John Medhurst - No Less Than Mystic - A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left

The editorial concluded, “The disputes among the Bolsheviks themselves and popular opposition to a government of ‘people’s commissars’ show better than anything else that the seizure of power and the social revolution are diametrically opposed”. 11

Two weeks later the anarchist writer N.I. Pavlov wrote in Golos Truda that 25th October had not been a vindication of the Bolshevik Party. “What is taking place now is not a rising of the Bolsheviks but a rising of all the laboring masses”, Pavlov claimed. “The Bolsheviks are not so very numerous, and it is not really their affair. A large percentage of the rebels are absolutely non-party workers, peasants and soldiers”. Pavlov asserted:

Neither the Chernovs nor the Lenins, by their decrees, laws, edicts, and authority, can help starving Russia. The only way out […] is for the peasants themselves, in an organised manner, to take all the land and grain and by their common effort begin to construct a new agricultural economy; and for the factory workers, without relying on any ‘control over production’ […] to take all production in their own hands.

Whilst he rejected the Constituent Assembly as an outdated bourgeois parliament, he finished with, “Long live the Soviets in local regions, reorganised on new, truly revolutionary, working class and non-party lines!” 12

For the next six months the anarchists continued to agitate against the Bolsheviks. They bitterly denounced the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk as an intolerable compromise with German imperialism. To the anarchists, the multiple blows of the Treaty, the nationalisation of the land and suppression of the Factory Committees, added to the concentration of power in governmental bodies like Sovnarcom, Vesenka and the Cheka, had created what they labeled a “Commissarocracy”. When the Fourth All-Russian Soviet Congress met in March 1918 to decide on ratification of the Treaty, all fourteen anarchist delegates voted against. Some even began to make noises about partisan resistance to the Bolsheviks.

On 12th April armed Cheka detachments surrounded twenty-six anarchist centres in Moscow and demanded they surrender. When they refused the Cheka stormed the premises, killing forty and arresting over five hundred. After this many anarchists relocated to Ukraine to join Nestor Makhno’s Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine, which over the next three years fought the White and Red army alike to preserve the freedom of the independent peasant communes set up there.

Makhno’s army and the region over which it presided were a functioning alternative to the regime being established by Sovnarcom. While the Bolshevik government dismantled free Soviets and independent Factory Committees in the areas under its controls, the “Black Army” protected and promoted Soviets and self-managed peasant communes within the “Free Territory” (roughly the southeastern quarter of present-day Ukraine). The Free Territory emerged from the Ukrainian People’s Republic, which declared itself a sovereign independent state in January 1918. The Republic lasted two months before most of Ukraine was ceded to Germany by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

In April 1918 an autocratic anti-socialist regime headed by the “Hetman” Pavlo Skoropadsky grabbed power in alliance with the German army. In response to the occupation the young anarchist Nestor Makhno formed the Black Army, whose total size would fluctuate between 20,000 and 110,000 men. Its heartland was the Gulyai-Polye region of south-east Ukraine. Makhno’s partisans covered great distances over the Ukranian steppes between the River Dnieper and the Sea of Azof, expropriating landed estates, liberating towns, freeing prisoners and redistributing wealth.

Makhno was born into a poor peasant family in Ukraine and became an anarchist at the age of sixteen during the 1905 Revolution. Arrested in 1908 for “terroristic” acts, he was sentenced to life with hard labour. While in prison he educated himself in mathematics, political economy and Russian history. He shared a cell with the older anarchist Peter Arshinov (who would later be his political adviser and produce the definitive History of the Makhnovist Movement ), who broadened his knowledge of the intellectual history of anarchism and the works of Bakunin and Kropotkin.

Released from prison after the February 1917 Revolution, Makhno returned to Gulyai-Polye. He founded a farm workers’ union and a Peasants Soviet so that peasants could run their own affairs free of the government and the landed gentry. He also became President of the Union of Metal and Carpentry Workers, the Peasants Union and finally of the Workers and Peasants Soviet of Gulyai-Polye. After October 1917, as President of the local Soviet, he brought all these forces together to create autonomous, self-managed peasant communes across southern Ukraine. In Richard Stites’s estimation, he “emerged directly from the people, and was perhaps the closest thing the Russian Revolution produced to a peasant leader with a utopian vision that seemed to fit the culture of his people”. 13

Around his “capital” of Gulyai-Polye, a town of about 30,000 people, Makhno established dozens of libertarian communes in which the land was held in common. The German occupation army put a temporary stop to this. After a brief but unsatisfactory visit to Moscow to seek Bolshevik aid he returned to Ukraine and formed the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army to fight the Germans, the Whites and Skoropadsky. The communes started up again, each one allocated land and livestock by elected Regional Congresses of peasants. At the end of the war the Germans withdrew and Skoropadsky fell. For the first six months of 1919, as the Red Army fought the White Army of General Denikin and Kiev changed hands several times, Makhno and his supporters were left alone to construct an anarcho-communist society in southern Ukraine that came to be known as Makhnovshchina . The first step towards that society was the election by Regional Congresses of a Military Revolutionary Council of Peasants, Workers and Insurgents to carry out the decisions of the Congresses.

Makhno has been presented by his detractors as a “Primitive Rebel”, a free-wheeling brigand in the tradition of the Russian steppes. But as Paul Avrich makes clear, he was “motivated by a specific anarchist ideology”. 14One of his first acts upon liberating a town from the Whites or local bourgeois authorities was to post proclamations that stated the citizens were now free to run their affairs in any way they saw fit. In reality there were exceptions, for although free speech, free assembly and a free press were proclaimed and abided by (strikingly different from the areas controlled by Sovnarcom), the army forbade institutions that tried to impose a separate political authority. As a result it dissolved the Bolsheviks’ Revolutionary Committees which claimed for themselves a governing authority with no popular mandate. The most complete summary of Makhno’s political philosophy is contained in the “Declaration of the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of the Ukraine (Makhnovist)”, issued 7th January, 1920 as the Red Army closed in on the Free Territory with the intent of shutting it down.

The Declaration begins by declaring that the Army was “called into existence as a protest against the oppression of the workers and peasants by the bourgeois-landlord authority on the one hand and the Bolshevik-Communist dictatorship on the other”. It claimed one goal–“The battle for total liberation of the working people of the Ukraine from the oppression of various authorities and the creation of a TRUE SOVIET SOCIALIST ORDER”. Beyond that, “All decrees of the Denikin authority are abolished. Those decrees of the Communist authority which conflict with the interests of the peasants and workers are also repealed”. It made clear that “the lands of the service gentry, of the monasteries, of the princes and other enemies of the toiling masses, with all their livestock and goods, are passed on to the use of those peasants who support themselves solely through their labour”.