Nestor Makhno and Rural Anarchism in Ukraine, 1917-1921. Colin Darch
despaired.83 He conducted vigorous polemics from the defeatist position, opening one tract with the words, ‘Comrades! When will you stop being such scoundrels?’ Some of the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR) prisoners were indignant enough at this to want to hold an enquiry into the authorship of the anonymous pamphlet.84 The second event was the overthrow of the Tsar in February 1917, and the assumption of power by the reformist Provisional Government. This led in March, under pressure from the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, to a declaration of general amnesty for all agrarian, military or terrorist crimes.85 Both Makhno and Arshinov were released under this amnesty. Makhno’s sudden liberation after more than seven years in prison seemed to him to be as sudden as a ‘crash of thunder’86 – and this is the key moment, the moment when the real story begins, when the story of a single dissatisfied, semi-urbanised peasant youth starts to become the story of a revolutionary mass movement seeking a form of political democracy that would challenge top-down decision-making to give those without power or property, in the hinterlands of empire, control over the governance of their lives.
At the time Makhno was a penniless 28-year-old, newly released from jail, and without professional skills.87 His eyes had been damaged by the years in prison, and he wore dark glasses in sunlight.88 Arshinov stayed in Moscow, where he was briefly active in the Moscow Federation of Anarchists, but Makhno was persuaded by his mother and his remaining anarchist comrades in Guliaipole to come home.89 He lacked experience in practical politics, but his prestige in Guliaipole as a returning political prisoner was high, and according to his own account the local anarchists and their sympathisers greeted him enthusiastically.90 The handful of published documents from this early period show him convening a meeting of a local committee, asking that the value of food rations for families of serving soldiers be publicised, reporting on the theft of a horse, attempting to organise the collection of statistical data on population and land, and dealing with issues of soldiers in reserve regiments released for fieldwork.91 Makhno became ‘a completely ordinary Soviet functionary’92 working in an office and dealing with bureaucratic questions.93
Vasilii Golovanov, who is a sympathetic and imaginative chronicler, argues that at this moment it is possible to see Makhno as a tragic figure, a man who sacrificed his chance of happiness to struggle for a political ideal.94 The interlude between Makhno’s arrival in Guliaipole in February or March 1917, and his flight from the town a year later, in April 1918, offers us a glimpse of the paths Makhno might have followed had he not chosen – or been compelled to choose – to become a guerrilla commander. It is a period that has (still) attracted relatively little scholarly attention, as Timoshchuk pointed out in 1996.95 To begin with, it seems, Makhno even hoped to settle down and live a peaceful domestic life. He went back to work at the Kerner factory,96 and after a few months, in November 1917, he married a young local woman, Anastasia Vasetskaia, apparently at the insistence of his mother.97 According to one account, Vasetskaia had written ‘warm letters’ to him when he was in prison, and they soon had a child. But Makhno’s chances of domestic happiness were short-lived: his comrades in the ‘Black Guards’ threatened Vasetskaia and forced her to leave Guliaipole with the baby.98
The February revolution – the abdication of the Tsar and the coming to power of Kerensky’s Provisional Government in Moscow – had released the pent-up energy of the Ukrainian masses. Makhno was returning to a country that was undergoing a massive realignment of forces. In late March a group of intellectuals led by Mykhailo Hrushevs’kyi99 formed the Ukrains’ka Tsentral’na Rada (Ukrainian Central Council). Its initial, modest objectives were to coordinate the national movement and to demand from the Provisional Government the right to print books and newspapers in Ukrainian and to teach it in schools.100 It later supported the idea of a federal framework (while more radical left parties, including the communists, worked for revolutionary transformation). However, with the Rada’s unilateral declaration of Ukrainian autonomy in June 1917, ‘the genie’ in Plokhy’s words ‘was out of the bottle’.101
In Guliaipole, some of Makhno’s old comrades had survived, but there were many faces that he did not know.102 He decided that he was not going to miss an opportunity to help create, as he put it, ‘…the means whereby to do away with the old regime of slavery and to conjure up a new one wherein slavery would not exist and wherein authority would have no place’.103 Police persecution had decimated the original anarchist group, but the handful of remaining members had reconstituted themselves as a new organisation in May 1916, and Makhno’s return saved the group from collapse.104 He frequently spoke at rallies, helped to print leaflets and organise public demonstrations, and agitated for ‘Free Soviets’ and for the non-recognition of Kerensky’s government.105
Makhno understood that the group lacked structure and spoke vigorously in favour of coordinated action. One speech, quoted in full in his autobiography (presumably from memory) summed up the development of his political ideas, and attacked sectarianism within anarchism. He referred to the ‘destructive phase’ of the revolution and argued that coordination was required to get rid of government institutions, as well as all forms of private ownership. This included taking over factories in the towns. At the same time, it was necessary to ‘draw closer to the peasant masses so as to assure … the constancy of their revolutionary enthusiasm’. ‘Our group’, he claimed, ‘is the only one which has remained in contact with the peasant masses’ since the 1905–6 revolution. The anarchists in Aleksandrovsk and Ekaterinoslav had been decimated, and were unreliable. The first task, therefore, was to organise a Peasant Union, and to elect an anarchist at its head.106
Makhno’s political positions were accompanied by rudimentary preparations for armed struggle – he had learned harsh lessons from the 1906 events. He believed that the best chance of success lay in forging close connections with the peasant masses, in seizing control of non-revolutionary organs and in establishing institutions to exercise power. Political isolation would be fatal, as it had been during the Stolypin reaction: the old anarchist ‘insurrectionist’ tactics would not work:
I determined to jettison different tactical requirements assumed by the anarchists in the years 1906–1907. During that period in fact, the principles of organisation were sacrificed to the principle of exclusiveness: the anarchists huddled in their circles which, removed from the masses, developed abnormally, were lulled into inactivity and thus lost the chance to intervene effectively in the event of popular uprisings and revolutions107
Some purists, to whom any form of organisation that was not spontaneous was anathema, objected to this position, arguing that propaganda was the only legitimate activity. Makhno believed, however, that peasants would understand that the anarchists did not want to impose opinions, but merely to present them.108
At the time the effective government of Guliaipole was military: a Serbian regiment, supported by a Russian machine-gun detachment, was garrisoned there. One of the officers had been elected president of the ‘obshchestvennyi komitet’ (the communal committee), an organ of the Provisional Government that could not enforce its will in the provinces. Makhno quickly realised that he had an excellent opportunity to step into the power vacuum before the SRs109 or other parties. At a meeting of the skhod Makhno attacked the idea that the Social Committee could be chaired by someone from outside the community, unaccountable for his actions. He proposed that the different sections of the town should choose representatives to study the question.110
At the end of March representatives reconvened to discuss the election of a new structure. An SR proposed the formation of a Committee of the Union of Peasants and Makhno seized on the suggestion as a pretext for presenting a proposal of his own. He contemptuously dismissed the political parties for gambling with the future,111 and urged the peasants to concern themselves with the immediate consolidation of revolutionary gains through communal ownership of land, mills and factories. On this basis they could build a new life for themselves without worrying about such irrelevancies as the Constituent Assembly.112 The meeting set up a Union of Peasants, with 28 members, and chose Makhno to chair it – he later claimed that his unanimous election to the chair happened