Nestor Makhno and Rural Anarchism in Ukraine, 1917-1921

Colin Darch

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781786805270
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Anarchism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Histories of the Russian Revolution often present the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 as the central event, neglecting the diverse struggles of urban and rural revolutionaries across the heartlands of the Russian Empire. This book takes as its subject one such struggle, the anarcho-communist peasant revolt led by Nestor Makhno in left-bank Ukraine, locating it in the context of the final collapse of the Empire that began in 1914.

Between 1917 and 1921, the Makhnovists fought German and Austrian invaders, reactionary monarchist forces, Ukrainian nationalists and sometimes the Bolsheviks themselves. Drawing upon anarchist ideology, the Makhnovists gathered widespread support amongst the Ukrainian peasantry, taking up arms when under attack and playing a significant role - in temporary alliance with the Red Army - in the defeats of the White Generals Denikin and Wrangel. The Makhnovist movement is often dismissed as a kulak revolt, or a manifestation of Ukrainian nationalism; here Colin Darch analyses its successes and its failures, emphasising its revolutionary character.

Over 100 years after the revolutions, this book reveals a lesser known side of 1917, contributing both to histories of the period and broadening the narrative of 1917, whilst enriching the lineage of anarchist history.

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 and industrialisation in the Russian Empire in the late 1800s and early 1900s 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 ...