Arshinov, a fellow anarcho-terrorist, had been jailed for blowing up a police station and assassinating a railway official. While incarcerated in Moscow’s notorious Butyrki prison, Makhno came under the ideological sway of a more experienced anarchist, Peter Arshinov. A few survivors went underground to keep the local anarchist cell alive. Stepped-up police action soon broke up the group – several were killed in a shoot-out, some were executed, while Makhno and 15 others were jailed in 1908 for murder. An informer sent in from a nearby town was shot. A second expropriation resulted in the shooting of a popular local policeman. A drunk who talked too much had to be killed by one of the anarchists. But typically for terrorist groups things soon started to go wrong. Five hundred roubles were stolen from a local nationalist poet, Kernerenko, and used to produce the first local anarchist leaflet on a second-hand hectograph. The Huliai Pole anarchist group was involved in small scale robbery to finance its activities. These savage measures left an indelible mark on the town and sowed the seeds of covert unrest that infected all the people, especially the young. Whoever was caught on the streets was brutally whipped. A detachment of mounted police was dispatched to Huliai Pole to suppress gatherings and meetings and terrorise the population. The tsarist regime unleashed a wave of repression to crush the risings. This was during the course of the 1905-06 Russian revolution, when the peasant uprisings in the Ukraine were among the most violent in the empire. He had little formal education and worked on the estates of local nobles and rich German peasants and briefly in a factory before at the age of 17 joining a local anarcho-terrorist group. Nestor Makhno was of peasant stock from the large peasant village of Huliai Pole, population 30,000, in the southern Ukraine. Raincoats that leak only when it rains, i.e., in “exceptional” circumstances, but during dry weather they remain waterproof with complete success. As Trotsky put it in another context, anarchist theory is like He shot both White and Red prisoners and banned rival political parties.Īnarchist rhetoric can seem very revolutionary in non-revolutionary times, but in revolutionary upheavals it is useless. He built a disciplined and centralised peasant army, formed his own officer corps, and set up a security apparatus just as brutally efficient as the Bolshevik Cheka. Instead, spurning the working class, Makhno hoped to establish anarchism by armed conquest. The problem was that while he copied their organisational methods, he did not, despite certain rhetorical asides, embrace the Marxist world view centred around the self-emancipation of the working class which alone gave Bolshevism a liberating and revolutionary content. Indeed I will argue that under the pressure of events, a partisan leader like Makhno who wanted to win a bloody civil war, had to increasingly forsake his libertarian “principles” and replicate the methods of his hated rivals, the Bolsheviks. It was glaring in Makhno’s case as he was above all an activist, who scorned the dilettantish amateurism of the city-based Russian anarchists. As most anarchists are little more than romantic dreamers, this contradiction is not sharply posed. Makhno is worth studying however, not just because he is a controversial historical figure, but because his movement reveals the profound dichotomy in anarchist politics – the enormous separation between their utopian theory and their practice. In reality, this was the struggle of the infuriated petty property owner against the proletarian dictatorship. Of course, Makhno called this the anarchist struggle with the state. …hostility to the city nourished the movement of Makhno, who seized and looted trains marked for the factories, the plants, and the Red Army tore up railroad tracks shot Communists. Lenin condemned Makhno as a “bandit”, while Trotsky stated that: The Bolsheviks had just as sharp opinions. The Bolsheviks’ suppression of Makhno and their crushing of the 1921 Kronstadt uprising are for anarchists two key examples of “Red tyranny”. The Makhnovchina, better perhaps than any other movement, shows that the Russian Revolution could have become a great liberating force. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, one of the leaders of the sixties New Left, declared in his book Obsolete Communism The Left-Wing Alternative that: Nestor Makhno, the Ukrainian anarchist partisan leader, is one of the great romantic heroes of anarchism. This version is uploaded for archival purposes only. Note: An updated and improved version of this article was published by Socialist Alternative in Marxist Left Review, 12, Winter 2016.
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