Alexander Berkman

Born in the Russian Empire in 1870, he emigrated to the United States as a teenager and became a prominent voice in the anarchist movement. He is often remembered for the 1892 attack on steel magnate Henry Clay Frick during the Homestead strike, an act that led to a long prison sentence and made him one of the best-known radicals of his era.

After his release, he wrote, edited, and organized alongside other leading activists, especially Emma Goldman. He was deported from the United States in the postwar crackdown on radicals, then spent time in Soviet Russia, where his experiences deeply disillusioned him and shaped his later writing against authoritarian rule.

Berkman died in 1936, but his memoirs, prison writing, and political essays have kept his voice alive for readers interested in labor history, anarchism, and the moral costs of revolution.