were the Black Guards, precursors to the anarchist Black Army which fought the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War. On the night of April 11, the Cheka (Soviet secret police) raided the House of Anarchy, a building occupied by the Moscow Federation, with the official aim of arresting and charging "robber bands" in the anarchist ranks. They were met with armed resistance by the Black Guards and in the ensuing battle, approximately forty anarchists were killed or wounded and about five hundred were imprisoned. Arrest and execution Having helped establish an underground group in 1918, Chernyi joined another group called the Underground Anarchists the following year. The organization, which had been founded by Kazimir Kovalevich and Piotr Sobalev, published two issues of an incendiary broadsheet denouncing the Communist dictatorship as the worst tyranny in human history. On September 25, 1919, together with a number of leftist social revolutionaries, the Underground Anarchists bombed the headquarters of the Moscow Committee of the Communist Party during a plenary meeting. Twelve Communists were killed and fifty-five others were wounded, including among the wounded the eminent Bolshevik theorist and Pravda editor Nikolai Bukharin. Chernyi was detained along with Fanya Baron on a counterfeiting charge. In August 1921, the Moscow Izvestia published an official report announcing that ten "anarchist bandits", among them Chernyi, had been shot without hearing or trial. However, historian of anarchism Paul Avrich contends that Chernyi was executed in September of that year rather than August. Although he was not personally involved in the bombing of the Communist Party headquarters, Chernyi was, because of his association with the Underground Anarchists, a likely candidate for a frameup. The Communists refused to turn over his body to his family for burial, and rumors persisted that he had in fact died of torture. Bibliography Novoe napravlenie v anarkhizme: assotsiatsionnyi anarkhizm. 2nd edn, New York, 1923. O klassakh. Moscow, 1924. Footnotes References See also Individualist anarchism in Europe List of anarchist poets One of the people who visited his lectures was Gerard Shelley 1921 deaths Anarchist partisans Anarchist theorists Individualist anarchists Russian anarchists Russian male poets Soviet anarchists Egoist anarchists Year of birth unknown Russian people executed by the Soviet Union Executed anarchists