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"Emma Goldman was deported to Russia in 1919 and remained there until 1921. She was a partisan of the Bolsheviks' take-over of the revolution even after Lenin told her he had no intention of altering his policy of murdering and imprisoning anarchists. It was not until Lenin and Trotsky massacred the insurgent sailors and anarchists of the Kronstadt naval base in 1921 that she finally broke with the red fascist Bolsheviks.
Writers sympathetic to Goldman refer to her disillusionment with Soviet rule, but tend to gloss over her outright complicity."

Emma Goldman wrote and lectured in favor of the Russian Revolution while in America. She did so knowing only scant information about what was really happening there. Very few people in America actually knew what was going on. So one could hardly blame her for "complicity". She thought the Bolsheviks were at least opening up revolutionary possibilities. She never thought it was an anarchist utopia. When she was deported to Russia she was cautiously optimistic about how the revolution was going there. When Emma went to see Lenin, it was to offer to do more organizing and activism as part of a Russian Society for American Freedom. She was obviously planning to be able to go back to America at some point. Goldman brought up the subject of anarchist prisoners and freedom of speech, to which Lenin responded by saying that releasing prisoners and granting freedom of speech would have to wait until the revolutionary period was over. This did not sit well with her, and was the beginning of Emma's disillusionment.

After traveling around the Russia visiting people (including Kropotkin), taking notes, and making observations for 15 months, the massacre at Kronstadt was the last, final straw, not the initial wake up call. Goldman had been losing faith in the Soviet Government with every passing month. Each week brought news of fresh disasters, starvations, shootings, and incarcerations. No longer having the luxury of distance living in America provided, she could now see first hand and up close what was really happening. At least in the end, she admitted she was wrong, and completely owned her mistake and naivety, unlike many leftists who kept defending the Soviet Union well into the 1980s. Again, this takes intellectual honesty and courage, and is a sign of her integrity as an anarchist, not evidence of her complicity.

I just don't understand the hostility towards Goldman here.