This week’s episode is brought to you by Trade Coffee. Did you know that 90% of coffee in the grocery store is actually stale? You heard that right: the coffee, you know, and think you love needs an upgrade. And instead of rebuying the same old, same old, let Trade Coffee send you something freshly roasted that you’re literally guaranteed to love. You take a coffee quiz to get started, then Trade calculates a flavor profile and starts sending you the freshest roasted and ethically sourced beans from America’s best independent roasters. Trade Coffee guarantees you’ll love your first bag, or they will replace it for free, and after that, the subscription is no hassle. You can skip shipments or cancel any time.

This week, I got a bag from Feast Coffee & Culture in Redding, California, specifically the Power and Glory blend, it’s great, so shout out to Feast in Redding, California for making a great cup of coffee. For listeners of our show, right now Trade Coffee is offering a total of $20 off your first three bags when you go to drinktrade.com/revolutions. To get started, take their quiz at drinktrade.com/revolutions and start your journey to your perfect cup. That’s drinktrade.com/revolutions for $20 off your first three bags.

This week’s episode is also brought to you by Ritual Protein. Powders can be intimidating, but the fact is we all need protein. It’s pretty important. Rituals Essential Protein is a delicious plant-based protein powder with three distinct formulas designed to meet the body’s changing protein needs. You can keep it simple and just add water, shake it up and sip, but we here in the Duncan house take all the good stuff in Ritual Protein Powder and put it in our smoothies every morning. That’s how we like to use it, it blends great, it tastes great, and it’s become part of our well ritual. Now, one of the great things about Ritual is their transparent supply chain, where every labeled ingredient comes with information about what and how and why it came to be in the bag. And it’s all sustainably sourced: the peas are regeneratively grown in the United States.

Ready to shake up your protein ritual? My listeners get 10% off during your first three months at ritual.com/revolutions. Ritual even offers a money back guarantee: if you’re not a hundred percent in love, visit ritual.com/revolutions today for 10% off your first three months.

Hello, and welcome to Revolutions..

Episode 10.87: Anarchy in Ukraine

Last time we talked about the ongoing transformation of Russia into a centralized one-party regime, which increasingly took the form of elected soviets of soldiers, workers, and peasant deputies, but which functionally became an appendage of the Communist Party. And as we discussed, this transformation caused tension, resentment, and finally outright revolt in many areas controlled by the Communists. But we also discussed how this was all taking place inside the context of the larger civil war, and many of those frustrated with the Communists ultimately concluded that the Reds, however annoying they were were better than the Whites. This week, we are going to talk about a region where this mess of social unrest and political tension and military necessity combined with particular volatility… Ukraine.

Since the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the armies of the Central Powers had been occupying Ukraine, but their capitulations on the western front in the autumn of 1918 meant that they were now going to be forced to withdraw. This withdrawal would leave a gaping power vacuum that left much of Ukraine in a state of anarchy. And I don’t mean that as a pejorative synonym for chaos and disorder — although there was an awful lot of that going around — I mean, a literal state of anarchy. Because Ukraine was the place where the black flag-flying anarchists enjoyed the greatest success at establishing their vision for what post-revolutionary society ought to look like. Now depending on who you talk to, they either provided a viable blueprint for an alternative to the creeping authoritarianism of the Communists, or, they were simply tossing off half-baked ideas that were never going to survive prolonged contact with reality. Either way, there is no way to tell the story of the Russian Revolution without discussing the Ukrainian anarchists, and specifically their greatest leader, Nestor Makhno.

Nestor Makhno was born in 1889 in Huliaipole, a small rural city in southeast Ukraine situated east of the Nepa River and north of the Sea of Azov. His parents had both been born serfs and were liberated by the Emancipation Decree of 1861, but they were still extremely poor at the time of his birth. Compounding the family’s misfortunes, Makhno’s father died when he was just 10 months old. Little Nestor was the youngest of five children, and he received only a few years primary education. As a student, he was noted for being bright and clever, but also extremely headstrong and rebellious. He didn’t last long in school though, but mostly because the family’s economic circumstances forced him to go out and work for wages. He took his first paying job at the age of just seven. Makhno spent what was left of his childhood working in the fields for wages before moving on to assorted other odd jobs. Wherever you went, the story was always the same: bright and capable, but rebellious and undisciplined.

Makhno came equipped with an instinctive hostility to authority that was compounded by a life spent working for various landlords and estate managers. He never did go back to school, and so unlike most of the other revolutionaries we’ve talked about, Makhno was not radicalized at university before advancing onto the coffee houses. In fact, he developed something of a loathing for those kinds of intelligentsia radicals who had no real connection to the things they were talking about. And in fact, Makhno actually was what many coffee house Russian revolutionaries idolized, but could never be themselves: a true revolutionary peasant.

Makhno first got into politics as a teenager in the wake of the Revolution of 1905. Attracted to the fundamentally anti-authority message of anarchism, he joined a small anarchist group in his hometown of Huliaipole in 1906. Their group numbered in the mere dozens, but were committed to continuing the revolutionary struggle even in these reactionary days of the Stolypin era. The group engaged in both revolutionary expropriations — which is to say, robberies, as well as revolutionary strikes against the enemies of the people — which is to say, bombings and arsons of local estates. He was arrested once and held for ten months before being released without charges even being filed. And then the Okhrana infiltrated the group, and after several shootouts with the police, Makhno was arrested again. Several of his comrades were hanged, and he himself was sentenced to death, but this sentence was commuted down to life in prison on account of his alleged youthful immaturity.

Transferred to a prison in Moscow, young Makhno wound up amidst other veteran political prisoners. And as we’ve seen before, Russian prisons turned out to be a great place to get further radicalized. In particular, Makhno met a guy called Pyotr Arshinov, who schooled him in anarchism, slipping him smuggled copies of Bakunin and Kropotkin. These books gave form and voice to Makhno’s own instinctive loathing of authority, and he became a committed anarchist, placing the blame for most social ills and injustices on the nature of political authority itself, and believing the common people would be just fine running their own affairs without the need for any parasitic and exploitive state apparatus.

Makhno was still sitting in prison at the age of 27 when the February Revolution hit. He and all the other political prisoners were amnestied and set free. He returned home to Huliaipole and immediately started working to organize the local population, putting into practice the things he had learned in prison. Makhno turned out to be a naturally charismatic leader, and in the post-February Revolution era became a forceful advocate for direct appropriation of land by the peasants. These were the days when the provisional government in Petrograd was dragging their feet on the land question, and we talk about how the peasants out there just started taking matters into their own hands. Well, Nestor Makhno was one of those taking power into his own hands. He led strikes and work stoppages, organized volunteer armed bands to go disarm local law enforcement, and simply seize estate lands and redistribute them to the peasants, asking neither permission nor forgiveness. It was during this period in 1917 that Makhno gained a reputation as a sort of revolutionary Robin Hood, rallying the locals under the slogan Land and Liberty, not unlike his Mexican counterpart Emiliano Zapata, who had been doing the same thing for years in the Mexican state of Morelos. Doing of their own initiative with their own people what the educated big city intellectuals only talked about doing.

This initial period of revolutionary anarchism was upended by the treaty of Brest-Litovsk and the invasion of Ukraine by the Central Powers. This invasion was ostensibly welcomed by the leaders of the Rada and their self-declared Ukrainian People’s Republic, and also ratified and recognized by the Russian Bolsheviks. Makhno and his comrades were aghast at the portrayal of the people of Ukraine, but there wasn’t anything they could do about it. He had a small partisan band who were sturdy, loyal, and tough, but they weren’t going to be able to fend off hundreds of thousands of invading Germans, Austrians, and Hungarians. So instead they settled into a life resisting the occupation when and where they could, and protecting local peasants from abuses by the occupation authorities.

In the early summer of 1918, Makhno embarked on a tour of Russia to try to gin up support for the Ukrainian resistance, eventually winding his way to Moscow in July. According to Makhno’s memoir, while in Moscow, he had two important meetings: first with aging Kropotkin, who offered him sage advice and cautious encouragement; but the other was an audience with Lenin in the Kremlin. According to Makhno, Lenin quizzed him on the situation in Ukraine, bemoaned the contagion of anarchism, but finally admitted that they were at least probably fighting on the same side. Makhno provides a detailed description of this conversation, and his depiction of Lenin certainly tracks with Lenin’s personality, but it is worth mentioning that, so far as I can tell, Makhno’s memoir is the only evidence we have that he ever met personally with Lenin. There’s apparently no other contemporaneous record, schedule, calendar entry, or note from anyone working inside the Kremlin at the time that confirms that this meeting ever took place. Which doesn’t mean that it didn’t, just that it’s not entirely clear that it did.

From Moscow, Makhno returned to Huliaipole and found things had gotten worse in his absence. The occupation forces were rooting out all his comrades, his mother’s home had been burned to the ground, his brother had been shot. He also discovered that a bounty had been placed on his own head, and he had to go into hiding.

But, it would be a very active hiding, not a passive hiding. Makhno started organizing and arming local forces to commence a more deliberate guerrilla campaign against the occupation, and it was during this period in the second half of 1918 that his reputation as an innovative military strategist and tactician grew. He wound up running an exemplary guerrilla campaign built on speed, mobility, surprise, local knowledge and loyal comradery. His growing forces were supported by the peasants with food supplies and information. They could gather, strike and disperse before the enemy forces — mostly Austrian soldiers — could respond. He famously pioneered the use of mounting machine guns on horse-drawn carts to strike targets with deadly speed. And while military affairs took up most of his attention, Makhno also became quite the anarchist proselytizer. He delivered passionate political speeches in every town and village he passed through, always and everywhere, promising the people what they wanted: land and Liberty. His courage in battle and steadfast commitment to the safety of the local population earned him the affectionate honorific Bat’ko, or little father, and as much as Makhno hated all forms of authority, he was earning quite a bit of it for himself.

This brings us to November 1918 when everything gets turned upside down once again. The defeated Central Powers had to renounce their claim to Ukraine and prepare to withdraw their forces. This left the propped up reactionary regime of Hetman Skoropadsky without anything propping him up. Multiple political factions gathered forces to overthrow the Hetmanate, and within a matter of weeks, Skoropadsky abandoned Kiev and fled into permanent exile. His flight was precipitated by the advance of those left leaning Ukrainian nationalists that had formed the initial leadership of the Rada. They took over Kiev on December 19th, and established a new directory government to govern what they were declaring to be the restored Ukrainian People’s Republic.

But they were far from the only faction in play. Conservative forces who had supported the Hetman and the occupation waited in the wings for an opportunity to launch a counterrevolution. Meanwhile, on the border with Russia, there loomed two forces: the Russian Communists were organizing an army to support a Ukrainian soviet socialist republic that would enter Ukraine as soon as they were sure the armies of the Central Powers were fully withdrawn, but there were also White armies under General denikin also poised for an invasion. They planned to take over Ukraine and use it as a further springboard to capture Moscow.

Meanwhile, anarchist groups like Makhno’s had no truck with any of these people, and they planned to carve out their own stateless society free of all outside authority or interference. At a regional congress of insurgent leaders in late 1918, they organized themselves into a much larger force called the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine, fighting under the black banner of anarchism. Makhno became its overall leader. And even though the insurgent army had its own interests, the brewing conflict over the future of Ukraine was a great time for enemies of enemies to become friends.

Makhno identified four immediate enemies for the insurgent army: the forces who had propped up the Hetmanate, the withdrawing armies of the Central Powers, the Don Cossacks, and the White Russians who were aligned with Denikin’s Volunteer Army. These last two were acutely important, and on January the 12th, 1919, the White Army launched an attack on the area controlled by Makhno. And on January 21st, they directly attacked Huliaipole. Facing this threat, Makhno resolved on an alliance with a rival faction he did not include on his list of immediate threats, but who would in time be his political rivals: the Russian Communists.

Now at that same moment, the Red Army was preparing its own invasion of Ukraine and they were looking for local military allies. So the Reds and the Blacks agreed to an Alliance of pure military convenience. Makhno agreed to integrate his insurgent army into the organizational structure of the Red Army, and nominally submit to orders from Red Army headquarters, but the Ukrainian insurgents would maintain their own internal structure, and in reality, acted far closer to an independent auxiliary force than a centrally controlled subsidiary of the Red Army. The Ukrainian front of the Red Army was now under the command of Vladimir Antonov, the guy who had overseen the capture of the Winter Palace during the October Revolution. His forces crossed into Ukraine and successfully captured Kiev on February 5th, installing the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic to replace the ousted Ukrainian People’s Republic.

Good luck keeping all of this straight.

As part of the offensive, Makhno’s forces participated in battles against the Whites down in the Donbass region, north of the Sea of Azov. As a result of the Black Army successes, the territory controlled by Makhno grew even more, and they soon control a large autonomous zone free from all outside authority, just the way they liked it.

So, what I want to do now is turn to what was going on inside this zone during the first half of 1919. We’re talking about a loose blob of territory comprising maybe 75,000 square kilometers east of the Nepa River and north of the sea of Azov. It had a geographic and political center in Makhno’s hometown of Huliaipole. At its maximum extent, it probably covered a population somewhere north of 7 million people. Mostly these were agrarian peasants, but we also have several small industrial cities with the working classes that go along with them. The population was also mostly Ukrainian, but there were also Russians in the city as well as a significant population of Jews. And in dealing with the Jewish population, makhno was famously a virulent anti-anti-Semite. Most of the people he had been fighting with since he was a teenager were Jewish, and he detested their persecution and abuse at the hands of anti-Semites. So while anti-Jewish pogroms tended to follow the advance of practically all the armies running around in Ukraine, Makhno wasn’t having it. In fact, he demanded the opposite. In his mind, everybody was a part of a universal brotherhood. Rank bigotry like antisemitism could not be tolerated, it had to be eliminated root and branch. So we find Makhno’s Black Army consistently anti-anti-Semitic, though this was not something everyone in the ranks embraced. He apparently had one troop commander summarily shot for exploitively raiding a Jewish settlement; another soldier was executed for waving a flag that said “beat the Jews and save Russia.”

Now Makhno’s ultimate object was for all the people living in his zone to live under their own authority, forming hyper-local councils that would see to their own affairs. When the Black Army rolled through town, they posted a notice which read:

The Army does not serve any political party, any power, any dictatorship. On the contrary, it seeks to free the region of all political power, of all dictatorship. It strives to protect the freedom of action, the free life of workers against all exploitation and domination. The Makhno Army does not therefore represent any authority. It will not subject anyone to any obligation whatsoever. Its role was confined to defending the freedom of the workers. The freedom of the peasants and the workers belongs to themselves and should not suffer any restriction.

So, Makhno was there to liberate and move on, not to stay and set up shop.

With this particular focus on hyperlocal Administration, makhno also started establishing formal anarchist communes — not just liberating existing villages, but setting up brand new settlements on land seized from largest states and populated with the formerly landless poor. They were meant to live together in communes of a couple hundred people, working the land together and sharing the produce together, and Makhno himself periodically resided in these communes, working the fields just as he had done when he was a kid, except this time, not for any master.

Now, these communes tend to function more like prototypes than anything else, and there were only a handful of them set up. Mostly the people in Makhno’s zone continued to live in their existing village structures, and continue on with their traditional way of life, simply cut loose of external authority. Now, ultimately what Makhno wanted was for all these communities to knit themselves together in a larger confederation that would spread out across Ukraine, and to affect this confederation they wanted to use the existing structure of the soviets. But they called for a very specific kind of soviet: a free soviet.

Over 1917 and 1918, they had seen how organized political parties — now most especially, the Communists — had been getting themselves elected to the executive committees of local soviets, and then ignoring the wishes of the peasants and the workers who had elected them, and instead serving the interests of the party. The role of the soviets had thus been flipped on its head: they were now enforcing top-down decrees with no input from the local population, rather than what they had originally been, which is a forum for the expression of local needs from the bottom up.

So by a free Soviet, what they meant was a soviet that explicitly barred members of political parties from joining. This was supposed to keep the soviet grounded in the interest of the local population they served, rather than having the local population serve the interest of some political party and their far off central committee. This was an idea that was gaining widespread traction, and as we talked about last week, the peasant uprising in the Volga were often rising up under the banner Soviet Without Communists.

So Makhno’s anarchism was rooted in hyper-local autonomy, but that did not mean the Ukrainian anarchists did not seek wider coalitions and confederations. In the first half of 1919, they held several regional congresses, the first one in January of about a hundred delegates, and the second more consequential and controversial congress held in February. It was controversial because by now the Communists had established a Ukrainian Soviet Socialist republic based in Kiev, and the growth and solidification of this anarchist autonomous zone in their midst was a threat. The second Congress held in February also established its own revolutionary military soviet that challenged the Communist’s claim to power. They further issued a declaration that read:

The workers and peasants of Ukraine had liberated the territory from its enemies. Now that the enemy is beaten, some government appears in our midst describing itself as Bolshevik and aiming to impose its party’s dictatorship upon us. Is that to be countenanced? We are non-party insurgents. We have revolted against all our oppressors. We will not countenance a new enslavement no matter the quarter whence it may come.

The Congress then declared its intention to establish a regime of freely elected, anti-authoritarian soviets.

Now it was not all land and liberty inside this anarchist free zone though, and there were internal contradictions of their own making that threatened the project. For one, the regional congresses approve the need for military conscription, which tends to undermine the kind of free choices guaranteed by the anarchist creed. But they insisted that this was all voluntary, it wasn’t conscription, because the levy had been approved by the people’s representatives at the regional congress. Which is, of course, clever rhetoric, but doesn’t matter very much to the people being pressed into service against their will as the Black Army joined the Reds and the Whites and everyone else pissing off every local population they pass through by conscripting people into their army at bayonet point.

There were also problems with the urban population. Makhno was temperamentally a peasant, and he kind of detested cities. He encouraged workers to take control of their own factories, but otherwise offered, very little understanding of their specific needs. He certainly didn’t care much about the value of paper money, which urban workers needed to buy things, like food from the villages. Makhno tended to insist that food should only be given up for bartered goods, goods the urban population often didn’t have readily at hand. So Makhno’s free society had many supporters among the peasants, but was viewed with increasingly hostile skepticism by the urban population.

So while there was internal dissension and internal conflict, the main threat to Makhno’s autonomous zone seemed to come from outside, from the Communists, those in Kiev and those in Moscow. In the spring of 1919, both the Reds and the Blacks were making it very clear to each other that once the war against the Whites was over, there would not be room in Ukraine for the both of them. These conflicts really started breaking out into the open when a third Regional Congress of Insurgents was called to convene on April the 10th. The Communist authorities deemed this congress counterrevolutionary, and explicitly banned the delegates from convening. In their eyes, it represented an attempt to create a state within a state that was outside the bounds of the authority of the Communists. Which of course, it was, that was the whole point, and since Communist authority didn’t actually extend into the region yet, the delegates to the congress just went ahead and convened in defiance of the ban. When they met, they incredulously defended themselves against the crazy charge that they were a bunch of counter-revolutionaries. They said:

Can it be that laws laid down by a handful of individuals describing themselves as revolutionaries can afford them the right to declare outside of the law an entire people more revolutionary than themselves? Is there some law according to which a revolutionary is alleged to have the right to enforce the harshest punishment against the revolutionary mass on whose behalf he fights, and this because that same mass has secured for itself the benefits that the revolutionary promised them… freedom and equality? Can that mass remain silent when the “revolutionary” strips it of the freedom which it has just won. Does the law of revolution required the shooting of a delegate on the grounds that he is striving to achieve in life the task entrusted to him by the revolutionary mass which appointed him? What interests should the revolutionary defend? Those of the party? Or those of the people at the cost of whose blood the revolution has been set in motion?

The Congress met and dispersed without further incident, but gauntlets are being thrown down.

Now, despite all this, as late as April 1919, both sides were still publicly supporting each other. Kamenev even came down and praised Makhno’s steadfast revolutionary principles, though he also sent a private telegram to Lenin recommending only temporary diplomacy with Makhno’s army. Makhno was also told by sympathetic functionaries inside the Soviet apparatus he might be ambushed and killed.

Now, this was not a great time for the Reds and the Blacks to be sizing each other up for a final battle, because General Denikin’s White Army was about to make a major push into Ukraine. Like his counterpart Admiral Kolchak, Denikin was now being supplied by the British, and throughout the fighting in 1919, his army would receive in total:

• almost 200,000 rifles
• 6,200 machine guns
• 500 million rounds of ammunition
• 1100 artillery pieces.
• and nearly 2 million shells.

They also delivered 60 brand new tanks and made available 168 aircraft from the newly minted RAF. They also received additional supplies for the soldiers, including 460,000 coats and 645,000 pairs of boots. Supplied to the hilt, and now commanding a pretty competent and disciplined white army of about 50,000 men, Denikin moved into Ukraine in the spring of 1919.

The forces opposing him started to break down in May. Trotsky visited the region for the first time and reported, “The prevailing state of chaos, irresponsibility, laxity, and separatism exceeds the most pessimistic expectation.” The Ukrainian front to the Red Army had been built on a system of alliances with local warlords, including people like Nestor Makhno. But just as the Whites started to advance, one of the most important of these local warlords, a guy called Nikifor Grigoriev, split from the Reds, taking all his forces with them. Now it wasn’t entirely clear what Grigoriev’s ultimate plan was, but he controlled a good chunk of southwest Ukraine. And his defection was a big deal. Trying to hold the rest of the line together, Kamenev ordered Makhno to denounce Grigoriev publicly, but Makhno refused to take a hard pro-Communist line, and said only that he remained unshakably loyal to the worker and the peasant revolution, and that, “As an anarchist revolutionary, I cannot by any means support seizure of power by Grigoriev or by anyone.” This rather lackluster declaration of loyalty to the Communists, which obviously implied that he wasn’t planning on letting the Communists take over either, rang alarm bells in Moscow that may be Makhno could not really be depended on, though it is worth pointing out the Makhno ultimately did denounce Grigoriev and wrote among other things, “Brothers, don’t you hear in his words a grim call to the Jewish pogrom? Don’t you feel the desire of Ataman Gregoriev to break the living fraternal connection between the revolution of Ukraine and revolutionary Russia?”

And of course, Grigoriev’s ultimate fate, which we’ll get to next week, was a pretty clear final denunciation by Makhno.

Then in the first week of June, there was a huge blow up between the Reds and the Blacks. A Fourth Regional Congress was scheduled for June 15, and this time the Communists absolutely refused to allow it to proceed, especially because the invitation sent out was addressed to soldiers in the Red Army, all, but encouraging them to mutiny and desert, to ditch the authoritarian Reds, and join the freedom-loving Blacks. So Trotsky issued order number 1824 on June 4th, absolutely forbidding the Congress. And he said among other things, “The Huliaipole executive committee, in concert with Makhno’s brigade staff, is attempting to schedule a Congress of Soviets and Insurgents. Said Congress is wholly an affront to Soviet power in the Ukraine, and to the organization of the southern front, to which Makhno’s brigade is attached. That Congress could not produce any result other than to deliver the front to the Whites, in the face of who Makhno’s brigade does nothing but fall further and further back, thanks to the incompetent and criminal tendencies and treachery of its commanders.”

This is quite an open denunciation of Makhno, and it was followed up by Communist-aligned Red Army forces moving into his district, breaking up the anarchist commune, and briefly occupying Huliaipole itself. But this occupation didn’t last very long, because just a few days later, Denikin’s forces showed up and drove off everyone.

Makhno resigned from his position in the Red Army while reaffirming his commitment to the revolution… at least, to the revolution as he understood it, as a revolution of workers and peasants — actual workers and peasants, not just those who claim to represent them. With the whites advancing through Ukraine, Makhno declared his intention to go on waging a guerrilla war, just like he had waged against the occupation forces in 1918. Trotsky ordered Makhno arrested for deserting his post, but sympathetic officers in the Red Army tipped him off, and he avoided capture by the Chekha.

Meanwhile, the Whites enjoyed unbroken success in Ukraine against the disintegrating line of Red and Blacks. The Red Army retreated more than 200 miles beyond even Kharkov, the main political and industrial center of eastern Ukraine and one of the most important cities in the whole region. On June 4th, Trotsky had confidently said, “I think that Kharkov stands in no greater danger than Moscow or any other city of the Soviet Republic.” it fell to the Whites by the end of the month, which opened up the question, if it was a no greater danger than Moscow, then how much danger was Moscow in?

Next week, we will answer that question, as we get to the second stage of Denikin’s 1919 summer offensive. The threat of an ultimate White victory will force the Reds and the Blacks back together into an uneasy fighting alliance, as the Red Army reformed a frontline, and Makhno’s guerrilla forces found the overextended White supply lines easy pickings.

They would once again team up to save the revolution they both believed the other was hell bent on wrecking.