An
Andersen, Hans Christian (1805-1875)
Danish and author and poet. Well-known for his children’s stories.
He was born in the slums of Odense, his father a cobbler, his mother a washerwoman. He received very little education, and had an unhappy childhood. He went to work when his father died when he was 11, first as an apprentice to a weaver and tailor and then in a tobacco factory. At the age of 14, he moved to Copenhagen to try a career as a singer, dancer and actor. At the age of 17, he was "discovered" by the Director the Royal Theatre, and his artistic career was launched. Anderson combined folk myths learnt from his superstitious mother or told to him by his father, with his own rich imagination. His objective was to bring happiness to children.
Andrade, David (1859-1928)
Early Australian anarchist and bookseller. The circle around his bookshop were among those who founded the Communist Party of Australia in 1920.
In May 1886 David Andrade, his brother Will and half a dozen others formed the Melbourne Anarchist Club, the first anarchist organisation in Australia. Andrade became the MAC secretary and one of its main propagandists. The club produced the journal Honesty which gave club news as well as publishing theoretical articles and Andrade was a regular contributor. Along with his brother, David Andrade followed the booksellers trade. In a news agency at Brunswick and later in Liberty Hall, Russell St. Melbourne the brothers operated the first anarchist book shops in Australia. Here they loaned and sold anarchist publications with their publicity noting that “Socialistic Literature of all kinds (both Communist, Collectivist and Anarchist) are well represented, both in books and pamphlets, and newspapers supplied from all parts of the world.”
Andrade was an energetic and flamboyant personality who deeply immersed himself in the anarchist activities of the day and was a writer, publisher, printer, distributor, organiser, general propagandist and activist for the anarchist cause. Aside from his contributions to Honesty Andrade’s writings were published in a “wide variety of local and overseas journals.” His main works include “Money: a study of the currency question” (1887), “Our Social System” which was an attack on monopoly in both land ownership and usury, and “An Anarchist Plan of Campaign” (1888). In 1892 he published the “realistic” novel ‘The Melbourne Riots and how Harry Holdfast and his friends emancipated the workers.’ Both The Melbourne Riots and David Andrade have been recently described as “utopian.”
Andrade was a major participant in the split in MAC in 1888 and was in conflict with J.A. Andrews and other anarcho-communists. The cause of the split in the MAC was over the “forcible reclamation and defence of liberty” – in other words violence. Andrade has been variously described as a “Proudhonist” and a “mutualist” and was at this time and afterwards vehemently opposed to any form of violence. He appears to have been isolated by the split and the publication of Honesty ceased with Andrade taking control of the plant. MAC member and anarcho communist Larry Petrie later described the club as basically “Tolstoyan.”
After the split Andrade continued his work writing, publishing and bookselling. In the early 1890s he was the secretary of the Unemployed Workers Association in Richmond and in 1893 as an outspoken member of a deputation of the unemployed bitterly attacked the system of representative government “We are ruled by a lot of robbers, and when I see a man go into Parliament I feel sorry for him, for he only makes another of the nest of vermin... Our legislators are more degraded than a person who abuses a woman or a child and I have no confidence in them.”
Later that year he had taken up a small selection of 10 acres in the Dandenong Ranges where he began clearing the land, building a house and working as a storekeeper and a mailman. His second son Proudhon Andrade was born here in a rough shelter the same year. Andrade persisted in this lifestyle for five years but was burnt out in the disastrous 1898 fires. He appears to have been financially ruined and mentally broken by this event. In 1903 he was admitted to the Yarra Bend Asylum and he lived for the rest of his life in asylums. He died in 1928 and in later years was described as a kind man with a smile on his face.
Source: Radical Tradition.
André, Edgar (1894–1936) .
Born in the Rhineland, brought up in Belgium, building worker, member of Socialist Young Guard. Conscripted, prisoner of war in France in 1918; docker in Hamburg, joined SPD; then unemployed, organised unemployed committee in Hamburg, joined KPD (Kommunistischen Partei Deutschlands/German Communist Party) at end of 1922. Very prominent activist in Hamburg in 1923. Organised League of Red Fighters, which he led in Hamburg. Nicknamed ‘Red General’, strongly hated by the Nazis, arrested in March 1933, tortured, sentenced to death, and beheaded on 4 November 1936.
Andropov, Yuri (1914-1984)
Son of railway worker, joined Komsomol at age 16, Komsomol full-timer 1936, promoted in the wake of the purges, and secretary of Karelia Komsomol at time it was annexed into USSR in 1940, then second secretary of Karelian Republic under the Old Bolshevik survivor Otto Kuusinen. Posted to Hungary by Malenkov as punishment for submitting an honest report on a party rival and became ambassador in 1954 and was in Imre Nagy’s office at the time Soviet troops invaded in October 1956, reportedly genuinely trying to avoid a confrontation. He was promoted to the Central Committee department after the suppression of the Hungarian uprising with the support of Kuusinen. Opposed Lysenkoism in last days of Khrushchev. Surprised everyone with his appointment to head of the KGB in 1967, evidently a consensus choice by the post-Khrushchev leadership, to limit the power of General Secretary Brezhnev. Under Andropov the KGB became much more effective in suppression of dissents through the use of more subtle means of pressure and intelligence, but allowed large numbers of dissidents to leave the USSR and work from abroad. Under Andropov, the KGB also worked to restrain the ‘Brezhnev mafia’, including the arrest of Brezhnev’s daughter for corruption. Information collected during his KGB days he used to eliminate opposition from the ‘Brezhnev-mafia’ and secure election to the leadership. According to Zhores Medvedev, after the death of Brezhnev, Andropov was the favourite candidate among the dissidents and intelligentsia. For the last 16 years of his life, including his period as head-of-state, Andropov lived in a single-bedroom flat. As head of state, Andropov initiated a campaign against “absenteeism, idleness, drunkenness, etc" and crime but succeeded only in generating opposition and an atmosphere of fear. Andropov died on February 1984.
Angadi, Ayana Veerayaswami (1903-1993)
Party pseudonyms: Raj Hansa, Ayana Devi, Taya Deva.
Born Jakanur (District Bijapur, Karnataka). Educated Oxford. Worked with British Communist Party in early ‘thirties. Joined Revolutionary Socialist League (C.L.R. James), 1939. Contributor, New Leader . Joined British Army, November, 1942; appointed Lecturer, Central Advisory Council for Adult Education in H.M. Forces. Left the Trotskyist movement after the war.
Compiled by Charles Wesley Ervin
Anneke, Friedrich (1818-1872)
Prussian officer discharged for his communist views. Member of the Communist League and one of the founders of the of the Cologne Workers Association in 1848. Editor of Neue Kölnische Zeitung. Member of the Rhenish District Committee of Democrats.
Annenkov, P. W. (1812-87)
Russian man of letters who lived a great deal abroad, where he became acquainted with Marx, though not Socialist. In his recollections, A Remarkable Decade (Vestnik Yevopy [European Messenger], 1880), he describes the meeting and conversation between Marx and Weitling in Brussels, March 30, 1846. In the same memoirs he also gives a literary portrait of Marx as reflected in the consciousness of a liberal Russian of the 1840s.
Anrooy, Henriette
Cousin of Karl Marx in Zalt-Bommel, Holland, married to Dr. A. Anrooy.
Anthony Pillai, Caroline (1908 – present)
Born Boralugoda (Kosgama, Avissawella of Hevagam Korale), Ceylon, daughter of Don Jacolis Rupasinghe Gunawardena, sister of Philip and Robert Gunawardena. Educated Siddhartha Vidyalaya, Kaluaggala, and Museaus College, Colombo. Became a teacher at Siddhartha Vidyalaya, 1924. Participated in Suriya Mal movement. Founding member, Lanka Sama Samaja Party, 1935. Delegate, Indian National Congress, 1937. Married S.C.C. Anthony Pillai, 1939. Sent to Nawalapitiya to organize estate workers. Member, Bolshevik Leninist Party of India, Madras, 1943-48. Member of the strike committee, Madras Labour Union strike of 1947. Entered SP, 1948. Joined SP (Loyalists), 1952. Joined SP (Lohia), 1956. After death of S.C.C. Anthony Pillai in 2000, returned to Sri Lanka. Resides in Alubodalawatte, Kosgama, about 2 miles from Boralugoda.
Compiled by Charles Wesley Ervin
Frank Anstey (1865-1940)
Francis George (Frank) Anstey (1865-1940), politician, was born on 18 August 1865 in London. His father Samuel, of Devon yeoman stock, had died five months earlier. The boy was cared for on a family farm until his mother Caroline, née Gamble, married John Lank, a stableman. The family travelled through the Midlands and to London in search of work. Frank remembered a kind and warm stepfather, but John's hot temper and trade union beliefs cost him several jobs. Between times, Caroline, a school-teacher, supported the family; it was an unsettled and often a meagre existence. Frank's formal education was a few years at Board school—'more Bible than grammar, more fear of hell than earthly geography, more crawlsome obedience to one's “betters” than knowledge of how to fight the battle of life'.
Aged 11, Frank stowed away on a full-rigged passenger vessel bound for Australia. He jumped ship in Sydney and signed on as 'bosun's boy' in a ship working the Pacific islands trade. For ten years he knew the brutality of seafaring life, and joined the Seamen's Union in 1883. He sailed to Asia and through the Pacific; what he saw of the coolie and Kanaka trades left him with a hatred of slave labour, a strong belief in White Australia, and a romantic interest in island life. He read widely, kept a common-place-book, and wrote sketches and verse.
Signing off, Anstey carried his swag in search of casual work. While driving a hearse in Sale, Victoria, he met Katherine Mary Bell McColl, daughter of a policeman, and married her in 1887; two sons were born in 1889 and 1891.
The Ansteys moved to Melbourne where Frank became a cleaner at the Working Men's College. He interested himself in the Knights of Labor, in David Andrade's Anarchists' Club, and in the Social Democratic Federation which supported the Trades Hall Council in 1891 in forming a Progressive Political League. He soon became a leading speaker and writer for the Labor cause. With fellow S.D.F. member Tom Tunnecliffe, in 1898 he founded the Victorian Labour Federation, a Rochdale-type co-operative, which prospered briefly. Its rules barred members of parliament as office-bearers; both Tunnecliffe and Anstey entered the Legislative Assembly within five years. Anstey helped found the Tramway Employees' Association and was its president for many years.
He served as member for East Bourke Boroughs (1902-04) and Brunswick (1904-10), his main interest being to attack monopoly in land ownership and banking and to advocate public ownership. John Curtin, a fellow member of the Brunswick Labor Party, became his friend and follower. In 1904, with his parliamentary colleague Charles McGrath, Anstey rode a bicycle on the first of several organizing tours through eastern Victoria. Admired for his oratory, he lectured regularly for Tom Mann's Victorian Socialist Party as well as for the Labor Party, and he wrote extensively for Tocsin and Labor Call, which he edited for some years. Suffering from a debilitating sickness which dogged him throughout life, he took a health trip to England in 1907; his expenses were met from a fund raised by his friends. He sent back perceptive reports of the British and European labour movements.
In 1910 Anstey became member of the House of Representatives for Bourke. His stand on public control of finance made him a strong supporter of the creation of the Commonwealth Bank. The outbreak of World War I caused a breach with his close associate W. M. Hughes. For Anstey, it was 'a war of rival capitalists … its inevitable outcome the enslavement of labour'. He conflicted with the Labor government over its budgetary policies and its use of war precautions regulations against opponents of the war. In 1915, he published The Kingdom of Shylock, the circulation of which was suppressed, in which he argued that 'this war makes the living worker a slave, and fills the treasury of Shylock to overflowing'. (When he revised the book for republication 1921 as Money Power, he deleted many of the anti-Semitic references). Having failed to convince caucus, he walked out and offered his resignation to the Victorian Labor executive, which refused to accept it.
Anstey was, with Frank Brennan, the first Labor parliamentarian to speak for the Australian Peace Alliance. When the Industrial Workers of the World leader Tom Barker was arrested for publishing an anti-war poster, Anstey sent his support and asked for copies; the police suspected him of conspiratorial activity. Although he was not against conscription for a people's army (a view which caused him some trouble in the labour movement), he campaigned prominently against the referenda of 1916 and 1917. In the 1917 election he condemned Hughes for having betrayed his party and principles to the 'Trusts, Combines and Monopolies, the Profiteers, Exploiters and the great vested interests of capital'.
In March 1918 Anstey sailed on his second trip to England, via the United States of America. In both countries, and in Europe, he met labour and socialist leaders. While he was in England, W. A. Watt, the acting prime minister, appointed him a member of an imperial press mission, in which capacity he visited the Western Front and met allied war leaders and publicists. On his return in 1919, he published Red Europe which welcomed the 'social revolution' in Russia and forecast the universal advance of the 'drum-beats of the Armies of Revolution'.
In 1922 Anstey became assistant leader of the Labor Party in the House of Representatives. He was appointed next year to the royal commission on navigation, which inquired into the use of non-Australian shipping in the coastal trade, a 'cheap labour' policy which he condemned. He was a trenchant critic of the Bruce-Page coalition, saying of Bruce that 'he delighted the masses with his unlimited promises, and the wealthy by the fact that he never fulfilled them'. In March 1927 caucus accepted his resignation as assistant leader and commiserated with him on his ill health; he said privately that he had acted out of disgust with the intrigues against his leader Matt Charlton, who was soon replaced by James Scullin for whom Anstey had worked in the 1906 election. He took a health trip to the Mandated Territory of New Guinea; on his return, he became a co-director with John Wren and a major shareholder of a New Guinea gold mining company, which failed to prosper.
Labor won a majority in the House of Representatives in October 1929. Caucus elected Anstey to cabinet and Scullin gave him the portfolios of health and repatriation. The Depression overwhelmed everyday administration, and Anstey led a fight within caucus for his financial ideas. He argued for a double dissolution to break the stranglehold of the Senate. He condemned the bankers and financiers as 'cormorants and vultures … whose sole aim is to devour the living standards of the Australian workers'. He urged that the government take direct control of the Commonwealth Bank and expand credit in order to reduce unemployment. In 1930 he published Facts and Theories of Finance to support his case. He moved successfully in caucus for the extension by one year of a maturing public loan but Scullin, then in London, overruled the decision. He had hoped for the support of E. G. Theodore but did not get it, and said the Labor ministers were 'mere Yesmen to the bankers'.
Anstey told caucus that he preferred the Lang Plan to the Scullin government's policies. Caucus dropped him from cabinet; he was, he said, glad to escape with his life. Now 64, he announced that the 1931 election would be his last. For the first time, he just scraped home. He served three last dispirited years and 'selected obscurity and left the limelight and dollars to wiser and more saintly men'.
In retirement, Anstey and his wife lived in Sydney on his scanty savings. In 1938 he met George Nicholas at a favourite place, the race-track. Nicholas thanked him for his help during the war in gaining a permit for the manufacture of aspirin and later sent him a cheque for £500, to which Anstey gave a 'hearty welcome'. After his wife's death, he returned to Melbourne, where he died of cancer on 31 October 1940. As a boy, he had gone with his father to hear the free-thinker Charles Bradlaugh; his will directed that there should be 'no followers or flowers, or praise, prayer or preachers' to mark the cremation. Wren named a colt for his 'great friend' Anstey, and the Victorian government named a railway station in his honour.
Frank Anstey lived his life in the memory of the poverty of his childhood and the harshness and inhumanity of his young manhood. He won his own education and way in the world. Like many self-educated men, he sought a simple explanation of social injustice—in his case, the depredations of private finance capital. His wit, love of words and sense of drama made him one of the greatest and most loved radical orators and writers of his time. He flayed his political foes, but with such style and grace that he made few enemies. He was generous to a fault and had little financial benefit from his long career. A free-thinker and a Freemason, he enjoyed the friendship and patronage of John Wren; but he never betrayed his deeply held beliefs. He was a better publicist than a politician; he ended his days in disillusion and disappointment, believing that his country and his class were as far away as ever from his early dream:
Man rises in his strength and looks around,
While in his sight the dawn of reason breaks.
Anthony Pillai, Sebastian Cyril Constantine (“Tony”) (1914– 2000)
Party pseudonym: S. Krishna Menon.
Born Jaffna, Ceylon, son of S. Anthony Pillai, a devout Catholic whose ancestors came from Tirunelveli District of Tamil Nadu. Educated St. Patrick’s High School, Jaffna, and Ceylon University College, Colombo. Founding member, Lanka Sama Samaja Party, 1935. Attended King’s College, London University. Joined the India League and a Marxist study group with other Ceylonese students, London. Returned to Ceylon, 1938, and re-joined LSSP. Married Caroline Gunawardena, 1939. Sent to Nawalapitiya to organize estate workers. After LSSP was suppressed, he and Robert Gunawardena led a series of strikes by bus workers, harbor workers, and granary workers. Went to Madurai and joined Bolshevik Leninist Party of India, July 1942; shifted to Madras, 1943. Delegate to BLPI conference, 1944. Central Committee, BLPI, 1944-48. Jailed at Alipuram, 1944-46. President, Madras Labour Union, 1946-75 and 1983. Leader, B&C Mills strike, 1947. General Council, All-India Trade Union Congress, 1947. Executive Committee, Workers United Front, 1947. Attended BLPI conferences, 1947 and 1948. Formed and elected president of Indian Overseas Bank Employees Union, 1948. Entered SP with BLPI, 1948. Councillor, Madras Municipal Corporation, 1948-59. When SP merged with KMPP, took leading role in rallying the dissidents; elected to the Tamil Nadu Ad Hoc Committee, September 1952. Founding leader, SP (Loyalists), 1952. Joined SP (Lohia), 1956. Opposed Lohia’s “Remove English” campaign. Formed SLP. Merged SLP into E.V.K. Sampath’s Tamizh Desiya Katchi (Tamil National Party), 1961. Joined Congress together with the Tamil National Party, 1964. President, Madras Port Trust Employees' Union, elected 1948. General Secretary and Vice President, All-India Port and Dock Workers Federation,until 2000. President, All-India Transport Workers Union. Vice President, Hind Mazdoor Sabha, 1952 and 1960-74. President, Tamil Nadu Council of Hind Mazdoor Sabha, 1957 and 1968. Member, Madras Legislative Assembly, 1952-57 (Choolai). MP, Second Lok Sabha, 1957-62 (North Madras). Ran for Lok Sabha from North Madras Constituency, 1967 (lost). Joined Congress and later Congress-Opposition (Kamaraj). Trustee, Madras Port Trust, 1954-2000. Fathered the Tamil nationalist political party, Namadhu Dravida Iyakkam. Presided over more than 200 unions in his lifetime.
Compiled by Charles Wesley Ervin
Antonov-Ovseyenko, Vladimir (1884-1939)
Bolshevik who led the October 1917 attack on the Winter Palace; disappeared in Spain 1938.
Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, the son of a military officer, was born in Russia in 1884, educated at the Voronezh Military School and the Nikolaevsk Army Engineering College. During this period Antonov-Ovseenko began to question the political system that existed in Russia and in 1901 was expelled from college for refusing to take the oath of loyalty to Nicholas II.
Antonov-Ovseenko moved to Warsaw where he joined the illegal Social Democratic Labour Party. The following year he found work as a labourer in the Alexander Docks in St. Petersburg and then as a coachman for the Society for the Protection of Animals.
At its Second Congress of the Social Democratic Labour Party in London in 1903, Antonov-Ovseenko, along with Plekhanov, Pavel Axelrod, Leon Trotsky, Vera Zasulich, Irakli Tsereteli, Moisei Uritsky, Noi Zhordania and Fedor Dan, supported Julius Martov’s Menshevik position.
In August 1904 Antonov-Ovseenko was arrested for distributing illegal political propaganda. He was released and sent to Warsaw where he became a junior officer in the Kolyvan Infantry Regiment. He used his position to recruit junior officers to the Mensheviks.
Antonov-Ovseenko deserted from the army during the 1905 Revolution. He joined the Menshevik Military Committee and edited the underground newspaper Kazarma (Garrison). However, he was arrested in April, 1906, but escaped from Sushchevsky Prison. Captured again in June, he was sentenced to death (later commuted to twenty years hard labour in Siberia).
In June, 1907, a group of Mensheviks freed Antonov-Ovseenko by blowing a hole in the prison wall. He spent some time hiding in Finland until he could be provided with a false passport that would enable him to return to Russia. Based in Moscow he organized workers’ cooperatives and editing illegal newspapers.
After two further arrests Antonov-Ovseenko left Russia and went to live in France. He joined other revolutionaries in exile and as well as becoming secretary of the Parisian Labour Bureau wrote for the radical newspaper, Golos (Voice).
Antonov-Ovseenko returned to Russia after the February Revolution. In May he joined the Bolsheviks and soon afterwards was appointed to the party’s Central Committee. Antonov-Ovseenko was the main architect of the armed insurrection and led the Red Guards that seized the Winter Palace on the 25th October, 1917. After the October Revolution he was appointed Commissar for Military Affairs in Petrograd and Commisssar of War.
During the Civil War Antonov-Ovseenko commanded the Bolshevik campaign in the Ukraine and organized famine relief in Samara province. Antonov-Ovseenko worked closely with Leon Trotsky and in 1922 he was appointed Chief of Political Administration of the Red Army.
At the Communist Party Congress in 1922 Antonov-Ovseenko attacked Lenin for making political compromises with the kulaks and foreign capitalism. He also supported the idea of permanent revolution and became one of the leaders of the left opposition.
As a supporter of Leon Trotsky, Antonov-Ovseenko lost his military command in 1923. To remove him from the political struggle in the Soviet Union, in 1925 Joseph Stalin sent him as ambassador to Czechoslovakia. Later he held similar posts in Lithuania and Poland.
Antonov-Ovseenko was the Soviet consul general in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. He arranged for Russian advisers to help the Popular Front government while expanding the influence of the Soviet Union in the country.
He disappeared in 1938. It is believed that Stalin was convinced that Antonov-Ovseenko was plotting against him and in August 1937 he recalled him to the Soviet Union, where he was arrested and shot without trial in 1939.
From Spartacus Schoolnet.