Early life Iuda Solomonovich Grossman was born into a
Ukrainian Jewish merchant family in
Kherson, in 1883. As a member of an ethnic minority group, Grossman was attracted towards
anarchism. In 1897, he joined the in
Yelysavethrad, for which he was placed under police surveillance. In 1902, he fled into exile in
Geneva, where he joined the
anarchist communist group
Bread and Freedom and became a supporter of anarchist
terrorism. He returned to the Russian Empire after the outbreak of the
1905 Revolution.
1905 Revolution Grossman was one of the leaders of the 1905 Revolution in the Polish city of
Białystok, where he recalled that anarchist groups had "sprang up like mushrooms after a rain" in the wake of
Bloody Sunday. He took the leadership of the local branch of the
Black Banner, an
anarchist communist organisation which advocated for a campaign of
terrorism against the city's
business owners. The city's previously small anarchist movement grew rapidly, with new recruits joining from the local branches of the
Socialist Revolutionary Party (PSR) and the
Bundist movement. At its peak, Grossman estimated that the city's anarchist movement counted 300 active members, with hundreds more sympathisers and supporters. Most of the city's anarchists joined the Black Banner, which printed anti-capitalist literature calling for a
social revolution against the
state and
private property, and distributed it to factory workers. Grossman himself called for the elimination of the anarchist movement's "
humanist tendencies", including the
idealism and
liberalism he perceived in the works of
Peter Kropotkin, and instead advocated for an anarchist theory grounded in
class struggle. During this period, Grossman observed a sense of what he called "mechanical militancy", in which terrorists would target anyone from business owners to postmen wearing state uniforms. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian trade unionist
Daniil Novomirskii attracted numerous members into his
South Russian Group of Anarcho-Syndicalists, leading Roshchin to remark that "God, if he existed, must be a
syndicalist". Grossman's brother,
Abram Grossman, became a leading opponent of syndicalism and instead practiced a
revolutionary form of
anarchist communism. In February 1908, Abram Grossman was shot by
Gendarmes at the
Kyiv railway station. Iuda Grossman subsequently succeeded his brother as a leading voice of anti-syndicalism, penning denunciations in the journal
Buntar under the pseudonym of "Roshchin". He accused exiled criticised the syndicalists for focusing their demands on higher wages and shorter working days, which he claimed would only benefit highly-organised
skilled workers, while neglecting the
unskilled workers and the
unemployed. After the suppression of the revolution, Grossman fled into exile in
Western Europe, where he moderated his stance and moved towards what he called "critical syndicalism". He now accepted the role of trade unions in revolutionary struggle, so long as they were not controlled by socialist political parties, and advocated for anarchists to join trade unions so they convert other workers to anarchism. By early 1908, Grossman had moved to
Paris, where he met fellow Ukrainian anarchist . The two received a letter from the anarchist militant
Dmitrii Bogrov, who had been accused by the PSR of being an
agent provocateur and asked them to help clear his name; Grossman and Knizhnik both believed Bogrov to be innocent of the charges against him. The accusations continued to follow Bogrov, who wrote to Grossman in 1911 that he had been forced to leave the PSR. To clear himself of the accusations, the PSR ultimately set him the tas of assassinating a government official; Bogrov chose to assassinate the prime minister
Pyotr Stolypin in September 1911.
1917 Revolution At the outbreak of
World War I, Grossman was in
Geneva, where he formed part of a group of
internationalists, along with the Russian anarchist
Aleksandr Ge and the Georgian anarchist
Georgy Gogelia. In the spring of 1915, Grossman signed the
International Anarchist Manifesto on the War, which called for workers in belligerent countries to transform the inter-imperialist war into a
civil war against their own governments. He and his group sharply criticised
Peter Kropotkin and other signatories of the
Manifesto of the Sixteen, who had declared their support for the
Allies, denouncing them as "anarcho-patriots". Grossman instead called for a
social revolution to overthrow the
Russian Empire and the
capitalist system. To publicise their views, Grossman and Gogelia published ''Put' k Svobode'', an
antimilitarist journal. When the Empire was finally overthrown in the
February Revolution of 1917, Grossman celebrated the turn of events, declaring that "the sun has arisen and has dispersed the black clouds". When the
provisional government proclaimed a general
amnesty for political prisoners and exiles, Grossman soon returned from exile. Following his return to Ukraine, he gave a series of lectures in
Donbas, alongside
Peter Arshinov and
Nikolai Rogdaev. He then moved to
Moscow, where he joined the
Moscow Federation of Anarchist Groups; there he met the Ukrainian revolutionary
Nestor Makhno, who later described Grossman and other members of the Federation as "men of books rather than deeds". After the
Bolsheviks seized power in the
October Revolution, Grossman declared his support for
Bolshevism. He formulated an anarchist theory on the "
dictatorship of the proletariat" and called for anarchists to cooperate with the Bolshevik government. This attracted criticism from the wider anarchist movement, with many anarchists denouncing him first as an "
anarcho-Bolshevik" and later as a "
Soviet anarchist". In early 1919, Grossman briefly moved to
Huliaipole to participate in the
Makhnovist movement. Makhno and
Volin suspected Grossman of being a spy for the
Cheka, but took no action against him. At a meeting of anarchists in Moscow in 1920, he proclaimed it to be "the duty of every anarchist" to collaborate with the
Russian Communist Party, which he characterised as the
revolutionary vanguard, and called on them to leave their political theories aside so they could focus on practical work to support the revolution. His speech was poorly received by most of the attendees, with the exception of
Alexander Berkman, who sympathised with Grossman's Soviet anarchism. Despite his loyalty to the new government, Grossman was briefly arrested by the Bolshevik authorities during a crackdown against the
Russian anarchist movement.
Art criticism During the years of the
New Economic Policy, Grossman withdrew from the anarchist movement and joined the
Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) as an
art critic. He penned a series of literary criticisms for the RAPP's journal
Na Postu. On the occasion of the centenary of
Mikhail Bakunin's birth in 1926, Grossman was recruited to give lectures about Bakunin at the
Communist Academy. In a 1926 article for
Contemporary Architecture, which he titled "Notes of an Ignoramus", he wrote that
modern architecture struggled to reconcile the material requirements of buildings with their moral requirements, and divided architecture respectively into
utilitarian and
aesthetic expressions. In 1929, he published the work
The Art of Changing the World. In April 1930, he participated in a meeting of RAPP critics at the
Communist Academy, where they denounced
Aleksandr Voronsky and members of the
Pereval group for
Trotskyism and various other anti-Stalinist tropes. Grossman was critical of
Nikolay Akimov's 1932 adaptation of
Hamlet, highlighting what he saw as a gap between Akimov's intentions and the result. In June 1933, he attended a meeting chaired by
Lev Kamenev at the
Academic Publishing House, which sought to publish a collected works of
William Shakespeare. Grossman died of natural causes shortly before the beginning of the
Great Purge, in 1934. ==Works==