Nestor Makhno and Rural Anarchism in Ukraine, 1917-1921. Colin Darch
on how effective these arrangements were, nor does he describe what problems arose and how they were solved.150 He spent two days a week ‘helping out … during the spring planting’, and working ‘at the electricity station’.151
This vague description of the way the communes operated was written years afterwards, when Makhno had every reason to portray the experience in a positive light. Later authors have been less complimentary. The anarchists killed a local landowner, Klassen, and then organised a model commune on his abandoned estate:
… it was a kind of prototype for the future … In this ‘commune’ they did not work so much as organise drunken orgies, although Makhno tried … to moderate his … friends. He worked in a commune two days a week, but failed to establish proper discipline … after that the word ‘commune’ in the sense used by the makhnovtsy started to cause horror among the townspeople.152
This kind of social experiment could not survive for long in the prevailing conditions. There were too many outside forces interested in Ukraine, with its fertile soil and its concentration of mines and metallurgical industries, including the Rada in Kiev and the Bolsheviks, whose nationalities policy emphasised the right to self-determination while advocating the close association of states. Ukrainian Bolsheviks were divided between leftists who feared that independence would weaken both Russian and Ukrainian proletariats, and rightists from the industrialised left bank who supported national self-determination.153
The period from March 1917 until February 1918 was the period of Makhno’s greatest social and political achievement. Most accounts concentrate on his military exploits in 1919 and 1920, when he was operating as an insurgent leader rather than leading an attempt to realise anarchist practices. The claim that makhnovshchina was a revolutionary movement of the toiling masses rests fundamentally on an analysis of its special accomplishments in the socio-political sphere: there were other peasant revolts, other atamany. Such an analysis must focus on 1917, and on the period between November 1918 and June 1919, when Makhno operated without military interference. But the available evidence fails to demonstrate that he was able to accommodate to the needs of a complex modernising economy based on industrialisation and urbanisation.
2
The Turning Point: Organising Resistance to the German Invasion, 1918
During the period of relative peace after the fall of the Tsar, Makhno and his comrades had an opportunity to put anarchist ideas into practice. This moment ended in February and March 1918 when the Germans and Austrians invaded Ukraine. There was never to be another prolonged period with such potential: makhnovshchina was to be transformed into a militarised insurgency, and Makhno to become a partisan guerrilla leader. In mid-1918 he was forced to flee Guliaipole, making a journey around Russia that ‘played a crucial role in shaping [his] views’.1 It was a turning point: the locally-based anarchist project to establish democratic behaviours, through which peasants and workers could decide their own lives, was overwhelmed by the immediate need to organise armed resistance against foreign occupiers. In the longer term, struggles against other, later threats to local autonomy were continuously to consume the anarchists’ energy.
The Ukrainian republic that emerged in 1917 sued the Central Powers for peace in February 1918, ending the state of war – and reducing the country to a mere ‘nation-building project approved by the Germans’.2 The German army moved into Ukraine on 18 February, and quickly drove the Bolsheviks out.3 One senior officer wrote later that
… it is the strangest war … they put a handful of infantrymen with machine guns and a cannon on the [railway] track and head off for the next station, which they capture, then arrest the Bolsheviks, bring in more troops by rail, and then set off again.4
By 1 March they had occupied Kiev and reinstated the Rada.5 The Austrians – latecomers who needed food supplies more than the Germans – insisted on control of specific areas, such as the port city of Odessa. The army commands eventually agreed on a demarcation of zones of influence on 28 March, with Germany allotted the lion’s share of territory. Austria gained control of half of Volhynia, Podolia, Kherson and Makhno’s province of Ekaterinoslav,6 although it was the Germans who controlled the collection and distribution of resources.7
In March, the Bolshevik government in Moscow signed a peace treaty withdrawing Russia from the war.8 Survival depended on ending the fighting, but the price was high. Russia lost Finland, Poland, the Baltic countries, Bessarabia – and Ukraine was already gone.9 Although resources provided to Germany and Austria were denied to Russia, Lenin and Trotsky nonetheless needed to secure a workable peace with the Central Powers.
With only 20,000 troops at the Bolsheviks’ disposal, they were heavily outnumbered in Ukraine – and their soldiers were more interested in land than in war. The Bolshevik insistence on defending Ukraine against overwhelming odds fed anti-communist feeling, but in the end the resistance to German occupation amounted only to a series of holding actions by demoralised communist troops.10 The south-eastern periphery of the Russian empire fragmented into a patchwork of autonomous Soviet republics – the Don, the Crimea, the Kuban, Odessa – over which there was no effective unified military command. Furthermore, the Ukrainian Bolshevik movement split into factions over its relationship to the Russian party.11
The Rada succeeded in isolating Ukraine from Bolshevik rule, but at the price of exposing the population to military occupation.12 Indeed its power ‘rested chiefly on German bayonets’.13 On 15 March the Rada asked the Germans to ‘liberate’ eastern Ukraine – the provinces of Khar’kov, Ekaterinoslav, Tauride, Poltava and Kherson, which were still under Bolshevik control. The Germans seized their chance and pushed on towards the Black Sea coast and the Donbas, meeting with only sporadic resistance from Red Guards.14 Central authority had disappeared, and neither the Rada nor the Bolsheviks had established effective, centralised administration. The countryside was parcelled up into fiefdoms run by local atamany or by spontaneously emerging local popular structures, anarchist in character if not in ideology.15 The Soviet of Peasants’ Deputies that had nominally been running Khar’kov province – for instance – had issued proclamations against land seizures, but they continued unabated nonetheless.16 A rapid and uncontrollable process of devolution of power to the local level was taking place.17
Even in these chaotic conditions, by the end of April Ukraine was fully under foreign military occupation and was forced to supply the Central Powers with the huge quantities of grain, animals and poultry that they demanded.18 German estimates foretold large wheat surpluses in the next harvest in June and July;19 they were not unduly concerned about the possibility of peasant resistance to the expropriation of food supplies.20
Anarchists were active not just in Guliaipole but also in Ekaterinoslav, driving around in armoured cars in front of the Red Guards. German accounts, unsympathetic and disapproving, describe a situation of chaotic criminality. The soldiers found an ordinary town with inns, hotels, parks, schools, museums and white-painted churches – but with its middle-class inhabitants disguised as workers, unshaven and wearing caps and overalls, fearful of Bolsheviks and anarchists.21 The anarchists had opened the jail and released the inmates.22 While the Bolsheviks looted shops and emptied banks, the anarchists visited the bourgeoisie in their homes and tortured them until they revealed where their wealth was hidden. In such a narrative, apart from the cruelty, there was little difference between revolutionaries and burglars.23
Map 2.1 The Occupation of Ukraine by Germany and Austro-Hungary, 1918
The area occupied by the Germans stretched all the way north to the Baltic Sea. (Cartographer: Jenny Sandler)
The ‘southern anarchists’ issued a declaration in March, urging their comrades to fight the Germans, not in defence of some ideal ‘fatherland’