Marie Isidorovna Goldsmith experienced the long, unyielding arm of the Russian State as a child. She watched as her parents, dedicated socialist revolutionaries in the Narodnik movement, were unjustly exiled and shuttled from town to town as political prisoners. Isidor, Goldsmith’s father, wrote in vivid terms years later about life in exile with his wife and daughter: “Two or three times a week exiles are obliged to present themselves at the police office to write their signatures in a special book. Besides this, in order to prevent escapes, the police daily come to their houses. The chief of the district has the right to imprison an exile without assigning any reason for so doing.” While we do not have any firsthand account of what the eight-year-old Goldsmith thought of the experience, these formative years watching her stoic and ideologically committed parents suffer at the hands of a vast, largely irrational, and intrinsically violent system called the State likely influenced her later turn to anarchism.