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Maatstaf. Jaargang 24 (1976)

Maatstaf. Jaargang 24

(1976)– [tijdschrift] Maatstaf–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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Paul Avrich Makhno and His Biographers

Nestor Makhno, the anarchist partisan leader, was among the most colorful and heroic figures of the Russion Revolution and Civil War. His movement in the Ukraine represents one of the few occasions in history where anarchists controlled a large territory for an extended period of time. For more than a year he was a greater power on the steppe than either Trotsky or Denikin. A born military leader, he fought simultaneously on several fronts, opposing Whites as well as Reds, Austrian invaders as well as Ukrainian nationalists, not to speak of the countless bands of irregulars who crossed and recrossed the steppe in search of plunder and booty. According to Victor Serge, he was a ‘strategist of unsurpassed ability’ whose peasant army possessed a ‘truly epic capacity for organization and battle’. Emma Goldman called him ‘the most picturesque and vital figure brought to the fore by the Revolution in the South.’1.

For all his importance, however, Makhno has been seriously neglected by historians. Existing accounts of his movement, with very few exceptions, consist of mixtures of fact and fiction, of hostile, sometimes vicious polemics, sensationalist journalism, or uncritical, romanticized portraits verging on hagiography. Perhaps it is inevitable that a glamourous and controversial figure of Makhno's stamp should lend himself to such treatment. Yet it is nonetheless deplorable. Professional scholars, moreover, have tended to rely on the early histories of Voline and Arshinov for their information, rather than examining the original sources. (This is true even for the most elementary data, so that David Footman, George Woodcock, and James Joll, repeating Voline's error, all give the year of Makhno's death as 1935 rather than 1934.) It is true that the journals and manifestos of the Makhno movement are hard to come by, having been in great part lost or destroyed in the turmoil of the Civil War. It is true also that the relevant documents in Soviet archives remain closed to Western specialists. Nor, to my knowledge, have the archives of Voline (held by his sons in Paris) been made available to the scholar, though they are bound to include important materials. Yet, for all these limitations, the sources are nevertheless considerable and remain to be thoroughly tapped. What do they include? To begin with, we have Makhno's personal memoirs through December 1918, published in a three-volume Russian edition in Paris between 1929 and 1937, the last two volumes edited with valuable prefaces and notes by Voline. Volume One was translated into French (Paris, 1929; reprinted in 1970), Spanish (Barcelona, no date), and also Italian (Ragusa, 1972), and a French translation of the remainder is now in preparation. In addition, eleven Makhnovist proclamations were preserved by Ugo Fedeli, a well-known Italian anarchist who obtained them in the 1920's during visits to Moscow, Berlin, and Paris, where he came personally acquainted with Makhno. These proclamations were published in the original Russian in the International Review of Social History

in 1968 and are included in the new English edition of Arshinov discussed below. (Fedeli, incidentally, was himself the author of a short but useful study of the Makhno movement, Dalla insurrezione dei contadini in Ucraina alla rivolta di Cronstadt, published in Milan in 1950.)

Further archival materials, which will be mentioned again later, are to be found in the Tcherikower Collection of yivo (the Jewish Scientific Institute) in New York City. Moreover Soviet histories and documentary collections, while invariably hostile and of limited worth, contain some useful information, as do recent articles on Makhno in Soviet academic journals, such as ‘The Makhno Movement and Its Downfall’ by S.N. Semanova, which appeared in Voprosy istorii (Problems of History) in 1966. Beyond all this, additional documents and photographs no doubt remain in the hands of Makhno's surviving comrades in France and other Western countries. Furthermore, Michael Palij, a Ukrainian immigrant who is now a librarian in an American university, has produced an unpublished doctoral thesis on ‘The Partisan Movement of the Anarchist Nestor Makhno, 1918-1921’ (University of Kansas, 1971), and another thesis has been in preparation for several years at the London School of Economics by Michael Malet, who published a bibliographical essay on Makhno in Number 21 of the C.I.R.A. Bulletin (Fall 1970).

It is from such materials as these that the story of the Makhno movement will eventually be reconstructed, as well as from the scattered files of Makhnovist newspapers in Western libraries, interviews with surviving participants in the Insurgent Army and with people who knew Makhno in exile, the eyewitness histories of Arshinov and Voline, and the secondary accounts of the Makhnovshchina by David Footman, Max Nomad, and others.

Until now, however, there has been no careful and up-to-date study of Makhno based on the whole range of available sources. As a result, a number of nagging questions persist. Was Makhno a military dictator, as his enemies maintain? A ‘bandit and counterrevolutionary’, as the Soviets describe him? A ‘primitive rebel’, in Eric Hobsbawm's phrase? Was he an incurable drunkard? An anti-intellectual? An anti-Semite? A pogromist? How critical were his military efforts in saving the Revolution from the Whites? Did his unsophisticated equipment and tactics doom him to defeat before a centralized professional army? How succesfull were his attempts to establish local self-management in the villages and towns of the Ukraine? What do we really know about him? How much is myth and fantasy, and how much is incontrovertible fact?



illustratie
Titelpagina van de eerste druk - uit 1923 - van Arsjinof's Geschiedenis der Machnobeweging, nog altijd het standaardwerk


So far none of the books about Makhno provide wholly satisfying answers. The work that comes closest to doing so, Peter Arshinov's History of the Makhnovist Movement, was the first (and for a long time the only) full-length chronicle in any language. It has been the starting point for all other accounts. Later writers, including Nomad and Footman, have added little of substance to what Arshinov told us more than fifty years ago, and his book remains the best general history of the subject. How suprising, then, that we have had to wait so long for an English translation.2. Arshinov was on intimate terms with Makhno long before the latter launched his movement in the Ukraine. They had been fellow inmates in the Butyrki prison in Moscow, having been convicted of separate terrorist acts in the aftermath of the 1905 Revolution. While in jail, it was Arshinov who taught Makno the elements of anarchist theory. Afterwards he became the head of the Cultural-Educational Section of Makhno's Insurgent Army and editor of its newspaper, Put' k svobode (The Road to Freedom). As a result, he was thoroughly familiar with the documents of the movement, many of which were subsequently lost.

Between battles Arshinov worked on his manuscript, which was destroyed four times, twice at the front and twice during searches. Each time it had to be rewritten from scratch, and it was finally completed in June 1921, a year before Arshinov's deportation by the Bolsheviks. The original Russian edition was published in Berlin 1923 by the Group of Russian Anarchists in Germany with a valuable preface by Voline, who also helped translate the book into German, in which it was published the same year. (It has also appeared in French, Italian, and Spanish.) Voline's thoughtful preface (included in the new English edition) presents an interesting biographical sketch of Arshinov as well as a cogent overall analysis of the Makhnovshchina. Arshinov's book, as Voline points out, was

illustratie
Omslag van de Franse vertaling van het eerste deel van Nestor Machno's herinneringen, verschenen bij Pierre Belfond in 1970


written by a committed anarchist who was personally involved in the events that he recounts. Yet its interest reaches beyond the history of a single political group, for it throws considerable light on the Revolution and Civil War and the emergence of the Soviet dictatorship. The present English translation, by Lorraine and Fredy Perlman, is workmanlike if a trifle dry and literal. It is followed by a new appendix consisting of the eleven Makhno proclamations from the Ugo Fedeli Collection, translated from the Russian by Ann Allen. (The appendix to the Russian edition, a protest against Makhno's detention in Poland, has been omitted.) There is also a map of the Makhnovist region as well as six good illustrations, among them the handsome

photograph of Makhno (reproduced here) from which a widely distributed Anarchist Black Cross poster was made a few years ago. Unfortunately there is no index. Although the book leaves certain questions unanswered and suffers from an uncritical approach to its subject, it is a pioneering effort and should be read by anyone interested in the libertarian aspects of the Russian Revolution.

The recent biography by Victor Peters,3. the first book on Makhno in English, takes a completely different approach. It is the work of an American professor, the son of a Mennonite farmer from the Gulyai-Polye region and author of a previous book on the Hutterites that is one of the standard works on the subject. By comparison, however, his book on Makhno is disappointing. It is much too short to provide an adequate narrative and analysis, and it contains little that is new, apart from some anecdotal details obtained from correspondence and interviews with Ukrainian émigrés in North America and Western Europe. Peters, unaccountably, has neglected some of the most basic sources on Makhno, such as the journals and proclamations of his movement. On the other hand, his narrative is easy to follow (though the writing is undistinguished) and the book is worth reading even if it does not make a substantial contribution to scholarship, let alone provide the definitive biography of Makhno that we need.

The third book,4. by contrast, possesses the literary qualities of a novel or adventure story. Its author, Malcolm Menzies, writes in the clear an vivid style of a good popular biographer. He is more readable than either Peters or Arshinov, ans his book deserves a wider audience than it has so far received. It is certainly worthy of publication in the original English from which the present French edition has been translated. It provides an interesting psychological portrait of Makhno, with fresh insights into his personality; and apart from some minor errors (that can easily be corrected) it is perfectly accurate. Moreover, it contains new material both on his youth in Gulyai-Polye and on his last years in Paris (Menzies has looked up Makhno's reminiscences in Sébastien Faure's journal Le Libertaire, as well as talking to everyone he could find in Paris who knew Makhno).

But Menzies's interpretations of Makhno's character do not always ring true. He exaggerates Makhno's peasant primitiveness, his jealousy and dislike of intellectuals, his despotism and lust for power and glory. Detailed research into the Russian and Ukrainian as well as Yiddish sources is essential to clarify these and other controversial aspects of Makhno's personality and career. Menzies's lack of these languages presents a serious handicap in this respect, though he has gone to the trouble of having some of the more important materials translated for him. His book, while it does contain new insights and information, makes no pretense of being an original work of scholarship. It lacks a proper bibliography and proper documentation. To a considerable extent it is a synthesis - an able and well-written synthesis - of Arshinov, Voline, Footman, and a few other works. For all its virtues, a longer and more exhaustive study, based on a thorough examination of the sources, is what is needed most at this time.

 

What might a definitive biography of Makhno contain that has been inadequately dealt with in previous works? The present essays can provide only a few hints. In the first place, it would have to come to grips with the very question of Makhno's anarchism. According to Emma Goldman, Makhno's objective was to establish a libertarian society in the south that would serve as a model for the whole of Russia. Interestingly enough, Trotsky once noted that he and Lenin had toyed with the idea of allotting a piece of territory to Makhno for this pupose, but the project foundered when fighting broke out between the anarchist guerrillas and the Bolshevik forces in the

Ukraine. But was Makhno in fact a true anarchist or merely another ‘primitive rebel’ from the southern frontier, harking back to Stenka Razin and Emelian Pugachev with their vision of Cossack federalism and rough-and-ready democracy? The answer is that he was both. Nor is there any contradiction, for the Cossack-peasant rebellions of the 17th and 18th centuries possessed a strong egalitarian and anti-statist character, mounting an all-out attack upon the nobility and bureaucracy and regarding the state as an evil tyranny which trampled upon popular freedoms. Makhno's anarchism was entirely compatible with these sentiments and with peasant aspirations in general. The peasants wanted the land and then to be left alone by gentry, officials, tax-collectors, recruiting-sergeants, and all external agents of authority, replacing them with a society of ‘free toilers’ who, as the village put it, would ‘set to work to the tune of free and joyous song.’5.

In this sense, Makhno was the very incarnation of peasant anarchism, the partisan leader in closest touch with the most cherished hopes and feelings of the village. He was, in George Woodcock's description, ‘an anarchist Robin Hood’,6. a familiar figure in other peasant and artisan societies, notably Spain and Italy, where anarchism also struck lasting roots and won a sizeable following. (In Mexico, too, he had his counterparts in Emiliano Zapata and Ricardo Flores Magón.) He was a modern Razin or Pugachev come to rescue the poor from their oppress and to grant them land and liberty. As in the past, his movement arose in the southern borderlands and was directed against the wealthy and powerful. ‘Makhno,’ wrote Alexander Berkman, ‘became the avenging angel of the lowly, and presently he was looked upon as the great liberator, whose coming had been prophesied by Pugachev in his dying moments’.7. Following the example of his predecessors, Makhno expropriated the landlords, removed the officials, established a Cossack-style ‘republic’ in the steppe, and was revered by his followers as their batko, their good father. He called on the peasants to rise against the ‘golden epaulettes’ of Wrangel and Denikin and to fight for free soviets and communes. At the same time he opposed the ‘Communists and commissars’ just as Razin and Pugachev had opposed the ‘boyars and officials’. The Bolsheviks, for their part, denounced him as a ‘bandit’, the epithet with which Moscow had maligned its guerrilla opponents since the seventeenth century. Furthermore, the same legends arose about Makhno as about Razin and Pugachev. As his wife told Emma Goldman, ‘there grew up among the country folk the belief that Makhno was invincible because he had never been wounded during all the years of warfare in spite of his practice of always personally leading every charge.’8.

There was, however, an important difference. Unlike Razin and Pugachev, and unlike his contemporary ‘atamans’ in the Ukraine, Makhno was motivated by a specific anarchist ideology. Throughout his life he proudly wore the anarchist label as a mark of his opposition to authority. As early as 1906, as a lad of 17, he joined an Anarchist-Communist group in his native town of Gulyai-Polye. His understanding of anarchism matured during his nine years in Butyrki prison, under the tutelage of Peter Arshinov, and was further deepened by his contact with Voline, Aaron Baron, and other anarchist intellectuals who joined his movement during the Civil War. Of the older theorists, his main source of inspiration was Kropotkin, to whom he made a pilgrimage in 1918, an encounter movingly described in his memoirs. He also strongly admired Bakunin, and the stream of leaflets and proclamations which issued from his camp often bore a Bakuninist flavor.

Makhno's anarchism, however, was not confined to verbal propaganda, important though this was to win new adherents. On the contrary, Makhno was a man of action who,

even while preoccupied with military campaigns, sought to put his anarchist theories into practice. His first act on entering a town (after throwing open the prisons) was to dispel any impression that he had come to introduce a new form of political rule. Announcements were posted informing the local inhabitants that they were now free to organize their lives as they saw fit, that his Insurgent Army would not ‘dictate to them or order them to do anything’. Free speech, press, and assembly were proclaimed, although Makhno would not countenance organizations that sought to impose political authority, and he therefore dissolved the Bolshevik revolutionary committees, instructing their members to ‘take up some honest trade.’9.

Makhno's aim was to throw off domination of every type and to encourage economic and social self-determination. ‘It is up to the workers and peasants’, said one of his proclamations in 1919, ‘to organize themselves and reach mutual understandings in all areas of their lives and in whatever manner they think right.’ With his active support, anarchistic communes were organized, each with about a dozen households totalling a hundred to three hundred members; and if few of the participants considered themselves outright anarchists, they nevertheless operated the communes on the basis of full equality and accepted Kropotkin's principle of mutual aid as their fundamental tenet. Regional congresses of peasants and workers allotted each commune tools and livestock confiscated from the nobility and as much land as its members were able to cultivate without hiring additional labor. That the first such commune should have been named in honor of Rosa Luxemburg, an anti-authoritarian Marxist and recent martyr in the German Revolution, is a reflection of Makhno's undoctrinaire approach to revolutionary theory and practice.

In his attempts to reconstruct society along libertarian lines, Makhno also encouraged expe-

riments in workers' self-management whenever the occasion offered. For example, when the railway workers of Aleksandrovsk complained that they had not been paid for many weeks, he advised them to take control of the railroad and charge the users what seemed a fair price for their services. Such projects, however, were of limited success, though they call for a closer examination by historians. For Makhno found little time to implement his economic programs. He was forever on the move. His army was a ‘republic on peasant-carts’, as Voline described it, and ‘as always, the instability of the situation prevented positive work.’10.

In the Ukraine in 1918/20, as in Spain in 1936/39, the libertarian experiment was conducted amid conditions of civil strife, economic dislocation, and political and military repression, and was thus unable to endure. But not for want of trying, nor from any lack of devotion to anarchism. Through all Makhno's campaigns a large black flag, the classic symbol of anarchy, floated at the head of his army, embroidered with the slogans ‘Liberty or Death’ and ‘The Land to the Peasants, the Factories to the Workers.’ Makhno and his advisers even made plans to establish anarchist schools modelled on Ferrer's experiments in Spain, and would have carried them out had the situation permitted.

In one area, however, Makhno made significant compromises with his libertarian principles. As a military leader he was compelled to inaugurate a form of conscription in order to replenish his forces, and he is known on occasion to have imposed strict measures of military discipline, including summary executions. His violent tendencies, some maintain, were accentuated by bouts with alcohol. Voline emphasizes Makhho's drinking and carousing nature, and Victor Serge describes him as ‘boozing, swashbuckling, disorderly and idealistic.’11. Hostile observes have compared him to a Chinese warlord, insisting that his army was libertarian only in name. This, however, is not a true picture. For while military considerations inevitably clashed with Makhno's anarchistic doctrines, his army was more popular both in organization and social composition than any other fighting force of his day.

By all accounts Makhno was a military leader of outstanding ability and courage. His achievement in organizing an army and conducting an effective prolonged campaign is, apart from some of the successes of the Spanish anarchists in 1936/39, unique in the history of anarchism. He inherited a good deal of the Cossack tradition of independent military communities in the South and of their resentment of government encroachments. His guerrilla tactics of ambush and surprise were both a throwback to the Russian rebels of the past and an anticipation of the methods of combat lately employed in China, Cuba, and Vietnam. But how critical were his efforts in saving the Revolution from the Whites? Voline flatly asserts that ‘the honor of having annihilated the Denikinist counter-revolution in the autumn of 1919 belongs entirely to the Makhnovist Insurgent Army.’ David Footman writes more modestly that ‘there is some justification for the claim that Peregonovka was one of the decisive battles of the Civil War in the south.’12. In any case, the importance of the battle is beyond dispute.

Makhno, in short, was a thoroughgoing anarchist who practiced what he preached in so far as conditions permitted. A down-to-earth peasant, he was not a man of words, not a phrase-maker or orator, but a lover of action who rejected metaphysical systems and abstract social theorizing. When he came to Moscow, in June 1918, he was disturbed by the atmosphere of ‘paper revolution’ among the anarchists as well as the Bolsheviks. Anarchist intellectuals like Borovoi, Roshchin, and Gordin struck him as men of books rather than deeds, mesmerized by their own words and lacking the will to fight for their ideals. Nevertheless, he respected them for their learning and idealism and later sought their

assistance in teaching his peasant followers the fundamentals of anarchist doctrine.

Makhno's anti-intellectual streak was shared by his mentor Arshinov, a self-educated workman from the Ukraine like his pupil. Arshinov, however, went further. In his History of the Makhnovist Movement he not only criticizes the Bolsheviks as a new ruling class of intellectuals, a theory first put forward by Bakunin, developed by Machajski, and restated during the Revolution by Maximoff and other anarchist writers, but he expresses contempt for anarchist intellectuals as well, calling them mere theorists who never took affirmative action but who ‘slept through’ events of unparalleled historical significance, abandoning the field to the authoritarians.13. This goes far to explain his Organizational Platform of 1926, which criticizes do-nothing intellectuals and calls for effective organization and action.

This brings us to the vexed question of Makhno's alleged anti-Semitism, which future biographers must subject to careful scrutiny. Charges of Jew-baiting and of anti-Jewish pogroms have come from every quarter, Left, Right, and Center. Without exception, however, they are based on hearsay, rumor, or intentional slander, and remain undocumented and unproved. The Soviet propaganda machine was at particular pains to malign Makhno as an ordinary bandit and pogromist. But after careful research, Elias Tcherikower, an eminent Jewish historian and authority on anti-Semitism in the Ukraine, concludes that the number of anti-Jewish acts committed by the Makhnovists was ‘neglible’ in comparison with those committed by other combattants in the Civil War, the Red Army not excepted.

To verify this, I recently examined several hundred photographs in the Tcherikower Collection (housed in the yivo Library in New York) depicting anti-Jewish atrocities in the Ukraine during the Civil War. While a great many of them document acts perpretrated by the adherents of Denikin, Petliura, Girgoriev, and other selfstyled ‘atamans,’ only one is labelled as having been the work of the Makhnovists, though even here neither Makhno himself nor any of his recognizable subordinates are to be seen, nor is there any indication that Makhno had authorized the raid or, indeed, that the band involved was in fact affiliated with his Insurgent Army.

On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that Makhno did all in his power to counteract any anti-Semitic tendencies among his followers. Moreover, a considerable number of Jews took part in the Makhnovist movement.

Some, like Voline and Baron, were intellectuals who served on the Cultural-Educational Commission, wrote his manifestos and edited his journals, but the great majority fought in the ranks of the Insurgent Army, either in special detachments of Jewish artillery or infantry or else within the regular partisan units, alongside peasants and workers of Ukrainian, Russian, and other national origin. Makhno personally condemned discrimination of any sort, and punishments for anti-Semitic acts were swift and severe: one troop commander was summarily shot after raiding a Jewish town, and a soldier met the same fate merely for displaying a poster with the stock anti-Semitic formula, ‘Beat the Jews, Save Russia!’ Makhno denounced Ataman Grigoriev for his pogroms and had him shot. Had Makhno been guilty of the accusations against him, surely the Jewish anarchists in his camp would have broken with his movement and raised their voices in protest. The same is true of Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, and others who were in Russia at the time or of Sholem Schwartzbard, Voline, Ida Mett, Senya Fleshin, and Mollie Steimer in Paris during the 1920s. Far from criticizing Makhno as an anti-Semite, they defended him against the campaign of slander which persisted from all sides. Finally, the last years of Makhno's life deserve fuller treatment than they have so far received from the historians. Of all the writers to date, Malcolm Menzies has provided the most satisfactory account of this period, yet even

he has not told the full and dramatic story of Makhno's escape across the Dniester, his internment in Rumania, his escape to Poland, his arrest, trial, and acquittal, his flight to Danzig, renewed imprisonment and final escape (aided by Alexander Berkman and other comrades ein Europe), and his ultimate sanctuary in Paris, where he lived out the last ten years of his life in obscurity, poverty, and disease, an Antaeus cut off from the soil which might have replenished his strength. He had always hated the ‘poison’ of big cities, cherishing the natural environment in which he was born. How ironic, then, that he should be destined to end his days in a great foreign capital, working in an automobile factory, a restless consumptive for whom drink provided meager relief.

Yet he never lost his passion for anarchism, never abandoned the movement to which he had dedicated his life. He attended anarchist meetings (frequenting the Jewish ‘Autodidact’ Clubstrange behavior for a pogromist!), defended the Organizational Platform of his old comrade Arshinov, and mingled with anarchists from all over the world, including a group of Chinese students and also Durruti and Ascaso, whom he regaled with his adventures in the Ukraine and offered his help when the moment for their own struggle should arrive. While death intervened to prevent this, it is of great interest that a number of veterans of his Insurgent Army did in fact go to fight in the Durruti column in 1936.14. How fitting, then, that the Spanish comrades should have provided financial assistance when Makhno lay mortally ill with tuberculosis.

Makhno's final moments are movingly imagined in Malcolm Menzies' book. In July 1924 Makhno, 44years old, is lying at death's door in a Paris hospital. Overcome by fever, he lapses into semi-consciousness and dreams his last dream, a dream of his beloved countryside, of the open steppe covered with snow, crisp and white, a bright sun in an azure sky, and Nestor Ivanovich seated on his horse, moving in slow motion towards a cluster of mounted comrades waiting in the distance, who touch their caps in greeting at his approach. Time passes, the seasons change, spring arrives - Germinal, - the rebirth of hope, a landscape of green, the smell of fresh earth, a murmuring stream, and a fleeting, all too fleeting, glimpse of freedom. And then eternal silence. Makhno's body was cremated and the ashes interred in the Père-Lachaise Cemetery, not far from the mass grave of Paris Communards who were massacred there in 1871.


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