Moisei Mikhailovich Greenshner was born into a Jewish family in the predominantly Jewish town of Kamenets-Podolsk, in Russia, on January 18th, 1893. Whilst still at school, he joined an anarchist group, the Podolskaia Bessarabskaiaz Gruppa, which had fifteen members. “…I liked it right away. I read anarchist proclamations—no books yet. But it was in my nature. I fell in love with it.”

He started work at fifteen, doing clerical work in a transport company. He distributed anarchist leaflets near the local theatre and near the schools.

In 1909, he decided to emigrate to the United States and ended up in New York. There, a cousin, Avrom, got him a job as a presser.

Avrom took Morris, as he was now known, to a meeting of the Arbeter Ring (Workers’ Circle) where he encountered Sidney Blackman, who had been a member of the anarchist group back home. Blackman encouraged him to move to Manhattan, where he joined the Anarchist Red Cross (ARC). He was very active in this, corresponding with twenty prisoners in Russia, under the name of Grisha. The New York group of the ARC had over a hundred members. Greenshner was equally a member of the Union of Russian Workers (URW) an anarcho-syndicalist organisation that had many members in both the USA and Canada.

He was also a member of an anarchist literary group, which distributed Russian and other European anarchist papers like Burevestnik and Khleb i Volya,, sending money to these papers to sustain them. He met his future wife, Becky, at a May Day event in 1910 and they married two years later.

In spring, 1917 the couple returned to Russia, arriving at Vladivostok and then moving on to Petrograd. There they met the anarchists Efim Yarchuk and the Kronstadt sailor Anatoli Zhelezhniakov. However, they remained there for only ten days, and moved on to Odessa. There, Izaak Golovin, with whom Morris had corresponded as an ARC member, got him a job as a lathe operator.

Morris fell ill with a form of polio. Thanks to another ex-prisoner with whom Morris had corresponded, Iosif Savitsky, he was transported to the Crimea by anarchist sailors, where he convalesced for six months. He returned to Odessa and took part in the activities of the Nabat anarchist confederation.

In 1923, Morris and Becky, who had witnessed Bolshevik repression against the anarchist movement, returned to the USA. There Morris worked in the Ferrer Center Bronx branch of the Workers Circle. In 1925 or 1926 the couple moved to Detroit and participated in the Yiddish group Fraye Arbeter Shtime.

He was one of the 180 anarchists interviewed in 1972 for his book Anarchist Voices.

He died on February 15th in Miami.

Nick Heath

Sources:
Avrich, P. Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America