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Title: Nestor Makhno Author: Paul Avrich Date: Oct 14 2016 Language: en Topics: Nestor Makhno, Ukraine, anarcho-communism, platformism, biography Source: https://libcom.org/history/nestor-makhno-man-myth.
Nestor Ivanovich Makhno, the anarchist partisan leader, was among the
most colorful and heroic figures of the Russian Revolution and Civil
War. His movement in the Ukraine represents one of the few occasions in
history when anarchists controlled a large territory for an extended
period of time. For more than a year he was a greater power on the
steppe than either Trotsky or Denikin. A born military leader, he fought
simultaneously on several fronts, opposing Reds as well as Whites,
Austrian invaders and Ukrainian nationalists, not to speak of the
countless bands of irregulars who crossed and recrossed the steppe in
search of plunder and booty. According to Victor Serge, he was a
"strategist of unsurpassed ability," whose peasant army possessed a
"truly epic capacity for organization and battle." Emma Goldman called
him "the most picturesque and vital figure brought to the fore by the
Revolution in the South."[1]
Makhno was born on October 27, 1889, of a poor peasant family in the
Ukrainian settlement of Gulyai-Polye, situated in Ekaterinoslav province
between the Dnieper River and the Sea of Azov. He was barely a year old
when his father died, leaving five small boys to the care of their
mother. As a child of seven, Makhno was put to work tending cows and
sheep for the local peasantry; he later found employment as a farm
laborer and as a worker in a foundry. In 1906, at the age of seventeen,
Makhno joined an anarchist group in Gulyai-Polye. Two years later he was
brought to trial for participating in a terrorist attack that claimed
the life of a district police officer. The court sentenced him to be
hanged, but because of Makhno's youth this was commuted to an indefinite
period in the Butyrki prison in Moscow. Makhno proved a refractory
inmate, unable to accept the discipline of prison life, and during the
nine years of his detention he was often placed in irons or in solitary
confinement. For a time, however, he shared a cell with an older, more
experienced anarchist named Peter Arshinov, who taught him the elements
of libertarian doctrine and confirmed him in the faith of Bakunin and
Kropotkin.
Released from prison after the February Revolution of 1917, Makhno
returned to his native village and assumed a leading role in community
affairs. He helped organize a union of farm laborers and served as its
chairman. Before long, he was elected chairman of the local union of
carpenters and metalworkers and also of the Gulyai-Polye Soviet of
Workers' and Peasants' Deputies. In August 1917, as head of the soviet,
Makhno recruited a band of armed peasants and set about expropriating
the estates of the neighboring gentry and distributing the land to the
peasants. From that time, the villagers began to regard him as a new
Stenka Razin or Emelian Pugachev, sent to realize their ancient dream of
land and liberty.
Makhno's activities, however, came to a halt the following spring, when
the Soviet government signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and a large
force of German and Austrian troops marched into the Ukraine. Makhno
shared the indignation of his fellow anarchists at this compromise with
German "imperialism," but his band of partisans was too weak to offer
effective resistance. Forced into hiding, he made his way to the Volga
River, then proceeded north to Moscow, where he arrived in June 1918.
During his short visit to the capital, Makhno had an inspiring audience
with his idol, Peter Kropotkin, an encounter movingly described in
Makhno's memoirs. He was also received in the Kremlin by Lenin, who
sounded him out on the attitude of the Ukrainian peasantry towards the
Bolsheviks, the military situation in the south, and the differences
between the Bolshevik and anarchist conceptions of the revolution. "The
majority of anarchists think and write about the future," Lenin
declared, "without understanding the present. That is what divides us
Communists from them." Though the anarchists were "selfless" men, Lenin
went on, their "empty fanaticism" blurred their vision of present and
future alike. "But I think that you, comrade," he said to Makhno, "have
a realistic attitude towards the burning evils of the time. If only
one-third of the anarchist-communists were like you, we Communists would
be ready, under certain well-known conditions, to join with them in
working towards a free organization of producers." Makhno retorted that
the anarchists were not Utopian dreamers but realistic men of action.
After all, he reminded Lenin, it was the anarchists and Socialist
Revolutionaries, rather than the Bolsheviks, who were beating back the
nationalists and privileged classes in the Ukraine, "Perhaps I am
mistaken," answered Lenin, who then offered to help Makhno return to the
south.[2]
When Makhno returned to Gulyai-Polye in July 1918, the area was occupied
by Austrian troops and by the militia of their Ukrainian puppet, Hetman
Skoropadsky. Organizing a band of partisans under the anarchist banner,
Makhno launched a series of raids against the Aus-trians and Hetmanites
and against the manors of the nobility. Extraordinary mobility and a bag
of clever tricks constituted Makhno's chief tactical devices. Traveling
on horseback and in light peasant carts (tachanki) on which machine guns
were mounted, his men moved swiftly across the steppe between the
Dnieper and the Sea of Azov, swelling into a small army as they went and
inspiring terror in their adversaries.
Previously independent guerrilla bands accepted Makhno's command and
rallied behind his black banner. Villagers provided food and fresh
horses, enabling the Makhnovists to travel forty or fifty miles a day
with little difficulty. Turning up quite suddenly where least expected,
they would attack the gentry and military garrisons, then vanish as
quickly as they had come. In captured uniforms they infiltrated the
enemy's ranks to learn their plans or to open fire at point-blank range.
On one occasion, Makhno and his retinue, masquerading as Hetmanite
guardsmen, gained entry to a landowner's ball and fell upon the guests
in the midst of their festivities. When cornered, the Makhnovists would
bury their weapons, make their way singly back to their villages, and
take up work in the fields, awaiting a signal to unearth a new cache of
arms and spring up again in an unexpected quarter. For Isaac Babel, in
Red Cavalry Tales, Makhno was "as protean as nature herself. Haycarts
deployed in battle array take towns, a wedding procession approaching
the headquarters of a district executive committee suddenly opens a
concentrated fire, a little priest, waving above him the black flag of
anarchy, orders the authorities to serve up the bourgeoisie, the
proletariat, wine and music. An army of tachankas possesses undreamed-of
possibilities of maneuver."[3]
Small, agile, well-knit, Makhno was a resourceful leader who combined an
iron will with a sense of humor, winning the unswerving devotion of his
followers. In September 1918, after defeating a superior force of
Austrians at the village of Dibrivki, his men gave him the affectionate
title of bat'ko, their "little father." Two months later, the end of the
First World War led to the withdrawal of Austrian and German troops from
Russian territory. Makhno managed to seize some of their arms and
equipment. He next turned his wrath upon the followers of the Ukrainian
nationalist leader Petliura. At the end of December, he succeeded in
dislodging the Petliurist garrison from Ekaterinoslav. His troops, with
their weapons concealed inside their clothing, rode into the central
railway station on an ordinary passenger train, took the nationalists by
surprise, and drove them from the city. The next day, however, the enemy
reappeared with reinforcements, and Makhno was compelled to flee across
the Dnieper and return to his base in Gulyai-Polye. The Petliurists, in
turn, were evicted by the Red Army shortly afterwards.
During the first five months of 1919, the Gulyai-Polye region was
virtually free of political authority. The Austrians, Hetmanites, and
Petliurists had all been driven away, and neither the Reds nor the
Whites were strong enough to fill the void. Makhno took advantage of
this lull to attempt to reconstruct society on libertarian lines. In
January, February, and April, the Makhnovists held a series of Regional
Congresses of Peasants, Workers, and Insurgents to discuss economic and
military matters and to supervise the task of reconstruction.
The question which dominated the Regional Congresses was that of
defending the area from those who might seek to establish their control
over it. The Second Congress, meeting on February 12, 1919, voted in
favor of "voluntary mobilization," which in reality meant outright
conscription, as all able-bodied men were required to serve when called
up. The delegates also elected a Regional Military Revolutionary Council
of Peasants, Workers, and Insurgents to carry out the decisions of the
periodic congresses. The new council encouraged the election of "free"
Soviets in the towns and villages -- that is, Soviets from which members
of political parties were excluded. Although Makhno's aim in setting up
these bodies was to do away with political authority, the Military
Revolutionary Council, acting in conjunction with the Regional
Congresses and the local Soviets, in effect formed a loose-knit
government in the territory surrounding Gulyai-Polye.
Like the Military Revolutionary Council, the Insurgent Army of the
Ukraine, as the Makhnovist forces were called, was in theory subject to
the supervision of the Regional Congresses. In practice, however, the
reins of authority rested with Makhno and his staff. Despite his efforts
to avoid anything that smacked of regimentation, Makhno appointed his
key officers (the rest were elected by the men themselves) and subjected
his troops to the stern military discipline traditional among the
Cossack legions of the nearby Zaporozhian region. Yet the Insurgent Army
never lost its plebeian character. All its officers were peasants or, in
a few cases, factory or shop workers. One looks in vain for a commander
who sprang from the upper or middle classes, or even from the radical
intelligentsia.
For a time, Makhno's dealings with the Bolsheviks remained friendly, and
the Soviet press extolled him as a "courageous partisan" and
revolutionary leader. Relations were at their best in March 1919, when
Makhno and the Communists concluded a pact for joint military action
against the Volunteer Army of General Denikin. According to the
agreement, the Insurgent Army of the Ukraine became a division of the
Red Army, subject to the orders of the Bolshevik supreme command but
retaining its own officers and internal structure, as well as its name
and black banner.
Such gestures, however, could not conceal the underlying hostility
between the two groups. The Communists had little taste for the
autonomous status of the Insurgent Army or for the powerful attraction
it exerted on their own peasant recruits. The Makhnovists, on their
side, feared that sooner or later the Red Army would attempt to bring
their movement to heel. As friction increased, the Soviet newspapers
abandoned their eulogies of the Makhnovists and began to attack them as
"bandits." In April 1919 the Third Regional Congress of Peasants,
Workers, and Insurgents met in defiance of a ban placed on it by the
Soviet authorities. In May two Cheka agents sent to assassinate Makhno
were caught and executed. The final breach occurred when the Makhnovists
called a Fourth Regional Congress for June 15 and invited the soldiers
of the Red Army to send representatives. Trotsky, commander in chief of
the Bolshevik forces, was furious. On June 4 he banned the congress and
outlawed Makhno. Communist troops carried out a lightning raid on
Gulyai-Polye and dissolved the agricultural communes set up by the
Makhnovists. A few days later. Denikin's forces arrived and completed
the job, liquidating the local Soviets as well.
The shaky alliance was hastily resumed that summer, when Denikin's drive
towards Moscow sent both the Communists and the Makhnovists reeling.
During August and September Makhno's guerrillas were pushed back towards
the western borders of the Ukraine. On September 26, however, Makhno
launched a successful counterattack at the village of Peregonovka, near
Uman, cutting the White general's supply lines and creating panic and
disorder in his rear. This was Denikin's first serious reverse in his
advance into the Russian heartland and an important factor in halting
his drive towards the Bolshevik capital. By the end of the year, a
counteroffensive by the Red Army had forced Denikin to beat a retreat to
the shores of the Black Sea.
At the end of 1919, Makhno received instructions from the Red command to
transfer his troops to the Polish front. The order was plainly designed
to draw the Insurgent Army away from its home territory, leaving it open
to the establishment of Bolshevik rule. Makhno refused to budge.
Trotsky, he said, wanted to replace Denikin's forces with the Red Army
and the dispossessed landlords with political commissars. Having vowed
to cleanse Russia of anarchism "with an iron broom,"[4] Trotsky replied
by again outlawing the Makhnovists. There ensued eight months of bitter
struggle, with losses heavy on both sides. A severe typhus epidemic
augmented the toll of victims. Badly outnumbered, Makhno's partisans
avoided pitched battles and relied on the guerrilla tactics they had
perfected in more than two years of civil war.
Hostilities were broken off in October 1920, when Baron Wrangel,
Denikin's successor in the south, launched a major offensive, striking
northwards from the Crimea. Once more the Red Army enlisted Makhno's
aid, in return for which the Communists agreed to an amnesty for all
anarchists in Russian prisons and guaranteed the anarchists freedom of
propaganda on condition that they refrain from calling for the overthrow
of the Soviet government.
Barely a month later, however, the Red Army had made sufficient gains to
ensure victory in the Civil War, and the Soviet leaders tore up their
agreement with Makhno. Not only had the Makhnovists outlived their
usefulness as a military partner, but as long as the bat'ko was at large
the spirit of anarchism and the danger of a peasant rising would remain
to haunt the Bolshevik regime. On November 25, 1920, Makhno's commanders
in the Crimea, fresh from their victory over Wrangel, were seized by the
Red Army and shot. The next day, Trotsky ordered an attack on Makhno's
headquarters in Gulyai-Polye, during which Makhno's staff were captured
and imprisoned or shot on the spot. The bat'ko himself, however,
together with a remnant of an army that had once numbered in the tens of
thousands, managed to elude his pursuers. After wandering over the
Ukraine for the better part of a year, the guerrilla leader, exhausted
and suffering from unhealed wounds, crossed the Dniester River into
Rumania and eventually found his way to Paris.
Given his colorful personality and the rich drama of his career, it is
small wonder that Makhno should be the subject of a growing literature.
Until recently, however, accounts of his movement, with few exceptions,
consisted of mixtures of fact and fiction, of hostile, sometimes vicious
polemics, of sensationalist journalism or uncritical, romanticized
portraits verging on hagiography. Perhaps it is inevitable that a
glamorous and controversial figure of Makhno's stamp should lend himself
to such treatment. To a degree, the problem stems from incomplete source
material. The journals and manifestos of the Makhno movement are hard to
come by, having been in great part lost or destroyed in the turmoil of
the Civil War. What is more, the relevant documents in Soviet archives
remain inaccessible to Western specialists. Nor, to my knowledge, have
the archives of Makhno's associate Volin (held by his sons in Paris)
been made available to the scholar, though they are bound to include
important material. Yet, for all these limitations, the sources are
considerable and remain to be exhaustively tapped.
What do these sources include? To begin with, we have Makhno's personal
memoirs through December 1918, published in a three-volume edition
between 1929 and 1937, the last two volumes edited with prefaces and
notes by Volin.[5] In addition, eleven Makhnovist proclamations were
preserved by Ugo Fedeli, an Italian anarchist who obtained them in the
1920s during visits to Moscow, Berlin, and Paris, where he became
personally acquainted with Makhno. These proclamations have been
published in the original Russian and are also included in the English
edition of Peter Arshinov's history of the Makhnovist movement.[6]
Further archival materials, to be mentioned again later, are to be found
in the Tcherikower Collection of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
in New York. Moreover, Soviet histories and documentary collections,
though invariably hostile and of limited worth, contain useful
information, as do articles on Makhno in Soviet academic journals.
Beyond this, additional documents and photographs remain in the hands of
Makhno's surviving comrades in France and other countries. There are
also the scattered files of Makhnovist newspapers in Western libraries,
interviews with participants in the Insurgent Army and with people who
knew Makhno in exile, the eyewitness histories of Arshinov and Volin,
and the secondary accounts by David Footman, Michael Palij, and others.
To date, however, there has been no comprehensive study of Makhno based
on the full range of available sources. As a result, a number of
questions persist. Was Makhno a military dictator, as his detractors
maintain? A bandit and counterrevolutionary, as Soviet writers describe
him? A "primitive rebel," in Eric Hobsbawm's phrase?[7] Was he an
incurable drunkard? An anti-intellectual? An anti-Semite? A pogromist?
How critical were his military efforts in saving the Revolution from the
Whites? Did his unsophisticated equipment and tactics doom him to defeat
before a centralized professional army? How successful were his attempts
to establish local self-management in the villages and towns of the
Ukraine? What do we really know about him? How much is myth and fantasy,
how much incontrovertible fact?
To answer these questions, one must come to grips with the underlying
question of Makhno's anarchism. According to Emma Goldman, Makhno's
object was to establish a libertarian society in the south that would
serve as a model for the whole of Russia. Interestingly, Trotsky once
noted that he and Lenin had toyed with the idea of allotting a piece of
territory to Makhno for this purpose,[8] but the project foundered when
fighting broke out between the anarchist guerrillas and the Bolshevik
forces in the Ukraine.
But was Makhno in fact an anarchist, or merely another "primitive" rebel
from the southern frontier, harking back to Razin and Pugachev with
their vision of Cossack federalism and rough-and-ready democracy? The
answer is that he was both. Nor is there any contradiction, for the
Cossack-peasant rebellions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
possessed a strong egalitarian and antistatist character, their
participants mounting an all-out attack upon the nobility and
bureaucracy and detesting the state as an evil tyranny which trampled on
popular freedoms. Makhno's anarchism was compatible with these
sentiments and with peasant aspirations in general. The peasants wanted
the land, and then to be left alone by gentry, officials, tax
collectors, recruiting sergeants, and all external agents of authority.
These were to be replaced by a society of "free toilers" who, as Makhno
expressed it, would "set to work to the tune of free and joyous songs
which reflected the spirit of the revolution."[9]
In this sense, Makhno was the very incarnation of peasant anarchism, the
partisan leader in closest touch with the most cherished hopes and
feelings of the village. He was, in George Woodcock's description, "an
anarchist Robin Hood,"[10] a familiar figure in other peasant and
artisan societies, notably in Spain and in Italy, where anarchism struck
deep and lasting roots. (In Mexico, too, he had his counterparts in
Emiliano Zapata and Ricardo Flores Magon.) To his supporters he was a
modern Razin or Pugachev, come to rescue the poor from the ir oppressors
and to grant them land and liberty. As in the past, his movement arose
in the southern borderlands and was directed against the wealthy and
powerful. Makhno, wrote Alexander Berkman, became "the avenging angel of
the lowly, and presently he was looked upon as the great liberator,
whose coming had been prophesied by Pugachev in his dying moments."11
Following the example of his predecessors, Makhno expropriated the
landlords, removed the officials, inaugurated a Cossack-style "republic"
on the steppe, and was revered by his followers as their good [119]
father. He called on the peasants to rise against the "golden
epaulettes" of Wrangel and Denikin and to fight for free Soviets and
communes. At the same time he opposed the "Communists and commissars,"
just as Razin and Pugachev had opposed the "boyars and officials." The
Bolsheviks, for their part, denounced him as a brigand, the epithet with
which Moscow had maligned its guerrilla opponents since the seventeenth
century. Furthermore, the same legends arose about Makhno as about Razin
and Pugachev. As his wife told Emma Goldman, "there grew up among the
country folk the belief that Makhno was invincible because he had never
been wounded during all the years of warfare in spite of his practice of
always personally leading every charge."12
There was, however, an important difference. Unlike Razin and Pugachev,
and unlike his contemporary "atamans" in the Ukraine, Makhno was
motivated by a specific anarchist ideology. Throughout his life he
proudly wore the anarchist label as a mark of his opposition to
authority. As early as 1906, it has been noted, he joined an anarchist
group in Gulyai-Polye. His understanding of anarchism matured during his
years in prison, under the tutelage of Arshinov, and was deepened by his
contact with Volin, Aaron Baron, and other anarchist intellectuals who
joined his movement during the Civil War. Of the older theorists, his
main source of inspiration was Kropotkin, to whom he made a pilgrimage
in 1918, as mentioned above, but he also strongly admired Bakunin,
calling him a "great" and "tireless" rebel, and the stream of leaflets
that issued from his camp often bore a Bakuninist flavor.
Makhno's anarchism, however, was not confined to verbal propaganda,
important though this was to win new adherents. On the contrary, Makhno
was a man of action who, even while occupied with military campaigns,
sought to put his anarchist theories into practice. His first act on
entering a town -- after throwing open the prisons -- was to dispel any
impression that he had come to introduce a new form of political rule.
Announcements were posted informing the inhabitants that they were now
free to organize their lives as they saw fit, that his Insurgent Army
would not "dictate to them or order them to do anything." Free speech,
press, and assembly were proclaimed, although Makhno would not
countenance organizations that sought to impose political authority, and
he accordingly dissolved the Bolshevik revolutionary committees,
instructing their members to "take up some honest trade."13
Makhno's aim was to throw off domination of every type and to encourage
economic and social self-determination. "It is up to the workers and
peasants," said one of his proclamations in 1919, "to organize [120]
themselves and reach mutual understanding in all areas of their lives
and in whatever manner they think right." With his active support,
anarchistic communes were organized in Ekaterinoslav province, each with
about a dozen households totaling one hundred to three hundred members.
There were four such communes in the immediate vicinity of Gulyai-Polye,
Makhno's base of operations, and a number of others were formed in the
surrounding districts. (Makhno himself, when time permitted, labored in
one of the Gulyai-Polye communes.)
Each commune was provided with as much land as its members were able to
cultivate without hiring additional labor. The land, as well as the
tools and livestock, was allotted by decision of the Regional Congresses
of Peasants, Workers, and Insurgents, and the management of the commune
was conducted by a general meeting of its members. The land was held in
common, and kitchen and dining rooms were also communal, though members
who wished to cook separately or to take food from the kitchen and eat
it in their own quarters were allowed to do so. Though only a few
members actually considered themselves anarchists, the peasants operated
the communes on the basis of full equality ("from each according to his
ability, to each according to his need") and accepted Kropotkin's
principle of mutual aid as their fundamental tenet. It is interesting to
note that the first such commune, near the village of Pokrovskoye, was
named in honor of Rosa Luxemburg, not an anarchist but a Marxist and
recent martyr in the German revolution, a reflection of Makhno's
undoctrinaire approach to revolutionary theory and practice.
In his efforts to reconstruct society along libertarian lines, Makhno
also encouraged experiments in workers' self-management whenever the
occasion offered. For example, when the railway workers of Aleksandrovsk
complained that they had not been paid for many weeks, he advised them
to take control of the railroad and charge the users what seemed a fair
price for their services. Such projects, though they call for a closer
examination by historians, were of limited success. They failed to win
over more than a minority of workers, for, unlike the farmers and
artisans of the village, who were independent producers accustomed to
managing their own affairs, factory hands and miners operated as
interdependent parts of a complicated industrial machine and floundered
without the guidance of technical specialists. Furthermore, the peasants
and artisans could barter the products of their labor, whereas the
workers depended on wages for their survival. Makhno, moreover,
compounded the confusion when he recognized all paper money issued by
his predecessors -- Ukrainian nationalists, Whites, and Bolsheviks
alike. He never understood the complexities of [121] an urban economy,
nor did he care to understand them. In any event, he found little time
to implement his economic programs. He was forever on the move. His army
was a "republic on tachanki," as Volin described it, and "the
instability of the situation prevented positive work."14
In the Ukraine in 1918-1920, as in Spain in 1936-1939, the libertarian
experiment was conducted amid conditions of civil strife, economic
dislocation, and political and military repression. It was therefore
unable to endure. But not for want of trying, nor from any lack of
devotion to anarchism. Through all Makhno's campaigns a large black
flag, the classic symbol of anarchy, floated at the head of his army,
embroidered with the slogans "Liberty or Death" and "The Land to the
Peasants, the Factories to the Workers." The Cultural-Educational
Commission, including Volin, Arshinov, and Baron, edited anarchist
journals, issued anarchist leaflets, and delivered lectures on anarchism
to the troops. Beyond this, the commission founded an anarchist theater
and planned to open anarchist schools modeled on Francisco Ferrer's
Escuela Moderna in Spain.
In one area, however, Makhno made a significant compromise with his
libertarian principles. As a military leader, it has been noted, he was
compelled to inaugurate a form of conscription in order to replenish his
forces; and he is known on occasion to have imposed strict measures of
military discipline, including summary executions. His violent
tendencies, some maintain, were accentuated by bouts with alcohol. Volin
underscores Makhno's drinking and carousing nature, and Victor Serge
describes him as "boozing, swashbuckling, disorderly and idealistic."15
Hostile observers have compared him to a Chinese warlord, insisting that
his army was libertarian only in name. This, however, is not a true
picture. Although military considerations inevitably clashed with
Makhno's anarchistic doctrines, his army was more popular both in
organization and social composition than any other fighting force of his
day.
By all accounts, Makhno was a military leader of outstanding ability and
courage. His achievement in organizing an army and conducting an
effective and prolonged campaign is, apart from some of the successes of
the Spanish anarchists in the 1930s, unique in the history of anarchism.
He inherited a good deal of the Cossack tradition of independent
military communities in the south and of their resentment of government
encroachments. His guerrilla tactics of ambush and surprise were both a
throwback to the Russian rebels of the past and an anticipation of the
methods of combat later employed in China, Cuba, and Vietnam. But how
critical were his efforts in saving the Revolution [122] from the
Whites? Volin flatly asserts that "the honor of having annihilated the
Denikinist counter-revolution in the autumn of 1919 belongs entirely to
the Makhnovist Insurgent Army." David Footman writes more modestly that
"there is some justification for the claim that Peregonovka was one of
the decisive battles of the Civil War in the south."16 In any case, the
importance of the battle is beyond dispute.
Makhno, in short, was a thoroughgoing anarchist, who practiced what he
preached insofar as conditions permitted. A down-to-earth peasant, he
was not a man of words, not a phrasemaker or orator, but a lover of
action who rejected metaphysical systems and abstract social theorizing.
When he came to Moscow in 1918, he was disturbed by the atmosphere of
"paper revolution" among the anarchists as well as the Bolsheviks.17
Anarchist intellectuals struck him, in the main, as men of books rather
than deeds, mesmerized by their own words and lacking the will to fight
for their ideals. Nevertheless, he respected them for their learning and
idealism and later sought their assistance in teaching his peasant
followers the fundamentals of anarchist doctrine.
Makhno's anti-intellectual streak was shared by his mentor Arshinov, a
self-educated workman from the Ukraine like his pupil. Arshinov,
however, went further. In his History of the Makhnovist Movement he not
only criticizes the Bolsheviks as a new ruling class of intellectuals, a
theory first put forward by Bakunin (speaking of Marx and his
associates), developed by Machajski, and restated during the Revolution
by Maximoff and other anarchist writers; he expresses contempt for
anarchist intellectuals as well, calling them mere theorists who seldom
acted but who "slept through" events of unparalleled historical
significance and abandoned the field to the authoritarians.18 This goes
far to explain his Organizational Platform of 1926, endorsed by Makhno,
which castigates do-nothing intellectuals and calls for effective
organization and action.19
This brings us to the vexed question of Makhno's alleged anti-Semitism,
which future biographers must subject to careful scrutiny. Charges of
Jew-baiting and of anti-Jewish pogroms have come from every quarter,
left, right, and center. Without exception, however, they are based on
hearsay, rumor, or intentional slander, and remain undocumented and
unproved.20 The Soviet propaganda machine was at particular pains to
malign Makhno as a bandit and pogromist. But after meticulous research,
Elias Tcherikower, an eminent Jewish historian and authority on
anti-Semitism in the Ukraine, concluded that the number of anti-Jewish
acts committed by the Makhnovists was [123] "negligible" in comparison
with those committed by other combatants in the Civil War, the Red Army
not excepted.21
To verify this, I have examined several hundred photographs in the
Tcherikower Collection, housed in the YIVO Library in New York and
depicting anti-Jewish atrocities in the Ukraine during the Civil War. A
great many of these photographs document acts perpetrated by the
adherents of Denikin, Petliura, Grigoriev, and other self-styled
"atamans," but only one is labeled as being the work of the Makhnovists,
though even here neither Makhno himself nor any of his recognizable
subordinates are to be seen, nor is there any indication that Makhno had
authorized the raid or, indeed, that the band involved was in fact
affiliated with his Insurgent Army.
On the other hand, there is evidence that Makhno did all in his power to
counteract anti-Semitic tendencies among his followers. Moreover, a
considerable number of Jews took part in the Makhnovist movement. Some,
like Volin and Baron, were intellectuals who served on the
Cultural-Educational Commission, wrote his manifestoes, and edited his
journals, but the great majority fought in the ranks of the Insurgent
Army, either in special detachments of Jewish artillery and infantry or
else within the regular partisan units, alongside peasants and workers
of Ukrainian, Russian, and other ethnic origin.
Makhno personally condemned discrimination of any sort, and punishments
for anti-Semitic acts were swift and severe: one troop commander was
summarily shot after raiding a Jewish town, and a soldier met the same
fate merely for displaying a poster with the stock anti-Semitic formula,
"Beat the Jews, Save Russia!" Makhno denounced Ataman Grigoriev for his
pogroms and had him shot. Had Makhno been guilty of the accusations
against him, surely the Jewish anarchists in his camp would have broken
with his movement and raised their voices in protest. The same is true
of Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, and others who were in Russia at the
time, and of Sholem Schwartzbard, Volin, Senya Fleshin, and Mollie
Steimer in Paris during the 1920s. Far from criticizing Makhno as an
anti-Semite, they defended him against the campaign of slander that
persisted from all sides.
Finally, the last years of Makhno's life deserve fuller treatment than
they have received from historians. Of all the writers to date, Malcolm
Menzies and Alexandre Skirda have provided the most satisfactory
accounts of this period.22 Yet even they have not told the full and
dramatic story of Makhno's escape across the Dniester, his internment in
Rumania, his escape to Poland, his arrest, trial, and acquittal, his
flight to Danzig, renewed imprisonment and final escape (aided by
Berkman [124] and other comrades in Europe),23 and his ultimate
sanctuary in Paris, where he lived his remaining years in obscurity,
poverty, and disease, an Antaeus cut off from the soil that might have
replenished his strength. According to Berkman, Makhno in Paris dreamed
of returning to his native land and "taking up again the struggle for
liberty and social justice."24 He had always hated the "poison" of big
cities, cherishing the natural environment in which he was born. How
ironic that he should have ended his days in a great foreign capital,
working in an automobile factory, a restless consumptive for whom drink
provided meager relief.
Yet he never lost his passion for anarchism, never abandoned the
movement to which he had dedicated his life. He attended anarchist
meetings (frequenting, among others, the Jewish Autodidact Club),
defended the Organizational Platform of his old comrade Arshinov, and
mingled with anarchists from all over the world, including a group of
Chinese students and also Durruti and Ascaso from Spain, whom he regaled
with his adventures in the Ukraine and offered his help when the moment
for their own struggle should arrive. Though death intervened to prevent
this, it is of interest that a number of veterans of his Insurgent Army
did in fact go to fight in the Durruti column in 1936.25 How fitting,
then, that the Spanish comrades should have provided financial
assistance when Makhno lay mortally ill with tuberculosis.
Makhno's final moments have been movingly conjured by Malcolm Menzies.26
In July 1934, Makhno, forty-four years old, is lying at death's door in
a Paris hospital. Overcome by fever, he lapses into semiconsciousness
and dreams his last dream, a dream of his beloved countryside, of the
open steppe covered with snow, a bright sun in an azure sky, and Nestor
Ivanovich seated on his horse, moving in slow motion towards a cluster
of mounted comrades waiting in the distance, who touch their caps in
greeting at his approach. Time passes, the seasons change, spring
arrives -- Germinal! -- the rebirth of hope, a landscape of green, the
smell of fresh earth, a murmuring stream, and a fleeting, all too
fleeting, glimpse of freedom. And then eternal silence. Makhno's body
was cremated and the ashes interred in the Pere-La-chaise Cemetery, not
far from the mass grave of Paris Communards who were massacred there in
1871.
[1] Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 1901-1941 (London, 1963),
p. 121; Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia (London, 1915), p.
166.
[2]
N. Makhno, Pod udarami kontr-revoliutsii (aprel'-iiun' 1918 g.) (Paris,
1936), p. 93.
[3] Isaac Babel, "Discourse on the Tachanka," The Collected Stories
(Cleveland, 1960), pp. 83-86. I have altered the translation slightly.
[4]
P. A. Arshinov, History of the Makhnovist Movement (1918-1921)
(Detroit and Chicago, 1974), p. 121; Volin, The Unknown
Revolution, 1917-1921 (Detroit and Chicago, 1974), pp. 307-308.
[5]
N. Makhno, Russkaia revoliutsiia na Ukraine (ot marta 1917 g. po aprel'
1918 g.); Pod udarami kontr-revoliutsii (aprel'-iiun 1918 g.);
Ukrainskaia revoliutsiia (iiul'-dekabr' 1918 g.); reprinted in a
one-volume edition in 1977. Volume 1 has been translated into
French, German, Spanish, and Italian.
[6] "Proclamations of the Makhno Movement, 1920," International Review
of Social History , 1968, part 2; Arshinov, History of the Makhnovist
Movement , pp. 265-84. Fedeli was himself the author of a short but
useful study of the Makhnovshchina: Delia insurrezione dei contadini in
Ucraina alia rivolta di Cronstadt (Milan, 1950).
[7] Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels (New York, 1959), pp. 183-86.
[8]
L. Trotsky, Stalinism and Bolshevism (New York, 1937), pp. 22-23.
[9] Paul Avrich, ed., The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution (Ithaca,
1973), p. 132.
[10] George Woodcock, Anarchism (Cleveland, 1962), p. 419.