The Russian Revolution in Ukraine (March 1917

Alpha Material-001

I dedicate this volume to the memory of my dead friends and comrades who struggled with me to organize revolutionary Ukrainian workers to bring about a free, anarchist communist society: Peter Gavrilenko, Alexander Kalashnikov, Moise Kalinichenko, Simon Karetnik, Philip Krat, Isidor (Peter) Lyutyi, Alexis Marchenko, Savva Makhno, Andrei Semenyuta, Gabriel Troyan, Stepan Shepel, Boris Veretelnik, Kh. Gorelik, Pavel Korostilev (Khundai), Luc Panchenko, Abram Shnayder, and others. They perished under various circumstances but always in pursuit of the same goal: the realization and putting into practice of the concepts of liberty, equality, and free labor. Nestor Makhno (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Alpha Material-002

On the occasion of publishing the initial volume of “The Russian Revolution in Ukraine” I find it necessary to add a few words of explanation. In the first place, I must advise the reader that this work lacks a number of important documents: the resolutions and proclamations of the Gulyai-Pole Union of Peasants, the Soviet of Workers’ and Peasants’ Delegates, and their ideological driving force — the Gulyai Pole Peasant Anarcho-Communist Group. The Anarcho-Communist Group struggled to unite the peasants and workers of the Gulyai-Pole region under its own banners. Always in the vanguard of the revolutionary movement, the Anarcho-Communist Group explained to the peasants and workers the significance of unfoldin... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Part 1 - Chapter 1 : My Liberation

The February Revolution of 1917 opened the gates of all Russian prisons for political prisoners. There can be no doubt this was mainly brought about by armed workers and peasants taking to the streets, some in their blue smocks, others in gray military overcoats. These revolutionary workers demanded an immediate amnesty as the first conquest of the Revolution. They made this demand to the state-socialists who, together with bourgeois liberals, had formed the Provisional “Revolutionary” Government with the intention of submitting revolutionary events to their own wisdom. The Socialist-Revolutionary A. Kerensky, the Minister of Justice, rapidly acceded to this demand of the workers. In a matter of days, all political prisoners we... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Part 1 - Chapter 2 : Meeting With Comrades And Firs...

Upon arrival in Gulyai-Pole, I immediately got together with my comrades from the anarchist group. Many of my former comrades had perished. Those who survived from the old days were: Andrei Semenyuta (the brother of Sasha and Prokofii Semenyuta), Moisei Kalinichenko, Filipp Krat, Savva Makhno, the brothers Prokofii and Grigorii Sharovsky, Pavel Korostelev, Lev Schneider, Pavel Sokruta, Isidor Liutii, Aleksei Marchenko, and Pavel Khundei (Korostilev). Together with these comrades came a younger bunch who had not yet joined the group in my time. But now they had been members for two or three years and were busy reading anarchist literature which they distributed to the peasants. Throughout the whole period of underground activity the group ha... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Part 1 - Chapter 3 : Organization of the Peasants' ...

About the middle of the week, the elected delegates gathered at the school to discuss the reelection of the Public Committee. For this meeting I, along with some of the teachers, had prepared a general report which the teacher Korpusenko was chosen to read. This report was well-conceived and well-written. The elected peasant delegates consulted with the delegates from the factory workers and jointly passed a resolution demanding the reelection of the “Public Committee”. At the insistence of the teachers Lebedev and Korpusenko, I contributed some words of introduction to this resolution. The delegates returned to their own electors and discussed the resolution with them. When the resolution had been confirmed by the electors,... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Part 1 - Chapter 4 : Examination of the Police File...

At about this time, the leaders of the Gulyai-Pole Militia, Lieutenant Kudinov and his secretary, the inveterate Kadet A. Rambievski, invited me to help them sift through the files of the Gulyai-Pole police administration. Since I attached great significance to these files, I asked our group to appoint another comrade to join me. I considered this matter so important that I was prepared to temporarily set aside all other work. Some of the comrades, Kalinichenko and Krat in particular, scoffed at the idea of my wanting to help the Militia bosses. Only after a lively discussion did Comrade Kalinichenko acknowledge what had to be done and agree to accompany me to examine the files. There was a document about Petr Sharovsky, a former member ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Part 1 - Chapter 5 : Re-election of the Public Comm...

Our group occupied itself for a time with internal matters, giving some structure to the organization and distributing tasks among our members, strong in numbers but weak intellectually (we now had over 80 members). One of these tasks was taking out subscriptions to all the Anarchist newspapers being published in Russia and Ukraine. During this period the reelection of the Public Committee was begun. Along with some other comrades from our group, I was nominated again by the peasants and was elected. This was the situation. Some of the peasants abstained from voting. The ones who did take part in the election for the most part voted for members of our group or for people sympathetic to us. In spite of the entreaties of my electors, I refu... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Part 1 - Chapter 6 : The Role of Teachers; Our Work...

Earlier I said the elementary school teachers of Gulyai-Pole had supported us from the time of my first speech before the assembly of peasants and workers. But I neglected to mention what this support was based on. The teachers agreed with my comment that it was shameful for the working intelligentsia to remain inactive at such a critical moment. The peasantry was experiencing great difficulties due to the lack of participation of the intelligentsia in their movement. Now the teachers threw themselves into practical work. They took part in the elections to the Public Committee, were nominated and elected. Of the 14 teachers in Gulyai-Pole, six were elected by the peasants. The peasantry, with the help of the Anarchist Communist Group, too... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Part 1 - Chapter 7 : The First of May; Relationship...

1 May 1917. Ten years had passed since I last participated in this labor holiday so I made a special effort to carry out agitational work to organize its celebration among the workers, the soldiers of the artillery detachments, and the peasants. I collected all the documents relating to the actions of the workers of the cities during the last days of April and presented them to our group, so that our members could prepare their own interpretations for agitational work among the peasants, workers, and soldiers. The commander of the 8th Serbian regiment sent a delegation to us to sound us out on the wish of this regiment of the Serbian state to participate with the toilers of Gulyai-Pole in the workers’ holiday. Of course we had no ob... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Part 1 - Chapter 8 : The Workers' Strike

Early in June the anarchists of Aleksandrovsk invited me to a conference being held to unify all the local anarchists into a federation. I came immediately to help the comrades come to an agreement. The Aleksandrovsk anarchists were all manual or intellectual workers. Formally they were divided into anarcho-communists and anarcho-individualists, but in reality they were all revolutionary anarcho-communists. All of them I esteemed as the closest of friends and I did my best to help them set up a federation. After organizing themselves, they began to organize the workers and for a time had a great ideological influence on them. When I returned from Aleksandrovsk, the workers of the Gulyai-Pole Union of Metal and Carpentry Workers invited me ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Part 1 - Chapter 9 : Some Results

Let’s move on to the “Public Committee” and look at how we, delegates from the Peasants’ Union, made use of the authority of this Committee in our region. In the first place, having taken over the Land Department, we also tried to ensure that the Department of Provisioning was also an independent entity. When the time came that I had taken over the whole Committee, myself and some of my comrades on the Committee demanded the abolition of the Militia. When the central authorities would not allow this, we deprived the Militia of the right to make independent arrests and searches and thereby reduced its role to acting as a courier service for the Public Committee. Furthermore, I summoned all the landowners and kulaks a... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Part 1 - Chapter 10 : Struggle Against Rent

The month of June. The peasants of the Gulyai-Pole raion refused to pay the second installment of their land rent to the pomeshchiks and kulaks. They hoped that after the harvest they would seize the land themselves without entering into any negotiations with either the owners of the government which protected the owners. Then the peasants would divide the land between themselves and any factory workers who wished to cultivate it themselves. Several other uyezds and raions followed the example of Gulyai-Pole. In Aleksandrovsk there was alarm among the government authorities and their agents from the Socialist and Constitutional-Democratic Parties — the S-Rs, S-Ds, and Kadets. With the technical and financial assistance of the Public... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Part 1 - Chapter 11 : P.A. Kropotkin Arrives in Russ...

Around this time we received news that P. A. Kropotkin was already in Petrograd. The local newspapers had written about this, but we, peasant-anarchists, not hearing his powerful appeal to anarchists and his detailed instructions about how the anarchists should begin to overcome the fragmentation in their own movement so we could take our rightful place in the Revolution, did not believe the newspapers. But now we received newspapers and letters directly from Petrograd indicating that P. A. Kropotkin had been taken ill on the journey from London to Russia but had safely arrived at the very heart of the revolution — Petrograd. We heard about how he had been greeted by the socialists in power, in particular by A. Kerensky. The joy in t... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Part 1 - Chapter 12 : Kornilov's March on Petrograd

Around August 20 1917 our group reviewed the distribution and utilization of our forces. This meeting was the most serious one we had held. I have already mentioned that our group did not have in its ranks a single theoretically-trained anarchist. We were all peasants and workers. Our schools turned out half-educated people. Schools of anarchism did not exist. Our fund of knowledge of revolutionary anarchism was obtained reading anarchist literature for many years and exchanging views with each other and with the peasants, with whom we shared all that we had read and understood in the works of Kropotkin and Bakunin. We owe thanks to Comrade Vladimir Antoni (known as Zarathustra) for supplying us with literature. In the course of this very ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Part 1 - Chapter 13 : Struggle with the Counter-Revo...

Thus the bourgeoisie was disarmed and its weapons were distributed among the revolutionary peasants. The disarmament took place without any blood being spilled. A Congress of Raion Soviets was convened with the purpose of examining the causes and goals of General Kornilov’s movement. The Congress welcomed the election by the Gulyai-Pole Soviet and other organizations of the “Committee for the Defense of the Revolution”, as well as all its actions up to the time the Congress was convened. The Congress expressed the conviction that the time for such actions had arrived. Reviewing the Kornilov attack on Petrograd, which had already been suppressed, the Congress once more emphasized that it considered the dismantling of the... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Part 1 - Chapter 14 : Visit to the Factory Workers o...

In spite of the reaction which reigned in all the government institutions and in the workers’ Soviet of Aleksandrovsk towards the toilers of Gulyai-Pole raion, the delegates of the Gulyai-Pole Soviet and the Congress, namely Comrade Antonov and myself, left for Aleksandrovsk with the aim of presenting to the factory workers a report on “the Counter-Revolution in the city and uyezd of Aleksandrovsk”, because we were convinced that revolutionary Gulyai-Pole could have an impact in Aleksandrovsk. The authorities received us with hostility but didn’t dare hinder us from making an official tour of all the factories, plants, and workshops so we could let the workers know what the peasants were thinking and what measures t... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Part 1 - Chapter 15 : The Provincial Soviet Makes Ad...

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 c... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Part 2 - Chapter 16 : October Coup D’état in Russia...

Repercussions of the October coup d’état — in Petrograd and Moscow, and then in the whole of Russia — reached us in Ukraine only at the end of November and the beginning of December, 1917. Up until December 1917 the Ukrainian toilers, both urban and rural, knew of the October coup d’état only through the manifestos of the All-Russian Executive Committee of Soviets, the Soviet of People’s Commissars, and revolutionary parties and groups. Two parties in particular were prominent: the Bolsheviks and the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries. For these two parties knew how to benefit from this period in the Russian Revolution to attain their goals. This was a vast uprising of workers, soldiers, and peasants... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Part 2 - Chapter 17 : Elections to the Constituent A...

Being hostile to the very concept of a Constituent Assembly, our Group was naturally hostile to the election of its delegates. Influenced by the agitational work of our group, the toiling population of the raion was, on the whole, also hostile to the idea of the Constituent Assembly. However, many of them took part in the elections. This is explained by the fact that the socialist parties — the Left and Right S-Rs, Bolsheviks, and Mensheviks — as well as the powerful Kadet Party — conducted a furious campaign throughout the country on behalf of their lists of candidates. Under the influence of this propaganda, the population of the country divided up into numerous groups, thereby completely destroying its unity and even f... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Part 2 - Chapter 18 : Provincial Congress

Before the December Provincial Congress of Soviets of Peasants’, Workers’, and Soldiers’ Deputies, an assembly of the Soviet of Gulyai-Pole raion was organized. All the delegates present at this assembly insisted that our representatives at the Provincial Congress be prepared not to fall under the influence of the agents of political parties. Our representatives were to declare, without hesitating, that they had come to the Congress, not in order to listen to reports of government agents and to obey them, but to read their own reports about what the toilers were doing locally and why they were doing it. And they were to explain why, in the future, they would not be following orders imposed from above. The delegates which ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Part 2 - Chapter 19 : Counter-Revolution of the Ukra...

At the end of the Congress, the delegates dispersed to their homes. We, Comrade Mironov and I, went to the Anarchist Federation with the intention of finding some good propagandists we could take back with us to the countryside. The Federation was in a better state than when I visited it in August while attending the Provincial Congress of Peasants and Workers. At that time I visited its various sections (the club, etc.). The Federation was still rather weak — it was barely able to tend to the city and its adjacent settlements — Amur, Nizhne-Dneprovsk, and Kaidaki. And yet the Federation was rich in armaments: carbines, rifles, and cartridges. In view of the unusual situation holding sway in the city, the Bolshevik — Left-... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Part 2 - Chapter 20 : With the Left Bloc Against the...

On December 31 1917 I was doing organizational work in the village of Pologi when I received an accurate report that a battle was going on in Aleksandrovsk between detachments of the Red Guard group of Bogdanov and some haidamak units of the Central Rada. At such a moment it was impossible to remain on the sideline as a neutral observer. The population was clearly hostile towards the Central Rada, whose agents were combing the countryside, hunting down revolutionaries, and treating them as “traitors...of Mother Ukraine” and defenders of the “katzaps”, whom it considered necessary to exterminate as mortal enemies of the Ukrainian language. Such concepts were offensive to the peasants. They dragged down from the trib... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Part 2 - Chapter 21 : Armed Peasantry go to the Aid ...

On January 3, 1918, the Red Guard Commander Bogdanov addressed an appeal for help to the peasants and workers of Gulyai-Pole. During the night of January 4, our group issued an appeal to the peasants and workers, inviting them to take up arms. On the same night I handed over my chairmanship in the Soviet to a comrade, and placed myself at the head of the anarchist detachment, composed of several hundred peasants. Fully armed, we set out for Aleksandrovsk. I recall that just before leaving Gulyai-Pole our detachment, at my insistence, elected its own commander. I refused the position because I foresaw that in Aleksandrovsk my presence might be required away from the detachment arranging liaison between the city and the village. The detachm... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Part 2 - Chapter 22 : Battle with Cossacks, Negotiat...

It was January 8 1918 and it was cold. Towards evening a fine snow began to fall presaging a slight thaw. Our combat units occupied their positions and dug trenches. We communicated by telephone with the Cossack commanders and arranged to name delegates who would meet half-way between the stations of Kichkass and Khortiz to establish clearly what each side wanted from the other. Our delegation was composed of two commanders from Bogdanov’s group, from the detachment of sailors — Comrade Boborikin, from the detachment of Aleksandrovsk anarchists — Maria Nikiforova, and from the revolutionary peasantry of Gulyai-Pole rayon and the Gulyai-Pole Anarchist Communist Group — myself. Around 6 p.m. we traveled by locomotive... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Part 2 - Chapter 23 : My Observations on the Left Bl...

The Front established against the advance of the Cossacks coming from the External Front towards Zaporozh’e was dismantled. No more Cossacks were expected from that direction. All revolutionary units were withdrawn from the right bank of the Dnepr to the left — to the city of Aleksandrovsk and nearby villages. The goal of Bogdanov’s staff was to advance in the direction of Crimea. The city of Aleksandrovsk was left without defense and the inhabitants were obliged to organize themselves for this purpose. The workers began to do this. The Revkom, with the support of its constituent parties, also began to display its “revolutionary” activity. Its activity consisted of arbitrary interference in the life the local... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Part 2 - Chapter 24 : Suppression of the Zemstvo Ter...

During the time that I, along with our bunch of energetic revolutionary peasants, worker-anarchists, and sympathetic-to-anarchism nonparty revolutionaries were absent from Gulyai-Pole, guests turned up in the village — agents of the Central Rada. These were landowners of Gulyai-Pole who had been appointed sub-lieutenants during the War and had now been sent into the countryside and villages to preach the idea of an independent Ukraine supporting itself on the backs of the “haidamaks” and the Cossacks. We arrived in Gulyai-Pole at night and during that same night I was informed by soldiers just returned from the Front that they had held a meeting at which agents of the Central Rada announced that troops of the Rada were co... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Part 2 - Chapter 25 : How the Exchange of Goods Betw...

From the beginning of its work in organizing the peasants, the Anarchist Communist Group had insisted on the necessity of carrying on this work in an anarchist manner. We needed to apply anarchist principles consistently in a various contexts. At first our tactics aroused protests from some members of the Group. Although entirely devoted to the cause, they were used to the old ways: negation of organization, of unity of action, of the possibility of remaining anarchists while applying its principles under a regime that was not anarchist, not even truly socialist. I was often told: “Comrade Nestor, apparently in prison you became imbued with statist ways of getting things done and now you are carried away with doing things that way an... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Part 2 - Chapter 26 : New Members of Our Group

Towards the middle of February three sailors from the Black Sea Fleet arrived in Gulyai-Pole. Two of them were peasants from Gulyai-Pole, the third was a stranger to us. He was visiting with his father who served as a coachman for the pomeshchik Abraham Jantzen. All three called themselves Left SRs. Two of them, Boris Veretel’nik (peasant of Gulyai-Pole) and E. Polonsky (the stranger) had party membership cards from the Sevastopol Committee of the Party of Left SRs. The third, Sharovsky, also a peasant of Gulyai-Pole, was not a party member. All three from the first days of their arrival in Gulyai-Pole showed up at general assemblies and made an impression as energetic revolutionary workers. That was a time when sailors were renowned... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Part 2 - Chapter 27 : The Agrarian Communes; Their O...

February — March, 1918. The moment had come to distribute the livestock and implements which had been seized from the pomeshchiks in the autumn of 1917 and to organize agrarian communes on the former estates. All the toilers of the raion understood the importance of decisive action at this moment, both for the construction of a new life, and for its defense. Under the direction of the Revkom, ex-soldiers from the Front began moving all the implements and livestock from the estates of the pomeshchiks and large farms to a central holding area. Their former owners were left with two pairs of horses, one or two cows (depending on the size of the family), one plow, one seeding machine, one mower, one winnowing machine, etc. Meanwhile the p... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Part 2 - Chapter 28 : The Successes of the German-Au...

In March, 1918 the city of Kiev and most of Right Bank Ukraine was occupied by expeditionary armies of the imperial German and Austro-Hungarian empires. After reaching an agreement with the Central Rada, directed by Ukrainian socialists under the presidency of the ancient SR Professor M. Hrushevsky, these armies entered Ukrainian territory and began a vile attack against the Revolution. With the direct assistance of the Central Rada and its agents, the German and Austro-Hungarian command extended a network of counter-revolutionary espionage over the whole Ukraine. While the expeditionary armies and the troops of the Central Rada were still on the right bank of the Dnepr, the Left Bank part of Ukraine was already infested with their numerou... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Part 2 - Chapter 29 : Consolidation of the Detachmen...

Things were happening fast. The German and Austro-Hungarian armies, led by General Eichorn, were already approaching Ekaterinoslav; from another direction shells were fired on Aleksandrovsk from near the Kichkass Bridge, about 80 kilometers from Gulyai-Pole. Opposing them were the Red Guard detachments commanded by General Egorov as well as numerous independent detachments which received weapons and ammunition from Egorov and the chief of the reserve Red Army of the “South of Russia” Belenkevich. These autonomous units acted at their own risk and peril — most often in sectors where there were no enemies. These forces were recalled urgently from Crimea to the region of Verkhnij Tokmak and Pologi. But there was no longer an... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Part 2 - Chapter 30 : Egorov’s Urgent Summons; the L...

It was a very tense moment. The Ukrainian nationalist organization seemed to be moribund. Its members didn’t say anything, they mostly just did what they were asked to do. The artillery and infantry were tuned up. We intended to advance but didn’t have panoramic sights for our cannon. We sent a telegram to Belenkevich: could he not provide us with new panoramic sights? We didn’t get an answer. At night Ukrainian SRs — the agronomist Dmitrenko and two youths — the fanatical nationalists P. Kovalenko and Mikita Konoplya — cut all the telegraph and telephone wires outside of Gulyai-Pole. This deprived me of connections with the staff of the Red Army command. I made sure all the peasants were informed about ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

<< Last Entry in Anarchism Russia. At the bottom.	Current Entry in Anarchism The Russian Revolution in Ukraine (March 1917 — April 1918)	Next Entry in Anarchism >> The Terror in Russia
All Nearby Items in Anarchism Russia. At the bottom., by Alliance of Revolutionary Socialists Russian Anarchists and the Civil War, by Paul Avrich Russian Counter-Revolution, by Grigori Petrovitch Maximoff Russian Counterrevolution, The, by CrimethInc. Russian Peasantry, The, by Charlotte Wilson Russian Proprietor, and Other Stories, A, by Leo Tolstoy Russian Revolution and the Communist Party, The, by Alexander Berkman "Soviet" Power, by Nestor Makhno "The State Always has a Conspiracy... Have You?", by Anonymous A Word, The, by Anonymous Russian Revolution in Ukraine (March 1917 — April 1918), The “Ceasefire” Is a Deadly Fraud, The, by CrimethInc. “The Barricades Must Be Torn Down.” Moscow-Fascism in Spain, by Paul Mattick The Case for Anarchism, by Guy Aldred “Anarchism … is a living force within our life …” Anarchism, Education and Alternative Possibilities, by Abraham P. DeLeon “Anti-Government Ideologues” and Coronavirus, by Iain McKay Social Significance of the Modern Drama, The, by Emma Goldman Words of a Rebel, by Peter Kropotkin War!, by Peter Kropotkin Wage System, The, by Peter Kropotkin Terror in Russia, The, by Peter Kropotkin

The Russian Revolution in Ukraine (March 1917 — April 1918)

By Nestor Makhno (1926)

Entry 3360

Public

Chapters

Chronology

Image Gallery of The Russian Revolution in Ukraine (March 1917 — April 1918)

Comments

Navigation