While Comrade Antonov and myself were in Aleksandrovsk, the Executive Committee of the Ekaterinoslav Provincial Soviet of Workers’, Peasants’, and Soldiers’ Deputies began to direct serious attention towards Gulyai-Pole. This Committee, politically astute, did not have recourse to repressions as is normally the case with inconsiderate and foolish revolutionary and counter-revolutionary politicians. Instead it resorted to “political wisdom”: by-passing the uyezd level, it sent a proposal to the Gulyai-Pole Soviet to delegate its own permanent representative to the Provincial Executive Committee of Soviets.

In the course of the discussion on this proposal, the Gulyai-Pole Soviet was astonished by the following circumstance: there was already a delegate from Gulyai-Pole on the Provincial Executive Committee — elected at the Provincial Congress. However, the Provincial Executive Committee was proposing that we send a second delegate directly from the Gulyai-Pole Soviet.

This proposal compelled our Soviet to review its past policies, according to which it had always determined it own role in revolutionary work and rejected the direction of higher bodies as incompatible with its understanding of the essence of revolution. Thus it seemed that our response to the Ekaterinoslav Provincial Soviet had, in principle, already been decided and merely needed to be formalized by means of a meeting and a resolution.

However, after we had referred to our original revolutionary views, we realized that they gave rise to problems in carrying revolutionary work in practice. We needed to form alliances with the industrial workers so that together we could claim the right to our heritage: the land, the factories, the plants, etc., and so that together we could exercise this right.

Guided by this idea, we found it mandatory to study the proposal of the Provincial Soviet from all points of view and try to understand what importance its acceptance or rejection would have for revolutionary work in Gulyai-Pole.

The proposition was submitted to serious discussion. Two questions required clarification: (1) the links generally of the toilers of Gulyai-Pole raion with other raions which were also striving to broaden and deepen the revolutionary process; and (2) the possibility that direct representation on the Provincial Soviet would lead to a conflict of ideas in our ranks.

In the end it was clear that the influence of Gulyai-Pole raion was widespread in the region, and that Kamishevatsky raion was working energetically with us. Many raions from Berdyansk, Mariupol’, Pavlograd, and Bakhmyt uyezds were sending us their delegates to learn our attitude towards the enemies of the revolution: the Provisional Government and the Ukrainian Central Rada; also to find out how be we were struggling to transfer all the land, factories, and workshops under the direct control of the peasant and worker organizations.

Moreover, the toilers of many raions of the mentioned uyezds had, by their actions. They had confirmed their solidarity with our ideas, confirmed that they shared our perspective on the land question and on the necessity of doing away with the rule of the Public Committees. They stood for self-management of social affairs and demanded their right to put their ideas into action.

The Gulyai-Pole Soviet and the Anarchist Communist Group saw in this the fruits of their combined efforts. Under the influence of the idea of unity, the Soviet resolved the question about sending their representative to the Provincial Executive Committee in a positive sense: to send a capable, reliable comrade from the Anarchist-Communist Group.

The rationale for this positive resolution was given by the members of the Gulyai-Pole Soviet — peasants and workers — who were not members of the Group. They considered themselves revolutionaries and sympathized with the anarchists but remained embedded in the working class as excellent defenders of the rights of labor. The resolution could be summarized as follows:

“The toilers of Gulyai-Pole raion are totally committed to the expropriation of private property in the means of production and consumption for the benefit of working people. But we are not going to get carried away and do something foolish! We realize that this extraordinarily important question can only be solved successfully if expropriations are applied in several raions simultaneously, or, at the very least, separated by only very short intervals of time. That’s why it’s necessary that the Soviet, the Anarchist Communist Group, and the Trade Union, which are all sympathetic to our idea, use their influence to root this idea as firmly as possible in the consciousness of the masses in the raions close to Gulyai-Pole, because Gulyai-Pole will be needing support from these adjacent raions at the critical moment if the practical implementation of these ideas is to be spread to raions even further from Gulyai-Pole.

As the initiator of this great project, it falls to Gulyai-Pole to take a leadership role, which it can fulfill only if when the idea of expropriating personal property is firmly established in its own raion. From this point of view it is very important for the Gulyai-Pole Soviet to have direct representation by a capable comrade on the Provincial Executive Committee of the Soviets. The Anarchist Communist Group and the Union of Metal and Carpentry Workers do not oppose this; on the contrary, they support it.”

Following this reasoning, both the Anarchist Communist Group and the Trade Union Executive spoke out at meeting of the Gulyai-Pole Soviet in favor of the decision to send their own representative to the Provincial Executive of the Soviets.

Since the Soviet insisted on sending a member of our Group, we chose Comrade Lev Schneider, an experienced working class organizer.