Twenty years have passed since the death of historian Paul Avrich on February 16, 2006, yet his influence on the study of American anarchism remains unmatched. I first met Paul in October 2000 at a symposium held at the Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. At the time, I was searching for a dissertation topic and, with some uncertainty, proposed a study of German immigrant anarchists. Paul responded with immediate enthusiasm and urged me to pursue it. That was all I needed.
In this brief reflection, I situate Avrich’s work within the broader landscape of anarchist historiography in the United States and explain why his contribution was not merely additive but transformative. He did more than recover a neglected movement; he reshaped the terms on which anarchism could be studied, understood, and debated within professional historical scholarship.
For much of the twentieth century, American anarchists and their movement were largely denied the mature, nuanced attention they deserved. When interest surged in the 1960s and 1970s, it did so largely through anthologies and polemical works that connected anarchist ideas to contemporary activism. These works were undeniably important; they shed light on anarchism’s enduring relevance, but they fell short of providing the unvarnished, sensitive histories the movement required.
It was precisely against this backdrop that Avrich’s work took shape. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he remained largely detached from the methodological skirmishes that accompanied the rise of the “new social history.” His scholarly trajectory had been shaped elsewhere, by his family background, his linguistic training, and above all by his early immersion in Russian history. These influences placed him at a distance from the prevailing trends in American historiography.
Born in New York City in 1931 to a mother who had been an actress in the Yiddish theater, Avrich initially focused on Russian radicalism rather than American labor history. His 1961 dissertation examined factory committees during the Russian Revolution. This research took him to the Soviet Union during the relative liberalization of the Khrushchev era. While working in Moscow’s Lenin Library, Avrich encountered materials on the 1921 Kronstadt uprising and the role anarchists played in opposing Bolshevik repression. This discovery, more than anything, changed the trajectory of his intellectual life. It nurtured both a deep sympathy for anarchism and a lasting hostility to authoritarian socialism.
These experiences shaped his insistence on treating anarchists neither as romantic martyrs nor as pathological extremists, but as thinking individuals responding to concrete historical conditions. In the wake of the 1968 Paris student uprisings, when Avrich was a professor at Queens College, he insisted on offering a course on anarchism. When his dean initially objected, Avrich allegedly threatened to resign. The course was approved, and he would teach it for the next twenty years.
Avrich’s engagement with anarchism extended well beyond the classroom. Starting in 1963, a young Avrich attended the annual banquet of elderly Jewish anarchists in New York. He also participated in meetings of Fraye Arbeter Shtime, one of the longest-running anarchist newspapers, where he formed lasting friendships and deepened his understanding of anarchism as a lived culture. He sometimes invited movement veterans to speak in his class. In 1976, he gave a book talk on the Russian anarchists as part of the IWW Workers’ Library Series.
One of Avrich’s significant contributions was revealing how anarchists foresaw the dangers of Soviet Russia, a prescience that earlier scholars had often overlooked. As immigration historian Rudolph Vecoli observed, Avrich reminded scholars that anarchists had seen in state socialism, and particularly in Soviet Communism, the seeds of totalitarianism.1 This vision, which set anarchists apart from other leftist movements, gave Avrich’s work a sense of urgency and clarity.
It wasn’t until the late 1970s that Paul Avrich shifted his focus to American anarchism, which he explored with passion and precision in several books throughout the 1980s and 1990s. One pivotal moment in American anarchist scholarship came in 1980, when Avrich served as consultant and narrator of the documentary Free Voice of Labor: The Jewish Anarchists directed by Steven Fischler and Joel Sucher of Pacific Street Films. This was followed by a History Workshop on Immigrant Anarchism organized by the Tamiment Library in New York. Avrich was again a key figure, delivering a lecture on the “widely ignored” role anarchists had played in U.S. labor struggles in the 19th and 20th centuries.2 He noted the imbalance in labor historiography, which had disproportionately emphasized the role of Communists in trade unions, and called for a rectification of this oversight. As historian Martin Miller noted, Avrich’s work stood in stark contrast to the “partisan accounts” that once dominated anarchist studies, reestablishing the field “on a solidly objective foundation.”3
Avrich’s methods, particularly his reliance on biography and oral history, were not without critics. David Goodway, for example, described his work as “highly traditional history, indeed political history or, at best, unreconstructed labour history.”4 Such criticisms misunderstand the nature of Avrich’s intervention. His biographical focus was not a retreat from social history but a means of humanizing a movement that had too often been abstracted or pathologized. Avrich emphasized the ethical and rational dimensions of anarchism, qualities frequently obscured by ideological polemic. Other historians saw this clearly. Labor historian Nick Salvatore praised Avrich’s work on Haymarket as a “superb piece of social history,” noting his skillful blending of “social history and scholarly detection with the biographical technique central to his storytelling.”5
For Avrich, anarchism was never reducible to the success or failure of political movements. The collapse of anarchist organizations often obscures the enduring achievements of anarchism as an “ethical and cultural movement.” It was this deeper story of values, solidarities, and moral resistance that Avrich wanted to document and preserve.6 As he once allegedly said: “Every good person deep down is an anarchist.”7
Central to this achievement was his extraordinary command of sources. Fluent in Russian and Yiddish, Avrich accessed a vast body of foreign-language materials unavailable to most earlier scholars. This linguistic competence allowed him to recover immigrant anarchist voices, which constituted the bulk of the early movement. While Bruce Nelson’s Beyond the Martyrs (1988) marked an important step toward a social history of American anarchism, it was Avrich who, as Paul Buhle wrote, “through heroic individual effort,” mapped the archival terrain of anarchist history. (6) Avrich’s dedication to unearthing these sources helped to reshape the historiography of anarchism and established him as a foundational figure for future historians.
Today, Avrich’s work remains widely read. It helped reimagine of anarchism as a legitimate and enduring philosophy whose influence extended well beyond organized labor movements. Even when individuals and groups hesitate to call themselves anarchists, anarchist ideas—ethical autonomy, anti-authoritarianism, mutual aid—continue to animate political and cultural life. That this continuity is now visible to historians is due in no small measure to Paul Avrich’s lifetime of scholarship.
Vecoli, “Review of Anarchist Portaits by Paul Avrich,” Journal of American Ethnic History Vol. 10, No. 3 (Spring 1991), 79.
Martin Blatt, “Two Letters from America: History Workshop on Immigrant Anarchism,” History Workshop No. 14 (Autumn 1982), 165-168.
Miller’s review of Anarchist Portraits in The American Historical Review Vol. 95, No. 3 (Jun 1990), 784.
Goodway, ed. For Anarchism: History, Theory, and Practice (New York: Routledge, 1989, 2013), 8-9.
Salvatore, “Review of The Haymarket Tragedy by Paul Avrich,” The American Historical Review Vol. 90, No. 3 (Jun 1985), 772.
Steven Biel, “Review: The Left and Public Memory,” Reviews in American History Vol. 23, No. 4 (Dec. 1995), 705.
"Paul Avrich ist tot,” DadAWeb: https://www.dadaweb.de/wiki/Paul_Avrich_ist_tot
Do you know where I could find a copy of Avrich's 1961 dissertation on the factory committees? I recently read an article from Long Haul Magazine about them and I feel like our whole movement needs to study them more.
https://longhaulmag.com/when-scythe-met-stone/
I also wonder if Avrich ever met Sam Dolgoff.
Anyways, amazing and fascinating article, thank you for taking the time to write it.
I love Paul's work. His book on Russian anarchists was the first thing that ever made me question the Russian Revolution, and the people who took power then. Thanks for writing this beautiful ode to him.