Nestor Makhno and Rural Anarchism in Ukraine, 1917-1921. Colin Darch
constable were killed.54 The police subsequently arrested six anarchists, who were all sentenced to administrative exile.55 Antoni served a one-month prison term.56 The detective in charge was a local named Karachentsev. To expose the group and its activities, he resorted to the standard weapon in the armoury of the Tsar’s security forces, the agent provocateur, infiltrating the group with his men, who played an active part in the assaults and robberies. The anarchists exposed and executed at least one of these agents. From information provided by the others, Karachentsev compiled a list of members, identifying the leader and supplier of weapons as Vol’demar Antoni.57
Karachentsev lacked hard evidence against other members of the group and decided to take direct action. He had heard that Aleksandr Semeniuta was in hiding in Ekaterinoslav and tracked down other anarchists hiding in the city, arresting Lisovskii, Levadnyi, Zuichenko and Al’tgauzen. Levadnyi broke under interrogation and described the whole series of robberies and killings, starting with Pleshchiner and continuing through the ambush of the postal wagon up to the shooting of the police constable. Al’tgauzen confessed to having participated in the robberies of Shindler and Kerner.58 Much later Makhno held Al’tgauzen responsible, as an agent provocateur, for the downfall of the group, but at the time he was indicted with the others.59 Zuichenko confessed and Karachentsev then arrested more anarchists, including Shevchenko and Mariia Martynova, Lisovskii’s lover.
Zuichenko’s testimony provided Karachentsev with the evidence he needed to bring the suspects to trial. Antoni, the group’s first leader, had fled to Belgium but had maintained his contacts with the group, acting as a supplier of weapons and explosives. After Antoni’s flight, Aleksandr Semeniuta had become the dominant figure in the organisation. Zuichenko described the group’s meetings, which took place most often at Levadnyi’s house, where they planned the expropriations. He revealed that they had planned to assassinate Karachentsev, and to shift their centre of activity to Ekaterinoslav, which was why Semeniuta had moved there.
After this success, Karachentsev telegraphed Guliaipole with instructions to arrest Nestor Makhno along with four other anarchists. Throughout August 1908 a series of confrontations, confessions, accusations and counteraccusations took place as group loyalty dissolved and individuals tried to save themselves by betraying others. Through it all Makhno – who seems by the sparse evidence available to have been committed and principled – refused to admit anything.60 On 1/14 September the police intercepted a note from Makhno to Levadnyi, telling him to ‘take the matter into [his] own hands’.61 The prosecutor later made much of this. Makhno explained it simply as an exhortation to Levadnyi not to attempt to shift his guilt onto the shoulders of others. The authorities produced another note from Makhno at the trial, referring in guarded terms to the planning of a possible escape attempt.62 But by now the police had found more witnesses in Guliaipole. Shevchenko’s brother was willing to testify that he had been hiding bombs in the courtyard, and that the group had held meetings at his house. He claimed that he had seen them in possession of sums of money as well as weapons.63
By this time Semeniuta had escaped abroad and sent Karachentsev a letter, addressing him as a ‘spotted devil’, and inviting him to come to Belgium, ‘where there is freedom of speech, and one can talk freely’.64 In the autumn of 1909 Semeniuta came back to Guliaipole to seek revenge for the death of his brother Prokopii, and ambushed Karachentsev outside a local theatre, shooting him dead and escaping.65 Later on, in 1911, he returned again, accompanied by a young anarchist woman. An informer spotted the pair and told the police, who surrounded the house. In the gun-battle that followed Semeniuta refused to surrender and shot himself; the young woman was wounded.66
At a preliminary hearing three of the accused retracted their earlier statements, alleging that they were made under duress. Makhno denied membership of any kind of association and repeated his explanation of the note to Levadnyi. But Zuichenko again confessed to everything and betrayed them all. One of the accused was hanged on 17/30 June 1909 by order of a court martial and another died of typhus in the prison barracks.67 Antoni and one of the others had escaped abroad. The arraignment accused Makhno and some others of several expropriations, under articles of the penal code that carried the death penalty. The prisoners stayed in custody in Aleksandrovsk for a year while investigations were completed. During the winter they managed to contact comrades who were still at large and planned an escape during a transfer to Ekaterinoslav. The attempt was abandoned in freezing sub-zero conditions.68
Makhno’s case was heard by the Odessa District Court Martial,69 convened in Ekaterinoslav in March 1910, and he was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging. He lived as a condemned prisoner for fifty-two days, until the authorities commuted his sentence, partly thanks to his youth (he was not 21 until October), and partly thanks to his mother’s efforts on his behalf.70 Of all these anarchist comrades who took part alongside Makhno in the post-1905 insurrectionist actions, the only one who survived to assume a role in the Makhno insurrection after 1917 was Nazarii Zuichenko.71
In July 1911 Makhno started a term of twenty years hard labour in Butyrka Prison in north-west Moscow.72 The years that Makhno spent in prison changed his life. It was in jail that he met Petr Arshinov, the man who was to ‘confirm him in the faith of Bakunin and Kropotkin’, support him throughout the civil war and follow him into exile.73 A native of Ekaterinoslav, Petr Andreevich Arshinov was two years older than Makhno, and had been a Bolshevik before his conversion to anarchism in 1906. He had worked as an itinerant metalworker on the railways, and had contributed to the Bolshevik newspaper Molot. Arshinov received a death sentence for his anarchist activities, but escaped to France, and subsequently to Austria-Hungary. The Austrian police caught him trying to smuggle subversive literature into Russia and extradited him. After a second trial he was sentenced to hard labour, and in 1911 joined Makhno in Butyrka.74
When the two men met, Arshinov had already experienced the hard life of the professional agitator and political exile. A resourceful man, he had gone to some lengths to improve his education, and he now worked to improve Makhno’s. His younger fellow-prisoner, commented Arshinov, ‘showed great perseverance, and studied grammar, mathematics, literature, cultural history and economics. Prison was the school where Makhno learned the history and politics that were to help him in his subsequent revolutionary activity’.75 He concentrated especially on three subjects – history, geography and mathematics. He used the prison library, and devoured both illegal and legal literature, reading Kropotkin, the poet Lermontov and many others. Nor was he above picking the brains of better-educated fellow-prisoners.76
In 1912, Makhno wrote later, he experienced a ‘deep inner crisis’. This convinced him that he must find his salvation through individual effort and that socialist intellectuals mostly only wanted to be ‘masters and leaders’:
In the end … I no longer felt the slightest respect for the so-called ‘distinguished politicians’ or their opinions. I reached the conclusion that as far as vital, concrete problems were concerned these men were nothing but children like me.77
He decided that everybody was equally deserving of respect, and that ‘those who consider themselves superior do not deserve the attention that they receive’.78
Makhno was neither an easy companion nor a model prisoner and was often in trouble. He spent time in irons, or in the solitary confinement cells, where he contracted the pulmonary tuberculosis that eventually led to his death in exile.79 He had already spent time in the prison hospital in Ekaterinoslav with typhoid fever, and in Moscow his health continued to deteriorate. Despite his illness, however, he was always on the lookout for opportunities to escape.80 His fellow-inmates, with whom he argued constantly about politics, sarcastically dubbed him skromnyi, or ‘the modest one’.81 The years in Butyrka left Makhno with an enduring hatred of prisons, and later, at the height of his power, when his forces captured a town he would release the prisoners and blow the jail up or set fire to it.82
Two major events marked the years that Makhno spent in prison. The outbreak of war in 1914 divided the political prisoners in Butyrka, as it divided their comrades outside,