 Anarchy's Son By Volodymyr Senchenko |
The Ukrainian mass media recently reported that shooting has begun in Ukraine of a multi-series film about the life of Nestor Makhno, an historical figure dating back to the stormy days of Russian revolution, between 1905 and 1921. This is a man whose persona did not fit into the generally accepted system of a structured society. He was the embodiment of a spontaneous movement by the working masses for social justice. Indeed, all Robin Hoods, Karmelyuks and Opryshkos fought against the authorities because the authorities protected a certain class, a layer of tyrants.
Leftist Robin Hood
Makhno also began, like his predecessors, by confiscating riches from the rich and sharing them out amongst the downtrodden. He joined this fight in the years of the first Russian Revolution, in 1905, while still a boy. It was at that very time that he teamed up with a group of anarchic communists in his hometown of Hulay-Pole. Their slogans were Equality, Freedom and No to Statehood. Makhno later wrote in his memoirs that it was then that he understood his goal in life, which he never betrayed even to his dying breath.
For him, reckless by nature and from a poor family with several children, this was absolutely logical. In the beginning, he also believed that expropriating the property of the expropriators could be a success. However, his later life pushed him toward fighting against any authority and the state as such. His robbing of the rich led to his conflict with the law and a death sentence. However, because he was thought to be a minor, the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in a Moscow jail.
It was in jail, in Butyrsk, that Makhno received his political education. In those years in Russian prisons the inmates were able to educate themselves under the instruction of prisoners quite learned in theory. These prison universities were original and quite effective. The famous anarchist P. Artynov was Makhno's teacher and mentor.
However, after nine years of incarceration, Makhno gained freedom when the March 1917 revolution flung open the dungeon doors to political prisoners. Out came a politically mature fighter for social equality and freedom for ordinary people. Returning to his native Hulay-Pole, he quickly acquired a leading place in the local council. And even more quickly, simple folk began calling him - a young man only 30 years old - by the respected title of Papa, "Papa Makhno," which is the name he entered Ukrainian history with. Here, for the very first time, he had a chance to test his social experiments, long before the Bolsheviks would do so. Makhno nationalized and distributed land among the peasants, introduced a system of exchange of goods subject to inflation, and opened up some social institutions. In the main, such measures were received positively by the population and did not meet with resistance. His understanding of anarchic communism - as societies of self-governed communities, of free workers without a state or authorities, looked quite attractive, even though it was never accepted by any leading political forces.
In essence, the return of society to its non-state order, based on communities, was a naive one. Humanity had already passed through this stage thousands of years ago. It passed through it because the state and state organizations turned out to be a more perfect and effective form of organization of society. There are no goal posts in the historical process; however, the attractiveness of non-state, non-conformist anarcho-communism, free of bureaucrats and officials, continued to remain attractive to simple folk.
A war against all sides
The October revolution in Petrograd, and the civil war that ensued, interrupted the social experiments being carried out by Makhno, even though it is unclear what they would have resulted in. A bloody and cruel war began between the armies of several states: the Ukrainian People's Republic, the Russian Tsar's White Guards (Denikin, Wrangel) and the leaders of the new Bolshevik state. Military fate tied Makhno to the Bolsheviks during the defence of Tsaritsin (Stalingrad). But there was something he did not like about Bolshevik statehood, and he requested a meeting with the top Bolshevik himself, Lenin. Makhno had a high regard for Lenin's intellect but realized that they had different ideals. From then on, his union with the Bolsheviks was only of a situational nature. He ended up heading the defence of his lands by the Azov against all the above armies.
From that time Makhno became known more as a military commander, a leader of free workers and insurgent Makhnovites. Indeed, he is regarded in history as "Papa Makhno," the founder of partisan tactics, the leader of peasant uprisings and of their war against all usurpers.
Various forces appealed to him for help at various times, as did different armies. As a matter of principle he only entered into a union with the White Guards. On every single occasion his collaboration with the Bolsheviks ended with the latter trying to defeat or take over the armed forces of the insurgents. There were occasions when it seemed that Makhno's forces were finished, but just as repression against the population started anew, thousands, tens of thousands of insurgents were mobilized and took their places alongside the black and red flags of Makhno. His army would seem to be disintegrating, but then it would suddenly be reborn. In fact, this phenomenon is still observed in various partisan conflicts across the globe.
Makhno's fighters are credited with innovations in the application of arms to the specific features of partisan wars, in particular, the unification of the machine gun and the horse-drawn cart. This was a terrible weapon in a war of manoeuvre (the Bolsheviks stole the credit for the innovation by saying that it was the work of their cavalry commander, Buddoniy).
The last great joint operation of the Makhnovites and the Red Army was during the siege of the positions held by Baron Wrangel on the Perekoposk Isthmus to Crimea. The commanders of the Red Army advanced tens of thousands of fighters. As a teenager, I heard from people who had taken part in the fighting that during the attack they were forced to walk on the corpses of their fellow fighters. As the siege let up, Makhno's insurgents went around the lines of the White Guards, through the shallow Sivash Sea, and attacked from the rear. The front got moved right down to the ports of evacuation. At this point, there was no longer any need for Makhno's fighters, and the commanders of the Red Army gave the order to disarm them and arrest the commanders. However, Makhno had foreseen this and took measures ahead of time.
Now, the entire force of the Red Army, consisting of several million soldiers, focused on the fight against Makhno's insurgents. Nestor was wounded once again, but it was very difficult to defeat his fighters. On one occasion, even the supreme commander of the Red Army was forced to shamefully flee in person from Nestor.
However, the sides were unequally matched, and in the summer of 1921 Makhno escaped to Romania with a small group of supporters. He eventually settled in Paris, where he died in 1934 in dire poverty. Official Soviet propaganda created a picture of Makhno's followers as bandits and thieves who had high-tailed it abroad with their booty.
A legacy in review
No faithful supporter of the Soviet system ever wondered why Makhno was made into one of the two most odious enemies of the Soviet order. We can understand the attitude toward Leon Trotsky, who was a personal enemy and adversary of Joseph Stalin. The dislike of Makhno, however, was due to the fact that he was a vanguard and a symbol of the spontaneous yearning by workers for justice, equality and self-government - all those things that the workers expected from communism.
In the eyes of the workers, Makhno's communism and the communism of the Bolsheviks differed significantly. Makhno, just like the communists, was in favour of the destruction of the state, but he advocated its immediate destruction, while Stalin drew the process out, as would become clear later on, to his own advantage. Makhno fought for the triumph of self-government, which recalls the freedom of the Ukrainian Cossacks. It has been said that Makhno was "the last living example of the Cossack spirit." After all, Hulay-Pole, Nestor's homeland, was a place where the hope for Cossack freedom never died.
There was undoubtedly one more reason why the Soviet system hated Nestor Makhno. In his memoirs, Makhno mentions that during his meeting with Lenin he complained to him that Lenin, just like his fellow Bolshevik communists, was avoiding mention of the very name of Ukraine. Lenin failed to respond to the complaint. At the end of their conversation Makhno said to Lenin: "You regard Ukraine to be Southern Russia." To which Lenin replied quite unequivocally: "Friend, to have a view is one thing, but to realise it is quite another."
And so Nestor Makhno had thereby revealed himself to the leader of Russian communism as a Ukrainian communist, and nobody at that time was forgiven for their Ukrainian identity.
With the declaration of Ukrainian independence last decade, it seemed that the golden era had finally arrived for Nestor Makhno. However, economic troubles postponed the return of his good name to society for a few more years.
And it seems that it is only now that some understanding is appearing of the historical importance of Makhno. The first step towards this will be a film of his life in several parts. This will mean the spiritual rehabilitation of a famous son of the freedom-loving people of the Azov steppe.
This could be a unique film about a person who became a legend in his lifetime: while he was being baptised the priest's vestment caught fire; and when his mother was registering his birth she wrote the wrong date, which saved him from the death sentence (as he was thought to still be a minor). During the years of the Civil War he was wounded 11 times, but not once fatally. The respectful title of "Papa" that he received was only given to renowned commanders of insurgents and partisans. Commanders of the Red Army preferred to be called Batya, the Russian equivalent.
All of this and a lot more of the heroic and amazing from Makhno's biography offer film makers unique material from which it will not be too difficult to make a masterpiece of Oscar proportions. It is hard to say what will actually happen, because average films are not made in Ukraine. They are either masterpieces of all ages and peoples, or something that is embarrassing to show to people. Let's hope we live to see the result.
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More in the section:
The Heat of the Land
Read also previous issue' articles:
A heat wave in Ukraine
"The Spirit of Hollybush" Comes to Donetsk
The new wave of Labor Migration
Home Discoveries
Asserting dignity
New Public Health for the New Ukraine
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