Sascha Schapiro
Encyclopedia
Alexander "Sascha" Schapiro ( – 1942), also known by the noms de guerre Alexander Tanarov, Sascha Piotr, and Sergei, was a Ukrainian
anarchist revolutionary and father of eminent 20th century mathematician Alexandre Grothendieck.
, Russia in 1889 or 1890, Alexander Schapiro grew up identifying more with the impoverished proletariat than with his own bourgeois family. In 1904 at the age of fourteen he left the town and joined an anarchist militant group (akin to the Chernoznamentsy) who were rounded up by the authorities in 1905 after an unsuccessful attempt to murder Czar Nicholas II. All were executed, save Schapiro who was spared on account of his youth, sentenced to life imprisonment and sent to rot in a dungeon in Moscow. He was spared a lingering death there by the intercession of an influential friend who secured his transfer to Yaroslavl
, where he stayed for twelve years. It was here that Schapiro was shot in his left arm whilst trying to escape, resulting in its amputation. After an attempted suicide, he spent the year 1914 in solitary confinement
.
With the collapse of the Czarist
regime in Russia in 1917, Schapiro was released, and hailed as a national hero. He was one of a number of anarchists who spoke out against the representative
system for electing the Constituent Assembly
proposed by Alexander Kerensky
's Russian Provisional Government
, writing that "no parliament can break the path toward liberty, that the good society can be realized only through 'the abolition of all power'". He befriended the anarchist revolutionaries Lev Chernyi
and Maria Nikiforova
and became a leading figure in a cadre of heavily-armed anarchists fighting in Ukraine associated with Nestor Makhno
's Black Army
. Schapiro lead a tempestuous life in Russia between 1917 and 1921 in an atmosphere of increasing repression of anarchists by the Bolshevik regime, marrying a Jewish woman named Rachil, with whom he had a son, Dodek. In an attempt to evade the Bolsheviks searching for him, he fled in 1921 to Minsk
, where he encountered and was financially supported by Alexander Berkman
. With the assistance of a Jewish woman named Lia, Schapiro then crossed the Russian-Polish border using forged papers bearing the name of Alexander Tanarov.
, where he remained save for spells in Paris and Belgium until 1924. There, he assumed the name Sacha Piotr and throughout the 1920s was an active participant in the anarchist movement, in 1928 becoming friends with prominent Spanish anarcho-syndicalists Francisco Ascaso
and Buenaventura Durruti
, Italian anarchist Francesco Ghezzi and German author Theodor Plievier
, who dedicated his 1927 novel Stienka Rasin to Schapiro. In Paris, he was a regular at the artist's hangout Café Dome, and befriended journalist and artist Aron Brzezinski, who made a bronze bust of him, as well as the novelist Scholem Asch. During this period was in infrequent contact with Makhno and his platformist Dielo Truda
group, who were based in Paris. Schapiro was one of the founding members, alongside Sébastien Faure
, Ugo Fedeli and Henryk Walecki
, of the Paris-based Œuvres Internationales Des Editions Anarchistes (International Works of Anarchist Editions). He contributed at least two articles to the publication, run at that time by the anarchist Severin Ferandel.
Schapiro met his wife, anarchist journalist Hanka Grothendieck, through the movement in Berlin while working as a street photographer. Due to the increasingly anti-Semitic environment in Europe at the time, the couple decided to give their son Alexandre the surname of Grothendieck's well-established Hamburg
middle class family. Forced to flee Germany after the rise to power of Adolf Hitler
, and intent on fighting in the coming Spanish Civil War
, the couple sent Alexandre to live with the Heydorns, a middle class family with anarchist sympathies, in 1933. In Spain, under the name Sacha Pietra, Schapiro fought the fascists until the defeat of the Second Spanish Republic
, after which he and his wife crossed the French border and he was interned at Camp Vernet
with his comrades. The Heydorns had cared for Alexandre in Berlin for seven years, but decided in May 1939, shortly before France entered the Second World War, that it had become too dangerous to keep him and he was put on a train to Paris to his parents. In Occupied Paris, Schapiro was free for a short time, constantly active in the anarchist movement, until he was arrested and deported to Auschwitz concentration camp
in 1942, where he was afterward murdered by the Nazis.
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
anarchist revolutionary and father of eminent 20th century mathematician Alexandre Grothendieck.
Early years and Russian revolutions
Born into a Hasidic family in the predominantly Jewish border town of NovozybkovNovozybkov
Novozybkov is a historical town in Bryansk Oblast, Russia. Population: -History:It was founded in 1701 and granted town status in 1809. Novozybkov was a major hemp supplier in the 18th and 19th centuries, particularly for the production of ropes for the Russian Navy...
, Russia in 1889 or 1890, Alexander Schapiro grew up identifying more with the impoverished proletariat than with his own bourgeois family. In 1904 at the age of fourteen he left the town and joined an anarchist militant group (akin to the Chernoznamentsy) who were rounded up by the authorities in 1905 after an unsuccessful attempt to murder Czar Nicholas II. All were executed, save Schapiro who was spared on account of his youth, sentenced to life imprisonment and sent to rot in a dungeon in Moscow. He was spared a lingering death there by the intercession of an influential friend who secured his transfer to Yaroslavl
Yaroslavl
Yaroslavl is a city and the administrative center of Yaroslavl Oblast, Russia, located northeast of Moscow. The historical part of the city, a World Heritage Site, is located at the confluence of the Volga and the Kotorosl Rivers. It is one of the Golden Ring cities, a group of historic cities...
, where he stayed for twelve years. It was here that Schapiro was shot in his left arm whilst trying to escape, resulting in its amputation. After an attempted suicide, he spent the year 1914 in solitary confinement
Solitary confinement
Solitary confinement is a special form of imprisonment in which a prisoner is isolated from any human contact, though often with the exception of members of prison staff. It is sometimes employed as a form of punishment beyond incarceration for a prisoner, and has been cited as an additional...
.
With the collapse of the Czarist
Russian Empire
The Russian Empire was a state that existed from 1721 until the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was the successor to the Tsardom of Russia and the predecessor of the Soviet Union...
regime in Russia in 1917, Schapiro was released, and hailed as a national hero. He was one of a number of anarchists who spoke out against the representative
Representation (politics)
In politics, representation describes how some individuals stand in for others or a group of others, for a certain time period. Representation usually refers to representative democracies, where elected officials nominally speak for their constituents in the legislature...
system for electing the Constituent Assembly
Constituent assembly
A constituent assembly is a body composed for the purpose of drafting or adopting a constitution...
proposed by Alexander Kerensky
Alexander Kerensky
Alexander Fyodorovich Kerensky was a major political leader before and during the Russian Revolutions of 1917.Kerensky served as the second Prime Minister of the Russian Provisional Government until Vladimir Lenin was elected by the All-Russian Congress of Soviets following the October Revolution...
's Russian Provisional Government
Russian Provisional Government
The Russian Provisional Government was the short-lived administrative body which sought to govern Russia immediately following the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II . On September 14, the State Duma of the Russian Empire was officially dissolved by the newly created Directorate, and the country was...
, writing that "no parliament can break the path toward liberty, that the good society can be realized only through 'the abolition of all power'". He befriended the anarchist revolutionaries Lev Chernyi
Lev Chernyi
Pável Dimítrievich Turchanínov , known by the pseudonym Lev Chernyi , was a Russian anarchist theorist, activist and poet, and a leading figure of the Third Russian Revolution. His early thought was individualist, rejecting anarcho-communism as a threat to individual liberty...
and Maria Nikiforova
Maria Nikiforova
Maria Grigor'evna Nikiforova , was an anarchist partisan leader. A self-described terrorist from the age of 16, she was known widely by her nickname, Marusya...
and became a leading figure in a cadre of heavily-armed anarchists fighting in Ukraine associated with Nestor Makhno
Nestor Makhno
Nestor Ivanovych Makhno or simply Daddy Makhno was a Ukrainian anarcho-communist guerrilla leader turned army commander who led an independent anarchist army in Ukraine during the Russian Civil War....
's Black Army
Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine
The Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine , popularly called Makhnovshchina, less correctly Makhnovchina, and also known as the Black Army, was an anarchist army formed largely of Ukrainian and Crimean peasants and workers under the command of the famous anarchist Nestor Makhno during the...
. Schapiro lead a tempestuous life in Russia between 1917 and 1921 in an atmosphere of increasing repression of anarchists by the Bolshevik regime, marrying a Jewish woman named Rachil, with whom he had a son, Dodek. In an attempt to evade the Bolsheviks searching for him, he fled in 1921 to Minsk
Minsk
- Ecological situation :The ecological situation is monitored by Republican Center of Radioactive and Environmental Control .During 2003–2008 the overall weight of contaminants increased from 186,000 to 247,400 tons. The change of gas as industrial fuel to mazut for financial reasons has worsened...
, where he encountered and was financially supported by Alexander Berkman
Alexander Berkman
Alexander Berkman was an anarchist known for his political activism and writing. He was a leading member of the anarchist movement in the early 20th century....
. With the assistance of a Jewish woman named Lia, Schapiro then crossed the Russian-Polish border using forged papers bearing the name of Alexander Tanarov.
Life in Europe, family and death
By 1922, Schapiro had reached BerlinBerlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
, where he remained save for spells in Paris and Belgium until 1924. There, he assumed the name Sacha Piotr and throughout the 1920s was an active participant in the anarchist movement, in 1928 becoming friends with prominent Spanish anarcho-syndicalists Francisco Ascaso
Francisco Ascaso
Francisco Ascaso Abadía was a prominent Anarcho-syndicalist figure in Spain.A baker and waiter, Ascaso joined the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo and one of its armed groups, Los Justicieros...
and Buenaventura Durruti
Buenaventura Durruti
José Buenaventura Durruti Dumange was a central figure of Spanish anarchism during the period leading up to and including the Spanish Civil War.-Early life:...
, Italian anarchist Francesco Ghezzi and German author Theodor Plievier
Theodor Plievier
Theodor Otto Richard Plievier was the German author of Stalingrad, , Moscow and Berlin ....
, who dedicated his 1927 novel Stienka Rasin to Schapiro. In Paris, he was a regular at the artist's hangout Café Dome, and befriended journalist and artist Aron Brzezinski, who made a bronze bust of him, as well as the novelist Scholem Asch. During this period was in infrequent contact with Makhno and his platformist Dielo Truda
Dielo Truda
Dielo Truda was an anarchist and platformist journal first published 1925 by a society called the Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad.Russian political exiles formed the group in Paris after the Russian Revolution of 1917...
group, who were based in Paris. Schapiro was one of the founding members, alongside Sébastien Faure
Sébastien Faure
Sébastien Faure was a French anarchist . He was a main proponent of the anarchist organizational form known as synthesis anarchism.- Biography :Before becoming a free-thinker, he was a seminarist...
, Ugo Fedeli and Henryk Walecki
Henryk Walecki
Maksymilian Horwitz was a leader and theoretician of the Polish communist movement.He was a member of the Polish Socialist Party - Left from 1906 and the Communist Party of Poland from 1918 and sat on its Central Committee and politburo...
, of the Paris-based Œuvres Internationales Des Editions Anarchistes (International Works of Anarchist Editions). He contributed at least two articles to the publication, run at that time by the anarchist Severin Ferandel.
Schapiro met his wife, anarchist journalist Hanka Grothendieck, through the movement in Berlin while working as a street photographer. Due to the increasingly anti-Semitic environment in Europe at the time, the couple decided to give their son Alexandre the surname of Grothendieck's well-established Hamburg
Hamburg
-History:The first historic name for the city was, according to Claudius Ptolemy's reports, Treva.But the city takes its modern name, Hamburg, from the first permanent building on the site, a castle whose construction was ordered by the Emperor Charlemagne in AD 808...
middle class family. Forced to flee Germany after the rise to power of Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
, and intent on fighting in the coming Spanish Civil War
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...
, the couple sent Alexandre to live with the Heydorns, a middle class family with anarchist sympathies, in 1933. In Spain, under the name Sacha Pietra, Schapiro fought the fascists until the defeat of the Second Spanish Republic
Second Spanish Republic
The Second Spanish Republic was the government of Spain between April 14 1931, and its destruction by a military rebellion, led by General Francisco Franco....
, after which he and his wife crossed the French border and he was interned at Camp Vernet
Camp Vernet
Le Vernet Internment Camp, or Camp Vernet, was a concentration camp in Le Vernet, Ariège, near Pamiers, in the French Pyrenees. It was originally built in June 1918 to house French colonial troops serving in World War I but when hostilities ceased it was used to hold German and Austrian prisoners...
with his comrades. The Heydorns had cared for Alexandre in Berlin for seven years, but decided in May 1939, shortly before France entered the Second World War, that it had become too dangerous to keep him and he was put on a train to Paris to his parents. In Occupied Paris, Schapiro was free for a short time, constantly active in the anarchist movement, until he was arrested and deported to Auschwitz concentration camp
Auschwitz concentration camp
Concentration camp Auschwitz was a network of Nazi concentration and extermination camps built and operated by the Third Reich in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany during World War II...
in 1942, where he was afterward murdered by the Nazis.