assistance in the research, writing, correspondence and, of course, conversation that have led to this book. It’s possible that some may have forgotten assisting me. Their help included granting me access to unpublished memoirs and other documents, responding to factual and other queries, criticising draft chapters and helping with translation. I must mention especially Ivan Antypenko of Philadelphia; Paul Avrich; Delice Baker-Duly who provided Swedish translations many years ago; G. N. Britten; the late E. H. Carr; the late Richard Caulk; Georgi Derluguian; Irina Filatova for several points of clarification; M. Fransiszyn; Daniel Guérin; Zenon Jaworskyi; Viktor Kachun; Annemarie Kinfu who provided German translations; Michel Kovetzki; the late A. L. Morton; Richard and Rita Pankhurst; Sean Patterson; Victor Peters; Michael Petrowsky; Mark Plant; the Very Rev. N. Pliczkowski; Jenny Sandler, who drew the maps; Alexandre Skirda; the late Teodor Shanin; Iuri Shevchenko of the University of Khar’kov for assistance with routes and distances; Vladimir Shubin (no relation of Aleksandr Shubin) for critical comments; Yehuda Slutsky for sharing his work on the Ukrainian pogroms; the late Volker Stitz; Lucien van der Walt; Leo van Rossum; Gottfried Wellmer who provided German translations; Dr. Olex Wintoniak of Dniprova Khvylia; the late Michael Wolfers; and Jason Yanowitz. Last, my special and enduring thanks go to Gary Littlejohn, who supervised with good humour and patience my now-superseded doctoral dissertation on makhnovshchina, and has also read through this manuscript and made many valuable suggestions; to Leo Zeilig, without whose enthusiastic encouragement a version of this work would still be lying in the bottom of a drawer; and to first Hilary Davies, Tom Rampling and Toni Ongala, and later Agnes Nkhoma-Darch for their many years of extraordinarily patient support. My thanks to the four anonymous reviewers of my original proposal, and to Pluto Press for their ongoing support – specifically to David Shulman, for his patience, and to Robert Webb. Some of the people mentioned above will almost certainly find themselves for various reasons in more or less strong disagreement with my argument and my conclusions, which now differ significantly from my earlier views on the Makhno rebellion. Nonetheless, I am grateful for their help.
Needless to say, I alone am entirely responsible for the interpretation as well as for all errors and omissions of whatever kind in this book.
Map 0.1Makhnovshchina’s Areas of Activity and Influence, 1918–21
The heartland of makhnovshchina was based around Guliaipole, Ekaterinoslav and Aleksandrovsk, but the movement’s influence extended intermittently over a much wider area. (Cartographer: Jenny Sandler).
1
The Deep Roots of Rural Discontent: Guliaipole, 1905–17
Nestor Ivanovich Makhno was born far from the centres of power, in the provincial Ukrainian town of Guliaipole, in Aleksandrovsk district, Ekaterinoslav province, probably in 1888, the fifth child in a family of former serfs.1 We know little for certain about his childhood and adolescence, and what we do know comes not from contemporary documentation but from later testimonies,2 including Makhno’s own. Some may have fed into each other, and some are the objects of condemnation,3 while Makhno’s own account was written in exile long after the events. The outline of the story of his youth is known but does not help us to understand how this half-educated provincial rebel, with no experience of soldiering, was able to become both an anarchist revolutionary and a successful commander within as well as apart from the Red Army.
After the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 his father, Ivan Mikhnenko, continued to work for his former master. When his wife was pregnant with Nestor, their fifth child,4 Ivan got a job with the Jewish merchant Kerner, who owned a factory, a shop and nearly 500 hectares of land.5 Before Nestor was even a year old, Mikhnenko died.6 The family lived in a shack near the market square, on the edge of town. They were too poor, in a semi-rural community, to afford to keep pigs or chickens, and Makhno’s earliest memories were of deprivation and struggle.7
Guliaipole, a provincial town like many others, was located on the river Gaichur, near the railway line to Ekaterinoslav.8 After the Stolypin agrarian reforms of 1906,9 the number of estates in the area grew to around 50, many owned by German colonists.10 Facilities included banks, a post and telegraph office, churches, a police station, a hospital, the volost’ administration building and several schools. Small-scale industrialisation had created a semi-proletariat, peasant workers at most a generation away from the land. Millworkers came seasonally from Poltava or Chernigov in the north, to live in barracks outside the town. Others laboured in factories, foundries or flourmills, or worked as domestic servants.11 German settlers, Jews and Russians lived in the area, but the population remained overwhelmingly Ukrainian.12
Makhno’s childhood and adolescence seem to have been unexceptional in this peri-urban provincial environment. When he was eight years old, he attended elementary school in Guliaipole for a couple of years and held a series of jobs as a farm boy, and then as an apprentice in a dye factory. By the time he was 14, according to one testimony, he had become a skilled dyer,13 and he later worked in the Guliaipole iron foundry.14 His contact with foundry workers may have had some influence on the formation of his political outlook and union activism, for metal-workers were known for their political militancy.15 Years later Makhno admitted that growing up poor fuelled his resentment against the better-off:
… I began to feel a kind of anger, of malice, even of hatred, for the landlords and above all for their progeny; against the young idlers who passed me by, all plump, hale and hearty, well-dressed, smelling of perfume, whereas I was dirty, in rags, barefoot and stinking of the dung heap …16
Aleksandr Shubin has pointed out that these circumstances were ‘almost ideal’ for fostering resentment: ‘poverty and a desire to escape it, to assert himself so as to take revenge on those who were responsible …’17: the later rapid growth of the insurgency that Makhno led is at least partially explicable in such terms. Makhno’s attachment to his mother, Evdokiia Matveevna, was strong, and her struggles fed into his anger towards the privileged. For years he harboured a grudge against a policeman who had once slapped her, and after his release from prison in 1917 he came close to shooting the man.18 The question remains, however, why it was that Makhno, out of the millions of youths in similar circumstances, went on to seize the historical moment between 1917 and 1921 and lead a massive uprising of the rural poor?
It seems probable that differences in the narratives around Makhno’s youth are determined to some extent by political positioning. He was supposedly hot-tempered,19 and there is anecdotal evidence that as a youth he was considered indolent and surly, qualities that led, in at least one case, to his losing a job.20 Indolence and surliness, of course, are plausible manifestations of resentment towards the wealthy. What is certain is that by his late teens, after the revolution of 1905 and irrespective of the psychological or personal circumstances that led him to it, Makhno became politically active. He seems initially to have been sympathetic to Menshevik ideas, and helped to distribute their literature. Despite this initial sympathy for the Mensheviks, he soon joined an anarchist-communist group – his older brothers were already members21 – and quickly became a participant in insurrectionist actions of ‘propaganda of the deed’, such as an attack on a post office, and robberies or ‘appropriations’.22 The anarchist-communists wanted a society organised around loose confederations of producers’ associations, in which agricultural and industrial labour would co-exist. Distinctions between inferior and superior work, between workers by hand and workers by brain, would vanish. This disappearance of the division of labour would result in a communal society in which all would work from free will.23
The conditions in which anarchist-communist ideas took root were by no means static, even in the Ukrainian provinces. Rapid urbanisation
