Nestor Makhno and Rural Anarchism in Ukraine, 1917-1921. Colin Darch
of the town while the terrified citizens fled as best they could, only entering the centre of Berdiansk on 28 March.60
The story of the capture of Berdiansk was subsequently to feed into a meta-narrative of the cruel behaviour of the makhnovtsy towards the population at large, a narrative that included but was not limited to accusations of carrying out pogroms and massacring German Mennonite settlers at various times.61 In Berdiansk, the panic-stricken evacuees would not have been so frightened, according to this logic, unless they had something to hide from revolutionary justice, and so deserved whatever fate befell them – the same logic of the French anarchist Émile Henry’s remark that ‘there are no innocent bourgeois’. Later, Soviet sources would claim that people were stabbed to death or blown up with grenades for having collaborated with the Whites.62 Given the horrific atrocities that were common occurrences everywhere during the civil war, this seems plausible, even if unproven; nevertheless, the numbers killed, and the extent of the cruelty exercised by the conquerors of Berdiansk, both remain the subject of dispute.63
By the end of March, the Bolshevik commanders were arguing about the best way to deploy Makhno’s troops. On 22 March, Dybenko telephoned Anatol Skachko, the commander of the Khar’kov group, to inform him of his intention to replace the anarchists at the front with newly-formed units despite what he called Makhno’s ‘inspired leadership’.64 Four days later Skachko received orders to push the insurgent brigade forward in an attempt to capture Taganrog on the Sea of Azov and to turn the White flank and rear in the Bakhmut region to the northwest.65 But on 28 March Denikin attacked the Soviet 8th Army northeast of Makhno’s sector, and drove it northwards almost to Lugansk. Simultaneously, Makhno had again occupied Mariupol’ on the coast, and was driving forward towards Rostov.66 He was yet again short of supplies, partly because Dybenko had, on his own initiative, advanced into the Crimea.67 There was in fact ongoing confusion in the command structure. Vatsetis ordered that the 3rd Brigade should be transferred across to the Southern Front, and despite Antonov’s protests the move was carried out.68 Makhno’s units, between Mariupol’ and Taganrog, came under the different command for operational matters, however the discipline and organisation remained in Antonov’s hands. Supplies were to be provided by the Ukrainian government.69
There was still a lot of suspicion between the two groups, justifiably or not. In the second half of March Makhno received intelligence reports that his people were under surveillance, that his popularity was regarded with suspicion and that there might even be an assassination attempt in the offing. Makhno subsequently met Dybenko in a Berdiansk hotel and raised the issue with him. Dybenko denied all knowledge of the plan and assured the bat’ko that he remained in the good books of the command. There was much slandering of honest revlutionaries, he added, and Makhno was not the only target.70
On 31 March, the Ukrainian 2nd Army and the 13th Army counter-attacked against the Whites, initially with some success, in an attempt to occupy the whole of the west bank of the Don and thus release troops for other fronts. In response, Denikin’s cavalry commander Andrei Shkuro attacked to the west in an attempt to outflank the Soviet right, where Makhno’s brigade was still pushing forward along the coast to Rostov from Mariupol’.
Political problems continued, however, to distract from the military difficulties that faced the Red Army. At one level, Makhno’s successes were still being lauded in such newspapers as Pravda and Izvestiia, and his popularity was at its height. Nevertheless, the problem of the situation of the commissars continued to worry the Bolsheviks.71 On 2 April the political commissar of the Trans-Dnepr Division complained that anarchist and Left SR agitation was making his work difficult. The fighting units of the Guliaipole garrison were anti-communist and included many non-party elements. There was a shortage of arms and of uniforms, and the partisans who comprised most of the fighting units were tired and demoralised. What he needed, nonetheless, were more political workers and more political literature.72
At a broader policy level, the Bolsheviks were also having considerable difficulty developing a policy towards the local peasantry that would secure food supplies. In April 1919 the Central Committee of the Komunistychna Partiia (bil’shovykiv) Ukrainy (the KP(b)U), passed a decree ‘On the Tasks of the Party in the Struggle against Kulak Gangsterism’. This implemented committees of poor peasants (kombedy, or in Ukrainian komnezamy) on the Russian model.73 Kulaks were excluded from the village committees completely, and middle peasants were only allowed to vote but not to stand for election.74 However the kombedy had no real incentive to assist the food committees (known as prodorgany), since any surplus that was extracted from the rich peasants went to the cities, and not into support for the rural poor. This applied equally to grain and to animal feed.75 The Bolsheviks had already tried this tactic in Great Russia, under a decree of 11 June 1918, but had absorbed the committees into the rural soviets at the end of the year. In the new decree the Ukrainian Central Committee pledged itself to send as many experienced political workers as possible to the villages, and to publish more peasant-oriented political literature.76 In Ukraine the differentiation between wealthy peasants (kulaks) and poor peasants was sharper than in Russia, and to the Bolsheviks another attempt must have seemed worthwhile.77 However, Lenin noted at the 8th Party congress that it was a mistake to apply Russian policies uncritically to the ‘borderlands’.78 Nonetheless, the kombedy survived in Ukraine into the New Economic Policy (NEP) period, and some delegates at the 8th All-Russian Congress of Soviets were still defending their activities as late as December 1920.79
Despite the praise for and recognition of the military contribution of the makhnovtsy, the Soviet authorities regarded Makhno’s activities with deepening suspicion. The RVS received information that Makhno had allegedly sent a delegate to Ataman Grigor’ev to negotiate terms for an alliance against the Bolsheviks. The town soviet of Ekaterinoslav had arrested the man. The situation, complained the Ekaterinoslav Bolsheviks, was ‘absolutely impossible’, and they urged the RVS to take urgent steps to liquidate the makhnovtsy, who were preventing communist work.80 By mid-April 1919, several months after the incorporation of Makhno’s units into the Red Army, the political position in the 3rd Brigade was still discouraging for the communists. Their decision to keep the insurgent units separate, after their acceptance of the unified command, now came back to haunt them in more ways than one.
Particular difficulties arose around the system of assigning commissars to each unit at all levels. For one thing, the insurgents saw no reason for them: ‘Why do they send us commissars? We can live without them! And if we do need them, we can elect them from amongst ourselves’.81 The assigned commissar for the brigade was stuck in Mariupol’, unable to take up his post. The 7th Regiment was disorganised, and its commissar had been replaced because of his inactivity. The 8th Regiment was keener, but the commissar had been killed in action. In the 9th Regiment the commissar had been obliged to introduce ‘comradely discipline’, and there were no organised party cells. The Pravda Section, formerly the 1st Liubetskii Regiment, had neither commissars nor political workers and was reportedly infected with anti-Semitism. The 1st Don Cossack Regiment was newly formed, and the artillery had little political organisation.82 The commissars were demoralised and complained of widespread pilfering among the troops. Drunkards had been sent to the front, members of the Cheka had been found decapitated or shot in the fields. In one town the partisans had dragged a wounded communist from his hospital bed and beaten him badly. One of Makhno’s aides-de-camp, Boris Veretel’nikov, had gained a reputation for persecuting Bolsheviks and for refusing to supply them with food. One commissar described the partisans as ‘the dregs of Soviet Russia’.83 Another urged the RVS to send the best possible political workers to Makhno’s sections. The work with Red Army men was good, with mobilised troops it was ‘rather bad’ and in the Makhnovite units it was lacking altogether. The commissar pointed out that some of his co-workers were hard drinkers, who themselves needed close supervision. They might easily make things worse, if left together with irresponsible soldiers. The refusal of political workers to go to the Makhnovite sections when assigned, he concluded, only encouraged ‘banditry and anti-Semitism’.84
From the Bolshevik point of view