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Title: Fate of the Makhnovist Author: Vadim Damier Date: November 1998 Language: en Topics: Makhnovists, biography Source: Retrieved on 10th May 2021 from https://aitrus.info/node/3624 Notes: Based on materials from the magazine Delo Truda — Awakening. Originally published in Direct Action. Translation from Russian by Riltok.
On August 28, 1921, Nestor Makhno, with few remaining comrades, was
forced to leave Ukraine, never to return again. The remnants of the
legendary peasant army, led by anarchists, crossed the Dniester and
ended up in exile. The heroic epic, which lasted about four years,
ended. Among the Makhnovist partisans who found themselves abroad was
Osip Tsebriy.
Osip’s father, Vasily Grigorievich, a peasant in the village of Tartaki,
Zhmerinsky district, Kiev province of the Russian Empire, having become
a soldier, met anarchists in Petrograd and became a staunch Bakuninist.
Upon coming back, he enjoyed great prestige and respect among fellow
villagers. During the 1917 revolution, the villagers, at his suggestion
on a general meeting, decided to unite in a commune and work the land
together.
After the arrival of German-Austrian troops and the return of the
landowners, the Tartaki peasants created a partisan self-defense
detachment which in turn, participated in the defeat of Skoropadsky,
defended their autonomy against all the authorities that tore and
tormented Ukraine. In the fall of 1920, a small detachment from Tartaki
under the command of Osip Tsebriy was sent to the aid of the
Makhnovists. Near the village of Yaroshenko, they merged with local
volunteers in the “Fighting detachment of the Anarcho-Makhnovists” under
the command of Korchun. On the way to Kharkov near the village of
Dachevo, the partisans fought the red infantry. With support of the
local population, the detachment continued operations and disarmed
police in the village of Pyatigory. They stayed for the winter in the
village of Tetev. Peasants sheltered soldiers who in turn, helped them
in agricultural works in the fields. The partisans once even managed to
defeat a detachment of red infinity; 500 men strong. Contact was
established with the main headquarters of Nestor Makhno. In the spring
of 1921 the detachment, including up to half a thousand partisans,
headed for Znamenka, engaging in battles with numerous red formations on
the way and suffering heavy losses. At the end of summer, in Tatievka,
he joined up with the Makhnovist detachment of Belash. After the defeat
of the movement, Osip, along with two comrades, escaped to Poland, then
to Austria and Yugoslavia.
In 1922 he ended up in Bosnia. Fate brought him to the village of
Rosavats, inhabited by Rusyns — migrants from Galicia. At a general
gathering of residents, he volunteered to work as a teacher; the
peasants gladly accepted his offer. In November, he began teaching 85
children, and in the evenings he worked with adults for an hour and a
half. After Christmas, he asked the residents to attend a general
assembly and offered to help them organize their local economy. Osip
explained to the peasants that they were in poverty because everyone
works alone. “Your area is very rich,” he said, “fertile land, black
soil, a lot of prunes, mushrooms ..., a lot of wild hogs and fluffy
foxes… Just a kilometer and a half there is a good place for a mill
plus, you can even install a small turbine to generate electricity…
There is a good place for a brick factory… In order for your labor not
to be wasted, we must form a “communal” economy.”
Residents agreed with Osip’s proposals; as a first measure, it was
decided to jointly make a bunch of cages for catching wild hogs. Osip
helped the peasants to obtain documents for the land, from which it
turned out that the village possessed another 850 hectares of public
land.
Many peasants complained about lazy bums and drunkards. To their
amazement, the Ukrainian communard offered them a solution. He brought
traps to the village for hunting foxes. “It is necessary to choose two
people who would go hunting,” Osip recalled. “I suggested that the
community appoint a younger guy, who loved chasing foxes, and an elderly
“bum” who just sits around as his assistant. Before entrusting them with
this work, I took them for 2 weeks for training. First of all, we
dressed and fed them. Within two weeks I taught them how to work the
traps. The young guy was taught how to handle a hunting rifle. The older
man was given the responsibility to skin the animals and take carcasses
to the soap factory... In three months, the hunters handed over 1,500
fox pelts and 250 kg of badger lard to the community. With the proceeds,
the community acquired a steam mill and a winnowing fan.”
When a small distillery was built, Osip offered to appoint three drunks
to work there. They turned out to be great workers and stopped drinking
altogether. In the same way, when a thief who tried to break in at night
was appointed a watchman, in the end, he fully justified the trust the
community showed in him!
In just five years the commune built and/ or acquired: one-class rural
school, a cooperative named “Makhno” with 80 workers, a house for the
elderly and children (for the period of fieldwork), a restaurant — hotel
for 80 people, a flour mill, a sawmill, a brick factory, a bakery, meat
and sausage manufactory, a workshop for drying fruits and mushrooms, a
barn for 60 thoroughbred Swiss cows, a cheese dairy, a tannery and a
shoemaker, a smithy, carpentry and mechanical workshop, a large barn and
a poultry house; a tractor, a thresher, a binder, and other machines
were purchased. 400 people from other villages and districts joined the
Rosavats’ commune. Overall it inhabited 500 people. Every week a fair
was organized, which attracted people from all over the area. The
community members built a 15 kilometer road connecting the village with
the highway to Banja Luka; 2 trucks were purchased. The construction of
residential buildings for communards began. There were no lazy people in
the commune; everyone was dressed, and well-fed. There was a public
house with three rooms. On the wall, Osip Cebriy hung the saying by
Élisée Reclus: “Full harmony in the life of our planet will not be
established until people unite into one large family. To become truly
beautiful, the earth, like a loving mother, is waiting for the moment
when her children will embrace fraternally and will conclude a great
alliance of free peoples among themselves.”
In 1927, Russian White Guards with their priests unexpectedly raided the
village. Wrangel officers received police posts in the district. They
began forcing the residents to build a church, but they refused. Then
the authorities arrested Osip and took him to a prison in Belgrade.
After 8 days, he was expelled from Yugoslavia, then illegally made his
way to Austria, and from there, under a contract, went to France.
As Osip later found out, residents tried to protest his expulsion, but
were severely beaten. The community was forced to divide property among
its members and go into hiding. But from time to time the former
communards hit back at their tormentors. One fine day the priest and two
monks were found dead (they “ate wrong mushrooms”), a week later the
newly built church burned down. The Tito partisans finally finished off
the community; the Soviet consulate invited residents to move to Ukraine
...
When Nazi troops invaded Ukraine in 1941, Osip decided it was time to
act. He managed to travel to the Kiev region and here in 1942 he created
a partisan detachment, independent from the Stalinist, Nazis, and from
the Ukrainian nationalists. Upon arriving, he helped the Ukraine
peasantry to organize their own “Green Army”, which, like the army of
Makhno, fought against the German troops and against the Red Army, for
their rights, for bread and freedom. Osip Tsebriy, who has always
declared himself a Makhnovist, tried to revive the glorious traditions
of Ukrainian anarchism.
Unfortunately, we do not know the details of the actions of his partisan
detachment. It is only known that in the winter of 1943 it was defeated
by the Nazis, and the peasants hid Osip for several months. In the end,
he was captured, but apparently not identified. This allowed him to
avoid death. He was thrown into the concentration camp. Osip regained
his freedom only in 1945 when the camp was liberated by the Western
allies.
In 1946 he emigrated to the United States where he lived to a ripe old
age. He wrote his memoirs for magazines titled “The Federation of
Russian Anarcho-Communist Groups in the USA and Canada” and “Delo Truda
– Awakening” until the last year of its publication in 1958.