were driving social change in both the cities and in the countryside. It has elsewhere been argued that government policy and institutional obstacles to easy movement into large cities meant that much industrialisation remained strongly linked to the countryside.24 Hence, the provincial city of Ekaterinoslav experienced massive population growth in this period: there were 47,000 people living there in 1885, around the time of Makhno’s birth, but by 1897 this had more than doubled to 113,000, and in 1910, before the outbreak of war, had again doubled to 212,000 inhabitants.25 Similar social and economic transformations took place in the rural areas generally, affecting the outlook of the peasantry in important and complex ways.
In the early twentieth century, the majority of Russian peasants were still organised around the dvor (household), a loose family unit that was the nucleus of peasant society in the sense that the family’s lives were integrated with the farming enterprise that provided food and even a surplus.26 In Teodor Shanin’s words:
The family provides the essential work team of the farm, while the farm’s activities are geared mainly to production of the basic needs of the family and the dues enforced by the holders of political and economic power.27
The other key social structure was the obshchina or peasant commune, a mechanism for distributing strips of land to families according to capacity and need. This was done though a ‘patriarchal village assembly’ called a skhod, made up of male heads of household and some village elders, who would decide when ‘repartition’ had become necessary, as well as when it was time for planting and harvesting. Most peasant farmers neither hired labour (which was provided by family members) nor worked for hire (as their needs were met by family production). Despite its democratic deficiencies, the skhod controlled many aspects of social and economic activity, as well as providing some security for the obshchina’s members.28 However, architects of the emancipation of 1861 were concerned not to prejudice the interests of landowners, so liberated serfs were required to purchase allotments from their former oppressors, sometimes losing as much as a quarter of their land in the process.29 Despite the romanticism about the character of the commune in the writings of some Slavophiles, they were far from being static and could also become centres of conflict: they were far from being ‘rustic haven[s] of equality, stability and brotherly love’.30 In times of unrest and revolution, violent clashes over land and other issues were frequent, particularly between peasants who had remained in the communes (obshchinniki), and peasants who had left in order to engage in private commercial farming (otrubshchiki), who were seen as exploiters.31
Access to schooling, access to transport networks, a growth in male labour migration,32 and military service for young men all began to impact on the so-called traditions of rural life, including the obshchina itself. Rural people could buy clothes and books, as well as manufactured goods.33 They engaged directly with the state through the judicial system, pursuing justice and resolving conflicts through the courts in diverse ways.34 Through the networks established by these processes, radical political ideas spread quickly among the younger members of the community, although the older generation – in positions of relative power as members of the local administration, the police force, or the bureaucracy – supported ‘tradition’, including the subjugation of women.35
Revolutionary unrest broke out in January 1905 all over the Russian Empire, and continued intermittently until 1907. In Ukraine it was most marked by peasant revolts on the right bank, although there were also strikes and violence in Khar’kov and Ekaterinoslav, and by the end of 1905 soviets had appeared in many Ukrainian cities. In the context of these revolutionary events, the varied processes of modernisation, and the state’s resistance to them during the so-called ‘Stolypin reaction’ from 1906 to 1910, the Guliaipole anarchist-communists saw their immediate task as a violent struggle against the police, the most obvious local manifestation of state violence. This was a continuation of tactics adopted during 1905. Southern anarchist groups such as the Chernoznamentsy (followers of the Black Flag) had energetically bombed, robbed, blackmailed and sabotaged, but with little impact. Many such activists were youths of Makhno’s generation: few were members of the intelligentsia. All the groups were numerically tiny, probably totalling less than 6,000 people for the whole Russian empire.36 After the defeat of the 1905 revolution, the sectarianism and pressure from the state significantly weakened the anarchist movement. Many militants were dead, in jail, or exiled, and survivors were isolated.
The Guliaipole organisation called itself the ‘Peasants’ Group of Anarchist-Communists’, and through a propagandist named Vol’demar Antoni maintained links with an anarchist-communist group in Ekaterinoslav.37 The dozen or so core members were mostly peasants, with a larger fringe of hangers-on. They held political classes in each other’s homes or in the open air. They used codenames and had a probation period for new members. They were tactically and organisationally unsophisticated, but appear to have been genuinely driven by political conviction in the notion of freedom for the people.38 Relations between the Guliaipole and Ekaterinoslav groups were close, influenced by an army deserter called Aleksandr Semeniuta. Most of their expropriations and assassinations were carried out between September 1906 and July 1908.39 According to one account the other members did not trust Makhno because he was habitually drunk, aggressive and talkative, often picking fights.40 Some testimonies claim that he was careless: a saucepan that he used to mix explosives once blew up on his mother’s stove.41 On the other hand, Aleksei Chubenko says Makhno attended meetings daily, and carried out missions efficiently and selflessly.42
The first robbery took place on the evening of 5/18 September 1906,43 when three armed men appeared at the home of a local merchant called Pleshchiner and demanded money. He handed over cash and jewellery. On 10/23 October, another group carried out a similar robbery, demanding ‘money for the starving’.44 They spent the money on a duplicating machine, producing leaflets and tracts attacking the Stolypin reforms, and calling for mass struggle against the kulaki. The third expropriation targeted the manufacturer Mark Kerner, the ‘Croesus of Guliaipole’ and the former employer of Makhno’s father. He was robbed by assailants who got away with cash and a silver ingot. Kerner later testified that there were seven members of the gang and that they seemed nervous, for he noticed that their hands were shaking. Two days later, on 15/28 November 1906, the expropriators sent Kerner a letter expressing regret that they had taken so little money from him. The ‘detachment of armed workers’, as they styled themselves, told Kerner that they knew he had informed the police and warned that if investigations continued his home would be bombed.45 Makhno was certainly under police surveillance by this time – in 1917, when Makhno gained access to the police archives of Guliaipole, he discovered that at least one member of his anarchist group had been a police spy.46 In late 1906 he was arrested for the first time, on suspicion of the murder of a rural police constable, but was released immediately.47
After the attack on Kerner the anarchist gang lay low for the rest of winter and through spring. In August 1907 they attempted a fourth expropriation, this time in the Gaichur settlement, a suburb of Guliaipole near the railway station. Four armed men with their faces covered burst into the house of a merchant named Gurevich late at night. They demanded money in the name of the anarchist-communists – the first time the group had identified itself during a robbery. Unfortunately for the expropriators, Gurevich’s nephew refused to be intimidated and raised a hue-and-cry. The four seized a post-office wagon near the railway station and galloped away, shooting as they went.48 Undeterred, on 19 October/1 November 1907 they tried again, this time ambushing a post-office cart which they raked with gunfire, killing a postman, a village constable, and a horse.
The local police failed to identify the robbers, but immediately after the last ambush the anarchists’ luck turned for the worse. A prisoner in Ekaterinoslav jail told the police that he knew the names of the ambushers – a fellow-prisoner had confided that he had taken part in the attack. The assault had been the brainchild of Vol’demar Antoni,
