the negotiations, the makhnovtsy remained politically active. In January they had captured 100 railway wagons of wheat, totalling 90,000 pudy, from Denikin, and sent them (with some coal as a bonus) to the workers of Moscow and Petrograd, a major propaganda coup that was even reported in Izvestiia.15 On 23 January the anarchists convened their first regional congress at Greater Mikhailovka, to discuss, among other things, counter-measures against the twin threats of Petliura and Denikin.16 Such congresses, it must be remembered, were considered to be the highest form of democratic authority in the political system of the Makhno movement, and involved peasants, workers and soldiers, who would take decisions back to village and local meetings.17 Makhno took the opportunity presented by this congress to establish firm control over various local, small-scale atamany such as Fedir Shchus, who had been arbitrarily robbing and murdering people in the area, and with whom he had been in conflict.18
In early February Makhno accepted Antonov-Ovseenko’s command.19 The Bolsheviks assigned his units to serve as the Third Brigade in the Trans-Dnepr Division under Dybenko and alongside Grigor’ev, an ataman known for his vicious pogroms.20 Ataman Grigor’ev came from a family of kulaks in Podolia, and had fought in both the Russo-Japanese and Great Wars, rising to the rank of captain.21 He was cunning and dangerous, although ‘untrained and unskilled’ as a commander. His political views were opportunist in the extreme: he supported in turn the Rada, the Hetmanate, the Directory, and then, after January 1919, the Bolsheviks.22 In 1918 he started to gather local partisan groups together, and by February 1919 controlled a force of 23,000 men with machine-guns and artillery. After he turned against the Directory, the Red Army’s commanders reached a tactical agreement with him and like Makhno, he retained control of his troops, under Red Army command. The most striking difference between the two partisan leaders was one of ideological consistency. Grigor’ev had few scruples about who he aligned himself with; he was an adventurer, anti-Semitic, xenophobic, and a hater of landlords.23 Makhno, on the other hand, was driven by a political philosophy, which guided his practice: he punished anti-Semitism, he refused to cooperate with the White Guards, he was guardedly hostile towards Ukrainian nationalism. He cooperated with the Bolsheviks but mistrusted them. Perhaps the Red Army commanders should have anticipated problems mainly from the unpredictable Grigor’ev, but in the event, both of the atamany proved dangerous in equal measure, and the military situation in April and May 1919 was too confused to allow Bolshevik strategists time to analyse their allies.
Antonov may have feared the possibility of an alliance against Soviet power by the two unruly guerrilla leaders, but this turned out to be both politically and temperamentally unworkable. In fact, the makhnovtsy joined the Red Army on conditions that were unfavourable to the Bolsheviks. The insurgents were to keep their internal organisation, their black flags and their title of povstantsi.24 They were to receive arms and supplies on the same basis as nearby communist units. In return, they had to accept the assignment of commissars to each regiment.25 The last two points were the cause of bitter recriminations, and eventually of the first rift between the mutually suspicious new allies.
Part of the difficulty in bringing the two forces together was that Makhno’s ideas of insurgent organisation were an attempt to resolve the contradiction between anarchist principle and military necessity. The two key points were mobilisation and discipline. Nominally, all Makhno’s soldiers were volunteers, and they were all eligible for positions of command, either by election or by appointment. But so-called ‘voluntary mobilisation’ was also practised, and the evidence is mixed as to why and how the rural and peri-urban poor joined up with Makhno.26 Possible motives include but are not limited to an ideological commitment to anarchism, a desire for loot and land, adventurism, or simply a desire to get rid of an outside authority that was seen as exploitative.
The most difficult idea to swallow for the Bolsheviks was that of ‘freely accepted discipline’. At least theoretically, the troops voted on every regulation, and if passed, each rule was rigorously enforced ‘on the individual responsibility of each insurgent and each commander’.27 However, direct orders were to be obeyed immediately: a few years later, during his trial in Poland, Makhno angrily insisted that his men would ‘unhesitatingly’ carry out their orders.28 Bolshevik military policy, on the other hand, had evolved from a position based primarily on political considerations, to one in which the problems of fighting to defend the revolution were of first importance. During the war against the Central Powers the Bolsheviks had denounced the militarism of the Tsarist regime. They had urged the peasant soldiers to rebel against the authority of their officers, who belonged to the class enemy. This tactic successfully undermined the Imperial Army, a weapon in the hands of the autocracy. The Bolsheviks infected it with revolutionary defeatism, both by agitation among the troops and by exploiting the soldiers’ concrete experience of their commanders’ cynical incompetence. By March 1918, when Trotsky became People’s Commissar for War (Narkomvoen), all that remained of the Imperial Army was Vatsetis’ division of Latvian riflemen.29 The sentiments of the masses were a mixture of an emotional belief in pacifism and their trust in the Red Guards and the partisan detachments. For example, whether anarchist, SR, or Bolshevik, most revolutionaries believed that officers should be chosen by their troops. Trotsky abandoned these democratic and anti-authoritarian ideas in favour of centralisation and tough discipline. There were good reasons for the reversal, but it gave partisans like Makhno the advantage of appearing more consistent and more faithful to the Russian revolutionary tradition. The makhnovtsy made maximum use of this point in their propaganda.30
Trotsky believed that the peasants were the least reliable members of the Red Army. They deserted in droves, and their morale was often fragile. ‘The chaos of irregular warfare expressed the peasant element that lay beneath the revolution’, he wrote in 1929, ‘whereas the struggle against it was also a struggle in favor of the proletarian state organization as opposed to the elemental, petty-bourgeois anarchy that was undermining it’.31 However, Trotsky was quite prepared to recruit former Imperial officers for their military expertise, so long as the army contained a core of proletarians on whose support the Bolsheviks could politically depend.32 He placed political commissars alongside the officers, from company level up to the commander-in-chief. Orders were valid only if both officer and commissar agreed. Thus, the Bolshevik leadership, with the support of small numbers of worker-soldiers, hoped to provide an example of dedication and enthusiasm, combined with iron discipline – the certainty of death in the rear – to hold the new army together. But the incorporation of units such as Makhno’s into the Red Army as regular troops presented difficult practical problems, and there were regular clashes. When the first commissars arrived in the Makhnovite regiments they discovered a general lack of organisation and discipline. The 3rd Brigade’s commissar reported from Guliaipole that, ‘the headquarters as such do not exist. There were a few men, headed by the Brigade commander, who ran the whole brigade […] everything was in a state of uncertainty and chaos’.33
Meanwhile, Makhno continued to consolidate his political base. A second regional congress was held in Guliaipole from 12–16 February34 at which Makhno refused his nomination as presiding chair, citing the pressure of military events at the front.35 Both Nabat and the Left SRs were represented, and speeches were made condemning attempts by the Bolsheviks to monopolise the soviets.36 Importantly, the congress established a Military-Revolutionary Soviet (Voenno-Revoliutsionnaia Sovet or VRS) with ten members, of whom seven were anarchists, as its executive arm.37 The congress retained, at least in theory, the right to dissolve the VRS.38 After heated debate, the congress also resolved that a ‘general voluntary and egalitarian mobilisation’ should be called, which placated anarchist objections to enforced conscription, and also had the effect of creating a militia force with a centralised command structure, recruited village by village.39 Makhno’s comrade Petr Arshinov claimed that the decision resulted in a greater influx of volunteers, but he admits that most of them were turned away because there were no guns for them.40 Indeed, by May, the troop strength had reportedly grown to as many as 55,000
