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”.14 One 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”.
The Declaration proclaimed that
factories, workshops, mines and other tools and means of production become the property of the working class as a whole, which will run all enterprises themselves, through their trade unions, getting production under way and striving to tie together all industry in the country in a single, unitary organisation.
These aims echoed the rhetorical goals of the Bolsheviks, with the crucial difference that they were underpinned by a federated, democratic “government” that allowed them to develop at their own pace, rather than a centralised dictatorship that imposed economic policy regardless of what workers wanted. The Declaration also supported free worker-peasant Soviets, proscription of the Cheka, abolition of any state militia or police and the “inalienable right” of free expression in newspapers, political parties and trade unions.15
In January 1919 the Red Army, under Commander Dybenko, attacked and took Kiev from the nationalist government of Petliura. For a brief time, the Makhnovists and the Bolsheviks worked together. In March 1919 Makhno and Dybenko concluded a pact for joint military action and Makhno’s forces held down a major portion of Denikin’s White Army. But Bolshevik policy in Ukraine was to replace local democratic bodies with Revolutionary Committees (i.e. Bolshevik Party cells) and disperse any Soviet that did not elect Bolshevik majorities. In contrast, the Makhnovists allowed free elections to Soviets and all other bodies (the Makhnovist Revolutionary Military Soviet elected at the Congress of Olexandrivske in late 1919 had a variety of socialists, including three Bolsheviks and six Mensheviks).16 Attempts by the Bolsheviks to implant Poor Peasant Committees in southern Ukraine, backed up by Cheka units, were met with armed resistance by Ukrainian peasants who supported Makhno.
In response the Bolsheviks began to insinuate that the Makhnovists were Kulaks and counter-revolutionaries. In April 1919, in response to the calling of the Third Regional Congress of Peasants, Workers, and Insurgents, Dybenko issued a telegram: