Extinguish the Old | A.L. & V.L. Gordin

This pamphlet collects just a few of the surviving literary fragments and insurrectionary ephemera produced by the Russian individualist anarchists A.L. and V.L. Gordin, before and during the Russian Revolution. In 1917, the Gordin brothers founded a society of Anarchist-Communists which they called the Union of the Oppressed Five, the "Oppressed Five" referred to those categories of humanity which endured the greatest hardships under the yoke of Western civilization: "worker-vagabond," national minority, woman, youth, and individual personality. The organizationalists and dry rationalists of the Russian anarchist movement considered the Gordin's wild-eyed philosophers run amuck, annihilators of all accepted verities and traditions who were satanically bent upon the destruction of all institutionalized discipline and (party) authority. In the context of the Russian Revolution, the Gordin Brothers fashioned Molotov cocktails out of these ideas and bolstered their impactive power with their own colorful and explosive language.