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Title: The Warrior Author: Max Nomad Date: 1939 Language: en Topics: Nestor Makhno, Russian Revolution, biography Source: Retrieved on 2020-07-20 from http://www.ditext.com/nomad/makhno.html Notes: Apostles of Revolution, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1939.
Present-day Paris is the great political cemetery for shattered hopes
and broken ambitions. Liberal German professors and Spanish Left-wing
Anarchists, Russian “Whites” and Polish Socialists, Chinese followers of
Trotsky and Armenian Nationalists, Austrian Monarchists and Italian
Fascist dissenters, sometimes sit at the same few tables of a cheap
restaurant unknown to each other. Paris is hospitable to all of them,
provided they leave French affairs alone, and comply with the police
regulations.
One of those walking political corpses, the Ukrainian Nestor Makhno,
actually died late in 1934 — almost forgotten by most of his
contemporaries. For years he had worn the unenviable halo of a
bloodthirsty ruffian, a leader of counterrevolutionary cutthroats and
the most dreaded organizer of anti-Semitic pogroms. Yet anyone who was
anxious to see him could meet him every Saturday night in the
Russian-Jewish Anarchist Workers’ Club of Paris.
The contrast between his personal and political affiliations on the one
hand, and the stories spread about him on the other, is characteristic
of the many contradictions surrounding that strange figure. That short,
insignificant-looking invalid, with the pallor of a consumptive in his
last stage, had fifteen years before been one of the most heroic and
glamorous figures of the Russian civil war. A semi-educated worker not
endowed with any gift of eloquence, he had aroused millions of Ukrainian
peasants to a life-and-death struggle against their despoilers. A
“lifer” at nineteen, who had never had regular military training, he had
dealt that deadly blow to the White Army which greatly contributed to
its final destruction. Organizer of an anarchist guerrilla band, and
later division general in the Red Army, he had dared the anger of the
then almighty Trotsky, who ordered him shot at sight.
Several years later, in misery and near-oblivion, he was coughing and
drinking himself to death in a Paris slum district, only a few miles
away from his ancient foe, now fallen from grace and denigrated in his
country like himself. Yet, he had only to compromise a little with his
principles — or perhaps with his own ambitions? — and he would have been
still alive at present, the idol of budding military heroes, chief of
the Soviet Union’s cavalry, or perhaps even Trotsky’s successor in the
supreme command of the Red Army.
Nestor Ivanovich Makhno was born in 1889, the youngest son of a poor
Ukrainian peasant. At that time his native village, Gulyai Polye, was an
unknown place in the province of Ekaterinoslav, about sixty miles north
of the Sea of Azov. Thirty years later he was to put that place on the
map. It became his “capital,” the center of his operations, from which
he went out to free the Ukraine of all her masters, German invaders,
Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists, Tsarist generals and Bolshevik
bureaucrats.
He lost his father when he was hardly one year old, and had to earn his
living after the age of seven. Tending the cattle and sheep of the local
peasants, working hard as a farm laborer and later as a painter in a
foundry shop, four winters of public school was all the training he had.
He never was a schoolteacher, as a persistent legend has it — apparently
in order to brand him as an “intellectual.”
The first Russian Revolution, that of 1905, aroused in him those
sentiments of active protest which were to determine the whole pattern
of his life. Only the most extreme expression of that protest would
satisfy his longing for justice and revenge. He found it in the
Anarchist movement. Russian Anarchism of those years had its orthodox
main current, and its various Right Wing and Left Wing “deviations,”
just as the other revolutionary parties and organizations. It was weaker
numerically than either the Mensheviks, the Bolsheviks, or the Populist
“Social-Revolutionists.” But it towered above the anarchist movements in
other countries. Its communicants, whether or not they understood the
intricacies of their respective philosophies, were mostly fanatical men
of action, and not merely dreamers and hairsplitters. Their protest
against “the double yoke of Capital and State” found its expression in
terrorist acts against the representatives of these two forces, while
the Marxists were altogether opposed to individual terrorism and the
Social-Revolutionists applied it only against the organs of the Tsarist
Government.
As a member of one of these Anarchist groups Makhno participated in a
minor terrorist exploit that claimed the life of a police captain.
Condemned to death, he escaped the gallows due to the fact that he was
not yet twenty. The Moscow penitentiary in which he was supposed to
spend the rest of his life did not succeed in breaking his spirit or
calming his fiery temperament — even though his hands and feet were
chained most of the time. Always at war with the prison guards, he was a
frequent guest in the damp, unheated disciplinary cells. His lungs
became affected, and the constant realization that he was doomed,
anyhow, might have still added to his reckless courage and contempt of
death. When at peace with his guards, he used the prison library to
extend his rudimentary education. A smattering of Russian literature and
grammar, some history — perhaps some treatises on the technique of
warfare? — and he had those scant elements of knowledge which made his
later career possible.
At last the Revolution of 1917 opened the doors of his prison after nine
years. He returned to his native village, where quite naturally he
became the most respected personage in spite of his youthful age of
twenty-eight. His Anarchism notwithstanding, he became vice-president of
the autonomous local administration, and chairman of the local union of
peasants and rural laborers. In August, 1917, three months before the
Bolshevik revolution, he anticipated its main feature — by initiating
the forcible expropriation of all big landholders.
At that time the Ukraine was ruled by a nationalist party usually called
after the name of its leader, Simeon Petlura, whose aspirations tended
towards independence, or at least very broad autonomy. The Bolshevik
revolution was for them the pretext for complete separation. During the
Brest-Litovsk peace negotiations early in 1918, they sided with the
Central Powers in order to obtain their assistance against the Russian
Communists who had occupied the Ukraine by January, 1918. The Germans
actually helped them to drive out the Bolsheviks, but they would not
permit them to remain in power. To the Prussian Junkers this typical
nationalist party of prosperous peasants, headed by obscure country
lawyers, insurance agents and schoolteachers, had the same taint of
radical plebeianism as had the Russian Reds. Whatever their opposition
to Socialist or Communist philosophy, Petlura and his men would
certainly have made no attempts to return the land to the Polish and
Russian nobles from whom it was seized. (There were practically no
Ukrainians among the big landholders in the Ukraine.) After a few weeks
of power the parliamentary government of the nationalist party was
“liquidated” by the military authorities of the Central Powers. The
place of Petlura was taken by a German puppet, the Russian-Ukrainian
General Skoropadsky. That general went out to organize a semi-absolutist
monarchist administration, fit for a near-Asiatic German colony. He
assumed the historical Ukrainian Cossack title of “Hetman” and was
slated to become the founder of a new dynasty.
Makhno had to go into hiding and was soon back in Moscow. He consulted
his better-read anarchist comrades, expecting from them some concrete
advice for his future revolutionary activities. But his friends were
very vague and left him theoretically in the air. Anarchism is a very
revolutionary theory for nonrevolutionary times.[1] It has little to
offer when it comes to immediate realizations, for the anarchists
themselves are aware that the time for their lofty ideal has not come as
yet. So Makhno decided to rely on his own intuition, so to speak. His
only adviser was the metal worker Peter Arshinov, an active terrorist
and Makhno’s fellow-prisoner prior to 1917, who had a certain gift of
writing and of spinning revolutionary theories.
In the meantime the German foraging expeditions in the Ukraine, covered
by the authority of the Hetman’s administration, were driving the
peasants to revolt. These had sullenly submitted to the return of the
land they had seized, but they would rather destroy their own crops than
let them be carried away by the German and Austrian invaders. In
retaliation the German militarists resorted to those punitive measures
which had made their name dreaded in their Central African colonies. In
turn, the peasants in many places replied by forming guerrilla bands
which, while harassing the invaders, were at the same time committing
unspeakable massacres among the Jewish population as well. This was
particularly the case in the northern provinces where practically all
the trade was in the hands of the Jews.
In July, 1918, Makhno returned secretly to his native district. He too
was going to start a guerrilla campaign against the peasants’ enemies.
But it was not to be under the Ukrainian chauvinist slogans of the
nationalist schoolteachers and ex-officers of the north, who egged the
peasants on against the Russians, the Poles and the Jews.
Makhno’s revolutionary-internationalist propaganda fell on propitious
ground in the southeastern Ukraine. The Jews constituted a minority
among the merchants of his region, and the social classes were not
separated along racial lines as in the north, where the bulk of the
Ukrainian-speaking peasantry was faced by Polish landed noblemen,
Russian big landowners and government officials, and Jewish traders. In
fact there was a great mixture of various nationalities in the
southeast, including Greeks and Bulgars, the predominating element being
of course the Ukrainians.
Makhno’s beginnings were modest enough. With his first group of five men
he attacked the manor of a Russian noble family, several of whose
members served as police officers. Aside from the lives of the
inhabitants they took several rifles, horses, and police uniforms. They
increased their band, and at the next opportunity their uniforms gained
them access to a ball of the local aristocratic gentry at which they
killed off all the participants. Wherever they went the peasants gladly
changed their horses. The next day they would reappear in another
province, sixty or seventy miles away, and exterminate the officers and
special guards, Germans, Austrians or natives. Mercy was shown only to
the private soldiers of those armies.
It took only a few weeks and Makhno and his growing band became the
terror of the respectable people — the symbol of the peasants’ revenge.
Hundreds of manors were destroyed, thousands of those whom the farmers
considered as their enemies were killed. Makhno’s reputation grew and
drew larger and larger armed forces into his ranks. Guerrilla bands
which hitherto had acted independently under leaders of their own,
joined Makhno and accepted his command.
He was not merely a guerrilla leader but an agitator as well. Tirelessly
he launched leaflets and appeals, addressed to the peasants, the enemy
soldiers, the Cossacks. The word “Anarchy,” in the meaning of
“No-government,” was not mentioned in his propaganda. But the gist of
that idea was expressed in simple words voicing hostility to any central
government that would rule them either from Moscow or from Kiev, either
in the name of a “proletarian dictatorship,” or in the name of a
bourgeois-democratic Ukrainian People’s Republic. Unsophisticated young
Makhno, like most of the other Anarchists, was of course unaware of the
fact that the Anarchy he adored was at bottom a misnomer; that it was
merely the extreme form of democracy, with every village and district
enjoying the greatest autonomy and having the right to decide its own
destinies and to elect its own authorities. To what extent such an ideal
might be realized under the present highly complicated social
conditions, is another question which need not be discussed here.
Less than two months after he started his great punitive expedition, he
achieved a feat which was the crowning of the legend that had already
begun to form around his name. On September 30, 1918, while heading a
small force of thirty men, and in possession of only one machine gun, he
found himself opposed by a force of one thousand Austrian soldiers and
special guards composed of the sons of rich farmers. A strategic ruse
and a reckless attack succeeded in routing an enemy who outnumbered him
thirty to one. His men, who at that encounter expected to die,
proclaimed him then and there their Batko, the Ukrainian equivalent for
“Little Father,” carrying the additional meaning of supreme military
chieftain. Local peasants, as well as guerrilla detachments from other
sections, fascinated by this heroic feat, likewise decided to declare
him the Batko of all revolutionary guerrilla forces of the South.
In the meantime the World War was coming to an end. By November, 1918,
the Germans and the Austrians began to withdraw their armies from the
Ukraine — about half a million men. Deprived of their support, the
“Hetman” Skoropadsky was unable to stand on his own feet. “Free” once
again, the Ukraine became the object of a bloody civil war, with three
claimants presenting their titles. The first in the field were the
Ukrainian nationalist followers of Petlura, the idol of the educated
middle classes and of the rich peasantry. With the help of the numerous
guerrilla bands of the northern provinces they had forced the “Hetman”
to flee, and had taken Kiev, the ancient capital of the Ukraine. Their
rule lasted hardly more than two months. For no sooner had Petlura begun
to organize his own administration and his own regular army, than the
Russian Red troops swooped down upon them from the north. Kiev was
Russian again.
While those changes were going on in the north, Makhno took advantage of
the disintegration of the German and Austrian armies to get as much
military equipment as possible. As a result, he could soon organize a
few regiments of infantry and cavalry and even a battery of artillery.
He had also a large number of machine guns. Had he only accepted the
invitation of the Ukrainian nationalists, he would have become one of
the most celebrated generals in their army, then in the process of
formation. But a “kulak” Ukraine, headed by schoolteachers and lawyers,
was not the acme of his aspirations.
He had his first armed conflict with them when with four hundred men he
went out to take Ekaterinoslav (now renamed Dniepropetrovsk), the
provincial capital of his own home region. The Bolsheviks in one of the
near-by localities placed a number of armed workers at his disposal. A
military ruse delivered the city into the hands of his men. They boarded
a freight train, crossed the Dnieper bridge and seized the railway
station in the center of the city. Had his enemies had but the slightest
suspicion, not one of its disguised passengers would have remained
alive. [309]
Another military ruse, which distinguished his later campaigns during
the various phases of the Civil War, has remained inseparably connected
with his name. His boys, wearing plain peasant garb, would enter a city
or other urban settlement to sell their cabbage on the market place. At
a whistle’s blow, the buggies with the cabbage were upside down, the
concealed machine guns were in operation, and the city was occupied
before the Whites could think of organizing any defense.
It was because his men were practically all peasants that they could
often get out of situations which no other guerrilla army would have
survived. Cornered, they would individually slink back to their
villages, bury their arms, take up their work in their fields as if
nothing had happened — only to reassemble at the next signal.
The Ukrainian Nationalists who established a regular front against
Makhno’s little “republic” soon disappeared as a concrete danger. Their
troops, consisting either of former guerrilla fighters or of mobilized
peasants, were easily “demoralized” by the contact with the wild men
from the South. Soon the vast territories north of Gulyai Polye were
left to themselves, as it were, without strong governmental authority
and without garrisons.
In the meantime a new danger began to threaten Makhno. The old Tsarist
generals had retired to the southeastern corners of European Russia, the
Caucasus and the Don Region. Thousands of officers of the old army
flocked to their banners and formed the nucleus of the White Army. They
found willing recruits among some of the semi-savage mountain tribes as
well as among the Cossacks. Emboldened by the material support on the
part of the Allied powers, they began to move north and westward.
It was an adversary much more serious than the enemies he had met
before. The few regiments Makhno had raised by that time — not more than
twenty thousand men — were not sufficient to stem that force. His
Anarchism now faced a very ticklish situation. To increase the ranks of
the fighters the “Conference of Workers, Peasants and Insurgents” of his
region, held in February, 1919, decided to declare a “voluntary
mobilization” of all able-bodied men coming within certain age classes.
The word “voluntary” saved the purity of Makhno’s Anarchist principles.
His own paper, the Road to Freedom (May 24, 1919) explained the meaning
of that word to the effect that the peasants had voluntarily decided to
be mobilized, and that therefore nobody was permitted to refuse service.
The conference elected a Regional Military Revolutionary Soviet of
Peasants, Workers and Insurgents, which for all practical purposes
formed the government of the region. Yet it all went under the name of
Anarchism.
Fighting the White Army was a tough job. The mobilization had given
Makhno a certain reserve of young men, but no new soldiers. His supply
of arms was limited, and he could get new ones only from the enemies he
killed. But that adversary fought well. Two White regiments consisted
exclusively of former officers — desperate characters, and therefore
excellent soldiers. Moreover, the enemy adopted Makhno’s tactics of
sudden cavalry raids in the rear, and even greatly “improved” upon them.
His foes terrorized the peaceful population and murdered all those
suspected of supporting the Batko. It was also at that time that the
Whites began a systematic extermination of the Jewish population, though
the latter as a whole took no part in the fights between the Whites, the
Reds, and the Greens. (The “Greens” was the general term — sometimes
incorrectly applied to Makhno as well — under which all the peasant
guerrilla forces were usually designated.)
The fact that pogroms took place in that region has given rise to an
almost ineradicable general belief that these anti-Jewish massacres were
fostered and organized by Makhno. Writers like the well-known Russian
emigre and French author, J. Kessel, have vied with Soviet novelists
like Pilnyak and Veresayev, in representing him in their stories as a
pogrom-monger. Jewish publications all over the world have continually
voiced that accusation. A special book published in Moscow in 1926,
about the Jewish Pogroms of 1918–1921, features his picture at the head
of its album of “famous” Jew-killers. When in 1927 Petlura, the emigre
leader of the Ukrainian Nationalists, was killed in Paris in retaliation
for the pogroms committed by the guerrilla bands in northern Ukraine,
Makhno, who was then in Paris, might have easily suffered the same fate
at the hands of some fanatical and misinformed avenger of Jewish wrongs.
Yet the official records published by Soviet historians expressly deny
his guilt in this respect.
However, there was the proverbial fire behind the smoke of slander
directed against Makhno. Anti-Jewish feeling — just as anti-Greek or
anti-Armenian feeling among many Moslem populations — was very strong
all over the Ukraine, as part of the old class antagonism between
peasant and trader. The Batko‘s men were not exempt from it. There was a
case when a few Makhno soldiers on furlough — and a Makhno soldier on
furlough was just a Ukrainian peasant — seeing two decomposed corpses
near a Jewish settlement, attacked its inhabitants and killed thirty
persons in the belief that the dead men were their comrades who had been
murdered by the Jews. The commander of that troop was shot by Makhno.
Another of his men was shot for merely displaying a hand-written poster
bearing the legend “Beat the Jews, Save Russia!” (Occasionally pogroms
were committed by Red Army soldiers as well, as can be seen from Red
Cavalry, the famous epic of Budenny’s Red horsemen by the well-known
Soviet writer Babel.) The explanation of Makhno’s particularly tragic
reputation lies partly in the fact that very often bands of ordinary
robbers operating in Makhno’s territory would assume the name of the
Anarchist’s dreaded followers in order to intimidate the population.
The permanent slur on his name actually poisoned Makhno’s life for the
rest of his days. In 1926 Anarchist papers in various languages
published his appeal “To the Jews of All Countries,” a pathetic document
proving irrefutably his complete innocence of all these charges. In
fact, nothing was further from him than any racial feeling. Not only
were “some of his best friends” Jews, but a Jewish intellectual, V. M.
Eichenbaum (“Volin”), was for a few months Chairman of his Military
Revolutionary Council and editor of Makhno’s proclamations; a Jewish
worker was the vice-president of his local administrative body in his
“capital,” Gulyai Polye; his artillery battery was manned exclusively by
Jewish city workers, all of whom sooner or later perished at the hands
of the Whites.
For six months, from January, 1919, to June, 1919, Makhno’s troops held
a large front, nearly seventy miles long, stretching northward from
Mariupol on the Azov Sea. Some of his attacks drove the White invaders
nearly one hundred miles back to their strongly defended bases in
Taganrog and Rostov on the Don. All the sadistic bestiality of which the
Whites were capable they vented on their Makhnovist prisoners, sometimes
even roasting them alive on red-hot iron sheets. It is hard to imagine
what they would have done to Makhno himself, upon whose head they placed
a prize of half a million rubles.
At that time Makhno’s sentiments toward Soviet Russia were of the
friendliest. After one of the battles in which the Whites were utterly
routed, about one hundred carloads of grain fell into his hands. The
booty was sent to Petrograd and to Moscow, which at that time were
greatly in need of food. In turn, the Soviet press had only the kindest
and most complimentary words for the heroic guerrilla leader of the
South, who had been tirelessly fighting against the German and Austrian
invaders, against the Cossack dictator Skoropadsky, against the
Ukrainian Nationalists of the Petlura brand, and finally against the
White generals. And in the meantime the Red Army was continually
pressing south, destroying Petlura’s power on the way and establishing
Bolshevik authorities everywhere — until it found itself face to face
with the mysterious insurgent leader.
The Bolsheviks had in their ranks many Anarchists who, carried away by
the great mass upheaval, had thrown in their lot with their former
opponents. These Anarchists saw in Bolshevism the inevitable first step,
necessary for sweeping away the debris of the old semi-feudal and
capitalist Russia. This step accomplished, they would be able to take
the next step toward real freedom and equality, which they would achieve
without violence, by the sheer power of persuasion in the competitive
struggle for the mind and the heart of the masses. Had not Lenin
himself, leaning upon famous passages of Marx and Engels, promised, as
it were, that the State — as a machine of compulsion — would disappear
in a higher phase of the revolutionary process?
True, the airs some of the Communist Commissars were assuming as soon as
they got power were anything but reassuring as to their intention ever
to cease to be the masters of one hundred and fifty million people. On
the other hand, many of the half-converted Anarchists began to feel
quite comfortable in their new role of near-Commissars, while those who
would not compromise had to undergo all the rigors reserved for the
“enemies of the Revolution.”
Makhno and his friends felt the difficulty of their situation. Here was
the merciless White enemy, ready to bring back the old Tsarist system
and to destroy the last vestiges of the progress achieved by the
upheaval of 1917. That White enemy had to be destroyed, and a union with
the Red Army would certainly accelerate that result. No doubt, this
would expose all Russia and the Ukraine to the authoritarian rule of the
modern Jacobins. But Makhno and his friends hoped the struggle they
would have to fight out with the Bolsheviks would not assume violent
forms. They were sure that the Ukrainian peasants, having the choice
between the “free Soviets” inaugurated by Makhno and the centralist
administration of the Bolsheviks, would know to whom to give their
preference. And if they had any misgivings about the coming peaceful
character of their differences with the Communists, they had only to
think of the reality of the White danger, in order to discard their
apprehensions about the intentions of Russia’s new masters.
The Bolshevik proposal to incorporate the “Insurgents” with the Red Army
was accepted. It was not a complete surrender. The organization of
Makhno’s army remained unchanged, except for the introduction of
political commissars appointed by the Moscow authorities. Subject to the
Supreme Command of the Red Army only with regard to military operations,
it maintained its old name of “Revolutionary Insurgent Army,” and kept
its black Anarchist flag. One of the most important points for Makhno
was the stipulation that his army should remain at the anti-White front
in the Southeast and not be transferred anywhere else. [314]
One very important matter remained unmentioned in the agreement. It was
the political status of the Makhno territory. The Batko took it for
granted that its political autonomy would not be touched and that the
peasants would be permitted to live their lives without any interference
on the part of the Bolshevik central and local authorities. The
Bolsheviks were determined not to permit any such “nonsense,” but they
proceeded cautiously in order not to hurt their allies’ feelings right
at the start. No Communist officials were installed at Gulyai Polye,
Makhno’s “capital” so to speak. But when they tried to establish their
institutions in other localities, there ensued bloody conflicts with the
population.
The Soviet authorities became suspicious and their press began to speak
of “kulaks” and “counterrevolutionaries.” But there was no open break as
yet. The calling by Makhno’s “Military Revolutionary Council” of an
autonomous regional Soviet Conference brought the matter to a head. This
assertion of administrative independence the authorities of the Red Army
considered nothing short of rebellion. In a telegram sent to the
Conference, Dybenko, one of the commanders of the Red Army, declared
that no such conferences would be tolerated, that they were openly
counterrevolutionary in character, and that their organizers would be
subject to the severest measures.
The Conference was not intimidated, and replied in a long dignified
letter which disputed Dybenko’s authority to interfere with local
affairs. At that time Makhno was division commander in the Red Army,
like Dybenko himself, and was not subject to the latter but to the
General Staff of the Second Army. With particular bitterness the
signatories pointed out that the conference was not an assemblage of
counterrevolutionists but of those “who first raised the banner of the
social revolution in the Ukraine, and had gone further to the left than
the Bolsheviks.”
The attacks in the Soviet press became more outspoken. At about that
time General Shkuro, the most notorious pogrom-monger in Denikin’s army,
wrote a letter to Makhno complimenting him on his valor and inviting him
to join the Whites. Shkuro had been fooled by a prisoner who, to win
time in the hope of fleeing, had told him the cock-and-bull story of
Makhno’s reactionary propensities. That invitation was immediately
reprinted, with much caustic comment, in Makhno’s paper Road to Freedom.
The Bolshevik press likewise carried that letter — adding that it was
intercepted by Red soldiers, and presenting it as evidence of
negotiations going on between Shkuro and Makhno. This piece of
“journalism” was a sort of propagandist preparation for the forthcoming
military attack upon the disrespectful rebels.
A last attempt to bring Makhno to “his senses” was made by one of the
then highest personages of the Soviet regime. It was Leo Kamenev, with
Zinoviev once one of the two chief assistants of Lenin, and later, with
the same Zinoviev and with Stalin, for a short while one of Russia’s
ruling triumvirate. In the name of the Council for the Defense of the
Republic, the soft-spoken Kamenev tried to convince Makhno that the
existence of the regional Military Revolutionary Soviet — Makhno’s
civilian government, as it were — was incompatible with the whole
structure of the Soviet Republic. But Makhno was not convinced. Yet,
there was no official break, and Kamenev kissed Makhno on parting,
assuring him and his comrades that there would always be a common ground
between the Bolsheviks and such true revolutionists as the Makhnovtsy.
A few days after Kamenev’s departure, Makhno received an urgent,
half-threatening and half-complimentary telegram from his recent
visitor. Grigoriev, a commander of one of the Soviet armies in the
Southern Ukraine, had rebelled and begun to organize pogroms. A former
Tsarist officer, he had first served the Ukrainian Nationalists against
the German-made dictator Skoropadsky; had later joined the Bolsheviks
against Petlura, and was now up in arms, either to become the supreme
ruler of the Ukraine himself or to hitch his car to the rising star of
the Whites. Makhno was requested to show his loyalty and to issue a
proclamation condemning Grigoriev’s action.
Makhno was indignant at the tone of the message. He replied in kind,
reasserting his loyalty to the Revolution and adding some impertinent
remarks about the commissars and secret police who suppressed all
activities of his Anarchist friends. He was going to find out first
whether the accusations against Grigoriev were well-founded. At the same
time he issued a circular to his own troops in which he as much as
hinted that he was not interested in the domestic quarrels for power
between an ex-Bolshevik guerrilla leader and his superiors.
Makhno had of course good reasons for not standing at attention as soon
as he got his orders. He had himself been accused of
“counterrevolution”; attempts to seize him and his staff had been made
by one of his subordinates who it was suspected had acted upon
instructions from “higher up.” He had also been warned of a deadly trap
that awaited him if he visited some Soviet institution on Bolshevik
territory proper. The Bolsheviks no longer trusted him, and he
reciprocated their sentiments. But the chief reasons for his
disobedience were of a military character. Grigoriev was active in the
western section of Southern Ukraine. An expedition against him would
have meant for Makhno the loss of his base, the exposure of his own
territory to an invasion by the Whites from the East, whom he was just
holding at bay on an eighty-mile front. Nor did he want to engage in a
fight with Grigoriev’s men, whom he hoped to win over without bloodshed.
Grigoriev’s campaign lasted nearly three months. He did not make great
headway, but his pogroms and his fights with Red Army detachments helped
the cause of the Whites. By July the latter had occupied most of the
Ukraine. Makhno, forced out of his native grounds — and at the same time
outlawed by the Bolsheviks — found himself in the territory haunted by
Grigoriev’s bands. He joined forces with the unscrupulous adventurer —
each of the two leaders waiting for a chance to get at the other’s
throat and to incorporate his men. Having at last intercepted messages
which his “ally” had exchanged with the Whites, Makhno took the
initiative by unmasking him at a public meeting and killing him before
he could pull the trigger.
The winning over of Grigoriev’s men was not an unmixed blessing.
Occasionally these would show inclinations to revert to the anti-Semitic
procedures of their recent leader. But whoever actually gave vent to his
suppressed desires in this direction would never get a chance to do it
again. [317]
Many things, however, had occurred before that happy ending of the
Grigoriev affair. The Bolsheviks, though appreciating Makhno’s help in
the struggle against the Whites, had their apprehensions. Behind his
Anarchism and his demand for local autonomy they saw not merely a more
or less Utopian protest against the “State”; they saw in it also the
beginning of an organized struggle of the peasant against the grain
seizures practiced by the Soviet authorities. Makhno’s “Anarchism”
appealed to the entire peasant population, because it meant to them the
nonpayment of taxes for the support of a bureaucracy which they
considered unnecessary, and of the city populations which gave them
nothing in exchange.
It was about this time that Trotsky, as the supreme commander of the Red
Army, visited the Ukraine. He saw the potential danger to his conception
of the Revolution if Makhno’s peasant anarchism should be allowed to
spread. So he started a campaign of abuse in his Red Army paper printed
on his famous train. “Scratch a follower of Makhno,” he wrote, “and you
will find a follower of Grigoriev. More often than not you don’t even
have to scratch: A frantic kulak or a petty speculator barking at the
Communists frankly sticks out on the surface.” That unwarranted insult
called forth much indignation in Makhno’s region. This is admitted by
the official Bolshevik historian Kubanin who characterizes that remark
as one of Trotsky’s “customary venomous phrases.” In later years, when
the leader of the Red Army fell from grace, similar venomous samples of
official journalism calling him the “vanguard of international
counterrevolution” and an “agent of the Nazis” might have given the
Great Exile occasion to think about the inscrutable ways of historic
justice.
Following up his argument, Leon Trotsky insisted that all the talk about
“No-government” was only a cunning device covering up the Anarchists’
ambition to establish a government of their own, which in essence would
be a government of the rich peasants. The great orator’s view that
Anarchists in charge of a given territory would invariably establish a
government of their own was no doubt justified. The rudiments of such an
“Anarchist” government, which claimed not to be one, were already in
evidence. It would have become a government not unlike that of the
Bolsheviks, only probably giving more scope to local autonomy. Trotsky’s
assumption that it would become a government of “kulaks” — whether
correct or not — was at any rate quite amusing in view of his own later
struggles within the Russian Communist Party. For it was he who seven
years later was to raise that same “kulak” charge against Stalin and the
majority of the party.
What Trotsky did not want to see was the social difference in the
officeholding personnel of the Bolshevik and the Makhnovist-Anarchist
states. The Bolsheviks represented the new bureaucracy issued from the
ranks of the educated lower middle classes, largely intellectuals and
semi-intellectuals, with a growing participation of self-educated
ex-workers. The upper crust of the Makhno movement contained no
intellectuals at all — except for one lone journalist, V. M. Eichenbaum,
known under the name of Volin, who was with them for a few months. All
their leaders and militants were, like Makhno, semi-educated peasants
and workers. The rivalry for revolutionary leadership between lower
middle class intellectuals, on the one hand, and self-educated workers,
on the other, has been of old standing not only in Russia but in the
Western countries as well.
Trotsky’s opportunity to strike came soon enough. Another regional
conference called by Makhno’s Revolutionary Military Council elicited
from him an order holding out court-martial to all those who would
participate in that assembly. In his opinion, that Conference was a
prelude to a counterrevolutionary mutiny like that of Grigoriev’s,
leading eventually to “the opening of the front to the Whites, before
whom the Makhno brigade is invariably retreating owing to the
incapacity, the criminality and the treason on the part of the leaders.”
Ever since that time the “opening of the front to Denikin” became one of
the stock assertions of official Communist historiography with regard to
Makhno. An opening of the front there actually was, but it came from
another direction. The initial retreat of Makhno’s men from the position
held against the White commander Denikin was caused by the attitude of
the Soviet Army authorities. They did not trust their Anarchist allies
and had reduced their supply of ammunition to well-nigh one-sixth of the
amount necessary.[2] Yet at the same time the Bolsheviks expected them
to risk complete extermination by fighting with mere swords and rifle
butts against the best French and British cannon and machine guns.
Moreover, Trotsky had openly expressed the idea that he would rather
lose all of the Ukraine to Denikin than permit the further spread of
“Makhnovshchina.” He knew that the latter, having the support of the
peasant masses, would eventually be harder to fight than the Whites who
were hated by the entire population.
As a result of Trotsky’s aforementioned order, Makhno was deposed from
his command as Division General within the Red Army. The Batko was
unwilling to start an internecine struggle while the common enemy was
threatening the Revolution. He complied, outwardly at least, by sending
his letter of resignation in which he wrote that he was tired of being
continually treated as “a bandit, an associate of Grigoriev, and
conspirator against the Soviet Republic for the purpose of
re-establishing the capitalist system.”
He left, taking with him his faithful personal guard of two hundred
crack horsemen. Before his departure, however, he wrote an appeal to all
his former fellow insurgents, giving the reasons for his resignation,
and enjoining them to continue the struggle, even though they would have
to do it as soldiers of the Red Army. The officers of his regiment
decided to submit to the higher Red Army command, but at the same time
there was an understanding among them that at a given moment they would
all unite again under the command of their old leader.
Makhno had good reasons for going into hiding. From other Division
Generals of the Red Army he had received a warning that Trotsky had
given orders to arrest him. Apparently there was to be a public trial,
followed by a death sentence for “treason.” Klementi Voroshilov, the
present Soviet Commissar of Defense, accompanied by a detachment of
Cheka men, went out to capture the fugitives. But his armored train was
ambushed by the Whites and they would all have perished had not the
outlaw come to the rescue of his would-be executioner. Voroshilov —
through his couriers — thanked Makhno and invited him to discuss further
plans for an anti-White campaign. Makhno’s reply read as follows:
I know of Trotsky’s order [to arrest me] and the role imposed upon your
conscience, Comrade Voroshilov, in connection with that order. I,
therefore, consider it impossible to discuss with you plans for a
further campaign. But these are my own plans: I intend to get in the
rear of Denikin’s army and to attempt his destruction. This is important
just now when he has undertaken a decisive advance on all fronts.
Your former friend in the struggle for the triumph of the Revolution,
June 15,1919
Batko Makhno
On the very same day members of Makhno’s staff and of his local
government were arrested by that punitive expedition and executed two
days later. The whole movement was outlawed. This, however, did not
subdue the spirit of the “boys” who had remained in the Red Army after
the departure of their leader. Makhno’s successor in the command, who
had been appointed by the Bolsheviks, was killed by his own men. Even
“regular” Red Army soldiers who had never served under the hero of
Gulyai Polye clamored for his leadership. They did not trust their own
officers, many of whom had been taken over from the Tsarist army, and
had betrayed them at the first opportunity.
A short time afterwards Makhno was visited in his No Man’s Land by a
Soviet military commissar who invited him to defend the city of
Alexandrovsk. That place was an important strategic point necessary for
the safe retreat of the Red Army from the Crimea. Makhno’s outlaw troop
had in the meantime been increased considerably by many refugees from
his native district, as well as by various independent guerrilla bands
and deserting Red Army detachments. The Red Army had no reserves in that
district; so the proposal practically meant that Makhno should subject
himself to complete extermination on the part of the Whites for the
defense of those who were out for his head. He demanded a public
retraction of the order, which declared him a counterrevolutionary and
an outlaw. This was refused, and he was proscribed again, anyone having
the right to kill him at sight. At the same time the White generalissimo
Denikin placed a price upon his head.
The White advance was gradually pushing the Red Army out of the Ukraine.
The Bolshevik evacuation proceeded practically without a struggle.
Possibly this was necessary because of the greater importance of the
defense of Central Russia proper. But many Ukrainians were very bitter
about it. In their opinion, the Bolsheviks were interested solely in
taking away as much man power and as much rolling stock as possible,
leaving the rest to the tender mercies of the Tsarists. It was this
situation which made Makhno’s comeback possible.
He gave up his plan to get behind Denikin’s lines and communicated
secretly with the officers of his former troops who had remained with
the Red Army. Upon his word they organized a general revolt against
their Bolshevik superiors and joined their old leader. That bloodless
mutiny meant a complete breaking-up of the Crimean Red Army coming from
the South. It was what the Bolshevik historians call Makhno’s “betrayal”
and opening of the front to the Whites. In the meantime Makhno had
“liquidated” Grigoriev in the manner described before. He had now an
army of about fifteen thousand men.
And now his offensive against the Whites started all over again.
Sometimes he would push them back over fifty miles to the East, and on
one of these occasions he took from them three armored trains. But he
was very short of cartridges, and two of his three offensives were
undertaken solely for the purpose of getting ammunition. The pressure by
the White Army grew heavier and heavier. Makhno had to blow up his
armored trains and retreat along village roads. After a month of this
trek he finally reached the city of Uman — about a hundred miles from
the Rumanian border. That city was then in the hands of the Ukrainian
Nationalists. They had raised their heads after the retreat of the
Bolsheviks and were now trying to wrest the country from the Russian
Whites. There was no love lost between the Nationalists (“Petlurovists”)
and the Makhnovists. For a while, however, in the face of the oncoming
Tsarist invader, they concluded a sort of truce, the Nationalists
promising to take over Makhno’s eight thousand wounded soldiers.
However, they did not trust each other. Makhno was convinced that his
bourgeois fellow Ukrainians would sooner or later betray him to the
Whites. The Nationalists, in turn, were afraid Makhno would “corrupt”
their troops and repeat the trick he played on Grigoriev.
Soon enough Makhno’s men found themselves entirely surrounded by that
section of the White Army that pursued them. Not mere defeat, but
complete extermination seemed unavoidable. What happened, however, on
that fateful night of September 25–26, 1919, in a battle started by
Makhno at three in the morning, was, perhaps, the turning point of the
Russian civil war. It may truly be said — incredible though it may
appear — that on that night the semi-educated ex-laborer, the Anarchist
outlaw, decided the fate of Russia. The ruse with which he routed a
superior army, the complete annihilation of his pursuers, the attack
upon their ammunition base, the blowing up of an artillery depot at
Berdiansk — all these feats actually broke the backbone of Denikin’s
advance toward the North, where the seizure of Moscow by his main army
had been expected for the month of December. Threatened at their very
base, with the immense supply of ammunitions and the main railway line
in the South cut off by Makhno, the Whites had to slow up their forced
advance toward Moscow. They were compelled to withdraw one division and
half of their best cavalry forces and to direct them against the
Southern insurgents. This enabled the Red Army to attack and to beat the
Whites exactly at the point where these had weakened their lines by
sending their men against Makhno.
The Anarchist historians and Makhno himself, who with bitter pride
insists upon this fact, cannot be accused of braggadocio. The historical
dates speak for themselves. The battle at Uman, in which Makhno
completely destroyed Denikin’s Southern Army, took place on September
25. The Whites’ victorious march toward Moscow turned into a retreat
about two weeks later. General Denikin, the head of the White Army, says
that Makhno’s revolt “had the effect of disorganizing our rear and
weakening the front at the most critical period of its existence.” A
similar statement is made in the official Soviet history of the Makhno
episode. There it is said that Makhno, “having hastened Denikin’s
penetration into the Ukraine, blew him up from within by taking part of
the Ekaterinoslav and Taurida provinces ... and cutting off Denikin’s
army from its supply bases.... The taking of Berdiansk and Mariupol by
Makhno cut Denikin’s outside connections through these ports.” In
general, however, official Soviet historiography is reticent about this
great achievement; just as it is silent at present about the historical
role of Trotsky, who, in turn, in the days of his own glory had clamored
most for Makhno’s head. Such has always been the gratitude of
revolutions to their nonconformist sons.
The victory at Uman and its further developments at last supplied Makhno
with large stores of military equipment, cannons, shells, machine guns,
motor lorries, even airplanes. Until that time he had never received
even as much as a rifle from the Red Army. He could expand, arming all
the enthusiastic young bloods among the peasantry that began to stream
to him from all sides. Soon he had as many as forty thousand infantry
and fifteen thousand cavalrymen. His foot troops — and his one thousand
machine guns — moved on light carts, and with the general sympathy of
the peasants surrounding him, he could change his horses continually and
make thirty-six to sixty miles daily. Thus he was always able to
outdistance the regular armies, which had to proceed at a much lower
speed. And in addition to that he had an enormous army of “spies.”
Women, boys, ragged old men — in fact, the entire peasant population
formed his “intelligence department” and reported to him continually the
doings of the enemy. Those who have read about the exploits of the
heroic peasant armies in the so-called Soviet regions of China can find
there an exact analogy to what was going on in the ever-changing and
elusive territory of Makhno’s armies.
Those armies had to live. All the food they needed was given to them
voluntarily by the peasants who knew that Makhno’s men were fighting for
their cause. Of course, there were things the peasants could not supply,
such as shoes, trousers or other articles. These had to be
“requisitioned.” But Makhno gave strict orders never to take from
private persons more than was absolutely necessary for the needs of the
men engaged in the search. Christian Rakovsky, then chief of the
Ukrainian Soviet Government, in a study made of that period, charged
Makhno and his men with systematic banditism. Under their army rules, he
said, Makhno’s boys were permitted to rob two days in a month; but these
two days were always extended to thirty. The official Soviet record
published in 1927 says that Rakovsky was entirely wrong in making that
statement. (Rakovsky, once one of the highest Soviet dignitaries, had in
the meantime fallen from grace as a member of Trotsky’s opposition of
1926.) In fact, the official Soviet historian says, there were fewer
robberies at the time when Makhno held the big city of Ekaterinoslav
than at any other time.
Of course there were seizures of large stores of shoes, cloth, sugar,
and other goods whenever an enemy city was taken. But there was no
combatant group that did not act likewise. What was taken on those
occasions was distributed among the peasants, after the immediate army
needs were satisfied. This won Makhno the sympathy of the rural
population; but in the opinion of the Bolshevik historian it was bad
military tactics, for the army did not have enough supplies left for
rainy days.
The organization of Makhno’s troops was modeled entirely after that of
the Red Army. Their officers — “commanders” in the terminology of the
Bolsheviks and the Anarchists — were almost without exception former
“noncoms” who had got their training during the World War. The spirit
pervading the men was extremely “democratic,” so to speak. The “bandits”
maintained that feature of the first Red Guards which has often been
derided by friends and enemies of Soviet Russia alike. The Revolutionary
Military Council, the supreme authority of that anti-authoritarian
venture, was elected by all the men assembled. So were also the
political commissars attached to the various formations, to watch the
loyalty of the commanders and to remain in contact with the rank and
file. At that time there were no longer elections in the Red Army, and
obedience was as strict there as in any other army. The official Soviet
historian, in order to ridicule the state of discipline in Makhno’s
army, tells the yarn of how in one of the Batko‘s divisions the soldiers
declared they would obey orders only after they had made sure that their
officers were sober when they issued them. In the days gone by similar
stories were reported in the Western press about conditions in the
Bolshevik army as well.
Makhno’s return after the victorious battle of Uman was the great
triumph and revenge of his life. Dividing his troops into three more or
less parallel columns, he sent them on a swift trek back to the Eastern
confines of the Ukraine to accomplish the destruction of Denikin’s rear
in the southeasternmost corner of Russia. On the way his soldiers paid
their visits to all the towns and cities which were still in the hands
of the White authorities. Unaware of what had happened, bureaucrats,
officers of local garrisons, landed noblemen, priests — all felt now the
deadly hand of the underdog’s anger. Jewish merchants were of course
subject to “requisitions” just as other capitalists. There was no
religious or race discrimination, even though, generally speaking, the
sentiment of the fighting peasants was rather hostile to the Jews. But
there were no pogroms. Some attempts were made in this direction,
chiefly by partisans who had joined Makhno from other bands. But the
leader would not stand for such “larks” and repressed them mercilessly.
During this campaign Makhno was able to seize and to hold for weeks some
large industrial centers such as Ekaterinoslav and Alexandrovsk. He made
desperate efforts to show the world an example of constructive
anarchism. The establishment of new bureaucratic authorities was
avoided. The population was to be stimulated to establish their own
forms of local self-government. Meetings were held to explain the
anarchist idea of a life based upon voluntary agreements between the
city and country, and between the toilers employed in the various
branches of the country’s industrial life.
The first contact with reality showed that matters were not as simple as
that. Large numbers of industrial workers were quite far from developing
that self-activity through their trade unions — a sort of syndicalism —
which Makhno urged upon them with paternal benevolence. They were still
under the sway of Right Wing Socialists whose great longing was the
re-establishment of the Constituent Assembly with the good old private
capitalist system. Their delegates voiced these sentiments at the
Workers’ and Peasants’ Conference at Alexandrovsk, and were insulted by
Makhno as bourgeois lackeys in the same way as they would have been at a
Bolshevik conference.
The workers’ opposition to their Anarchist tutors was not based merely
upon ideological differences as to the future political and economic
organization of the country. There were very concrete practical
difficulties. The railway workers demanded to be paid. Makhno gave them
very friendly advice to the effect that they themselves should organize
the traffic and get their reward from the passengers and freight
shippers. This was rather cruel fun, or at least involuntary humor. In
those days the trains were used almost exclusively for military
purposes, and the army transport was expressly exempt from all charges.
The workers of the small trades could barter shoes, clothing and other
commodities against food, but the miners and metal workers, producing
for the country at large but not for the peasants’ direct needs, had to
shift for themselves. To provide for them Makhno would have had to give
them “something for nothing,” that is do what the Bolsheviks did: force
the rural population to feed the cities. Which, in turn, would have
discredited him among the peasants; for by acting in that manner he
would be doing exactly what the farmers held against all the preceding
governments.
And then there was the Babylonian confusion in the financial system of
that Anarchist republic which left all of Makhno’s advisers in helpless
despair. Makhno did not issue his own money. That would certainly be
unanarchistic; so he recognized the paper money of all the various
regimes that for a time had controlled that region — the Ukrainian
bourgeois Nationalists, the Russian Whites, and the Bolsheviks. Even the
old Tsarist notes were accepted. This suited the peasants, who had
accumulated the most variegated assortment of worthless paper money —
for every successive government annulled its predecessor’s currency. But
this was no solution of the problem; so one of the Anarchist theorists,
who for a while had been the Chairman of Makhno’s Revolutionary Military
Council, expressed his bewilderment in the pathetically naive remark:
“How is it that people cannot solve the financial problem if there are
money notes in so large numbers?” On the whole, however, Makhno, who
accepted his “assessments” in all currencies, kept the White money and
distributed the Soviet notes.
Makhno’s rule, in Ekaterinoslav and Alexandrovsk, the two important
cities which were in his power for about four to six weeks, had this
distinctive feature: It proclaimed complete freedom of the press. The
Makhnovists had two daily papers during that period, one in Russian —
the city workers in the Ukraine are mostly Russians — and one in
Ukrainian for the rural population. Every political party that could
afford it had its paper, the Right Social-Revolutionists, the Left
Social-Revolutionists, the Bolsheviks. News of a military character
could be published only when obtained from the daily organ of the
occupational army.
However, Makhno would stand for no nonsense if any of the political
groups showed any desire to impose its own will upon the population. In
Alexandrovsk the Bolshevik Revolutionary Committee proposed to Makhno a
sort of division of power. They would take care of the civilian
administration while the Batko would be in charge of the military end of
it. The reply they got was to the effect that they would be put against
the wall immediately if they made the slightest attempt to play at
government. The commander of one of his regiments became involved in one
of those attempts to seize power from within. Makhno had him shot
jointly with the other participants of the conspiracy.
To uncover conspiracies of this kind Makhno’s army had a special
“Intelligence Department.” That military term, however, covered
something that to all practical purposes was nothing but the Anarchist
edition of the Bolshevik Cheka. Communists have charged it with all the
arbitrariness, cruelty, tortures, and summary executions which the
anti-Communists or communist dissenters have usually attributed to the
Soviet secret police, that is, to the Cheka and to its successor, the
G.P.U. And it seems that to a certain extent there was a lot of truth in
the accusations of both sides. As an Anarchist, Makhno recognized
neither police, nor prisons, nor courts of law. His “Intelligence
Department” comprised all of these services in one. True, that service
was supposed to apply only to army matters — but in times of revolution
and civil war everything falls under this all-embracing head. Thus the
first phase of Anarchism, as attempted in that section of the Ukraine,
assumed the form of a military dictatorship with a strong personal
tinge, Makhno being, in his own words, “the first among equals.”
During all that time, — that is in the course of October and part of
November, 1919, — both cities were continually attacked by the armored
trains of the Whites. Then came a number of reverses. Half of the
insurgent army became sick with typhus, which was then raging all over
Russia. A large section of the White Army, on its retreat from the North
in the direction of the Crimea, drove Makhno out of Ekaterinoslav. The
Bolsheviks, following in the wake of the retreating White Armies, soon
reoccupied all of northern Ukraine. Another few days and Makhno would
face the Bolsheviks again.
Looking back upon Makhno’s lost opportunities, Peter Arshinov, the
Batko‘s chief propagandist and historian, bewails his friend’s lack of
statesmanship which eventually caused his ruin. Many old-time guerrilla
bands from northern Ukraine had begun to join his ranks, and so did some
Red Army detachments. Another military leader would have used his
victory and his prestige for extending the borders of his territory, for
creating a large army that could hold its own against the Bolsheviks and
the Tsarists alike. Not so Makhno. Did he shrink from this task because
it would have meant the complete relinquishment of his Anarchist
principles, which in the preceding process had not remained pure anyway?
Did he hope, after the crushing defeat he had dealt their mortal
enemies, that the Bolsheviks, prompted by gratitude, would permit him to
live his own life in the territory he had liberated so many times, and
to build his Anarchist commune, his free peasant Soviet Republic, in the
three southern provinces of the Ukraine?
In the beginning everything seemed full of promise for future ,
harmony. There were joint meetings at which both armies celebrated their
victory over the common foe. That was in the latter part of December,
1919. Then all of a sudden Makhno’s troops were ordered to the Polish
front. There was no real war with the Poles at that time. The latter
were still waiting for the complete extermination of the White forces —
ready to attack Russia and the Ukraine after all danger of a Tsarist
restoration was removed. Consequently, there was no military necessity
to send Makhno against the Poles. His transfer — though it was a piece
of grim Red Army humor to “transfer” a man who was still technically an
“outlaw” — is frankly conceded by the Soviet historian Kubanin for what
it actually was: a means of tearing Makhno’s men from their native
territory, and converting them into a regular Red Army troop. It meant
for the Bolsheviks the extinguishing of that ever-smoldering hearth of a
peasant “counterrevolution,” and for the Anarchists the end of their
hopes for a Third Revolution.
Makhno’s Revolutionary Military Committee refused to leave the
territory. Moreover, half of his army, including the staff, was sick
with typhus, the Batko practically unconscious most of the time. That
refusal meant war. By the middle of January, 1920, the insurgent army
and its leaders were again outlawed “for betraying the Revolution.” It
was the beginning of a war of extermination which lasted nine months —
until once more the Red Army needed the “outlaw’s” help.
That internecine fight was one of the darkest chapters of the Russian
Revolution. The Bolsheviks seldom took prisoners. Even ordinary soldiers
from Makhno’s army were executed. Makhno’s army made distinctions.
Privates were either incorporated or released as soon as they were
taken. The officers were invariably shot and so were also all Communist
Party militants. The Bolsheviks had begun the procedure in the occupied
Makhnovist villages by shooting every peasant who in some way was
suspected of wrong sympathies.
Not all of the prominent Makhnovists were shot upon capture. In some of
the more “hopeful” cases, secret police methods, the constant threat of
execution and the application of torture, so the Anarchists charge,
would induce the prisoners to turn traitors. It is from the ranks of
these that attempts upon Makhno’s life were organized as the simplest
method of “liquidating” his movement.
The terrific onslaughts of the retreating Whites, typhus, and finally
the fights with the Red Army had greatly reduced Makhno’s forces. He had
now perhaps not more than five thousand armed men left. However, he had
with him the full sympathy of the local population. That sympathy was
one of the manifestations of the peasants’ aversion to the Central
Government. A similar sullen mood, directed against the Government
authorities, prevailed in other sections of the Soviet Republic as well.
It expressed the peasants’ protest against the food requisitions which
the rural population regarded as outright robbery. In the course of nine
months about one thousand Soviet officials entrusted with grain
requisitions in Makhno’s territory were killed by the embittered
peasants. The official Soviet historian calls those villages which most
strenuously objected to, and prevented, those seizures “bandit
villages,” without realizing all the unconscious humor of that
designation. Moreover, the same historian a few pages further on frankly
admits that sometimes a good half of the Red Army soldiers were in favor
of Makhno, that is of the “bandits.” Another Soviet historian, Yakovlev,
speaking about Makhno’s great prestige in his territory, says that the
Communists could not find anybody in the villages “who could be our ally
in the struggle against the bandits.” The peasants, in their blindness,
apparently did not see the “bandits” in quite the same light.
By 1920 the Soviet Government conceived an idea of how to placate the
rural population. Most of the land which had been set aside for the
formation of “Soviet farms,” that is State-owned grain factories, was
distributed among the peasants. This failed to bring the desired
results, for the requisitions of grain, cattle, and horses continued.
And not only did the peasants never get any pay for what the Government
took away — they often saw with great indignation how the seized fodder,
instead of being used, was left to rot at the railway stations, because
of either inefficiency or sabotage.
The next step of the Bolsheviks was to carry the class war into the very
village. They supported the landless and near-landless as against the
middle and more prosperous strata, organized them in “Committees of the
Poor” and let them have a share in the grain seized from the other
peasants. That Bolshevik stratagem failed to establish equal land
distribution in the rural regions, nor was such a redistribution
intended. The aim was to create within the village a sort of auxiliary
force that would help in the forcible grain requisitions by the
authorities. It was a very subtle move, and it placed Makhno in an
awkward position.
Makhno could have counteracted the Bolshevik inroads among the poorer
sections of the peasantry by putting an end to the economic inequalities
within the rural population. However, he was not prepared to go as far
as that — for the time being, at least. The Batko was apparently afraid
lest such a measure, with its ensuing internecine conflicts within the
village, should break the backbone of his military resistance. His wish
was to maintain a sort of united front of the entire peasantry until the
Bolshevik officeholders had been forced to leave his countryside alone.
After that he and his Anarchist assistants would have possibly attempted
to inaugurate a collective form of agriculture.
So he maintained the existing inequalities, and thus to a certain extent
justified the gibes of his Bolshevik enemies and the criticism of his
anarcho-syndicalist cousins — to wit, that in spite of all his Anarchist
verbiage, he was at bottom a typical peasant rebel whose movement, if
victorious, would not have gone beyond the establishment of a farmers’
republic. That very un-Anarchist element of inequality was conspicuous
within his military forces as well. Makhno’s horsemen constituted a sort
of “Anarchist” nobility, and looked with a certain contempt upon their
own infantry. And the Batko himself, as in the good old feudal times,
was surrounded by a chosen troop of crack bodyguards, wielding the
absolute authority of a primitive chieftain — or of a party chief in a
totalitarian state.
Makhno’s friends, in facing the “kulak” charge coming from the
Bolsheviks, had and still have always an answer ready, which, though not
a refutation, was at least an effective rejoinder. They pointed to the
fact that the alleged proletarian regime established by Lenin’s
disciples has created a new sort of swivel-chair “kulaks” whose
privileges with regard to the rest of the population greatly exceeded
those of the village kulaks over the other peasants. It was their
allusion to the economic advantages enjoyed by the ever growing number
of officeholders, technicians, specialists, party organizers, in short,
the new hierarchy now ruling the Soviet Republic.
But whatever the rights or the wrongs in that controversy between the
Makhnovists and the Bolsheviks, the blow dealt to the Batko through the
establishment of the “Committees of the Poor” was a very painful one.
Some of the leaders and members of the “Committees” went rather far in
their new loyalty. Not only did they become part of the Soviet
administrative apparatus which was opposed by the great mass of the
peasantry, but some of them also to all practical purposes became
informers helping the Bolshevik secret police to hunt down and to
execute wounded Makhno soldiers who were being taken care of by the
local peasantry.
Makhno retaliated in kind and gave no quarter to those who helped his
enemies. Human life grew cheaper and cheaper as the struggle went on.
The Batko‘s heart became hardened and he sometimes ordered executions
where some generosity would have bestowed more credit upon him and his
movement. The fact that the Bolsheviks had preceded him with the bad
example was no excuse. For he claimed to be fighting for a better cause.
The war with Poland encouraged those White elements which had remained
in the Crimea and entrenched themselves behind the impregnable isthmus
of Perekop. Headed by General Wrangel, whom the English and French kept
supplied with ammunition through the Black Sea ports, they invaded the
Ukraine, threatening the territory so dear to Makhno. In the course of
the summer, 1920, Makhno made repeated counterattacks against Wrangel,
but more often than not he would get between two fires. The Red Army,
sure of its victory over the Poles, left unanswered all his offers to
collaborate with them against the Whites. They had even men to spare for
the pursuit of the indomitable rebel and thus thwarted his attacks
against the last “White” hope of the Allied powers.
Very much that happened during that year looked like an exact repetition
of the events of the preceding year. Just as before Makhno had been
accused of having opened the front to Denikin, he was now declared to
have made an alliance with Wrangel. The fact of the matter was that
Wrangel repeatedly sent to him officers offering him complete
territorial autonomy, on condition that Makhno would join his forces
against the Bolsheviks. Messengers of this kind were shot immediately.
The leader of the Whites, aware of Makhno’s prestige among the local
peasantry, now engaged upon a very subtle game. He pretended that Makhno
was with him, and organized spurious “Makhnovist” groups working among
the peasantry. As a result, orders were given by Makhno to kill any
Wrangel man taken prisoner.
Eventually Wrangel went even as far as to set afoot a special “Tenth
Brigade named after Batko Makhno,” in order to induce the peasants to
throw in their lot with the Whites. Tragically enough, that brigade was
headed by a sincere, though naive, revolutionist. Misguided by the
Bolshevist accusations and by Wrangel’s bragging, he had actually
thought he was serving the cause of Makhno by going over to the Whites.
When he found out his mistake, he came over to his old leader in order
to die at his hand. But Makhno induced him to bring over the whole staff
of his brigade, examined the men in the presence of a representative of
the Red Army, and used the information obtained to launch a terrific
unexpected attack that broke up Wrangel’s “invincible” Drozdov Brigade.
In the meantime the war with Poland took an unexpected turn. At the very
doors of Warsaw, the Polish Army, vigorously supported by the French,
had defeated the Red Army and nullified most of its previous victories.
General Wrangel, hitherto considered a negligible quantity, became an
actual menace. Large sections of the South were in his hands. This
decided the Soviet authorities to consider Makhno’s proposals for joint
action, which they had spurned two months before.
The written agreement concluded in the middle of October, 1920, between
the Red Army and the “outlaws,” contained a political and a military
section. In the political section, the Bolsheviks promised the immediate
liberation of all arrested Makhnovists and other Anarchists, granting
them full freedom of oral and printed propaganda. Moreover, the
Anarchists could participate in the preparations for the forthcoming
All-Ukrainian Soviet Conference, and be elected to the various Soviet
bodies. The military agreement, which incorporated the “Insurgents” in
the Red Army, contained an interesting clause barring detachments of the
Red Army from entrance into Makhno’s ranks: an evidence of the great
attraction which the romantic halo of these fearless fighters exerted
upon many members of the Soviet armed forces. An unsigned clause of the
political agreement demanded local autonomy for Makhno’s territory, or,
as the clause put it, “the establishment ... of free organs of political
and economic self-government, their autonomous and federative
connection, based on agreements with the government organs of the Soviet
Republics.” That last point was subject to confirmation by the central
authorities of the Soviet Republic. Needless to say, it never was
accepted — though no reasons were given.
The Soviet press was in no great hurry to publish the agreement, for it
gave the lie to all its former assertions that Makhno was an ally of
Wrangel, that he was a bandit, and the like. It was only when the Makhno
troops threatened to balk that the agreement was published — in two
weekly installments, although the whole document contained no more than
five hundred words. Moreover, its military clauses were published first,
and the political clauses a week later. The Anarchists charge, quite
plausibly, that this was done deliberately in order to prevent the
readers from grasping the full significance of the agreement. At the
same time the Ukrainian Soviet papers published the statement that
Makhno had never negotiated with Wrangel and that former reports to that
effect were based on wrong information.
Within three weeks, Wrangel’s troops were cleared out from Makhno’s
territory, and after that the Batko‘s men took a prominent part in the
Crimean campaign that drove Wrangel into the sea. On November 15,
Simferopol, the capital of the Crimea, was taken and the fate of the
Whites sealed forever. Ten days later the chief commander of Makhno’s
troops in the Crimea and all of his staff members were arrested by the
Bolsheviks and shot. Only the commander of the cavalry escaped by
breaking through the Red Army detachments that were to arrest him. But
of his fine fifteen hundred horsemen, the pride of Makhno’s troops, only
two hundred and fifty had remained alive, when eleven days later they
rejoined Makhno in Gulyai Polye. The Batko had not taken part in the
Crimean offensive. He had a shattered leg from one of his previous
campaigns and had to remain at his headquarters.
The well-known Russian Anarchist, V. M. Eichenbaum (“Volin”), in his
preface to Arshinov’s history of the Makhno movement, recalls an
interesting conversation which, as a political prisoner, he had at the
time with Samsonov, one of the heads of the Cheka. To Volin’s remark
that the Bolshevik treatment of Makhno at the time when they had an
agreement with him was an act of treachery, Samsonov replied: “You
consider this treachery? We knew how to use Makhno when we needed him;
and when he became useless to us, we contrived to liquidate him.”
There were also official reasons for that course of action, which
sounded better than Samsonov’s cynical admission. Makhno, it was
declared, was mobilizing the peasants and preparing a new army to fight
against the Soviet Government. He refused to go to the Caucasus front to
which he had been ordered by the supreme military command, and instead
of fighting in the Crimea against Wrangel, he was fighting in the rear
against the Red Army. The Makhnovists, on the other hand, deny all these
allegations. The official Soviet historian Kubanin admits that the Red
Army attacked Makhno “before he had the time to strike.” So it was a
case of “preventive killing.” [336]
It may very well be that Trotsky and his subordinates actually believed
that Makhno had such intentions to rise against the Soviet Government.
The dissatisfaction of the peasants all over the Soviet Republic was
growing. It was to express itself three months later in the Kronstadt
and Tambov rebellions. The situation was certainly very propitious for
the spread of a Makhnovist Jacquerie all over the Ukraine and even over
the rest of Russia.
The executions in the Crimea were accompanied by simultaneous mass
arrests of all Anarchists and Makhnovists throughout the Ukraine. It was
all carefully prepared many days in advance. Red soldiers who in the
ensuing fights were captured by the insurgents had with them undated
leaflets entitled “Forward against Makhno!” These leaflets, they
admitted, were given to them on November 15 and 16, that is on the very
day on which Makhno’s men had just broken into Wrangel’s stronghold and
taken his capital Simferopol!
Leon Trotsky, Chief of the Red Army, and Christian Rakovsky, President
of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, were the two men wholly responsible
for the action taken against their most fearless allies in the struggle
against the Whites. Seven years later they were both arrested,
ostracized, and exiled as “counter-revolutionists.”
With his special cavalry detachment, or bodyguard, of one hundred and
fifty to two hundred men, Makhno broke through the Red Army lines which
had been gradually encircling Gulyai Polye. As in former days, the
magnetism of his name immediately attracted various unattached guerrilla
bands as well as Red Army soldiers, who deserted to the outlaw. Soon he
had fifteen hundred cavalrymen and one thousand infantry. With this
midget army he immediately turned upon his pursuers, who were out for
his head. The first weeks were rather encouraging for the Rebel. The Red
Army soldiers, mostly peasants, were not very eager to fight a man whom
they dimly suspected to be the champion of their rights, their own flesh
and blood. They showed little fight and this enabled Makhno to be often
victorious over a numerically much superior foe.
Sometimes he would take twice as many prisoners as he himself had men.
But only a small part of that number were ready to enter his ranks as
volunteers. The rest were sent “home.” A few days later they were, of
course, again in the Red Army; special commissions had been established
to take care of the released prisoners. The Red Army authorities did not
have the same compunctions with regard to the prisoners taken from
Makhno. As a rule, they had them shot in order to prevent the
contamination of the Red Army soldiers. Such is civil war.
For a while Makhno and his friends had illusions that they would be able
to win. They hoped that after a few victories a part of the Red Army
would pass over to them, while the rest would retire northward and leave
their territory alone. Maybe their hopes went even further than that —
toward a sort of Anarchist Ukraine and even Russia. Who knows?
Makhno’s hopes were not realized. True, he had some moments of triumph,
as when in one case he was joined by an entire Red Cavalry brigade with
its commanding staff. But these were exceptions. His own army hardly
ever exceeded three thousand men, harassed continually and sometimes
even surrounded by an enemy fifty times stronger. It was an eight
months’ march into almost certain annihilation, with his men gradually
succumbing to bullets, disease, and hardships. Cut off from his native
base, he often made extended raids into central and eastern Russia, as
far as the Volga and the Don Rivers. Was he thinking of Stenka Razin and
Emelyan Pugachev, rebel leaders of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, who had aroused millions of peasants against their masters
and seriously threatened the rule of the Tsars?
Paradoxical as it may sound, it was the Kronstadt sailors’ revolt of
March, 1921, and, shortly afterwards, the peasant uprising in the
province of Tambov, which spelled the doom of Makhno’s hopes. These
revolts, on Russian territory proper, had been animated by the same
spirit of peasant dissatisfaction against the crude food seizures, which
caused the Ukrainian peasants to support the Anarchist Batko. Lenin saw
the writing on the wall, and inaugurated the New Economic Policy, with
its Single Agricultural Tax as a substitute for the hated requisitions.
This measure either reconciled or placated the great majority of the
peasants. Their chief grievance removed, they were no longer interested
in supplying man power and material support for an armed struggle
against the Government. Left to his own resources, Makhno remained
isolated with his faithful troop of adventurous dare-devils — forced to
resort to “requisitions” whenever the food they needed was not supplied
voluntarily.
Bleeding from many wounds, his army reduced to a mere handful, Makhno
sought refuge in Rumanian territory. This happened in August, 1921. He
was immediately arrested and placed in a concentration camp. In official
Soviet history this became evidence of his “alliance with the Rumanian
King.” Less than a year later he escaped to Poland. He was interned in
the Warsaw prison and accused of fomenting a rebellion of the four
million Ukrainians of Galicia in order to bring that territory under
Soviet rule! This was at least as good as his “alliance with the
Rumanian King.”
Even in foreign prisons and in exile Makhno remained a spectre haunting
his former Bolshevik allies. Through their ambassador, Christian
Rakovsky — who later was possibly ashamed of it — they insistently
demanded his extradition as a “bandit,” though they hardly made such
requests with regard to the “White” generals, Denikin and Wrangel, whom
he had helped to destroy. For reasons of their own Poland and Rumania
refused, just as for similar reasons the Kaiser’s Government permitted
Lenin and his friends to cross Germany in that famous “sealed car.” At
the same time the Polish-Russian Communist Felix Kon had the sad courage
to call the heroic Anarchist “the White-Guardist Hetman.” Felix Kon had
spent sixteen years of his life at hard labor in Tsarist penitentiaries;
yet a few years of participation in the power of the Tsar’s successors
made him sink below the level of his former persecutors.
At last by 1923 Makhno was able to leave Poland and find refuge in
France. Then came years of misery and despair. Consumption,
never-healing wounds, brooding over the black ingratitude on the part of
the Revolution which his heroism had saved, disappointment with the
moribund state of the anarchist movement — all this was gradually
breaking him physically and mentally. At times the consoling bottle
became his only escape from suicide or worse. He lost many of his old
friends and admirers. It was chiefly the assistance of the Spanish
Anarchists which kept him from actual starvation.
It was exactly at that time that the French novelist and Soviet
propagandist, Henri Barbusse, charged him with being a paid agent of the
Allied Governments. A similar charge, that the French had supported
Makhno with arms and ammunition, was brought by General Slashchev, once
Wrangel’s right-hand man and pogrom-monger, who later made up his mind
to change his masters and to become a professor at the Soviet Military
Academy. (The official Soviet historian, though quoting that accusation,
doubted its veracity.) The unceasing stream of slander and vilification
has well-nigh succeeded in blackening his name forever. As if all of
this were not enough, a spurious diary of “Makhno’s wife” was published
by the Soviet press presenting the Batko as a drunken wretch staggering
on the village roads of his territory and playing the accordion to the
amused and disgusted peasants. And last but not least there was the
persistent accusation of Jew-killing, coupled with an abundant stream of
novels and short stories depicting the hero of Gulyai Polye as an
unspeakable ruffian and a bloodthirsty, lecherous bandit.
In Paris Makhno wrote his reminiscences, and he contributed to a Russian
anarchist monthly in Paris, which printed his articles in deference to
his name rather than to their contents. His theoretical schooling was
rather rudimentary and his style primitive. He would call the State “a
disgusting institution” and deprecate the military importance of his old
foe Trotsky by calling him a “sergeant-major.” He seemed to have
believed that if men calling themselves Anarchists were entrusted with
power and authority, the social system established by them would abolish
all authority; just as the Bolsheviks seem to think that the transfer of
all the good things of life from the expropriated capitalists to a newly
enthroned officeholders’ class is identical with the “emancipation of
the proletariat.”
Makhno was particularly bitter when writing about the Ukraine, his
homeland, whose liberator he had hoped to become. Her inclusion in the
Soviet Union was in his opinion comparable to her occupation by the
German and Austrian armies during the World War — only camouflaged by
“Bolshevik hot air.” He considered as sheer hypocrisy that clause of the
Soviet Constitution of 1923 which granted self-determination to each of
the constituent republics, including the right of withdrawal from the
Union. For anyone caught in the “act” of advocating such a withdrawal
would never get another chance of advocating anything at all.
Unwittingly he gave vent to the nationalist longings of most of his
countrymen. For in the remote recesses of their hearts even the
Ukrainian Communists dream of the well-being their country might enjoy
if it did not have to share its enormous wealth with the rest of the
Soviet Union. They seem to be perfectly oblivious to the words of the
Gospel that it is more blessed to give than to receive.
When in 1934 Makhno breathed his last in a Paris hospital, he left few
mourners outside of Spain, where the powerful anarcho-syndicalist
movement has erected him a monument in the hearts of a million organized
workers. Of the old comrades of his heroic days hardly more than two
have survived. The Jewish intellectual V. M. Eichenbaum (“Volin”) has
remained faithful to his old anarchist hatred of Bolshevism, against
which he issued in 1934 a French pamphlet under the title Red Fascism. A
poetical soul rather than a theoretical thinker, he has preferred the
loneliness of exile and the quixotic devotion to a vague and
inconsistent gospel to surrender to the modern Jacobin Bonapartists of a
spurious communism. The other of the two, the Russian metal-worker Peter
Arshinov, was a revolutionary terrorist in the days of the Tsar, and
later, after the Revolution of 1917, in charge of Makhno’s educational
and propaganda activities. In 1935 he rejoined the Bolsheviks whom he
had left in 1906 when he became an Anarchist. He is the author of an
extensive History of the Makhnovist Movement — a book that has been
translated into many languages and has become one of the classics of
international anarchist literature. In recounting the struggles between
Makhno and the Bolsheviks the present writer has largely accepted the
facts as given by Peter Arshinov. Strange as it may appear, Arshinov’s
desertion to his former bitter enemies was in reality not an act of
renegacy. The experience of the Makhnovist movement, as well as of some
of the Anarchist uprisings in Spain between 1931 and 1933, have shown
that anarchism in action is bound to assume forms usually termed
Jacobinism, Blanquism or Bolshevism; in other words, that in one form or
another, it will resort to the establishment of a revolutionary
government and thus become untrue to the main tenet of its own
philosophy. After fifteen years of starvation and exile he apparently
drew the conclusion which permitted him both to remain consistent with
himself and to jump upon the big bandwagon. That conclusion was quite
simple: once the point at issue was the question of what group of
professional revolutionists was to get supreme power in a collectivist
system of society — a combination of declasse intellectuals and
ex-workers, or a similar combination of ex-workers and peasant
ex-noncoms — it was no longer a matter of principle, but merely of
personal preferences, whether that power was wielded in the name of Marx
and Stalin, or in that of Bakunin and Arshinov.
If one is to believe the report of the Moscow correspondent of the Paris
Le Temps, there was not a single word about Makhno’s death in the press
of the Soviet Union. To the growing Russian generation to whom Trotsky
is a traitor and a counterrevolutionist, Makhno, if his name is known at
all, is just one of the petty, contemptible bandits who infested the
Ukraine during the civil war, and helped the Whites in their struggle
against the Revolution.
References
Piotr Arshinov, Istoria Makhnovskogo Dvizhenia (History of the
Makhnovist Movement), Berlin, 1923.
Em. Iaroslavski, L’Anarchisme en Russie, Paris, 1937, p. 67.
The “Jew Killer”
J. Kessel, Deux Grands Aventuriers Russes, in Revue de France, Paris,
1922.
I. Babel, Red Cavalry, New York, 1929.
Leon Trotsky’s Crusade
M. Kubanin, Makhnovshchina (The Makhno Movement), Leningrad, 1927, p.
77.
Outlawed
P. Arshinov, op. cit., pp. 123–124.
The Great Battle
General A. Denikin, The White Army, London, 1930, p. 327.
M. Kubanin, op. cit., p. 87.
The “Bandit Army”
M. Kubanin, op. cit., p. 186.
The Struggle for the Peasant
M. Kubanin, op. cit., p. 130.
Exile and Death
M. Kubanin, op. cit., p. 163.
Internationale Presse-Korrespondenz, Berlin, October 28, 1922.
Il Nuovo Avanti, Paris, August 2, 1934. (Item entitled Il Generate
Anarchico.)
Le Temps, Paris, August 28, 1934. (Correspondence by Pierre Berland.)
Solidaridad Obrera, Barcelona, September 11, 12, 13, 1935. (Three
articles by Volin.)
[1] In 1936 Leon Trotsky aptly characterized this aspect of anarchism by
comparing that theory to those raincoats which are excellent except when
it rains.
[2] Seventeen years later, during the Spanish civil war, Stalin, in
sending military assistance to the Loyalists, pursued the same tactics
with regard to the Anarchist troops fighting against the Fascists. The
Anarchists, who constitute a very important section of Spain’s organized
labor, were refused cannon, airplanes and all the heavier equipment, and
were accused of “inactivity” and even cowardice when in spite of their
suicidal heroism they failed to make headway against a superior enemy on
the Aragon front.