Shadows In the Struggle for Equality

From Cop City to the Dakota pipelines and Jane’s Revenge to numerous struggles worldwide, anarchist organizers are relentlessly targeted by the state today as they have been for over a century.

Shadows in the Struggle for Equality is the first-hand account of Boris Yelensky, an activist of the Anarchist Red Cross (later the Anarchist Black Cross), during the Russian revolutionary movement from 1905 through 1917, and the subsequent Leninist/Stalinist repression.

Written with great humility and compassion, Yelensky recalls his fifty years of tireless organizing to aid victims of state oppression and injustice, beginning with a vivid sketch of the history of the Russian revolutionary movement and the critical role played by anarchists. He then provides the rich history of the Anarchist Red Cross spanning the time from the Revolution to his settling in the US where he dedicated his life and his book “to the Fighters for Freedom, Humanism and Justice, to those who endeavored to help these fighters by applying the principle of mutual aid.”

In telling why an anarchist relief organization became necessary he calls attention to a neglected aspect of revolutionary history—the sabotage and discrimination of many social-democrats against their fellow-prisoners and in the outside relief organizations. Of the vast sums collected all over the world, from Czarist times up through the 1950s when the book was written, very little reached the anarchist prisoners.

With newly translated material, and over a dozen beautiful illustrations by N.O. Bonzo, this stunning edition of Shadows in the Struggle for Equality will serve to inspire a continuation of solidarity and support for those who are incarcerated in the struggle for freedom, humanism, and justice.