poets, hung out at cafes upon her arrival in France in 1913. She married Witold Brzostek, a Polish anarchist, before rear riving in Russia in 1917 where she threw herself into the Revolution in Petrograd. There, Marusya went to the famous Kronstadt Rebellion giving speeches on Anchor Square with crowds numbering between 8,000 and 10,000 sailors. The provisional government nearing collapse was due partly with thousands of Kronstadt sailors to unite with the fighters in Petrograd. And when the government began hunting them down, hunting down the Bolsheviks and anarchists, she made her way back to Alexandrovsk in July 1917, eight years after her escape as an outlaw.
Chudnov, a former Makhnovist, physically described Marusya as “32-35, medium height, with an emaciated, prematurely-aged face in which there was something of a eunuch or hermaphrodite. Her hair was cropped short in a circle.” After meeting her in 1919, Kiselev, the Bolshevik agitator, described Marisa as “around 30 years old. Thin with an emaciated face, she produced the impression of an old maid type. Narrow nose. Sunken cheeks. She wore a blouse and skirt and a small revolver hung from her belt”. Malcolm Archibold wrote that “generally physical descriptions fall into two camps; one emphasizing attractiveness, the other repulsiveness”.
Marusya was well loved. As a militant anarchist organizer, she robbed from the rich, gave to the poor, and cared for her class. Once, after being traded from prison for a Soviet chairman who was kidnapped by worker delegates, Marusya was carried over the head of her compas. She showed the legendary Mr. Makhno around to the workers group, and escaped death on several occasions.
Her final trial was held September 16, 1919, in what represented a field court marshal, where she defiantly swore at the court after being sentenced; breaking down only when saying goodbye to her husband before they were shot.
Marusya gave impassioned speeches calling for workers to struggle against the government, and for a free society. She made it clear on several occasions that the anarchists are not promoting anything to anyone. The anarchists only want people to be conscious of their owns situation, and to seize freedom for themselves.
It was with a revolutionary spirit that repeated: “the workers and peasants must as quickly as possible seize everything that was created by them over many centuries and use it for their own interest” that led to the overthrow of the government in the Ukrainian anarchist revolution.
As Malcolm Archibald captures inside of this sensational underground zine, at a 1913 Russian anarch-communist conference in London, where Maria Nikiforova signed in as Marusya, one of the main concerns was the lack of anarchist education and agitational tracks.
It’s estimated that 700,000 people commit suicide every year. Imagine if these oppressed hundreds of thousands discovered they’re able to find redemption in the revolution against depression. I myself understand what it feels like, with many others, becoming radicalized with exposure to revolutionary knowledge, who find it worthier what brief moment we have in this world to help liberate those who unnecessarily suffer under our collective oppressions.
How could they blame us? How could they blame us after a life of so much oppression and being our people suffer? Who could blame us for resolving, with a gulp of sincerity in our throats, to devoting our lives to uplifting the people and be willing to lay down our lives for the oppressed?