Lhe Russian invasion of Ukraine has stimulated interest in the fascinating history of this country and its people. Very few, however, are those who mention the Makhnovtchina, this anarchist uprising which takes its name from its charismatic guide, Nestor Makhno, and which, at the end of the First World War, fought “ against the Reds and the Whites », and this until the absorption of Ukraine into the new Soviet Union. The radical nature of such an insurrection led to its marginalization by nationalist historiography, while the Leninist vulgate worked to slander it, while erasing its traces. It is all the more enlightening to return to this collective experience, which advocated “ the social and labor independence of workers and peasants » against the nationalism of the ephemeral republic of Ukraine.
Udo not self-manage war
The peace concluded by the Bolsheviks with Germany and Austria-Hungary, in March 1918, in fact delivered Ukraine to their armies, which occupied the country and supported counter-revolutionary reprisals there. The resistance is organized in the name of Volnitza, this “free life” with which the Ukrainians associate their independence. Makhno, a Ukrainian anarchist, sentenced in Moscow to life imprisonment, and released by the February 1917 revolution, made his native town of Houliaipole, about a hundred kilometers north-west of Mariupol, the regional center of a libertarian guerrillas. In the summer of 1918, he proclaimed that ” win or die ” is “ the dilemma facing the peasants and workers of Ukraine at the present historical moment”. “But all of us cannot die, we are too many. We are humanity. So we will overcome », he explains. He is nicknamed Batko (“Father”), because of his undeniable qualities of military command. One of his comrades in the fight describes him “ devoted to the point of fanaticism to the class to which he belongs, to that of the poor peasants deprived of all rights, subjugated, crushed ».
From November 1918 to June 1919, the Makhnovtchina controlled southeastern Ukraine, including the strategic port of Mariupol and a portion of Donbass. The influence of his supporters extends to the gates of Kharkiv in the north and Odessa in the west. “Free communes” were created on the initiative of the poorest peasants, in conjunction with “free workers’ councils”, the true antithesis of the councils/soviets then established by the Bolshevik power. The school wants to be emancipated from the Church as from the State, according to the libertarian theses of the pedagogue Francisco Ferrer, shot in Barcelona in 1909. These few months of concrete utopia inevitably remain unfinished, in a context where the war imposes on its priorities again. Two regional congresses of “ peasants, workers and partisans » are held in January and February 1919, devoting the “voluntary mobilization” against the counter-revolutionary troops of the White Russian general Denikin, who launched the offensive from the Donbass, supported by his Chechen cavalry.
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