Feldman, Abram

Workman. Anarchist since 1905. He was arrested several times under the tsar. He suffered serious injury in a demonstration. Having had a hand in the armed mutiny by the 41st Seledinsky Regiment in Kiev in 1906[*] he was sentenced to death in 1907. This was commuted to 18 years’ penal servitude. After 4 years in custody, he escaped and moved to America. There he belonged to the Federation of Workers’ Union of the United States and Canada [Union of Russian Workers of the USA and Canada]. He took part in strikes and demonstrations and was injured again. He returned to Russia after the February Revolution in 1917. He was active in Bessarabia and was twice arrested by the Kerensky government for anarchist propaganda. In 1918 he served on the revolutionary military committee and the soviet in Khotin. When Bessarabia was occupied by Austro-German troops, he was arrested, only to be set loose by some peasants. He then fled to Galicia where he organized some anarchist groups. In the fight against Petliura in 1919 he was he helped organize the clandestine revolutionary committee in the city of Kamenietz-Podolsk. He served on the one in Khotin and took part in the armed actions against the reaction. He was secretary of the Kamenietz-Podolsk anarchist group. Later he joined the Nabat and a trade union in Odessa. 

Being an anarchist, he was ousted from the factory committee at the Ptashnikoff works. In late 1920 he was arrested in Moscow on the very day he arrived there and, as an anarchist, was jailed for the duration of the civil war. Released in 1921, it was not long before he had picked up a further three-year jail term. He mounted a 9-day hunger strike, followed by one that lasted 13 days and after a third, 10 and a half-day hunger strike he was expelled towards the end of 1921 together with The 10 following a furore at the congress of Red Trade Unions. 

See: https://umedia.lib.umn.edu/item/p16022coll557:2668/p16022coll557:2665 

Feldman’s questionnaire in Letters from Russian Prisons states he was ‘in 1907 sentenced to death for participation in the mutiny of the Forty-first Selidinski regiment in 1905.’

‘The story of Namdlef’ in the Berkman papers says he returned from America, via Harbin, in May 1917. https://hdl.handle.net/10622/ARCH00040.189

From: L’Adunata dei Refrattari, 15 September 1923.