Wolf Leibovich Gordin (Russian: Вольф Лейбович Гордин), or Vladimir Lvovich Gordin (Владимир Львович Гордин; January 1, 1885 – June 2, 1974), also known as Beoby or Beobi, was a Russian anarchist and the creator of a constructed language called AO.
Early life Born in Mikhalishki, Grodno Governorate, in what is now Belarus, to Rabbi Yehudah Leib Gordin and Khaye Esther Sore (née Miller), elder brother of Abba Gordin, Wolf was influenced by labor Zionist and anarchist ideas as a young man. In 1908, Wolf and Abba Gordin opened Ivria, an experimental cheder, a school for the teaching of secular Hebrew, in the town of Smarhon (within the Vilna Governorate, part of the Russian Empire). Working together, the two brothers created their own educational press, Novaya Pedagogika, writing and publishing numerous pamphlets on pedagogy between 1907 and 1914 as well as a single issue of a Yiddish-language journal, Der yunger yid [Jewish Youth] in Vilna in 1911. Their libertarian teaching philosophy bridged the non-authoritarian style of Leo Tolstoy's school for peasant children at Yasnaya Polyana and the egoism of Max Stirner.
Revolutionary period When the First World War swept through the region, Wolf and Abba traveled along the Dnieper River through Ukraine, making a living by giving private lessons. The outbreak of the October Revolution of 1917 found Abba in Moscow and Wolf in Petrograd. There, in April 1917, Wolf founded an organization, the Union of the Five Oppressed—a title expressing the combination of struggles against capitalism, conformism, patriarchy, colonialism, and ageism—and became chief editor of the anarchist newspaper Burevestnik (The Petrel) in November, following a split in the editorial collective. Subsequently, Wolf joined his brother in Moscow.
This began a period of intense creativity and revolutionary agitation for Wolf and Abba, who signed their many collaborations in Russian as "the Gordin Brothers" (Brat'ya Gordinii). "They did not so much write books, as 'bake' them, so prolific was their literary output", Boris Yelensky recounts, singling out for special admiration their children's fable, Pochemu? ili Kak muzhik popal v stranu Anarkhiya ("Why": Or, How a Peasant Got Into the Land of Anarchy, 1917). In 1921, the Bolshevik and former anarchist Victor Serge noted that [t]he two Gordin brothers have played a key role in the Russian anarchist movement of these past few years. Tireless orators and propagandists, prolific writers, journalists, pamphleteers, and initiators of multiple enterprises, combatants at the barricades of July and October 1917, thanks to their ever-working imaginations they have greatly contributed to creating and sustaining both the life and the waste of this movement.
Pananarchism A "Pananarchist Manifesto" was printed in 1918 by the Moscow Federation of Anarchist Groups under the collective name of the Gordin Brothers; however, Abba Gordin credits Wolf Gordin with its authorship. In keeping with the prefix pan-, in the sense of "all", "pananarchism" was to be "an expanded and articulate anarchism" that encompassed the concerns of the Five Oppressed groups, addressing them via a comprehensive program of communism, individualism, "gynanthropism" (feminism), "cosmism" (or "national cosmopolitanism"), and "pedism" (the liberation of youth via libertarian education). In this sense, the Gordins understood pananarchism as an alternative to Volin's concept of a "synthesis" between different anarchist tendencies. Pananarchism also entailed an extension of anarchist principles to "everything", including the fields of knowledge and culture: it meant a critique of both religion and science from a "sociotechnical" perspective.
The Sociotechnicum In 1918, the Gordin Brothers issued a "Declaration of the First Central Sociotechnicum", a manifesto for the creation of "a special institution of social experimentation" dedicated to the proposition that "social apparatuses can be invented, perfected and cultivated artificially". Sociotechnics, as a field of experimental work, rejected the Marxist conception of "social science" but asserted "the need for a sociotechnical attitude to social issues, in other words, the need to admit the same freely building and restructuring, the same free and inventive attitude toward social nature, which humanity, thanks to civilization, has achieved in relation to the physical environment". The Sociotechnicum, as an institution dedicated to sociotechnics, was also intended to "shelter sociotechnicians, i.e., social builders and inventors, from persecution both by those in power and by public opinion". In 1919, the Gordin Brothers were interrogated in connection with the September 25th bombing of the Moscow Committee of the Russian Communist Party in Leontiev Lane. Wolf Gordin's manuscript for a book on "Sociophilosophy" was seized by the Cheka. Cheka director Felix Dzerzhinsky, after "a long personal conversation with the Gordins," decided that "both they and their 'Social-Technicum' group had neither taken part, nor even knew about the impending assassination attempt on the Mosc. Com. RCP [Moscow Committee of the Russian Communist Party]... Their 'Social-Technicum' is 10–12 communist sectarians who have renounced private property".
AO After 1919, Wolf Gordin and Abba Gordin ceased to write collaboratively, and Wolf pursued his interest in what Serge called "the idée fixe of a universal language of which he is the inventor and which is written in numbers, the language AO."
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