Emma Goldman in Exile From the Russian Revolution to the Spanish Civil War By Alice Wexler Illustrated. 301 pages. Beacon Press. $24.95 By HERBERT MITGANG c.1989 N.Y. Times News Service At the height of the red scare in 1919, the American anarchist Emma Goldman was imprisoned on Ellis Island, put on a ship with 246 men and two other women who were branded radicals, and deported to the Soviet Union. The roundup was engineered by J. Edgar Hoover, then head of the Justice Department's Radical Division, and started him on the road to prominence. Gen. Leonard Wood, a veteran of the Spanish-American War, said the radicals ``should be put on a ship of stone with sails of lead and their first stopping place should be hell.'' In darkness, a military transport with a detachment of armed marines sailed past the Statue of Liberty. Eventually, the ship reached a port in Finland, where the radicals entrained and crossed the border into revolutionary Russia. Greeted by the wife of Maxim Gorky and listening to a Soviet military band playing the Internationale, an emotional Emma Goldman said: ``This is the greatest day in my life. I once found political freedom in America. Now the doors are closed to free thinkers, and the enemies of capitalism find once more sanctuary in Russia.'' As Alice Wexler points out in ``Emma Goldman in Exile,'' a well-researched and readable biography, her enthusiasm for the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics quickly waned. The struggle for leadership and internal conflicts of the revolution altered the supposed dictatorship of the proletariat into a dictatorship of the Communist Party apparatus. Emma Goldman, a revolutionist of international stature, found herself a pariah in the United States -- which she continued to love, even in exile -- and a thorn in the side of the Soviet Union. She lived there with her fellow-deportee and lover, Alexander Berkman, for less than two years. By 1923 she had written ``My Two Years in Russia'' (to her surprise, the publisher, Doubleday & Page, changed the title to ``My Disillusionment in Russia'') and by 1925 she was giving speeches in England on ``The Bolshevik Myth and the Condition of the Political Prisoners.'' In her book, she told how she came to believe that the inequality, repression and especially the terror were politically caused and an inevitable result of Bolshevik ideology. ``Emma Goldman in Exile'' covers the last 20 years of her life and follows Miss Wexler's ``Emma Goldman in America'' (also published by Beacon Press). Together they form an authoritative biography of a vibrant and influential personality. She was a character in E.. Doctorow's novel ``Ragtime'' and in Warren Beatty's movie ``Reds.'' Her two-volume autobiography, ``Living My Life,'' was published in 1931 and is still in print (Dover Books). Writing about ``Living My Life'' in a current book about American autobiography called ``Fabricating Lives,'' Herbert Liebowitz saw fit to describe it as garrulous and exhausting, overlooking its significance not as artful writing but as social history. Emma Goldman (1869-1940) was born in Russia and moved to the United States in 1886. She was soon caught up in a swirl of movements -- feminism, birth control, pacificism, anarchism. Despite the fears of the Red hunters, she was a bomb thrower only in her speeches and pamphlets. She is studied today for the very principles that put her in jail and caused her deportation. ``For nearly 30 years, she had taunted conservative Americans with her outspoken attacks on government, big business and war,'' Miss Wexler writes. ``On her freewheeling coast-to-coast lecture tours she defended everything from free speech to free love, from the rights of striking workers to the rights of homosexuals. ``Her name became a household word, synonymous with everything subversive and demonic, but also symbolic of the `new woman' and of the radical labor movement that blossomed in the years before World War I. To the public she was America's arch revolutionary, both frightening and fascinating. ``She flaunted her lovers, talked back to the police, smoked in public and marched off to prison carrying James Joyce's `Portrait of the Artist' under her arm.'' In exile, Emma Goldman lived in France, visited England and Canada on lecture tours and continued to speak out and write about her beliefs. Her anti-Bolshevism was not universally admired on the democratic left. For example, Harold Laski initially offered to assist a campaign for Russian political prisoners, but he and other members of the British Labor Party concluded that her main interest was attacking Bolshevism. Miss Wexler, who treats the subject of her biography candidly, describes how Emma Goldman could be so adamant that she lost colleagues in general sympathy with her beliefs. The Spanish Civil War drew her back into the international struggle against fascism. In Barcelona, she worked with the anarchists in defense of the Spanish Republic. In ``Homage to Catalonia,'' of course, George Orwell has written at length about the role of the anarchists and their clash with the communists while both were fighting Franco's forces. ``Emma Goldman in Exile'' helps to flesh out the story of the internal disputes among the Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War. Miss Wexler concludes that it is strange that Emma Goldman has been honored for her attacks on Soviet Russia rather than for ``her lifelong sense of exile to fight for a new world in which all people might feel at home, a world without boundaries or borders, where no one would be deported for dissident opinions and all would share freely in the wealth of the earth.''