Exactly one hundred years ago, an event took place that opened one of the most interesting and controversial pages in the history of the Civil War in Russia. On April 6, 1917, a 28-year-old young man arrived in the village of Gulyaypole in the Aleksandrovsky district of the Yekaterinoslav province. He returned to his native places, where he had been absent for nine years and another three or four months before returning and could not imagine that very soon he would be in his native village. His name was Nestor Makhno.
- a group of liberated prisoners of Butyrka. In the first row on the left - Nestor Makhno
Nestor Makhno spent eight years and eight months in prison. On August 26, 1908, 19-year-old Makhno was arrested for the murder of an official of the military administration. The young man then participated in the activities of the Union of Poor Farmers, or the Gulyaypole group of anarchists-communists, led by his senior comrades Alexander Semenyuta and Voldemar Antoni. On March 22, 1910, the Odessa Military District Court sentenced Nestor Ivanovich Makhno to death by hanging. However, as he did not reach the age of majority at the time of the crime, the death penalty was replaced with indefinite hard labor for Nestor. To serve his sentence, Makhno in 1911 was transferred to the hard labor department of the Butyrka prison in Moscow.
Although by the time of his arrest, Nestor Makhno was already a convinced anarchist and one of the key members of the Antoni-Semenyuta group, in fact, his formation as an ideological revolutionary took place precisely in prison. This was not surprising. In childhood and adolescence, Nestor Makhno practically received no education. He was born into a family of peasants Ivan Rodionovich Makhno and Evdokia Matveyevna Perederiy. In the family, Ivan had six children - brothers Polycarp, Savely, Emelyan, Grigory, Nestor and sister Elena. When the youngest son Nestor was only 1 year old, his father died. From childhood, Nestor learned what hard physical labor is. Nevertheless, he still learned to read and write - he graduated from the Gulyaypole two-year primary school. This was the end of his formal education. Nestor worked on the farms of wealthier neighbors - kulaks and landowners, and in 1903, at the age of 15, he went to work in a paint shop, then moved to M. Kerner's iron foundry in the same Gulyaypole. In August 1906, Nestor joined the Gulyaypole group of anarchist communists, and its leader Voldemar Antoni, who, by the way, was only two years older, became the person who told Makhno about the foundations of the anarchist worldview, about the political and social system.
In Butyrka prison, Nestor Makhno met another famous anarchist - Pyotr Arshinov. In the famous film-series "Nine Lives of Nestor Makhno" Pyotr Arshinov is shown as a middle-aged man, much older than Nestor himself. In fact, they were the same age. Peter Arshinov was born in 1887, and Nestor Makhno in 1888. Nestor Arshinov became a mentor not because of his age, but because of his much greater experience of participation in the revolutionary movement. Arshinov, as it was shown in the film, was not a "intellectual theoretician" either. A native of the Penza province, the village of Andreevka, Arshinov in his youth worked as a mechanic in railway workshops in Kizil-Arvat (now - Turkmenistan), where he joined the revolutionary movement. After all, railway workers in the Russian Empire were considered the most advanced detachment of the proletariat, along with printers.
In 1904-1906. Pyotr Arshinov, who was not yet twenty years old, led the organization of the RSDLP at the Kizil-Arvat station, edited an illegal newspaper. In 1906, trying to avoid arrest, he left for the Yekaterinoslav region. Here Arshinov became disillusioned with Bolshevism and joined the communist anarchists. In the anarchist environment, he became known as "Peter Marine", participated in numerous expropriations and terrorist acts in Yekaterinoslav and its environs, becoming one of the most prominent militants of the Yekaterinoslav group of anarchist communists. On March 7, 1907, Arshinov, who by that time was working as a mechanic at the Shoduar pipe-rolling plant, killed Vasilenko, the head of the railway workshops in Aleksandrovsk. Peter Arshinov was arrested on the same day and on March 9, 1907, he was sentenced to death by hanging. But the sentence could not be carried out - on the night of April 22, 1907, Arshinov safely escaped from prison and left the Russian Empire. Returning two years later, he was nevertheless arrested and ended up in hard labor in the Butyrka prison - along with Nestor Makhno.
It was Arshinov who undertook to train an illiterate like-minded person from Gulyaypole in Russian and world history, literature, and mathematics. The inquisitive Makhno listened to his comrade-in-arms diligently. During the long eight years and eight months that Nestor spent in the Butyrka prison, he became a sufficiently educated person for a young man who was barely literate in the past. Subsequently, the knowledge transferred by Arshinov and some other inmates greatly helped Nestor Makhno in leading the rebel movement in the Yekaterinoslav region.
- prisoners of the pre-revolutionary Butyrka
The February Revolution of 1917 freed numerous political prisoners of the Russian Empire. On March 2, 1917, Nestor Makhno also emerged from the gates of the Butyrka prison in Moscow. He came out full of worries not only for the family, which remained in distant Gulyaypole, but also for the fate of the Gulyaypole group of anarchist communists. When Makhno arrived in Gulyaypole, he was enthusiastically greeted by local anarchists. In his memoirs, he notes that many of those comrades with whom he acted in 1906-1908 were no longer alive, others left the village, or even Russia. Back in 1910, during an attempted arrest, Alexander Semenyuta shot himself. His brother Prokofy also shot himself - even earlier, in 1908. In 1909 Voldemar Anthony, nicknamed "Zarathustra", left Russia. The founder of Gulyaypole anarchism settled in Latin America for more than half a century. Around Nestor, who returned to Gulyaypole, rallied Alexander Semenyuta's brother Andrei, Savva Makhno, Moisey Kalinichenko, Lev Schneider, Isidor Lyuty and some other anarchists. They unequivocally recognized Nestor Makhno, an anarchist and convict, as their leader. As a respected person, Nestor was elected as a comrade (deputy) chairman of the Gulyaypole volost zemstvo. Then he became the chairman of the Gulyaypole Peasant Union.
The idea of creating a Peasant Union in Gulyaypole was proposed by the SR Krylov-Martynov, who arrived in the village, an emissary of the Peasant Union operating in the Alexandrovsky district, controlled by the SRs. Makhno agreed with the proposal of Krylov-Martynov, but made his own remark - the Peasant Union in Gulyaypole should be created not to support the Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries in its activities, but to realistically protect the interests of the peasantry. Makhno saw the main goal of the Peasant Union as the expropriation of land, factories and plants into the public domain. It is interesting that the SR Krylov-Martynov did not object, and the Peasant Union was created in Gulyaypole with its own special principles, which differed from the principles of other branches of the Peasant Union. The committee of the Gulyaypole Peasant Union included 28 peasants and, contrary to the wishes of Nestor Makhno himself, who, as a convinced anarchist, did not want to be any leader, he was elected chairman of the Gulyaypole Peasant Union. Within five days, almost all the peasants of Gulyaypol joined the Peasant Union, with the exception of a rich stratum of owners, whose interests did not include the socialization of land. However, activities as chairman of the Peasant Union and deputy chairman of the volost zemstvo could not suit the revolutionary anarchist, whom Nestor Makhno considered himself to be. He strove for more decisive action, bringing closer, in his opinion, the victory of the anarchist revolution. On May 1, 1917, a large May Day demonstration was held in Gulyaypole, in which even the soldiers of the 8th Serbian Regiment, which was standing nearby, took part. However, the regiment commander hastened to withdraw the units from the village when he saw that the soldiers were interested in anarchist agitation. However, many soldiers joined the demonstrators.
Nestor Makhno, out of several dozen of his like-minded people, created the Black Guard detachment, which began actions against the landlords and capitalists. Makhno's black guards attacked trains with the aim of expropriation. In June 1917, the anarchists put forward an initiative to establish workers' control at the enterprises of Gulyaypole. The owners of the enterprises, fearing reprisals from the Black Guards, were forced to yield. At the same time, in June 1917, Makhno visited the neighboring town of Aleksandrovsk, the district center, where scattered anarchist groups and small groups operated. Makhno was invited by the Aleksandrovsk anarchists with the specific purpose of helping in the organization of the Aleksandrovsk anarchist federation. Having created a federation, Makhno returned to Gulyaypole, where he assisted in uniting local workers in the metallurgical and woodworking industries.
In July 1917, the anarchists dispersed the zemstvo, after which new elections were held. Nestor Makhno was elected chairman of the zemstvo, he also declared himself the commissar of the Gulyaypole region. Makhno's next step was the creation of the Farm Laborers' Committee, which was supposed to consolidate agricultural workers who worked for hire on kulak and landlord farms. Makhno's active actions to protect the interests of middle and poor peasants met with massive support from the population of Gulyaypole and the surrounding area. The recent political prisoner became an increasingly popular political figure not only in his native village, but also outside it. In August 1917, Nestor Makhno was elected chairman of the Gulyaypole Council. At the same time, Nestor Makhno emphasized his opposition to the Provisional Government and demanded that the peasants of the region ignore the orders and instructions of the new government. Makhno put forward a proposal for the immediate expropriation of church and landowners' land. After the expropriation of the lands, Makhno considered it necessary to transfer them to a free agricultural commune.
Meanwhile, the situation in the Yekaterinoslav region was heating up. On September 25, 1918, Nestor Makhno signed a decree of the County Council on the nationalization of the land, after which the division of the nationalized landowners' lands among the peasants began. In early December 1917, the provincial congress of Soviets of Workers, Peasants and Soldiers' Deputies was held in Yekaterinoslav, in which Nestor Makhno also participated as a delegate from Gulyaypole, who also supported the demand to convene an All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets. Nestor Makhno, as a well-known revolutionary and former political prisoner, was elected to the judicial commission of the Alexander Revolutionary Committee. He was given the task of examining the cases of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks arrested by the Soviet government, but Makhno suggested blowing up the Aleksandrovskaya prison and releasing those arrested. Makhno's position did not find support in the revolutionary committee, so he left it and returned to Gulyaypole.
In December 1917, Yekaterinoslav was captured by the armed forces of the Central Rada. The threat also hung over Gulyaypole. Nestor Makhno convened an emergency Congress of Soviets of the Gulyaypole region, which passed a resolution under the slogan "Death to the Central Rada". Even then, Nestor Makhno, from whom at the end of the twentieth century Ukrainian nationalists completely unreasonably tried to mold the image of a "supporter of independent Ukraine", categorically criticized the position of the Central Rada, and generally demonstrated a negative attitude towards Ukrainian nationalism. Of course, at first, if there was a tactical need, it was necessary to cooperate with Ukrainian socialists, who spoke from nationalist positions, but Makhno always distinguished between the anarchist idea and “political Ukrainians”, to which he treated, like any other “bourgeois ideologies,” negatively. … In January 1918, Makhno resigned from the post of chairman of the Gulyaypole Council and headed the Gulyaypole Revolutionary Committee, which included representatives of anarchists and left-wing socialist revolutionaries.
In his memoirs, Nestor Makhno later dwelt on one of the main reasons for the weakness of the anarchists in those revolutionary months. It consisted, in his opinion, in their disorganization, inability to unite into unified structures that could act harmoniously and achieve much greater results. The October Revolution of 1917, as Makhno later emphasized, showed that anarchist groups failed to cope with their goals and found themselves in the "tail" of revolutionary events, acting as junior associates and assistants of the Bolsheviks (anarcho-communists and part of the anarcho-syndicalists).
After the capture of Yekaterinoslav by the Austro-German troops and the troops of the Ukrainian state that helped them, Nestor Makhno organized a partisan detachment in early April 1918 and, to the best of his ability, fought against the Austro-German occupation. However, the forces were unequal, and Makhno's detachment eventually retreated to Taganrog. Thus ended the first, initial stage of the presence of the legendary "father" in Gulyaypole. It was at this time that the foundations were laid for the subsequent formation and success of the famous free peasant republic, which then for three years opposed both whites and Ukrainian nationalists and reds.
