Ida Mett

Ida Mett died in Paris on 27 June 1973, at the age of 71.

Mett and her husband then returned clandestinely to France, living as illegal immigrants in Le Pré-Saint-Gervais until their arrest and imprisonment during the Battle of France in 1940. The French State moved Mett and her young son to the Rieucros Camp, where they were detained for a year, until their release was secured by the French Trotskyist Boris Souvarine. After their attempts to leave for the United States were blocked by the authorities, Mett and her family moved to La Garde-Freinet, where they remained under constant surveillance.

It was at this time that she met Buenaventura Durruti and Francisco Ascaso, who invited her to Catalonia following the proclamation of the Spanish Republic. In Barcelona, Mett participated in the local anarcho-syndicalist movement, observing the outbreak of the Spanish Revolution of 1936, during which she provided medical aid to anarchist militiamen.

She fled first to Poland, then Berlin, before finally arriving in Paris, where she took the pen-name "Ida Mett" and co-edited the Russian anarchist magazine Delo Truda. Through the magazine, she began to closely collaborate with the Ukrainian anarchists Peter Arshinov and Nestor Makhno, with whom she penned The Platform. Following a conflict with Makhno over the editing of his memoirs, in 1928, she was expelled from Delo Truda for her religious practices, after she lit a yahrzeit candle for her recently-deceased father.

Born into the predominantly Jewish town of Smarhoń, in the Pale of Settlement, Ida Markovna Gilman was exposed to radical ideas from a young age. In the wake of the Russian Revolution, she moved to the Russian capital of Moscow to study medicine and became an active participant in the Russian anarchist movement. Before she was able to complete her studies, in 1924, she was arrested on charges of anti-Soviet agitation and deported from Russia.

Ida Mett (1901-1973) was a Belarusian Jewish anarcho-syndicalist, physician and writer. Following her experiences in the Russian Revolution, she fled into exile in France, where she collaborated with other exiled revolutionary anarchists on the Delo Truda magazine and the constitution of platformism. She then went on to participate in the anarcho-syndicalist movements in Belgium, Spain and France, before repression by the fascist Vichy regime forced her to cease her activities. She spent the final decades of her life working as a nurse and publishing history books.